The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(18 PM

Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(18 PM

ISSN 1554-6985 VOLUME V · NUMBER (/current) 1

SPRING/SUMMER 2010 (/previous)

EDITED BY (/about) Christy Desmet and Sujata (/archive) Iyengar

CONTENTS

The (Dis)possession of Lear's Two Bodies: Madness, Joseph R. Demystification, and Domestic Space in Peter Brook's King Teller Lear (/782421/show) (pdf) (/782421/pdf)

S HAKESPEARE' S LITERARY AFTERLIVES

E DITED BY MARK BAYER

The Afterlife of Timon of Athens: The Palest Fire Gretchen (/782392/show) (pdf) (/782392/pdf) E. Minton

Khaki Hamlets: Shakespeare, Joyce, and the Agency of Mark Literary Texts (/782397/show) (pdf) (/782397/pdf) Bayer

"Nothing like the image and horror of it": King Lear and Richard Heart of Darkness (/782425/show) (pdf) (/782425/pdf) Meek

Mark Introduction (/782387/show) (pdf) (/782387/pdf) Bayer

The Question: Hamlet's Life After Life (/782444/show) (pdf) Mark

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(/782444/pdf) Robson

A PPROPRIATIONS IN PERFORMANCE

"A Mistaken Understanding": Dunsinane and New Writing at Emily the RSC (/782405/show) (pdf) (/782405/pdf) Linnemann

C ONTRIBUTORS

Contributors (/782450/show) (pdf) (/782450/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2020

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The (Dis)possession of Lear's Two Bodies: (/current) Madness, Demystification, and Domestic Space in Peter Brook's King Lear (/previous) JOSEPH R. TELLER, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME (/about)

ABSTRACT Criticism of Peter Brook's King Lear (1971) emphasizes the film's relationship to the theories of Jan Kott and Antonin Artaud, a tendency that has led many to interpret the film as merely a bleak and narrow redaction of Shakespeare's play. This essay offers an alternative reading of the film rooted in both early modern theories of kingship and contemporary theories of embodiment in order to approach the film's nihilistic idiom from a different valence. In arguing that both playtext and filmtext explore tensions between the political and natural bodies of the king, I claim that the film dramatizes Lear's recognition that kingship is a metonymy imposed upon the enfleshed human subject, a subject which is dependent for existence upon the generative powers of femininity. Once Lear recognizes his dependence on and possession by female domestic authority, he attempts to escape the demystified, shameful flesh that constitutes his "unaccommodated" subjectivity, and ultimately achieves this escape through the cinematic techniques of fragmentation that characterize Brook's filmic language. Thus, we should value Brook's film not only because of its

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reevaluation of Goneril and Regan, but also because it utilizes incipient postmodern theories of art and the subject of its late 1960s milieu in order to realize crucial historical and cultural discourses already existing in Shakespeare's playtext.

Since its release in 1971, Peter Brook's King Lear has been the subject of a deeply bifurcated body of criticism. As critics have long noted, the film's commitment to experimental cinema and to a firmly nihilistic interpretation of Shakespeare's playtext is indebted to Brook's exposure to a number of sources, most notably Jan Kott's essay "King Lear or Endgame," as well as to the theories of Bertold Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Indeed, it is the film's relationship to the theater of cruelty, its unflagging dedication to the bleakest and most hopeless elements of the play — even to the point of cutting and sometimes rewriting the playtext — that has dichotomized responses to Brook's work. Anthony Davies, for instance, devalues the film because of its reductive treatment of Shakespeare's text, claiming that "viewed as a critical interpretation of Shakespeare's play, [Brook's film] must be judged both intellectually narrow and aesthetically impoverished . . . [w]hy, the question remains, does Brook choose to perpetrate with such dispassion his cinematic deconstruction on King Lear?" (Davies 1988, 151). In a later evaluation of the film, Davies writes that "In making King Lear 'so much a story of our time,' it is arguable that the play has been reduced to the dimension of a domestic quarrel" (Davies 1997, 251). Similarly, Laurilyn J. Harris, in putting forward a gentler evaluation, criticizes the film's reductionism, arguing that "while [Brook's] vision is valid, it is also limited . . . and captures only one dimension of a multi-dimensional play" (Harris 1986, 236). It is to such charges of "aesthetic impoverishment" and "unfaithfulness" to Shakespeare's playtext that Barbara Hodgdon responds when she rightly urges critics to evaluate the performance of a Shakespearean text as a filmtext in its own right, with its own auteur, that demands to be interpreted on its own terms: "This means working, not with a single authoritative text and its signed and unsigned derivatives, but with a multiplicity of texts — a playscript, a theatrical performance, a filmtext — and finding more precise modes of description and analysis for the ways they engage us" (Hodgdon 1983, 150). Although with the expansion of performance scholarship in Shakespeare studies, Hodgdon's call has produced more positive readings of Brook's film, broadly speaking the discussion of this film has stagnated, for scholars generally either laud the film as a fine example of meta-cinematic experimentation or decry it as a reductive http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 2 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

and biased vision of Shakespeare's great play, dated by its intellectual debts to the culture of the 1960s.

For these reasons, I would like to provide an alternative reading of Brook's seminal film of Lear, a reading that attempts to move the discussion beyond the cinematic influences and textual rearrangements that underlie the film's bleakness. In what follows, I will argue that Brook's interpretation of Lear is deeply rooted in Shakespeare's playtext and that we can better understand the film's notorious treatment of the fragmented and isolated human subject by attending to specific cultural contexts of Shakespeare's early modern milieu. This approach shares some common ground with the recent work of Lukas Erne, who has reminded us of the importance of recognizing both performance history and early modern textual-literary contexts in interpreting Shakespearean drama.1 By mobilizing feminist scholarship that has pointed out the playtext's concern with misogynistic language as well as more general issues of gender and embodiment, I hope to show that Lear is a play that interrogates the nature of political power through the trope of the fleshly body, and that far from reducing or eliding the film's faithfulness to Shakespeare's text, Brook's cinematic idiom and his commitment to dramatizing the isolated and fragmented subject of postmodernity are supported by central elements of the playtext and the early modern constructions of political authority and gender that inflect it.

EMBODYING THE POLITICAL AND DOMESTIC A key component of reevaluating Brook's King Lear lies in complicating the traditional domestic/political binary that has dominated studies of the playtext. On the one hand, scholars such as Bruce Young (2002) and Sharon Hamilton (2003) argue that Lear is predominantly about domestic relationships between fathers and children. On the other hand, political and feminist criticism by writers like Dan Brayton (2003) and Cristina Leon Alfar (2003) has challenged such "humanist" readings, emphasizing instead historicized versions of political power and kingship, as mediated by gender and economics within early modern culture. The two approaches thus tend to simplify the interweaving of political and domestic discourses that dominate the play's gendered constructions of royal authority. However, theorists of gender and embodiment such as Carol Rutter (2001) and Claudette Hoover (1985) have rightly shown the play's concern with sexuality, gender, and misogyny, while performance scholars like Pascale Aebischer (2004) and Roger Apfelbaum (2004) have underlined the importance of "embodying" playtexts in performance in order to recuperate a wider

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range of textual meanings potentialized by Shakespeare's and other early modern dramatists' texts. I would like to appropriate this fruitful feminist line of argument, which emphasizes the performing body as a place for the construction of dramatic meaning, to interpret Brook's film, and especially its sympathetic depiction of Goneril and Regan, to show that Brook's Lear accesses crucial insights into the gendered spheres of domestic and political power that pervade Shakespeare's playtext and that illuminate Brook's significant evaluation of Lear's "pelican daughters" (King Lear, 3.4.72).

The film achieves this vision through a treatment of masculinized embodiment, a dynamic largely overlooked in Brook's realization of Shakespeare's playtext. More specifically, Brook's film shows that Lear's demystification originates in the rupture of his two male identities as private father and public monarch, a sundering of subjectivity resulting from his divesting of his "body politic" and his subordinating his "body natural" to the feminized domestic space represented in Goneril and Regan. Using Ernst Kantorowicz's theory of the king's two bodies and reading this theory through early modern language of bodily possession, as outlined by Dan Brayton, I argue that Brook's film conflates Lear's "body natural" (the sphere of domestic identity) and "body politic" (the public sphere of landed kingship) and then ruptures and opposes these identities in the first half of the film. Once Lear violates the integrity of his two bodies by divesting himself of his public "body politic," he submits his natural, domestic body to feminine possession, a domestic power structure represented in part by the potential sexual reproductivity of Goneril and Regan. This submission of masculinized political authority to feminized domestic authority results both in the dissolution of the king's "body politic" and in the parallel humiliation and demystification of Lear's domestic body natural, a process that generates the misogynistic madness that dominates the last half of the film. In discovering that kingship is a metonymy imposed upon an arbitrary, domestic male body (which is itself dependent on the generative power of the female body), Lear's madness — his fear of bodily possession and loathing of female fertility — is directed at disembodiment itself, at an escape from what Michael Neill has called the "ontological shame" that is inherent in Lear's recognition of his limited, mortal, frail flesh.2 Hence, when Lear begins to see himself as "unaccommodated man," as "the thing itself" (1.4.104-105), his madness becomes an exorcising repudiation of feminine fertility — an attempt to repossess a masculine political identity free of domestic authority — that ultimately motivates Lear's final escape from his shameful, embodied subjectivity through Brook's camera lens. The disturbing closing sequence of the film, then, http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 4 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

produces a montage that cinematically presents not only Lear's final self-negation and escape from the frail and unaccommodated domestic body, but also the film's final denial of coherent subjectivity.

Embodiment is crucial to understanding the gendered discourses of political authority in the play, both in current critical theory and in Shakespeare's historical moment. In the period of 1603-1605, the years immediately following King James's accession to the English throne, the embodiment of royal authority — of the "body politic," of the people — in the physical body of the sovereign was becoming a commonplace of the Stuart government. This is the theory of embodied kingship summarized in Kantorowicz's seminal 1957 study of political theology, The King's Two Bodies, and although Kantorowicz's argument has been criticized in recent years for its association with twentieth-century fascism (cf. Norbrook 1996), it remains a significant framework for discussing the way Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought about kingship. Upon his accession to the throne in 1603, James I advocated the unity of Scotland and England as a quasi-mythic "Great Britain." The proposed political union was conceived as a "natural" one because of James's Scottish ancestry and the prevailing assumption that the king embodies the state he governs. Francis Bacon's 1603 tract defending this proposed union, A Breife Discourse, Touching The Happie Union of the Kingdomes of England and Scotland, argues for the "natural" logic of such a union of political bodies, drawing on the humanist axiom that one can understand the political world by reflecting upon the natural one (Bacon 1603, sig. A3v-A4v). Using similar language in his first speech to parliament in 1604, King James claims that he embodies the union of the houses of Lancaster and York through his "descent lineally out of the loynes of Henry the seventh" (James 1994, 135). Such political claims are significant because of their dependence upon the semiotic identity of the king with the geographic and demographic body politic. Indeed, in his 1604 speech James goes on to argue that England and Scotland should become one body politic because King James himself contains both English and Scottish blood within one body natural, a physical space that embodies the ideal nation-state (137). In the discourse of the early Stuart regime, then, there is an inherent connection between the realm of the sovereign's physical, domestic body and the figurative, political body — the nation — comprised of his subjects.

The point here is not to belabor the historical veracity of the theory of the king's two bodies under James I. Rather, it is to underline the thematic connection between King Lear's preoccupation with the integrity of the British kingdom and the exigent politics of James's http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 5 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

political union during the time Shakespeare was most likely composing Lear. Therefore, even if Kantorowicz's theory is drawn in part on wishful paraphrases of source texts, or on an incomplete account of early modern English politics before the Civil War, as Norbrook claims (1996, 348-51), thinking of the king's person as the site of intersection between the physical body and the political body remains central to understanding Shakespeare's exploration of political and domestic spaces in the play. This "politics of somatic space," as I call it, creates in Shakespeare's cultural moment a pervasive language of kingship and its concomitant socio-political conflicts, and if the play was first performed in the presence of James, as the title page of the first quarto claims, this politics of somatic space would have resonated quite clearly in the play's anxiety over divided kingdoms, civil wars, and a disintegrating monarch.

The theory of the king's two bodies also becomes quite helpful to a hermeneutics of gendered power in Brook's vision of Lear, for just as it probably inflected contemporary politics performances of Lear in its early modern debut, the theory also allows us to interrogate the rupture of Lear's gendered subjectivity and the concomitant portrayals of gendered power spheres that catalyze the play's demystification of kingship through somatically figured madness. To use the theory in such a way, however, we must complicate it with a realization that the embodiment of political power is by its nature performed, and as such is also gendered — a dynamic quite pertinent to the political and sexual imaginary of post-Elizabethan England. As Bruce Smith intimates in his study of masculinity in Shakespeare, the theory of the king's two bodies assumes in the seventeenth century a particularly masculine valence, for it is a male trope that imbues the king's person with a transcendent being that defies the mere fleshly embodiment of the human subject (Smith 2000, 27).3 Also, Smith's study shows that masculinity or "manhood" is an identity that by definition must be achieved rather than received or given in early modern culture (2).4 This performed nature of maleness is crucial for understanding Shakespeare's portrayal of Lear because it suggests that both "kingship" and "maleness" can be constructed, performed identities, whose founding unit is the body itself (10). In King Lear, it is precisely this negotiated, fictive nature of male embodiment and kingship that Shakespeare strips bare through Lear's mad ravings against domestic, feminine rule. Therefore, considered with all its implications of embodiment, Kantorowiczian political theology informs my reading of Brook's film in at least two ways. First, it allows a dynamic interplay of gendered power discourses by showing the fragmentation of power into feminized domestic space and masculinized http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 6 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

political space, and suggests a rich discourse of male/female body politics underlying both Shakespeare's playtext and Brook's filmtext. Second, understood in conjunction with Smith's insights, it can complicate Lear's (and our) assumptions about the nature of early modern kingship by revealing royalty's performative, gendered essence.

DIVIDING, DIVESTING, AND DISPOSSESSING "THE THING ITSELF" Before exploring the development of gendered political structures in the first half of the film, I would like to glance at a climactic moment in the progress of Lear's demystification as king, the moment in the film in which gendered networks of meaning are manifested most explicitly: the meeting of Lear and Poor Tom in the storm. In the storm scene, Brook uses a series of shots from Lear's POV both to emphasize the relationship between Lear and Poor Tom (men who are "possessed") and to highlight the association between gendered power networks and Lear's self-identity within those networks. When Paul Scofield's gritty (and, as Alexander Leggatt [2004] points out, decidedly "masculine")5 Lear enters the hovel, Tom identifies himself as "A serving-man . . . [who] served the lust of my mistress' heart and did the act of darkness with her," one who "out-paramoured the Turk" in sexual appetite.6 His warning against female sexuality accentuates the film's emphasis on the body, for as Tom speaks, the camera repeatedly cuts from an unfocused close-up of his head to a medium-distance shot of Tom's naked upper- body, and back again (figure 1).

Figure 1: Edgar's vulnerable nakedness The series of rapid cuts not only builds the sexual energy of the speech, but also juxtaposes a visually dominant male body with Tom's verbal declamation of feminine sexuality. The effect is to contrast the vulnerable male body visualized in the shot with the spoken suggestion

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of female sexual power: it is a moment where female sexuality impinges on the dispossessed, "unaccommodated" male body that Tom represents.

Lear's response to the sight of Poor Tom contributes to the scene's anxiety about the vulnerability of the male body (as evidenced in Lear's "Off, off, you lendings" [3.4.106]; see figure 2).

Figure 2: Lear's "divesting" As Lear discovers that Poor Tom is "unaccommodated man," he gives his speech as the camera slowly tracks down Tom's nearly-naked, wet body from Lear's POV. When Lear says, "Thou art the thing itself" (3.4.104-105), the downward pan slows over Tom's loincloth (figure 3), revealing in Lear's mind a connection between Tom's male "essentialness" and Lear's forfeited political body.

Figure 3: Edgar?s loincloth through Lear's eyes The fact that Lear has already identified himself with Tom ("Didst thou give all to thy daughters?" [3.4.48]) only supports the inherent link in this scene between male sexual and political power. The scene's http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 8 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

emphasis on the vulnerability of the male body to the temptation of female sexual power also suggests how Lear perceives the basic conflict with his daughters: Lear's focus on Tom's genitals becomes an index of his need to assert his former masculinized identity against the forces of female domesticity that have vied for sovereignty, through Goneril and Regan, over the film's narrative up to this point. Thus, the meeting of Tom and Lear in the storm serves as a point of collision in the film between notions of feminine and masculine power, while Tom's body emblematizes the discourses of Kantorowiczian political theory that the film accesses in the playtext. The encounter also demonstrates that constructs of royal political power are emphatically somatic and male in Brook's visual language: the image of the naked male body, "the thing itself," haunts this central sequence as a trope of Lear's movement toward demystification and alienated subjectivity.7

The storm scene, therefore, teaches us that a major organizing principle of the film's visual language lies in the vulnerability of the divested male human body. Moreover, this male, somatic vulnerability inflects the film's identification of maleness with public, exterior spaces and femaleness with interior settings marked by the domestic hearth. Such a division between male and female spheres is not Brook's innovation. Rather, the film appropriates modes of gendered theatrical space that Hanna Scolnicov has asserted are integral to the western theatrical tradition, a convention in which female identity is expressed through interior spaces (especially the hearth), while male identity is signed in exterior spaces such as the street or the forum (Scolnicov 1994, 11-15). Similarly, this logic of gendered space throughout Brook's film makes manifest coded political spheres derived from the playtext and the cultural traditions informing it. Brook's invocation of gendered space thereby reveals and manipulates what is available in Shakespeare's dramaturgy. Indeed, in Brook's description of his film's symbolic economy, his words gesture toward a spatial concept commensurate with Scolnicov's historical insights, suggesting that the major elemental division in Lear's society in the film is between interior and exterior settings: We decided to start with the idea that the basic element of life in the society in which Lear lived was the contrast between heat and cold. One real element that emerges from the plot is the notion of nature as something hostile, dangerous, against which man is to battle . . . what counts from a psychological point of view is the contrast between the safe, enclosed places and the wild, unprotected places. Which leads you to two denominators of security: fire and fur.

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(Brook 1987, 204) This dichotomy between "hostile" and "secure" spaces manifests itself in a cinematic language in which domestic spaces are symbolized by interior scenes, blazing hearths, and thick furs, while the elemental forces of "wildness" are communicated through stark exterior shots showing the barren, frigid countryside of Jutland where the film was shot (see figures 4 and 5).

Figure 4: Gloucester's castle and hearth, an example of interior domestic space

Figure 5: Lear's hunting party, associating exterior space with masculinity Brook's words contrast with Anthony Davies's claim that the barren landscape of Jutland does nothing but punctuate "the world view which Brook strives to impose" (Davies 1997, 250); they also challenge R. B. Parker's analysis that Brook uses mise-en-scène expressionistically rather than symbolically (Parker 1991, 81, 83). Understood in light of

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Scolnicov's work, the interior/exterior polarities in Brook's mise-en- scène are intertwined with symbolically gendered political spaces, for as the storm scene indicates in its emphasis on essential masculinity vis-à- vis the adumbrated genitalia, gender coding is signed in the exterior/interior visual idiom Brook adapts from a playtext that "depends crucially on the contrast between indoors and out" (Holland 1994, 61). "Unaccommodated man" is made vulnerable by the forces of nature unmitigated by roofs that should protect "houseless poverty" (3.4.104, 26) and domesticated spaces are routinely symbolized in the film by fireplaces (as in the sequence in Goneril's castle, discussed below) and dining halls. In short, Brook's interior/exterior visual logic aligns with congruent semiotic pairings of domestic/political spaces, of female/male power spheres invoked by carefully composed background images in the film's key scenes.

The opening of Brook's King Lear employs this public/domestic, gendered coding to describe a masculine model of Lear's political body that the storm scene works to deconstruct. The sequence also develops the conceptual union of body politic and body natural in the king in order first to rupture the unity of Lear's public/domestic subjectivity, and then to gender the consequent political and domestic spaces sundered by the rupture. As the opening credits roll, the camera tracks slowly over a sea of male faces, men who are awaiting, in a space exterior to Lear's throne room, the publication of Lear's decision. The pan evokes the type of somatic politics being worked out in the text: Lear's "public" kingdom — the body politic represented by the male subjects in an exteriorized space — is unequivocally male (we learn that these are Lear's hundred knights). After showing the mass of men who represent the masculinized, public state, the tracking shot cuts to a static, interior visual of Lear's throne room. This symmetrically composed frame increases the stakes of a gendered reading of the film's conception of somatic politics, for we do not know at first that the large, coarse, phallic stone (Hodgdon 1983, 146) in the center of the composition is actually Lear's throne, a fact that, once recognized, highlights the embodiment of male political power made visually explicit (figure 6).

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Figure 6: The phallic throne: Lear's knights wait outside the door Thus, the phallic image, in its placement immediately after the sea of the male body politic outside the throne room, emerges as an establishing symbol of the alignment of political power with male embodiment in the film. It is a crucial index showing the relationships among maleness, political order, and public (exterior) space in Brook's cinematic idiom. Although at this moment both political and domestic powers are unified in Lear's throne room (the phallic throne is located within an interior space), their immanent rupture into two competing gendered spheres is already intimated by the closing throne room door that separates exterior and interior spaces.

The division of the kingdom in this scene dramatically foregrounds the synecdoche that links the king's body politic with his male body natural. When Lear partitions the map, we are presented with an emblem that unites the map of the state with Lear's own body. The map, as John Gillies and Dan Brayton have shown, is a symbolically dense prop in Shakespeare's theater, for its deployment underlines the political significances of early modern cartography (Gillies 2001, 109-21; Brayton 2003, 400-403). Additionally, Brayton has convincingly argued that Lear's division of the physical map is an attempt to "oversee his symbolic death in order to fossilize himself within the political order that will succeed him" (2003, 401). Although this "fossilization" fails miserably, the rich semiotic possibilities of the map latent in any performance of this scene remain. Moreover, the political discourses encoded in the map are in this scene interwoven with the sexualized symbolization of the throne and the orb of state (figure 7), both of which Kenneth S. Rothwell has read as symbols of sexual reproductivity (1997, 139).

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Figure 7: Goneril holding the orb of state Indeed, in Brook's vision, the political world the map represents is inextricably bound up with the realm of the (sexually-produced) body natural of Lear himself. As Lear proclaims, "Of all these bounds, even from this line to this, we make thee lady" (1.1.63, 66), Gloucester pulls back the thick fur that covers the floor-map; when Lear rises from the dark recess of his throne a moment later, he dons a prominent bear skin, a symbolic vestment of his embodied royal authority (figures 8 and 9).

Figure 8: The fur-covered map

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Figure 9: Lear's robe of state This series of shots iconically links the political map — a sign of the male body politic outside — to Lear's body. The king's parceling of the kingdom thus ironically becomes a visual divesting of Lear's royal authority even as the action embeds Lear's body in the political map, for as Lear tries to identify himself with the cartographic sign of his kingdom, he is also metaphorically shedding from his body the thick fur that signifies his political power — this is the only scene in which Lear wears the robe of state. The visual language of the throne room sequence — its network of political and sexual symbolism encoded in the map, throne, and orb — graphically portrays the king's political "abdication" as a physical divesting: Lear initiates a demystification of gendered authority that culminates in his recognition of Tom's nearly- naked "thing itself" in the storm.

This political divestment in the throne room scene also demonstrates how both political and domestic power are expressed in part through early modern discourses of territorial possession and dispossession; that is, Lear's royal power lies in his ability to own and dispose of the land and the people who live on it (Brayton 2003, 403-404). Similarly, as Brook's discussion of interior/exterior settings and Scolnicov's claims about theatrical space both suggest, power in the domestic sphere can also be understood as somatic possession — the ability to "own" and protect a natural, physical body from the exterior world. Lear expresses this sense of royal-power-as-possession when he banishes Cordelia and Kent. But the King of France also reinforces a politics of possession when he identifies Cordelia with land, thereby equating his political and sexual power with ownership. France declares, "Be it lawful, I take up what's cast away. Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon. Thy dowerless daughter, King, is queen of France" (1.1.255, 258-59), using language that is, especially when considered within this scene's context of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 14 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

bequeathed kingdoms and landed marriages, suggestive of property rights ("I seize upon"), revealing the relationship between male political power and its desire to possess the female body. More significantly, Lear employs a gendered discourse of possession when he uses his political authority to banish Cordelia. Lear calls upon Hecate, a figure that Jeanne Addison Roberts associates with a preternatural cult of female religious rule (Roberts 1992, 125), in order to "exorcise" his land of his youngest daughter. The cursing of Cordelia suggests that Lear calls upon a deity associated with female power in order to remove the "body" of his daughter from the "body politic" of his kingdom. Possession — here meaning both political and familial/domestic possession — thus emerges as a function of a female-gendered sphere of power summarized in Lear's invocation of the goddess. Similarly, even as Lear dispossesses his kingdom of Cordelia, he reduces and submits himself indirectly to the domestic space of his body natural when he claims that he will stay with each daughter with his hundred knights, that he will "make abode with [each] by due turn" (1.1.135-36). The language of possession resonates with vital significance throughout this important scene: possession is constructed first as male political power over geographic space and the female body (Brayton's claim), but is then subtly translated into the female figure of Hecate. Lear begins the scene in complete possession of a male kingdom, but concludes the scene effectually divested of this male power and in the "possession" of his daughters' "abodes," spaces deriving their domestic power from feminized discourses of divine dispossession. This conflict between domestic and political power structures organizes Brook's more sympathetic treatment of Goneril and Regan and leads to Lear's mad railings against female domestic power. The irony is that Lear himself catalyzes the dichotomy by linguistically confusing domestic and political power, while simultaneously and symbolically divesting himself of his masculine body politic.

DOMESTICITY AND LEAR'S LOATHING OF THE "KIND NURSERY" If the throne room scene represents a sundering of Lear's body natural and body politic, as well as a gendering of domestic and political power spheres through the language of (dis)possession, then 1.4 represents a conflict between Lear's masculine, public identity as king (which he has "cast off"), and Goneril's domestic space, the household that visually tropes her power over the interior, somatic realm. Brook's textual rearrangement is provocative in this sequence, which opens with a frame of text telling us that Lear is at "Goneril's [not Albany's] Castle," preparing us to read the following setting as Goneril's domestic domain

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rather than merely a male political center. We see Goneril and Albany dining face-to-face in front of a fire (figure 10) as Goneril voices her concern about Lear's unruly knights ("'Tis politic, and safe, to let him keep at point a hundred knights?" [1.4.316-17] becomes an emphatic question).

Figure 10: Albany and Goneril in front of the fire The shot composition establishes the domestic nature of Goneril's qualms by associating her visually with the hearth, the symbol of feminine dominion in the classical and western theatrical tradition (Scolnicov 1994, 14). Goneril's attitude toward her father's destructiveness is developed gradually and organically in the first few minutes of the sequence, for rather than giving her three longer speeches in which she complains to Oswald about Lear's retinue (as in the playtext's 1.3), Brook allows her resentment to accumulate in two- and three-line comments, interspersed with shots of the knights' rowdiness. As Goneril tells Oswald to "Say I am sick. I will not speak with him" (1.3.9), the camera cuts to Lear's small army of hunting knights on the frozen countryside. The shot cuts back to the interior of the castle, and Goneril assures the servants (in front of a fire in the dining hall), "If you come slack of your former services, you shall do well; the fault I'll answer" (1.3.10-11). After cutting to Lear's train entering the courtyard, the camera cuts back to Goneril, who says to Oswald, "Put on what weary negligence you please . . . If he should detest it, let him to my sister's" (1.3.14-15). The effect of this deftly edited montage is to produce a thoughtful Goneril who is not treacherously devising a plan to thwart her father, as a critic such as Bruce Young would have it (2002, 59-60).8 Rather, Irene Worth's Goneril is measured and justified in her growing outrage, a woman concerned with the integrity and order of her (now sovereign) household (figure 11).

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Figure 11: Goneril chastising her father before the hearth The alternating shots of exterior and interior space accentuate the film's growing conflict between male political power (the identity Lear still wishes to retain through his knights) and female domestic power: Goneril asserts her authority through domestic servants in scenes shot before large dining-hall fires, all of which suggests her ordered attempt to defend her political and domestic rule from the destructive, masculinized, barren world outside.

This gendering of domestic space underpins Irene Worth's Goneril, whose domestic sovereignty and circumspect rule are manifest in the dining hall scene. By the time she chastises Lear for his behavior, Worth's Goneril has developed a free-standing subject-position vis-à-vis familial domesticity. She delivers her reproaches to Lear gently, sitting next to him in-frame, conveying concern for her father's well-being within her domestic space (figure 12).

Figure 12: Goneril asks her father to "disquantity" his train Goneril asks more than commands Lear, "A little to disquantity your http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 17 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

train, and the remainders to be such men as may besort your age, which know themselves, and you" (1.4.240-43). Instead of being a power- hungry woman bent solely on overthrowing Lear, Goneril appears concerned for her father, perhaps suspicious that his knights are in a position to abuse or humiliate the king, who is already mentally disintegrating (earlier in the scene, Scofield yammers in a voice cracking with senility, "Where's my fool?" (1.4.42). The fact that most of this conversation takes place in front of the fire emphasizes Goneril's responsibility for the domestic sphere, for the fire links this exchange to the intimate conversation with Albany and thus to the mythic hearth that opened the sequence. Lear's figure is also visually subordinated to the domestic set of the dining hall even when Goneril is not on camera affirming her authority over Lear's body natural. When Jack MacGowran's Fool says, "Sirrah, I'll teach thee a speech" (1.4.113), he is opposite Lear, the fire in the background the only light in the scene. When the Fool chides Lear in his next speech, "I have used it, nuncle, e'er since thou mad'st thy daughters thy mothers; for thou gav'st them the rod and putt'st down thine own breeches" (1.4.163-65), MacGowran is in close-up, speaking over a loaf of bread on the table, a composition that foregrounds the domestic space of the dining hall and Lear's somatic place within it (figures 13 and 14).

Figure 13: Fool shows Lear "the two crowns of the egg"

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Figure 14: Lear and Fool at table, with hearth in the background The overall effect of the sequence — the Fool's chiding in front of the fire and Goneril's gentle, emotionally dynamic speeches — is two-fold. First, it shows Goneril's potential for a fuller subject-position within the playtext, a position ascribable to her role as domestic ruler that shifts her motives away from the purely political; and second, it underlines Lear's physical dependence upon both the fires of the interior dining hall and Goneril's feminine, domestic rule — she is both daughter and "mother" ruling over interior spaces, over the "kind nursery" upon which Lear's body natural depends and against which he will begin to rage.

The climactic destruction of the dining hall and the curse on Goneril's womb dramatize Lear's outrage at his loss of political identity, as well as his attempts to dislodge himself from the film's logic of domestic possession of the male body. After Goneril admonishes Lear to "disquantity" his train, Lear screams, "Darkness and devils" (1.4.243), striking the fireplace mantel with his riding crop. Crying out that Goneril is a "degenerate bastard" (l. 245) — the camera cutting to show Worth's pained face — Lear pauses with a napkin in his hand, a reminder of his physical dependence on his daughter. Lear then violently overturns a table, setting off a destructive riot that nearly destroys the hall. More than simply justifying Goneril's anxieties, the destruction also represents Lear's attempt to extricate himself from the domain of the feminine "mother" by reasserting masculine violence through his knights. The attack on the dining hall symbolically positions male political violence against domestic control, which subsides when in the background the exterior doors open to provide an exit for Lear and his knights. Hence, following the logic of Brook's gendered exterior/interior idiom, male violence catalyzes a temporary rupture of domestic space and stages what may be termed a brief "exorcism" that allows male subjectivity an escape back into the barren exterior world beyond the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 19 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

pale of Goneril's domesticating fires (figure 15).

Figure 15: The doors of the hall open; the knights re-enter the exterior world

If the barren outside world signifies the male political domain that Lear wishes to reconstitute through violence, then his curse of Goneril is a liminal moment in which female fertility and sexuality become essential symbols of domesticity, and therefore the central fear informing Lear's madness in the storm scene with Poor Tom. When Lear curses Goneril's womb at the end of this sequence, Scofield's face, profiled in close-up, marks a visual boundary between the warm domestic space behind the camera's POV (from which Lear is escaping) and the barren masculine world outside, beyond Scofield's face (figure 16).

Figure 16: Lear curses Goneril at the threshold of interior and exterior worlds

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This composition inscribes Lear's body within the margins of the domestic world and magnifies his yearning to escape his daughter's authority. When Lear begs the goddess of nature, "into [Goneril's] womb convey sterility, dry up in her the organs of increase" (1.4.270-71), the camera cuts to Worth's anguished face at the word "sterility," in a close- up that highlights the importance of fertility for a woman who indeed will never have children (figure 17).

Goneril's pain at "Dry up in her the organs of increase" The montage of the curse speech thereby aligns Goneril with generation, a crucial source of feminine power that bridges the domestic and political spheres. In addition, the curse reveals Lear's fear of mastery by this domestic world, so that the only way he may regain political autonomy and "exorcise" himself from domestic space is to reclaim the power to procreate from his daughter. The aggressiveness with which Lear asserts his will against his daughter (who is also his "mother," his de facto "kind nursery") is further underlined when he invades the frame to accost and dominate Goneril so "that she may feel how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child" (1.4.279-81; figure 18).

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Figure 18: Lear aggressively moves left, invading Goneril's frame Hence, while Lear wishes to embed his body in the map of the body politic, as represented by the exterior world in the background of the shot (he will "abjure all roofs" (2.2.397), Goneril's body is a site for the procreative, female "body natural" — for the enveloping domestic sphere against which Lear retaliates. The curse reinvigorates the film's bifurcation between exterior/interior, political/domestic spaces, and argues that the essence of female domestic and political power is the ability to enflesh human subjects. The effect of Lear's denial of female reproductivity is evident in Goneril's face as Lear strolls into the barren male political world: her eyes brim with tears, and her warning to Regan through Oswald becomes not an insidious plot against fatherhood, but empathy for her sister's womb, her "particular fear" that Oswald will carry to Gloucester's castle.

The conflict between domestic and political spaces within which Lear is attempting to regain his political identity reaches its climax when Goneril and Regan rapidly pare down Lear's train of knights. Like Goneril, Susan Engel's Regan speaks gently to Lear, seemingly concerned for his well-being. Her line, "Sir, you are old: Nature in you stands on the very verge of her confine" (2.2.235-37), is delivered as she sits next to Lear, the two figures facing each other intimately within frame. Regan's tone is not cruel; she merely reminds her father that he should submit to domestic rule, the "nursery" that will care for his decaying body natural. But when Goneril and Regan admonish Lear to dissolve his train, the conflict between their domestic rule and Lear's grasp of his political identity is foregrounded. When Goneril asks, "Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance from those that she calls servants or from mine?" and Regan adds, "If then they chanced to slack ye, we could control them" (2.2.432-35), the two women stand next to each other in front of the castle door, again marking their identification with interior space (figure 19).

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Figure 19: "What need one?" Note Regan's "gorgeous" robe As the women divest Lear of his train, the gendered conflict becomes stark: Lear's knights represent to him the last vestiges of his masculine identity as king, the last link to his already-divested body politic. He "needs" them in order to maintain a kingly subject-position. Lear is quite clear that without his knights, "man's life is cheap as beast's" (2.2.456), a comment that points out the relationship between kingship and its ornamental expression through the possession of men. Just as Regan clothes herself in "gorgeous" apparel (the camera cuts at the word "gorgeous" from Lear's weaving upper body to Regan's fur-clad torso) and thereby expresses her feminine "body," so too does Lear express his masculine identity through knightly "vestment." For Lear, to eliminate the train is to relegate him fully to a completely domestic subject- position. This is exactly what Goneril's and Regan's paring attempts to achieve.

Lear's choices are clear at this point in the domestic/political, interior/exterior conflict: he either must submit himself to a "naked" subjectivity and become a natural body possessed by the domestic world, or he must seek an escape from subjectivity altogether, since his political identity has been subsumed by Regan's and Goneril's domestic rule. Lear, of course, chooses the latter and rushes into the wild storm, abjuring not only all roofs, but also his own invaded, shameful body. The storm scene's defamiliarizing effects emphasize the fragmentation of Lear's subjectivity: harsh, electronic thunder, black frames, rapidly shifting montages of Lear and the Fool, reverse shots of Lear arguing with himself in the speeches of 3.1, all represent the film's dismantling of Lear's subject-position. But in terms of Lear's "pelican daughters," his "reason not the need" speech marks the climax of their dominance, for the second half of the film reabsorbs Goneril and Regan's potential for self-sustaining subjectivity into the political world of Britain and the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 23 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

invasion by France's army. Although for reasons discussed below, I disagree with Carol Rutter's suggestion that the second half of the film fails to engage a feminist agenda (cf. Rutter 1997, 198), I think a more productive method of interpreting the film lies within early modern language of possession. The first half provides more deeply considered characterizations of Goneril and Regan because the first half is concerned with the effect of domestic space on Lear's body natural once his body politic has been relinquished, dissolved — divested. Thus, domesticity and the daughters' spheres of influence govern the film up to Lear's "reason not the need" speech. However, once Lear's subjectivity and his drive to escape from domestic possession become central, the film's emphasis shifts back to the politics of the playtext's French invasion. Political space overtakes the domestic at this point and repossesses the narrative's trajectory, a point highlighted by the decreasing focus on interior settings through the end of the film.

At this juncture, therefore, we must clarify and qualify Brook's more sympathetic treatment of Goneril and Regan. Although Brook's directorial vision opens a space for Engel's and Worth's portrayals of more sympathetic women, Brook's cinematic idiom inscribes these female characters within a domestic space that is traditionally associated with oppressed or silenced femininity (Scolnicov 1994, 6-7). This directorial employment of stereotypically gendered spaces makes it difficult to view Brook's treatment of feminine subjectivity as unqualifiedly "feminist," and it partially supports Kathleen McLuskie's claims that even attempts at feminist readings of Shakespeare fail to create a completely radical, feminist point of view (McLuskie 1985, 106). However, my overall goal is not to recuperate Brook as a feminist, but rather to explore the significance of Goneril's and Regan's expanded subjectivities in relation to the film's gendered power spheres and its visual language. Brook's ingenuity lies in his ability to turn the domestic world into an active, politically interested articulation of femininity that is far removed from the subservient silence so conventionally associated with the feminized hearth and home. Thus, even though Brook's artistic vision is generally circumscribed by conventional stereotypes of gendered space, his treatment of Goneril and Regan within the gendered spaces of King Lear also demonstrates his ability to re-inflect and empower femininity while simultaneously critiquing misogyny — even to the maddening of royal Lear.

POSSESSION AND EXORCISM OF THE SHAMEFUL SUBJECT What are we to make, then, of Lear's madness, as understood both

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through the gendered framework of political and domestic power I have adumbrated and through the language of possession as a mode of thinking about the domestic, natural body? In what remains, I would like to show that Lear's madness is inflected by early modern understandings of bodily possession, and that Brook's film exploits the connections between feminine fertility and somatic possession in order to stage a repudiation of a coherent subject-position either for Lear or for the audience. In other words, Lear's madness can be understood as a desire to exorcise from his own body the influences of feminine domesticity, a desire that perceives procreation as a base proliferation of domestic subjects — the shameful, fleshly bodies Michael Neill (2006) has described — without inherently political meaning. Once Lear's illusion of kingship is demystified in the storm, he realizes that his body natural is the only "real" body available to him. In this demystified position, Lear's madness manifests itself as a drive to escape subjective embodiment, a dynamic evidenced by Brook's closing sequence.

The early modern period saw the beginning of what Carol Thomas Neely has described as the formation of the modern secular subject: In the early modern period and especially in the decades before and after the beginning of the seventeenth century, several cultural debates in process (over the prerogatives of medicine, the validity of witchcraft accusations, the control of possession and exorcism) have the effect of requiring and welcoming the separation of human madness from the similar-appearing conditions caused by sin and guilt, demonic and divine possession, bewitchment, or fraud. By making such distinctions, these debates gradually map out the normal, "natural," and self-contained secular human subject — one that of course exists within a divinely ordered and devil-threatened cosmos but is not entirely shaped by supernatural forces. (Neely 2004, 47) This emerging distinction, so regularly asserted by scholars of early modernity, was often politically inflected in the post-Reformation era's bitterly sectarian atmosphere. In England especially, the Protestant state encouraged the treatment of possession as a medical and physical affliction curable by secular intervention rather than by Roman Catholic ritual exorcisms that the state perceived as subversive, "papist" manipulations of a gullible public.9 The proliferation of pathologies for supernatural possession contributed to an increasing overlap in religious, scientific, and psychological discourses, and drama served a unique role in this discursive secularization through a heightened awareness on stage of alternative explanations for "distraction," "possession," and 10 http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 25 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

"madness" (Neely 2004, 46-47, 49).10 Within this milieu, therefore, Shakespeare's stage has available to it a rich multitude of natural and supernatural discourses with which to inflect and express Lear's madness. In the case of King Lear, gendered medical language provides a framework for understanding the dissolution of Lear's body natural. The physician Edmund Jorden published a treatise emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between "possession" and "disease," a work likely to have been in Shakespeare's hands sometime between its publication in 1603 and the first performance of Lear in 1605, since its terminology surfaces in Lear's fear of the hysterica passio. Jorden's tract, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother, is implicitly positioned against Catholic ritualism: I thought good to make knowne the doctrine of this disease, so farre forth, as may be in a vulgar tongue conveniently disclosed, to the end that the unlearned and rash conceits of divers [sic], might be thereby brought to better understanding and moderation; who are apt to make everything a supernaturall work which they do not understand, proportioning the bounds of nature unto their own capacities. (1603, sig. A2v-A3r) However, Jorden does not completely discount possession as a viable explanation for physical affliction, claiming, I doe not deny but that God doth in these dayes worke extraordinarily, for the deliverance of his children . . . and that among other, there may be both possessions by the Divell, and obsessions and witchcraft, & and dispossession also through the Prayers and supplications of his servants. (1603, sig. A3r) Significantly, Jorden distinguishes between supernatural and natural causes of disease. But what I want to suggest in presenting these passages is that although the early modern period witnessed the emergence of medicine as an alternative explanation for supernatural possession, the discourses of possession, madness, and physical disease were not easily extricated from one another in Shakespeare's culture. In fact, since Jorden's tract was published just before the composition of King Lear, and since Lear himself claims to suffer from hysterica passio — the wandering womb of Jorden's "suffocation of the mother" — it is very likely that Shakespeare exploits the indeterminacies among discourses of possession, madness, and sexuality available in Jorden's text.11 The play thus appropriates language from these discourses to interrogate the domestic "possession" that Brook's filmtext accesses, as well as to dramatize a misogynistic madness that serves as a male

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"exorcism" of feminine possession.

Within these interweaving discourses, Lear's madness emerges in Brook's film as a perceived "possession" by "motherly" — i.e., domestic and female — authority over the body natural. When Lear finds the disguised Kent stocked in Gloucester's courtyard, for example, it is an affront to the power once symbolized by the king's body politic, a sign that Lear's political identity is forfeit to a new order represented in Lear's sons-in-law, but more immediately mediated by his daughters. What is fascinating about Lear's reaction here is that this attack against his body politic manifests itself as a violation of his body natural through the language of feminine possession: "O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, thy element's below" (2.2.246-48).12 Later in the scene, Lear apostrophizes his heart, ordering it "down" again. And when Lear is at the height of his anger against his daughters' domestic authority, he cries out, "No, I'll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws or e'er I'll weep" (2.2.472-75). Taken alone, these passages merely indicate a once-fierce king's fear of appearing effete in public, but read within a somatic politics, the lines are pregnant with meaning. Lear interprets his dependence on domestic space (e.g., Goneril's dining hall) as a possession of his body natural by feminine forces. More horrifyingly for Lear, his body natural is literally ruled by a domestic "womb," the essential symbol of fertility and female dominion. If previously Lear could exorcise himself of Goneril's literal domestic hearth and dining hall by reentering the barren political exterior world, here such an option is no longer available, for here not only is Lear "distracted" by his dependence upon the domestic body, but the very sign of that feminized order now possesses his own body. Madness for Lear thus slips linguistically into bodily possession, an invasion of his subject-position by the female's organs of increase.

In short, making Goneril and Regan figures of domestic power with autonomous subject positions opposing male political authority reveals the rich valences of Lear's hysterica passio, dynamics embodied and exploited in Brook's ambitious production. Once we organize a reading of the film- and playtexts around the principles of bifurcated and conflicting "bodies" of gendered power — bodies represented in the domestic interiors and political exteriors offered in Brook's cinematic idiom and elaborated in Scolnicov's insights into feminine theatrical space — Lear's madness dominates Brook's camera lens: off-centered close-ups, erratic pans and jump-cuts, and the disembodied effects of the storm scene all emanate from the "possession" of Lear's body natural http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 27 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

and indeed mimic Lear's destabilized subjectivity (cf. Hodgdon 1983, 146). Therefore, since Lear's madness is linked to his domination by feminine domesticity, Lear's misogyny assumes a more poignant "rationale" in Brook's interpretation, for it allows us to read the possibilities coded in Poor Tom's body, which offers Lear a final possibility for exorcising his body natural from the invasive wandering womb.

Tom's body in the storm scene represents to Lear a possible method, mediated by Christian iconography, to assert once again male political authority. But this potentiality is only suggested, then withdrawn from our vision. Tom becomes instead an index of Lear's demystified, humiliated body natural and suggests the impossibility of Lear's regaining a masculinized body politic once the domestic sphere has asserted itself in the narrative. As described earlier, Tom's body in the storm scene is clad only in a thin loincloth. But Tom is also crowned with a thick wreath of shrubbery, and his face is shrouded in a prominent black beard. As the camera pans down Tom's humiliated body, cutting between his emaciated torso and crowned head, Tom becomes a crucified and humiliated Christ figure (Parker 1991, 81), an emblem of abject mortality and suffering and the trope par excellence of male enfleshment or incarnation (figures 20 and 21).

Figure 20: Edgar with a crown of weeds

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Figure 21: . . . and a loincloth Emblematically, therefore, Tom offers a traditional remedy for Lear's "possessed" body natural: the physical, religious ritual of exorcism, mediated by the sacramental body of the God-man. Lear seems to acknowledge this possibility of "re-embodiment" when he beholds Tom's suggested genitals beneath the loincloth and says, "Thou art the thing itself." At this juncture, Lear apprehends the metonymic power of his own kingship, the arbitrary designation of his body politic that seemed inherently identical to his person in the opening scene. Tom's genitals signal the network of the film's gendered meanings associated with the phallic throne. But whereas the images of Tom invoke the presence of a humiliated Christ figure standing in opposition to Lear's possessed body natural, Lear immediately realizes that there can be no "exorcism" of feminine, domestic power. Rather, Lear recognizes that he, too, is merely "the thing itself": he is only a body natural, a shameful animated corpse that lacks any natural identity with a body politic. Lear enters the hovel and sees Poor Tom's body as a positive reassertion of somatic politics, a reestablishing of incarnated, male political space. Instead, Lear reads his own subject-position out of Tom, and sees that the domestic space of the frail body is the only real subjectivity available for him. He is himself "unaccommodated man," born because copulation thrived not, as in late medieval political theology and early modern absolutism, because he was ordained the king of a mystical body politic and destined by God to rule.13

Once Lear recognizes his own domestic nature — his own body natural — as the sole meaningful unit of his subjectivity, the only option available for him is an escape from subjectivity itself, for it is only this way that he may be "exorcised" of this "wandering womb," this knowledge of his own feminized corporeality (i.e., derived from the domestic space). The king expresses this option through his bitter irony http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 29 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

and misogyny in the "mad scene," which Brook sets against the liminal space of the seashore not merely as a gesture toward Beckettian dramaturgy, but in order to foreground both Lear's demystified body natural and the old men's desires to escape a fleshly subjectivity, a mortality derived from embodiment within the domestic space of the womb.14 Lear pitifully mumbles that he is "every inch a king" (4.6.106), diminishing the dignity these lines might carry, and the shot shrinks Lear's previously imposing torso: a solitary figure in an unbroken white background, Scofield crosses his arms not to defy, but to hide (figure 22).

Figure 22: "Every inch a king" As Lear continues this speech, we realize that his ravings about sex and adultery are ironic commentaries not only on Gloucester's sexual sins, but on the utter dependence of men (specifically men) on the womb that gives them flesh. Lear claims, "Let copulation thrive" (4.6.112), and we sense he refers not only to the bastard Edmund, but also to the futility of regulating procreation, which as Lear learned in the encounter with Poor Tom, is a mere proliferation of unaccommodated, fleshly bodies, not the making of royal subjectivities. Since even a "dog's obeyed in office" (4.5.154-55), Lear asserts the primacy of corporeality over metonymical political meaning: the only reality underpinning subjectivity is enfleshed and feminized, not political and masculine. When Gloucester and Lear, the last of the "legitimate" male rulers (as far as they know), embrace each other and weep, they are the only subjects that exist in this world, and the black and white seashore emerges as the last border of meaning separating the weeping male subjects from the void beyond, into which both men seek to escape from "possession" by the domestic/sexual spaces now dominated by Goneril and Regan (figure 23).

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Figure 23: Lear and Gloucester weep at the threshold, Edgar in the background

The film's final scene — Lear's death — cinematically describes the evacuation of subjectivity for which Lear yearns in the last half of the narrative. Lear's fragmented dissolution also serves as a visual summary of his larger journey, for it refracts the sundering of Lear's artificially conceived dual identities in 1.1 into the defamiliarizing visual language for which the film is known. We see Lear, screaming "Howl, howl, howl," walk across the barren landscape with Cordelia's body. They are not central figures, nor are they shot close-up. Rather, their bodies are both virtually absorbed by the vast, cold background — two fragile, ill- defined figures dwarfed by the immensity of the growing white void. Once Lear places Cordelia's body on the ground and kneels over her, the sequence dissolves into a fractured series of shots whose only coherent meaning lies in their meaninglessness: Lear kneels over Cordelia ("Oh, you are men of stones"), then Cordelia is gone, out of frame, and Lear is looking directly at us ("Cordelia? I might have saved her"). Lear addresses Kent, who is in frame with him ("You're welcome hither"); then turns to look at us, with Cordelia standing behind him simultaneously alive and ghostly ("And my poor fool hanged"). The shot cuts again to Lear looking at the camera ("Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, never, never"), then cuts to Lear from behind, kneeling over nothing ("never, never, never" [5.1.255-307]; see, for example, figures 24 and 25).

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Figure 24: "And my poor fool hanged"

Figure 25: Lear over Cordelia's body — over "nothing" The effect of this disjointed and fantastic sequence is profound in its miming of the meaninglessness of consciousness and subjectivity that Brook intends to communicate to his early 1970s audience, a fragmentation that pervades Lear's shattered mind. Ironically, this is the "exorcism" of Lear's feminized, domestic body, but the ritual is communicated through Cordelia's evacuated subjectivity: she is both present and absent, both in frame and out of frame, both alive and dead. She becomes an evacuated subject divested of cinematic meaning, and Brook uses montage here to separate not only Lear from his daughter, but also the audience from both subjects, so that we, too, may partake visually in the exorcism of subjectivity that the death scene dramatizes.

Lear himself wishes to emulate the example of his daughter's anatomized and voided subject-position, and the film's last image epitomizes the argument of the film's second half. When he says, "Do you see this?" (5.3.309), the camera focuses on Lear's buttoned tunic, http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 32 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

his last remnant of bodily vestment (figure 26).

Figure 26: Lear's last vestment — "kindly undo this button" The emphasis here is on the king's body natural, and even though Brook excises Lear's "Pray you undo this button," the suggestion of a clothed body soon to be shuffled off in death is evident in the coarse fabric that fills the frame, a garment that almost parodically recalls the fur of state that Lear symbolically cast off in 1.1. As he commands, "Look on her: look, her lips, look there, look there!" (5.3.309-10), the camera pans up to Lear's face, which gazes into the lens, the dying man pointing at us as if we were Cordelia's body. Making eye contact with Scofield at this moment is tantalizing, for it shows us that as Lear commands us to look "at her," all we can behold is him: we are told to see his vested body and bearded face as an analogue to Cordelia's voided presence, to look at him as the undefined female subject whose death models his exorcism from shameful, embodied life (figure 27).

Figure 27: "Do you see this? Look there . . ."

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The disjunction between hearing the command "look on her" and looking at Lear from Cordelia's (voided) POV also aligns father and daughter in a striking way, for just as we looked at Cordelia through Lear's POV when he banished her in 1.1, so too do we look at Lear from the valence of the disembodied Cordelia during his own dissolution. While the initial banishment was a divestment and fragmentation of Lear's masculinized body politic, Lear's death scene is a disintegration of his now feminized body natural — of his fleshly subjectivity, which was the demystified, necessary product of a powerful, domestic fertility that "possesses" all subject-positions and undermines the fictional holds of political identity. Lear is thus exorcised of his wandering womb of female domesticity, of his humiliated body, via Brook's closing sequence: the king's head cranes backward, and he drifts slowly down out of frame, which then dissolves into pure white nothingness (figure 28).

Figure 28: Lear's dissolution in the void As the film's relationship to the postmodern theories of Artaud and Kott implies, the price for the exorcism in this cinematic idiom is nothing less than the possibility of cohesive subjectivity itself, for as Cordelia's first words in the film intimate, "the thing itself" is in reality "nothing" at all: it is an unclothed body natural, an ashamed corpse, playing a man, playing a domestic subject — playing a king.

CONCLUSION Emphasizing the interplay of gendered discourses of political and domestic power in Peter Brook's King Lear necessarily runs the risk of stereotyping Brook's interpretation of Goneril and Regan. Indeed, feminist critics have critiqued Brook's directorial vision in the film as debilitatingly circumscribed by traditionalist, patriarchal notions of male

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power to the exclusion of feminine subjectivity. Carol Rutter claims that Brook's treatment of Goneril and Regan in the film does not adequately explore the dimensions of feminine sexuality that Lear's daughters can represent, that Brook is limited by "male-oriented directing" and as a result cannot permit a sympathetic vision of Lear's eldest daughters (Rutter 1997, 196, 198).15 This critique is not new in reviews and scholarship of Brook's oeuvre, but as an interrogation of gendered power structures represented in Lear and his daughters can illustrate, such an unqualified assessment of Brook produces an inadequate account of his film. It overlooks the networks of culturally embedded, conflicting discourses that work to demystify political power and to reveal it as a fictive identity imposed on an inherently domestic — and thereby feminized — fleshly body. In short, Peter Brook's artistic vision can be read through concepts of embodiment that are important to feminist Shakespearean critics, and the emphasis in his film on the complications of masculine embodiment only demonstrates Brook's anticipation of later production theories that privilege the female body, even if Brook's vision is broadly circumscribed by traditionalist conceptions of theatrical space. And if indeed Goneril and Regan are reabsorbed into the political, masculine world in the second half of the film, it is a "limit" imposed by Shakespeare's plot as well as Brook's creative horizon, a limit that Brook's rejection of the mystified subject of political authority at least partially transgresses.

More significantly, though, an interpretation utilizing Kantorowiczian political theology, as well as early modern discourses of political and somatic possession, can illuminate the ways in which Brook appropriates both a subtly feminist reassessment of Goneril and Regan as well as postmodern theories of the subject in order to dramatize crucial historical discourses within Shakespeare's playtext. Rather than merely reflecting the troubling "despair and anger of the 1960s" (Mullin 1983, 195) through the alienation, cruelty, and nihilism of Kott, Artaud, and Beckett, Brook's interpretation of King Lear offers us a historically and textually informed vision of how such cinematic techniques can bring into focus the gendered conflicts between the political and domestic spheres motivating Lear's misogynistic madness. Indeed, early modern political theory can allow us to appreciate the artistic connections between Brook's treatment of fragmented, alienated subjectivity, and his more nuanced — if sometimes inconsistent — treatment of Lear's pelican daughters. Finally, understanding Lear's madness as somatic possession by feminine, domestic power structures and reading that possession as a deconstruction of masculinized, performed political power manifested as evacuated subjectivity, permits http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 35 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

us to interrogate the connections between gendered political and domestic "bodies," while at the same time showing how early modern constructs of masculinity, femininity, and authority produce a wider range of "faithful" production choices for King Lear than critics who privilege a narrower definition of "faithfulness" to Shakespearean playtexts allow. This seems a more productive paradigm for scholars of Shakespeare and the afterlives of his plays: for by illuminating this 1971 appropriation of the playtext's concerns with embodiment, possession, and political authority, we see that Brook does not deconstruct or redact Lear, but instead embodies one more shadow of Lear's possibilities.16

NOTES 1. See Lukas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003) for the foundations of this kind of analysis. Erne claims that while performance studies of Shakespeare have been needed correctives of New Critical tendencies to reduce Renaissance plays to poems, they have tended to neglect the reality that Shakespeare's plays were also literary texts produced in a specific historical moment. Awareness of this twofold nature of Shakespeare's plays — as both performance text and literary text — is hence vital to a fuller understanding of Shakespearean drama. 2. My analysis of the playtext, as realized in Brook's film, shares some similarities with the "ontological shame" of King Lear that Michael Neill has put forward in a recent lecture, "'The Little Dogs and All'" (2006). Indeed, although my interpretation arrives at necessarily different conclusions than Neill does, and although his discussion of "ontological shame" does not address the gendered possibilities and connotations implied in my argument, Neill's deeply compelling historicist reading of the play illuminates an important emphasis on embodiment and royal shame that is vital to interpreting Brook's film. 3. Smith (2000) invokes Kantorowicz's theory as one of several modes by which masculine identity is represented in Shakespeare, though he does not elaborate the full significance of gendered somatic politics that this political theology supports. 4. See Smith's concluding chapter, "Coalescences," for a concise discussion of the constructed nature of masculinity and its significance in specific Shakespearean performances. 5. Leggatt points out that Scofield's characterization marked a vital turning point in a twentieth-century movement away from Lear as "reverend old king" to Lear as a strong, unsympathetic tyrant (Leggatt 2004, 105-17). 6. King Lear, 3.4.83-86, 89-90. Because Brook's textual editing

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reorganizes scenes and includes altered and completely new lines, I will cite the approximate playtext lines parenthetically, without line breaks, from the Arden 3 edition, ed. R. A. Foakes (1997). 7. Many thanks to Jonathan Watson for his assistance in producing the still frames for this essay. All frames are from King Lear, dir. Peter Brook (1971). 8. Young (2002), using insights derived from Emmanuel Levinas, argues that the play is composed of characters who act "for themselves" (i.e., Goneril and Regan) and characters who act "for others." 9. For discussions of demonic possession in early modern England, see Stephen Greenblatt's seminal essay, "Shakespeare and the Exorcists" (1987) and Van Dijkhuizen's elaboration of Greenblatt's argument, "Mystical Bodies" (1999). 10. Neely's introduction (2004) also provides an outstanding summary of the cultural meaning of madness and distraction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and shows how gender constructs influence cultural understanding of madness vis-à-vis the stage. 11. Jorden's treatise has been a popular historical text for exploring the intersection of demonology and early modern physiology. For another account of this treatise's potential influence on Shakespeare, see Joanna Levin's "Lady Macbeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria" (2002). 12. Although Scofield actually reverses the words of the Latin term, I preserve the word order of the playtext here for clarity. 13. For a discussion of the role pagan deities play in Lear's universe, see William R. Elton's King Lear and the Gods (1966). For a different take on the role absolutism plays in King Lear, see Richard Halpern's "Historica Passio: King Lear's Fall into Feudalism," in his The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (1991), 215-69. 14. For a recent analysis of how Brook's film treats subjectivity through Edgar and Gloucester in the "Dover cliff" scene, see Simon J. Ryle's "Filming Non-Space" (2007). 15. Rutter reads Charles Marowitz's account of Brook's original 1962 stage rehearsals of the unruly knights (Marowitz 1988, 14-15) as an example of such "in-gendered" directing, and argues that Goneril's sexuality is not sufficiently explored in the second half of the 1971 film. 16. My gratitude to Peter Holland for his thoughtful suggestions during the evolution of this essay.

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale. 2004. Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://borrowers.uga.edu/782421/show Page 37 of 41 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

Alfar, Cristina Leon. 2003. "Looking for Goneril and Regan." In Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England. Edited by Corinne S. Abate. Burlington: Ashgate. 167-98. Apfelbaum, Roger. 2004. Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: Textual Problems and Performance Solutions. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Bacon, Francis. 1603. A Breif Discourse, Touching The Happie Union of the Kingdomes of England and Scotland. London. Brayton, Dan. 2003. "Angling in the Lake of Darkness: Possession, Dispossession, and the Politics of Discovery in King Lear." ELH 70: 399-426. Brook, Peter. 1987. The Shifting Point. New York: Harper. Davies, Anthony. 1997. "King Lear on Film." In Lear From Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism. Edited by James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 247-66. Davies, Anthony. 1988. Filming Shakespeare's Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elton, William R. 1966. King Lear and the Gods. San Marino: Huntington Library. Erne, Lukas. 2003. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge University Press. Foakes, R. A., ed. 1997. King Lear. Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Gillies, John. 2001. "The Scene of Cartography in King Lear." In Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 109-37. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1987. "Shakespeare and the Exorcists." In Modern Critical Interpretations: Shakespeare's King Lear. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea. 97-120. Halpern, Richard. 1991. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hamilton, Sharon. 2003. Shakespeare's Daughters. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.

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Harris, Laurilyn J. 1986. "Peter Brook's King Lear: Aesthetic Achievement or Far Side of the Moon?" Theatre Research International 11: 223-39. Hodgdon, Barbara. 1983. "Two King Lear's: Uncovering the Filmtext." Literature/Film Quarterly 11: 143-51. Holland, Peter. 1994. "Two-Dimensional Shakespeare: King Lear on Film." In Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television. Edited by Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 50-68. Hoover, Claudette. 1985. "'The Lusty Stealth of Nature': Sexuality and Antifeminism in King Lear." Atlantis 11: 87-97. James I. 1994. King James VI and I: Political Writings. Edited by Johann P. Sommerville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jorden, Edmund. 1603. A Breife Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother. London. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. King Lear. 1971. Director Peter Brook. Performers Paul Scofield, Irene Worth, Susan Engel, Jack MacGowran, Cyril Cusack, Patrick Magee, Tom Fleming. DVD; Columbia, 2004. Kott, Jan. 1964. "King Lear or Endgame." In Shakespeare Our Contemporary. New York: Norton. 127-68. Leggatt, Alexander. 2004. Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear. New York: Manchester University Press. Levin, Joanna. 2002. "Lady Macbeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria." ELH 69: 21-55. Marowitz, Charles. 1988. "Lear Log." In Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook. Compiled by David Williams. London: Methuen. 6-22. McLuskie, Kathleen. 1985. "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure." In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 88-108. Mullin, Michael. 1983. "Peter Brook's King Lear: Stage and Screen." Literature/Film Quarterly 11: 190-96.

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Neely, Carol Thomas. 2004. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Neill, Michael. 2006. "'The Little Dogs and All': Ceremony, Nakedness, Shame, and the Deconsecration of Kingship in King Lear." Lecture given at the University of Notre Dame. 31 October. Norbrook, David. 1996. "The Emperor's New Body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism." Textual Practice 10: 329-57. Parker, R. B. 1991. "The Use of Mise-en-scène in Three Films of King Lear." Shakespeare Quarterly 42: 75-90. Roberts, Jeanne Addison. 1992. "Shakespeare's Maimed Birth Rites." In True Rites and Maimed Rights: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age. Edited by Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 123-46. Rothwell, Kenneth S. 1997. "In Search of Nothing: Mapping King Lear." In Shakespeare, the Movie, 2: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. Edited by Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London: Routledge. 135-47. Rutter, Carol. 2001. Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage. London: Routledge. Rutter, Carol. 1997. "Eel Pie and Ugly Sisters in King Lear." In Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism. Edited by James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 172-225. Ryle, Simon J. 2007. "Filming Non-Space: The Vanishing Point and the Face in Brook's King Lear." Literature/Film Quarterly 35.2: 140-47. Scolnicov, Hanna. 1994. Women's Theatrical Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Bruce. 2000. Shakespeare and Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Dijkhuizen, Jan Frans. 1999. "Mystical Bodies: King Lear and the Discourse of Possession." In Critical Self-Fashioning: Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicism. Edited by Jürgen Pieters. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 104-28.

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Young, Bruce. 2002. "King Lear and the Calamity of Fatherhood." In In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans. Edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 43-64.

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The Afterlife of Timon of Athens: The Palest (/current) Fire

GRETCHEN E. MINTON, MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY (/previous)

(/archive) ABSTRACT Vladimir Nabokov's novel about a fictional poet and his delusional commentator cleverly and consistently alludes to the relative obscurity of Timon of Athens in the Shakespearean canon. Nabokov's use of Timon as a point of reference in this novel both highlights the complexity of Pale Fire's interest in light, shade, and obscurity and serves as a metaphor for the afterlife of this infrequently referenced Shakespearean play. Timon of Athens — a shadowy, unfinished, and co-authored play — works very well as a companion piece to Pale Fire, itself constructed as a multi-authored, heavily-edited work that undergoes repeated revision.

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) is structured as a work of textual criticism on a 999-line poem written by an Appalachian poet named John Shade. The poem itself (written in four cantos and also called "Pale Fire") is only a fraction of the length of the whole work because the introduction, commentary, and index on Shade's poem comprise the bulk of Nabokov's book. This apparatus criticus is presented as the work of a colorful professor of literature named Charles Kinbote, who insists that he was a close friend of John Shade and claims to hail from

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a distant land called Zembla. Kinbote is no ordinary commentator, however. His inflated ego causes him to believe that he inspired the poem with his tales about the exiled king of Zembla, Charles the Beloved, so despite the fact that the poem seems to be completely autobiographical (i.e., about Shade's life), Kinbote insists that hidden deep within "Pale Fire" is his own story. Although we can readily tell that Shade's poem has nothing to do with this subject, Kinbote persists in his deluded belief (more understandable when we later learn that he himself claims to be this exiled king).

Despite his professed admiration for Shade, Kinbote freely criticizes many lines in this work, frequently offering suggestions for improvement or condemnation of certain poetic images. In a note explaining Shade's allusion to Browning's "My Last Duchess" in one line of the poem, Kinbote directs the readers to the proper source and then suggests that they should condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry — or a long poem, alas — with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past. Such titles possess a specious glamour acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy and shifts onto a bust's shoulders the responsibility for ornateness since anybody can flip through a Midsummer Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick. (Nabokov 1989, 240) The notion that anyone could look to these Shakespearean sources as inspiration for titles or allusions is predicated upon the popularity and cultural relevance of the plays. However, although it may be easy to use lines from Midsummer, Romeo, Hamlet, The Tempest, or Lear as the basis of a title or an allusion, the same cannot be said for all of Shakespeare's plays.

For instance, take the case of one of his least known and quoted works, Timon of Athens: some readers will not have even heard of the play, much less be able to pick out allusions to it unless they are looking. Nonetheless, it is a phrase in Timon that inspires the title of Shade's poem as well as Nabokov's book. Kinbote's comment above ("or a long poem, alas") reflects his own frustration with Shade's decision to look to Shakespeare for his title. In lines 961-62 of his poem, Shade writes, "But this transparent thingum does require / Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire" (Nabokov 1989, 68, italics in original). The words http://borrowers.uga.edu/782392/show Page 2 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

"pale fire" are lifted from act 4 of Timon, but this is more than just a passing reference, because this play is relevant, in complex and provocative ways, to both Shade's poem and Kinbote's own narrative. While the allusions to Timon in Pale Fire are often explained in books and articles about Nabokov, my objective is slightly different. I would like to look more closely at Timon's role in Pale Fire and to suggest not only that Nabokov's book has more to do with Timon than others have assumed, but that Pale Fire can also change the way that we read Timon.

THE TALISMAN When he writes his commentary note about Shade's invocation of Shakespeare for the title of his "transparent thingum," Kinbote is perplexed: "But in which of the Bard's works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens — in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of 'pale fire' (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster)" (Nabokov 1989, 285). This parenthetical comment about the "statistical monster" becomes one of the book's great jokes, for despite the fact that it is highly unusual for anyone to possess Timon as his only Shakespeare play or for the average author to allude to this drama, the title does indeed, against all odds, come from Timon. The lines in Shakespeare's play are given by Timon in his misanthropic rage, speaking to the thieves who have heard that he has found gold in his wilderness retreat. Timon insists that these men who have come to rob him blind are emblematic of the nature of existence, because everything is a thief: The sun's a thief and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears . . . (Timon of Athens, 4.3.431-35) Timon's discourse about the thievery upon which the natural world is built points to this theme in Pale Fire. Kinbote has, in fact, stolen Shade's poem, pocketing it at the very moment that Shade is shot and killed in a mysterious accident.1 Against the wishes of the poet's widow and his colleagues at Wordsmith College in New Wye, Kinbote sneaks off with the index cards on which the poem is written and produces his own edition of Shade's work, which has far more to do with Kinbote than with the poet. Literary thievery connects with other motifs about theft in Pale Fire, such as the unsolved case of the missing crown

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jewels of Zembla. More provocatively, the theme of thievery suggests Kinbote's tendency to steal identities. He claims to be Charles II of Zembla (which of course seems like a fictional identity), but there are also clues in the book that suggest he could be a Russian scholar named Botkin, an unknown lunatic from Russia, or perhaps even a creation of Shade himself (see Boyd 1999 and Takács 2002, 100-102).

Further clues that point to the title phrase of "Pale Fire" emerge because Kinbote "accidentally" quotes the exact passage from Timon 4.3 in an entirely different part of his commentary. Pontificating on what he claims as a variant reading of Shade's lines 39-40 (which, like Kinbote's other variants, has nothing in common with the original), Kinbote writes, One cannot help recalling a passage in Timon of Athens (act 4, scene 3) where the misanthrope talks to the three marauders. Having no library in the desolate log cabin where I live like Timon in his cave, I am compelled for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this passage into English prose from a Zemblan poetical version of Timon which, I hope, sufficiently approximates the text, or is at least faithful to its spirit: The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon. (Nabokov 1989, 79- 80) The joke here, of course, is that "silvery light" is the "pale fire" phrase that Kinbote is unable to locate when looking for the inspiration for Shade's title earlier in the work. On the very next page of Kinbote's commentary, we see him using this same metaphor of "pale fire" to describe his relationship with Shade: "In many cases I have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent light from my poet's fiery orb, and unconsciously aping the prose style of his own critical essays" (81). Kinbote thus seems to set himself up as the moon to Shade's sun, but the irony of Shade's name brings us much closer to the tendency of Kinbote's moon to eclipse this poet-sun, casting him, indeed, in the shade. A further irony emerges as we see that the Zemblan translation has reversed the genders of the sun and moon from Shakespeare's original, making the sun feminine and the moon masculine and thus suggesting the superior role of the moon.2 As we shall see later, for Kinbote the male sex is always superior. Thus when Kinbote speaks of the moon as masculine, he is also arguing for the superior role of the

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commentator over the poet — a claim that he makes throughout the commentary, despite his protestations about Shade's genius.

Having noticed the extraordinary coincidence of Kinbote's possessing only one Shakespearean play, an extremely obscure one that just happens to be the source of the title of Shade's poem, we must also ask the obvious question: Why is Kinbote carrying around a Zemblan translation of this play? No answer emerges if we take Kinbote to be what he at first claims, an ordinary citizen of Zembla. However, if we accept his initial hints and eventual assertions that he is the exiled king of Zembla of whom he speaks, he provides an account of why he is carrying this play. Kinbote explains that the Zemblan king (Charles II) stumbled upon a closet when he was thirteen years old that was "stuffed with disparate objects," including "a thirty-twomo edition of Timon of Athens translated into Zemblan by his uncle Conmal, the Queen's brother" (Nabokov 1989, 125).3 A further connection is established by the added detail that the passageway goes under three transverse streets in the Zemblan capital: Academy Boulevard, Coriolanus Lane, and Timon Alley (126).

When the king opens the closet thirty years later, this time as a prisoner in his own country and desperate for escape from the palace in which he is being held against his will, he finds the closet empty except for the "tiny volume of Timon Afinsken still lying in one corner" (Nabokov 1989, 128). Later that same night, removing the shelves of the closet so that he can escape through that passage in utter darkness, "an object fell with a miniature thud; he guessed what it was and took it with him as a talisman" (132). This object, of course, is the Zemblan translation of Timon. The king discovers also that the secret passage opens into the green room of the theater, where he is rescued by the actor Odon, one of his supporters, and whisked away in a narrow escape down Timon Alley. We find later that this is, indeed, the only book with which the king escapes, and it is also the only book that Kinbote seems to have in his mountain retreat where he works on the edition of Shade's "Pale Fire" after the poet's death.

THE MISANTHROPE As this escape passage shows, the connections between Timon and Pale Fire are not limited to the title phrase and metaphors associated with stealing light. One of the most intriguing points of comparison, unnoted by others who have written on Timon and Pale Fire, has to do with a key element of Kinbote's personality: his flamboyant homosexuality,

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coupled with a persistent misogyny. His first childhood discovery of the secret passageway is told against the background of his relationship with Oleg, Duke of Rahl, with whom he has recently shared a bed as well as his earliest sexual encounter. When the two explore the tunnel that leads to the green room, they never get as far as opening the door into the theater because they hear "Two terrible voices, a man's and a woman's, now rising to a passionate pitch, now sinking to raucous undertones" (127), followed by the woman's shriek and a silence. Horrified by this inexplicable threat of heterosexual lust, the boys retreat immediately to their own room, where they lock themselves in because "the recent thrill of adventure had been superseded already by another sort of excitement" and "both were in a manly state and moaning like doves" (Nabokov 1989, 127). This initial homosexual experience for Charles II is the start of a series of escapades with young boys that persists throughout his kingship and continues on the other side of the Atlantic, where Kinbote entertains numerous ping-pong playing boys and employs a young muscular Negro gardener.

As Brian Boyd notes, the escape passage juxtaposes the colors red and green, associating red with homosexuality (the fugitive king accidentally puts on a red suit in the dark, which makes him dangerously visible) and green with heterosexuality (the green room where the actress Iris Acht had carried on an affair with Charles's grandfather, Thurgus the Third, which was the reason for the passageway in the first place).4 Many of the heterosexuals in Pale Fire are associated with green, such as a resident of New Wye named Gerald Emerald, who resists Kinbote's advances and is scornful of the Zemblan king, whom he derides as "quite the fancy pansy" (Nabokov 1989, 268).

Kinbote's homosexuality seems to go hand-in-hand with his misogyny. He is unable to accept the advances of any woman, whether it be Fleur (the daughter of a countess who attempts to seduce Charles when he is a prince), a mountain girl he encounters during his escape from his kingdom, or his own wife Disa (all of whom are associated with greenery). His attempts to sire an heir are futile because "the anterior characters of her unfortunate sex kept fatally putting him off" (Nabokov 1989, 208). With this attitude in mind, it is no surprise that Kinbote develops a vehement hatred for Sibyl Shade, the poet's wife, of whom Kinbote is intensely jealous, for he can understand neither her protective attitude toward her husband nor the poet's affection for his helpmate. To Kinbote, Sibyl is a "spider" and an "impossibly rude hostess" (162) who disliked and distrusted Kinbote from the first time she met him (171). Despite the fact that he characterizes his relationship http://borrowers.uga.edu/782392/show Page 6 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

with Shade as spiritual, when Sibyl is absent Kinbote feels like "a lean wary lover taking advantage of a young husband's being alone in the house" (287). He insists that Shade was "mortally afraid of his wife" despite the fact that the "Pale Fire" poem shows nothing but tenderness toward her.

Interestingly, Timon is the play that includes the fewest lines for women of any Shakespearean play. The only female characters are a group of dancers dressed as Amazons (part of the entertainment in act 1, scene 2), and two whores named Phrynia and Timandra who travel in the company of the Athenian captain Alcibiades (act 4, scene 3). Timon's world is one dominated entirely by men; his lavish parties, designed for male friends such as Alcibiades, whom he showers with gifts, are a model of homosocial bonding. Although Shakespeare's play does not hint that Timon and Alcibiades have the type of relationship that Marlowe's Edward II and Gaveston do, the associations between Alcibiades and homosexuality were well-established in the classical texts and certainly known in early modern England. Plutarch, for instance, described Alcibiades as a beautiful young warrior who was Socrates' friend and lover. Act 3, scene 6 of Timon of Athens shows Alcibiades arguing on behalf of a young soldier who has killed a man in a rage; his passionate attachment to the soldier (who is never seen in the play) is suggestive of a male-male relationship. The Athenian captain sues for this soldier's release and finds his desperate plea ignored by the senate; the result is Alcibiades' banishment, during which he, Coriolanus-like, seeks revenge by raising an army and laying siege to his home town. Like Alcibiades, Coriolanus is often associated with homosexual longing (signaled by his admiration for his rival soldier Aufidius, his overbearing mother, his conflicted feelings for his wife, and even his name). Thus, the mention of Coriolanus Lane alongside Timon Alley in Nobokov's book brings these associations close together — these are the plays of Shakespeare that well might be the most attractive to a man like Charles/Kinbote, who is as repelled by women as he is attracted to men.

When he leaves Athens and retreats to the woods in his misanthropic rage, Timon curses everyone, taking a particular pleasure in the curses that he bestows upon Alcibiades' whores (who are, inexplicably, traveling with him on his way to sack Athens). Like many Shakespearean characters, Timon associates women with rampant sexuality and the spread of disease. But nowhere do the curses reach the same height as they do in 4.3, when Timon addresses Alcibiades' companions. He gives them money, telling them, "Hold up, you sluts, / http://borrowers.uga.edu/782392/show Page 7 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

Your aprons mountant" (Timon of Athens, 4.3.134-35) and encourages them to continue their trade so that they can corrupt the Athenian society with venereal disease: "Consumptions sow / In hollow bones of man, strike their sharp shins / And mar men's spurring" (150-52). The only use to which women can be put is the destruction of the male society in which Timon once reveled.

Unexpectedly, the names of these two whores turn up in Kinbote's commentary when he discusses his conflicted feelings for his queen, Disa. Although he cannot feel any passion for her, he does feel a deep tenderness, describing their love as "an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse" (Nabokov 1989, 210). He repeatedly swears that he will not cheat on her, but finds himself carnally drawn to men again, speaking of them as "prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron" (210). Adopting the names of Alcibiades' female whores to refer to Charles/Kinbote's male whores is a curious detail added by Nabokov. The sexualized androgyny in Kinbote's description highlights both Alcibiades' supposed homosexuality and the all-male nature of the early modern theater. For Kinbote, it is always the males who are pretty and desirable, and the female body is discomforting and dirty. He laments that once when he went away, his resident lover had spent the week with "a fiery-haired whore from Exton who had left her combings and reek in all three bathrooms" (26-27). The invocation of Phrynia and Timandra in Kinbote's narrative reinforces the connection between Timon and Pale Fire — not just in terms of the overt references, but in terms of the thematic connection between the two works with regard to homosexuality and misogyny.

Both Timon and Kinbote distrust and are repelled by females, but find themselves shunned by males. Kinbote's strangely tender meeting with his wife in Nice before he completes his journey to North America can be read in light of Timon's meeting with his faithful steward Flavius in the wilderness (whom Timon characterizes as womanly because he sheds tears).5 Both men realize on some level that an extraordinary kindness is being extended to them, but in both cases it is not enough. Timon dismisses Flavius' honesty with the bitter comment that the one honest man in the world is only a steward (Timon of Athens, 4.3.493). Similarly, Disa's love for Kinbote is not enough because she is a woman; he ignores her comment that she could come visit him in New York, compliments her on her hairdo, and whispers, "I must be on my way" (Nabokov 1989, 214).

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THE EPITAPHS Kinbote's and Timon's stories do indeed share a similar shape: a man at the top of his glory is eventually cast down, finding himself friendless and in exile. This similarity is noticed by Kinbote, who not only ruminates on his tiny edition of Timon, but fashions himself as an outcast living, like Timon, in a "bookless mountain cave" (Nabokov 1989, 194). Such isolation and misanthropy become, in both works, a kind of madness. Kinbote harbors fantasies of all sorts, leaving the reader to question his sanity. He seems to suffer from persistent delusions of grandeur, a conviction that he was Shade's closest friend, and a demented belief that the bullet which kills Shade was intended for him. The characters around Kinbote also recognize his unstable and intractable personality. As one of his colleagues at New Wye puts it, "You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you . . . What's more, you are insane" (25).

Timon's misanthropy is also connected to a loss of sanity; he digs for roots in the wilderness and greets his visitors with a long strain of curses, sometimes giving up on words and throwing rocks and medlars instead. When the wilderness to which he retreats becomes populated by his visitors, he cannot endure the situation any longer, so he resolves to die and thus finally escape the society that has caused him unbearable suffering. His cause of death is unknown, but the implication is that he kills himself, for he even carves his own epitaph before he dies. Yet ultimately the death remains a mystery, for we have no body and no witness to Timon's final moments. A similar mystery surrounds Kinbote at the end of Pale Fire. Suicide has already been established as a key thematic point because of Shade's daughter Hazel, who drowned herself after being shunned on her first date (an episode that serves as the ending to canto 2, the center of Shade's poem). Kinbote expresses admiration for Hazel's desire to take her own life, escaping the squalor of this world: "We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins" (Nabokov 1989, 222). As many critics have suggested, the probability that Kinbote will also take his life at the end of this work is quite high.6 Like Timon, though, he provides us with neither the certainty of his death nor the satisfaction of finding his body (in sharp contrast to the vivid description of Shade's fallen body on Kinbote's lawn).

An added piece of evidence that Kinbote might take his own life is that the name "Kinbote" presumably means "regicide" in Zemblan (Nabokov 1989, 267), and thus Kinbote is set up to be his own

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(Charles's) killer. The phrase "king-killer" also passes Timon's lips when he directly addresses his now useless treasure of gold. He characterizes the gold as a "sweet king-killer and dear divorce / 'Twixt natural son and sire" (Timon of Athens, 4.3.377-78). This happens at the point when Timon is speaking about carving his own epitaph: Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave: Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat Thy gravestone daily; make thine epitaph, That death in me at others' lives may laugh. (4.3.373-76) This premeditation shows the ways in which Timon was also his own king-killer. Kinbote, the killer of himself as Charles, was also, as was said of Shade, "his own cancellation" (26).

Timon's epitaph is the most curious aspect of the play, for a soldier discovers it in the woods, seeming to read it there: Timon is dead, who hath outstretched his span, Some beast read this, there does not live a man. (Timon of Athens, 5.4.3-4) The soldier then claims he cannot read the language in which the epitaph is written, so he takes a wax impression and presents it to Alcibiades, who reads the epitaph at the end of the play. Or rather, he reads both versions of the epitaph, which contradict one another:7 Here lies a wretched corpse, of wretched soul bereft. Seek not my name. A plague consume you wicked caitiffs left! Here lie I, Timon, who alive all living men did hate, Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait. (5.5.70-71 ) Scholars have suggested many reasons for these contradictory epitaphs, which both come from Plutarch, but are presented there as the work of two separate authors; the general agreement is that Shakespeare had intended to omit one of the epitaphs in performance, but what we have is a text that reflects a moment prior to that decision.8 Nonetheless, if Timon's objective was, as he says above, to use his death to laugh at others, he has some measure of success. In the case of Shakespeare's most famous tragic hero, Hamlet, we know exactly how he dies, hear his final words, see his body on stage, and witness the acclamation of his life. With Timon, on the other hand, we do not know the cause of his death, do not know that his final words are final, have no presentation of the body or suggestion that it has been found, and listen to two epitaphs (or three?) that are contradictory about whether Timon will http://borrowers.uga.edu/782392/show Page 10 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

reveal his name, yet share a common desire to curse us. Timon is like a cenotaph, laughing far beyond the grave.

Now the tantalizing question emerges: did Kinbote leave an epitaph? During a discussion among the faculty of New Wye about the vanished Zemblan king, one professor pronounces, "History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph" (Nabokov 1989, 266). Yet we know that the most remarkable epitaph that Kinbote leaves is Pale Fire itself, with all of its word games, complex interwoven patterns, and contradictory versions of a story. Though we are left uncertain whether the author is Kinbote, Botkin, or Shade himself, regardless of the theory, the dead manage to keep speaking. This poem was presumably intended to be 1000 lines long and ends at line 999, but despite the fact that Shade dies, Kinbote allows the "Pale Fire" poem to have a voice (albeit a bizarre one). And if Kinbote is about to die, it will not be without having the last laugh of publication. Shade's remark near the end of the poem — "I'm reasonably sure that we survive / And that my darling [i.e., Hazel] somewhere is alive" (69) — seems at first glance to be contradicted by his sudden death on the very day he writes these lines, but there is ample evidence that Hazel speaks throughout the poem.9 No matter who the author is (ultimately, of course, Nabokov), the work is filled with poltergeists, visions of the afterlife, and communications with the dead. Like Shade's poem that discusses the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter (IPH), Nabokov's book stands as a testimony that death is anything but silence.

THE VARIANTS I would like to conclude by making some comments on how the complex interplay of Shakespearean texts within Pale Fire can help us to understand the afterlife of Timon. Although the title of Nabokov's book undoubtedly points, at least in part, to Timon, there is another possibility that critics have suggested for the source of the title. Priscilla Meyer notes that there is a "pale fire" turn of phrase in Hamlet as well, when the ghost bids his son farewell: "The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, / And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire" (Hamlet, 1.5.89-90). Critics have effectively shown that the verbal echo is not accidental, for Pale Fire includes key allusions to a "glow-worm" (i.e., firefly).10 Nonetheless, Meyer takes this connection to an extreme: "Nabokov embeds hints in Kinbote's commentary that point to Timon of Athens as the source for the title of Shade's poem. But just as Kinbote's Zemblan etymologies conceal Nabokov's, Nabokov's clues lead to a false bottom that conceals his own purposes. Shade's "Pale Fire" may come from

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Timon, but Nabokov's Pale Fire comes from Hamlet" (Meyer 1988, 113).11 The assumption that Hamlet must be the "real" source while Timon is just a decoy seems to me entirely misguided. Timon is no more of a false bottom than Hamlet; the point is, and always was, that texts shadow and reflect one another, and sometimes the light might come from unexpected sources. Furthermore, if Hamlet was the "source" of the first "pale fire" phrasing, it must also be relevant that Shakespeare was in effect stealing from himself when he wrote Timon several years later. Just after Pale Fire's publication, Nabokov articulated the essence of his philosophy: "You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you can never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable" (quoted in Boyd 1999, 5).

It is precisely because Timon is an unlikely Shakespearean source with a limited afterlife that its presence in Pale Fire strikes us as so unusual and provocative. As I have already shown, the connection between these two works goes far beyond what others have assumed, particularly in the mirrored characters of Kinbote and Timon. When Meyer claims that "The 'pale fire' of Timon of Athens, a hermit in his cave in exile from his kingdom, has no relevance to Shade's poem about family love, loss, and death" (Meyer 1988, 132), she first fails to recognize that Timon is certainly about loss and death, and second, discounts the fact that Kinbote's story is, as he himself notes, an interesting echo of Timon's. We cannot privilege the Hamlet connection over the Timon connection any more than we can privilege the Shade poem over the Kinbote commentary. Instead, we are prompted to ask about these two plays, with Calinescu, "Why does one of them occupy perhaps the most peripheral place in the Shakespearean canon, while the other holds perhaps the most central one?" (Calinescu 1993, 128).

The "pale fire" of Timon and the "pale . . . fire" of Hamlet are, in essence, variants of one another, which is appropriate, given the emphasis upon variants in Nabokov's work. Kinbote's index contains an entry entitled "variants," in which he cites the passages for which he has given Shade's earlier versions of particular lines. The first example is the variant that prompts Kinbote to cite the sun/moon passage from Timon in his Zemblan translation. Kinbote later informs us that at least one of these variants was wishful thinking, so he composed his own lines and presented them as one of Shade's own variants; despite this confession, however, Kinbote refuses to return to the earlier place in the commentary and omit this spurious passage. Kinbote's index and editorial practice point to different kinds of variants — not just the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782392/show Page 12 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

instances when an author revises his own text, but also when an editor corrects what he considers to be spurious readings. In the case of Pale Fire, of course, the editor eventually becomes so intrusive that the work gives us the illusion of having two authors. What we also learn from reading Shade's "Pale Fire" is that some "variants" are actually errors in the publication process. Shade encounters an instance of this when he has a near-death experience and sees a great white fountain; later he seeks out a woman who wrote of a similar experience, but when he meets her, he finds that her account had misprinted "fountain" when in fact the woman saw a "mountain" (Nabokov 1989, 62). Nabokov constantly reminds us that the text is in a state of flux, dependent on the writer's revisions, the scholar's editing, and the audience's re-reading.

Such a reminder gives us an excellent occasion to think of the peculiar textual situation of Timon. Although the play exists in only one copy (the 1623 Folio), it is a text that is co-authored (with Thomas Middleton), probably unfinished, and full of what seem to be errors.12 Because Timon has only one authoritative source text, but inconsistencies in character names, entrances announced hundreds of lines before they occur, and multiple epitaphs for the protagonist, editors of this play are placed in the position of realizing that if they emend the text they are departing from what is actually printed in order to conjecture what may have originally been written or intended — a ghostly process, indeed. Luckily most editors are not subject to the lunacy that plagues Kinbote, but nonetheless, as an editor of Timon myself who has read the commentary notes on most editions of Timon ever published, I am particularly aware of how much influence editors have had on the way we read this play.

Because Timon is so seldom studied and performed compared to most of the other plays in the Shakespearean canon, its marginalization seems to leave it in the perpetual place of reflecting the light of Shakespeare obliquely.13 Yet if Shade's sense that "maybe Shakespeare floods a whole / Town with innumerable lights" (Nabokov 1989, 192) is correct, then each point of light can in turn be its own sun. Kinbote's preferred title for Shade's poem, Solus Rex, uses a chess metaphor to point to his own story of the exiled king. In addition to "alone," solus can also mean sun, which might suggest a sun king,14 but I prefer to read it as an echo of Timon's soliloquy in 4.3 to the "blessed breeding sun" and our sun/moon passage later in this same scene. This passage, quoted in Pale Fire in the original and as a back-translation from a fictional Zemblan edition, can also cause us to pause on the puzzling textual debate over the word "moon." Here is the passage again, in fuller context: http://borrowers.uga.edu/782392/show Page 13 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

The sun's a thief and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n From general excrement. (4.3.431-37) Although the word "moon" in line 445 makes sense because it allows for a closed system in which the sun, sea, and moon are all robbing one another, editors have always been perplexed by the logic of the sea dissolving the moon into salt tears. Thus the eighteenth-century editor Lewis Theobald suggested that this word should be emended to "mounds," which destroys the closed system of thievery in lines 441-45, but gestures toward "earth" later in that same line, while also making a bit more sense logically.15 Although most editors retain "moon," "mounds" is worth considering, or at least worth playing with, as Nabokov would undoubtedly agree. In Pale Fire, the invitation to play with the word "moon" appears in reference to Aunt Maud's transmutation: "Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral" (Nabokov 1989, 36). And according to Shade, the title "Pale Fire" is itself a "moondrop title" (68).16

Like the words fountain/mountain, variants invariably (pun intended) resemble one another in some crucial way. Nabokov's interest in word games — anagrams, word golf, foreign translations, etc. — brings out the close relationships of linguistic systems. Similarly, people in the book often resemble one another in surprising ways. Shade seems to have been killed by the escaped convict (Jack Grey) who is intending to kill Judge Goldsworth, whom Shade resembles. Charles's escape is successful only because forty of his subjects dress like him and go in different directions to confuse the authorities.17 These resemblances become all the more important when it is revealed to us that the name Zembla means resemblance (Nabokov 1989, 265). Near the end of the commentary, Kinbote cries in excitement: "He [Shade] was reassembling my Zembla!" (260), which suggests that this closely connected word is also at play. The proliferation of resemblances and reassemblances is a prime example of what Shade refers to as the "contrapuntal theme": But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But topsy-turvical coincidence, http://borrowers.uga.edu/782392/show Page 14 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(19 PM

Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game. (Nabokov 1989, 62-63) Timon of Athens — a shadowy, unfinished, and co-authored play — works very well as a companion piece to Pale Fire, itself constructed as a multi-authored, heavily-edited work that undergoes repeated revision. Timon is part of the "correlated pattern" to Nabokov's game, while providing more thematic and linguistic material for the book than people ever give it credit for. And thus Timon is, against all odds yet all the more intriguing for being a "statistical monster," one of the suns that Nabokov reflects. Furthermore, Nabokov's text invites us to explore with a new sense of purpose the uneven texture of Timon, both as it was first printed and as it has come down to us.18

NOTES 1. If we believe Kinbote's version of the murder, the killer was Gradus, an assassin hired to kill the last king of Zembla, Charles II (whom Kinbote claims to be). In Kinbote's version, Shade is accidentally hit by the bullet intended for him. A likelier version of the story that emerges is that Jack Grey, a convict escaped from an asylum, goes on a quest to find and kill Judge Goldsworth, who is responsible for his sentencing. Kinbote is renting his place while Goldsworth is away, and Shade (his next-door neighbor) is said to resemble him. 2. For more about the gender switching in this passage, see Meyer 1988, 82 and Calinescu 1993, 129. 3. For more on the character of Conmal and his Shakespearean translations, see Schuman 1999, 172-73. 4. "Redness and homosexuality had been associated with Shakespeare and Timon of Athens when Charles, retracing his childhood exploration with Oleg, took that copy of Timon Afinsken with him and unwittingly donned scarlet clothes before emerging through a green door in the Royal Theater and thence into Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley" (Boyd 1999, 167). 5. This meeting is also reminiscent of Richard II's final meeting with his Queen in Shakespeares play. 6. Kinbote recognizes, "Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects" (Nabokov 1989, 193), which further suggests that his end might also be parallel to hers. Boyd 1999, 103-106 discusses other evidence that

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Kinbote may be planning suicide. 7. The first of these epitaphs is cut from the Arden 3 edition. 8. See the Arden 3 edition of Timon, 100-109. 9. See Boyd 1999, Chapter 9. 10. Reflecting upon the moment when he first gains access to Shade's complete poem, Kinbote writes, "For a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fire-flies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits" (Nabokov 1989, 289). See also Boyd 1999, 77-79. 11. Meyer bases this argument largely upon Nabokov's biography, focusing on his need to avenge his own father's accidental and unjust murder: "In Pale Fire [Nabokov] both avenges his father's murder through his verbal assassination of the mentality of political murderers and immortalizes his love for his father in a series of reflections of martyred royalty in history and art. In the process, he recapitulates the history of Hamlet's role in literature, beginning before and ending after Shakespeare wrote it" (Meyer 1988, 113). See also Calinescu 1993, 125-27. 12. See the Arden 3 edition of Timon, especially 1-18. 13. As Timon says, "All's obliquy" (Timon of Athens, 4.3.18). This word seems to be a combination of "obloquy" and "obliquity," though Pope emended the line to "All is oblique" (see Arden 3 Timon, 273). 14. See Takács 2002, 99. 15. A few decades later Edward Capell, more concerned with the circularity of the imagery than a plausible misreading of the manuscript, emended this word to "earth." 16. See Meyer, who points out that "The moral of Shade's story may be that he should take the mysteries of the moon and of that Moor [i.e., Kinbote's gardener] with the wheelbarrow to heart, not only to improve his art but as a matter of life and death" (1988, 133). Calinescu points out the broader importance of textual play within Pale Fire: "This kind of sophisticated literary game . . . aims at persuading the reader to constantly reread and playfully reconsider the text from a variety of new perspective suggested by the text itself" (1993, 125). 17. This tactic is, of course, also used in the battle of Shrewsbury in Shakespeare's Henry IV. 18. I would like to thank Mark Bayer for co-organizing the Shakespeare Association of America seminar that inspired this paper, Tony Dawson for so many conversations about Timon's epitaphs, and Michael Sexon for always giving me reasons to return to Nabokov.

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REFERENCES Boyd, Brian. 1999. Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Calinescu, Matei. 1993. Rereading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Meyer, Priscilla. 1988. Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1989. Pale Fire. 1962; New York: Vintage Books. Schuman, Samuel. 1999. "'Comment dit-on 'Mourir' en Anglais?': Translating Shakespeare in Nabokov's Pale Fire ." English Literature and the Other Languages. Edited by Ton Hoenselaars and Marius Buning. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. 167-74. Shakespeare, William. 1982. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. Arden 2. London and New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, William, and Thomas Middleton. 2008. Timon of Athens. Edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton. Arden 3. London: Cengage. Takács, Ferenc. 2002. "Shadow and Substance: Pale Fire and Timon of Athens." Mivés semiségek 80: 97-106.

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Khaki Hamlets: Shakespeare, Joyce, and the (/current) Agency of Literary Texts

MARK BAYER, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO (/previous)

ABSTRACT | I | II | III | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) In the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Stephen Dedalaus and his friends debate the cultural afterlife of Hamlet. Stephen concludes that Hamlet has had a decidedly negative impact on successor cultures. There is, however, considerable irony in Stephen's position: Stephen's prosecution of Hamlet is eerily similar to the trials of Ulysses, itself the target of years of censorship amid accusations that the book was obscene, with a strong tendency to corrupt its readers. Stephen's comments in Ulysses and the novel's legal travails illustrate that the modernist desire to bracket artistic works as autonomous and separable from moral considerations is ultimately illusory and falls prey to its roots in a Kantian project that refuses such a separation.

Nowhere is Shakespeare's ambivalent, complex, and spectral legacy within successor cultures more apparent than in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), where Shakespeare, his plays, and their cultural value for later generations are debated extensively by a number of Joyce's characters.1 Rooted in an highly unorthodox interpretation of Hamlet, the so-called "Shakespeare theory" that Stephen Dedalus constructs in this chapter interrogates the

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long term moral trajectory of the play with a prosecutorial zeal that finds in Shakespeare furtive sponsorship of a violent and pernicious cultural agenda that, ultimately, is "a forecast of the concentration camp" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 240). Here, I wish to argue that Stephen's case against Hamlet is built upon an understanding of literary reception as a form of authorial liability and cultural agency whereby both the work and its author are held responsible for actions rendered in their name, even in unforeseeable future contexts.

Stephen's intense questioning of the cultural authority of Shakespeare and his works anticipates many twentieth-century concerns about literature's engagement with society. Despite a prevailing intellectual climate that, with notable exceptions, defends and fosters artistic expression, those on both sides of the political spectrum agree that in certain instances, this freedom must be curtailed and the producers of socially damaging works from time to time held accountable. Shrouding truly profane literature in the integument of l'art pour l'art, at least since Benjamin, has been routinely condemned (Jay 1988, 112 and 1993, 71). Stephen argues that Shakespeare's reputation is a function of just such a skewed emphasis in favor of abstracted aesthetic criteria, that readers tend to praise Shakespeare's plays as autonomous works of art (in a Kantian sense) unconnected and undisturbed by any kind of moral and contextual considerations. Interrogating Shakespeare in this manner offers a model for cultural agency and textual reception that explicitly recognizes the political valences latent in literary works and disrupts the humanist consensus that automatically and uncritically affirms the ethical value of the "classics" for future generations, anticipating a major reorientation in the way literary works were critically understood and appreciated.

Paradoxically, Stephen's prosecution of Hamlet is eerily similar to the trials of Ulysses, itself the target of years of censorship amid accusations that the book was obscene, with a strong tendency to corrupt its British and American readership. If Hamlet contains material that might affect future readers detrimentally, prosecutors and moralists provided abundant evidence that Ulysses was doing the same thing in the present. Stephen's claims against Hamlet therefore seem to be motivated not by an altruistic desire to rid the world of artistic productions that might lead to nefarious social outcomes, but rather, as a way of coming to terms with the literary fathers that haunted both Stephen and his own literary progenitor, Joyce. The kind of literary paternity that Joyce and his characters find unavoidable in Shakespeare is, on the one hand, extremely vexing yet, by subtly rebuking the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 2 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

established figures of previous literary periods, proves to be an important conduit through which the literary field is transfigured to allow a much different modernist sensibility to flourish. Stephen's line of inquiry is even more provocative given the strong autobiographical connection often supposed between that character and Joyce, himself a burgeoning artist struggling with the monolithic and haunting literary legacy bequeathed to him by Shakespeare.2

Stephen's engagement with Shakespeare, then, is clearly evocative and symptomatic of what Harold Bloom has termed the anxiety of influence. Heavily inflected by Freudian psychoanalysis, this theory of individual creation suggests that artists are inspired by "misreading," that they seek to diminish the achievements of their predecessors in order to equal and supplant them. Bloom's theory has been rightly criticized for treating the literary or artistic field as an autonomous and decontextualized sphere, divorced from the specific historical factors that condition literary production, yet it is not difficult to imagine a similar form of aesthetic and psychological apprehension played out through the more tangible mechanisms with which writers must actually contend in any given period. It is my intent, therefore, to show how Stephen's bitter critique of Hamlet in a modern context and Ulysses' own prosecution for its alleged negative influence on readers provide a concrete historical manifestation of the agency of literary works, both in their ability to detrimentally affect a hypothetical readership and in their productive effects on future writers; it is an effort, in other words, to historicize the "anxiety of influence," which too often is understood and ultimately dismissed as an abstract, almost mystical, and decidedly individual, process. Unlike most instances of Shakespearean appropriation, in which a third party adapts Shakespeare to promote some kind of artistic or political agenda, Stephen's comments in Ulysses suggest that the middle term is unnecessary and largely irrelevant, that Shakespeare's plays take on an agency of their own to produce various outcomes in future contexts: the plays themselves constitute their own afterlives.

I From the Restoration through the nineteenth century, Shakespeare's cultural ascendancy seemed destined to continue indefinitely. The plays were comfortably understood as stable and uncontested vessels for the articulation and dissemination of a transcendent vision of human nature. His works were, as Ben Jonson anticipated in 1623, "not of an age, but for all time" and the author himself destined to live as "a monument

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without a tomb" (Shakespeare 1997, 3351-52). A century later, Dryden was only the first of many subsequent and influential literary figures to speak of the "divine Shakespeare"; the works, after all, constituted "a lay bible," with the author himself presiding over a "kind of established religion."3 And it was exactly this kind of adulation and perceived transcendence that animated Paul Hifferman's ultimately abortive attempt, in 1770, to consecrate a temple to the Memory of Shakespeare, complete with towering columns, painted ceilings, and of course, an enormous painting of the playwright emanating like the sun from behind "clouds of Gothic ignorance and barbarism" (Marder 1963, 19).

By the later nineteenth century, praise of Shakespeare took on a more theoretically rigorous and teleological character as Shakespeare's writings were enlisted as an integral component in a Hegelian movement from more primitive forms of social existence towards enlightenment. For Hegel, Shakespeare not only "soared above [other tragedians] at an almost unapproachable height" (1962, 85), but the plays themselves took part in the liberating emergence of the World Spirit as it "bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun" (1896, 3:547). Not coincidently, Hegel's metaphor for the steady accretion of philosophical enlightenment through "the recesses of thought" is that of the "old mole" to which Hamlet compares the ghost of his father, steadily prompting the eventual discovery of the truth from below the stage (1896, 3:547).4 Understanding the plays in this way was, of course, made possible by the emergence of the aesthetic as a separate sphere of discourse and the epistemological separation of literary works from the material existence of both the author and reader. In the Third Critique, Kant argues that an aesthetic judgment [d]oes not depend upon any present concept of the object, and does not provide one. When the form of an object (as opposed to the matter of its representation, as sensation) is . . . estimated as the ground of a pleasure in the representation of such an object, then this pleasure is also judged to be combined necessarily with the representation of it, and so not merely for the subject apprehending this form, but for all in general who pass judgment. (Kant 1970, 30) These a priori judgments of "the beautiful" demand universal assent and force us to consider the work as an independent entity, regardless of the circumstances of production or reception.

Hegel's appropriation of Shakespeare continued a tendency to understand him in messianic terms and suggests that the true meaning http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 4 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

of the plays was not fully recoverable without the more astute cultural sensibility of later ages. Emerson enlists Shakespeare as a "speculative genius" in a transcendental project that includes himself and his own intellectual predecessors: Kant, Fichte, Schiller, and Coleridge. Later, Emerson formulated a more explicit theory of literary authorship where the poet, of which Shakespeare was the prime exemplar, is in constant dialogue with both the past and the future.5 His genius, therefore, was obscured from his contemporaries: [I]t was not possible to write the history of Shakespeare till now. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is sort of a living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers. Now literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. (Emerson 1883, 194-95) The playwright's ability to speak meaningfully and presciently to the concerns of future generations is what identifies him as "the poet of the human race . . . our poet-priest" (Emerson 1883, 193, 209). But by positing interpretation of Shakespeare as an ongoing process of discovery and revision, Hegel and Emerson unwittingly allow for the possibility of rupture and reversal in some future age. If Shakespeare's works were somehow prophetic, would it not then be possible, from the more enlightened vantage of subsequent generations, to understand Shakespeare as a regressive influence and the plays as documentary justification for retrograde developments in both aesthetic and sociopolitical spheres?

The modernists' relation to Shakespeare, as well as to other "classic" authors, was significantly more unsettled than that of their predecessors. Their trenchant observations of an increasingly alienating social world, governed by technology and economics, and its attendant psychological angst forced these writers to qualify their acceptance of their literary forebears, just as they questioned other supposed "gifts" of the past. Though falling short of indicting Shakespeare on ethical grounds, T. S. Eliot did much to demystify the unqualified reverence accorded to Shakespeare; in a not-so-subtle satire of the philosophical pretensions of contemporary critics who continued in a tradition inaugurated by the Romantics (Bate 1998, 258-65), he dismissed readings of the plays that strove to "bring in a new philosophy and a new system of yoga," suggesting instead that "it is good that we should from time to time change our minds" about Shakespeare's genius (Eliot 1964, 107).6 By famously isolating and exposing the structural and aesthetic difficulties in Hamlet, Eliot typifies his generation's tendency http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 5 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

to understand Shakespeare in opposition to still emerging contemporary standards of literary taste (Taylor 1989, 232). He also assumed that Shakespeare, like the modernists, was searching for some kind of literary aesthetic to counter the "period of dissolution and chaos" that supposedly marked his age as well as Eliot's own (107). But unlike his own dramatic forays, notable for their unity and rational control, the Elizabethan drama, according to Eliot, was deficient in offering a lucid rejoinder to a perceived existential discord; lacking both aesthetic unity as well as a coherent philosophical worldview, "none of the plays of Shakespeare has a 'meaning'" (115). Shakespeare encapsulated the spirit of his age, to be sure, but did so unconsciously, even haphazardly, by deploying conventions without doing "any real thinking" (116). By questioning the true nature of Shakespeare's contributions to Anglo- American culture, Eliot offered a precedent for subsequent commentators who refused to endorse the accrued wisdom on the matter, yet still believed that Shakespeare's work formed an indispensable part of the cultural "tradition" they inherited and in which they participated. This same ambivalence allowed Eliot's contemporaries to extend their censure of Shakespeare to the more urgent impostures so evident in modern life.

Joyce was similarly haunted by the legendary dramatist, as are the characters that populate his works. In a 1918 letter to Martha Fleishmann, he nervously compares his accomplishments to those of Shakespeare at the same age, alarmed that he falls short, and dismayed that "je me sens plus vieux encore," that he is running out of time and is unable to match the literary output of the great dramatist (Joyce 1957, 2:189). Joyce's private anxieties are echoed in Ulysses where, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, Shakespeare's spectral image appears, "rigid in facial paralysis," to both Stephen and Leopold Bloom in the bathroom mirror at a Nightown brothel. Shakespeare's ghost is crowned, to be sure, but only "by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 15, 671). This demonic and seemingly omniscient ghost, unlike that of King Hamlet, is not responsive to his son's queries, nor does he provide the anticipated guidance that will alleviate the hero's emotional turmoil. Instead, he chides Bloom for his "vacant mind," which would deign to trade in Shakespeare's dramatic legacy. Much like the specter in Hamlet, this ghost might be seen as an embodiment of both Dedalus' and Bloom's conscience. Amid the chaotic dramatic environment of the "Circe" episode, Shakespeare's ghost raises even more doubts and evinces far greater anxiety than at Elsinore. In this scene, referred to by some as "the Court of Conscience," Shakespeare's ghost is the culmination of a variety of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 6 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

spirits, including those of Paddy Dignam (whose funeral Bloom attends in the "Hades" episode), Stephen's deceased mother, and "The Sins of the Past," among several others who remind both characters of their mortality, especially when contrasted with the literary immortality achieved by the playwright. Indeed, "God, the sun, [and] Shakespeare" will preside over the day of judgment, claims Stephen (Joyce 1968, Chapter 15, 649, 623). This motley cast of characters, including Shakespeare, though so expressive to Dedalus and Bloom, at the same time fails to achieve the gravitas ordinarily accorded the dramatist, appearing as they do in a burlesque cabaret at a whorehouse. Characters in Ulysses encapsulate the general modernist opinion of Shakespeare: they agree that he possessed prodigious creative talent — he was, after all, "[t]he Playwright who wrote the folio of this world" — but admittedly, he "wrote it badly" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 273). The modernists' acute awareness of their literary debts, although often experienced as a violent rupture with the literary tradition rather than an harmonious integration into it, is nevertheless tempered by farce, offering unprecedented opportunities to interrogate the precise valences and social legacy bequeathed by the great writers of the past through the agency of their literary artifacts.

II These highly ambivalent allusions to Shakespeare, and especially to Hamlet, abound in Ulysses, but are most fully developed as explicit commentary on Shakespeare's long-term cultural authority in "Scylla and Charybdis." In this chapter, Stephen Dedalus, the burgeoning young poet, participates in a wide-ranging literary conversation — focused on the meaning of Hamlet and its ramifications for the subsequent aesthetic and ethical estimation of Shakespeare — with George Russell, John Eglinton, Thomas Lyster, and all others who care to listen in the National Library in Dublin, a physical and symbolic archive where the canon is both visually celebrated and intellectually appreciated. Stephen, exemplifying an acute anxiety of influence shared by many modernists, associates Shakespeare with his own colleagues and rivals in what to him is an impermeable Dublin literary establishment from which he is regularly and painfully excluded (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 245-47). He feels that he must diminish Shakespeare's literary reputation and the moral authority of his work in order to overcome the massive impotence that this monolithic literary tradition evinces in young writers. Far from being a disinterested intellectual hero overcome by extraordinary circumstances, he feels that the title character should rightly be seen as le distrait, an absentminded and

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callous murderer who set an alarming precedent justifying death on a large scale to satisfy his own curiosity and overly stringent standards of verification (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 239). Because according to tradition Shakespeare himself played the role of King Hamlet, the instigator of the violence, Stephen transfers responsibility for the potentially detrimental influence of Hamlet immediately onto the playwright, for whom, he claims, the drama was intensely autobiographical; in it, Shakespeare expressed the trauma of his youth, his seduction by Anne Hathaway, the untimely death of his son Hamnet, and his subsequent estrangement from his wife and his own brothers Edmund and Richard, with whom Anne had an affair. Taking his cue from several popular nineteenth-century biographies, Stephen believes that Shakespeare's dysfunctional family life prompted the violence and nihilism of the tragedies and the deep skepticism of the problem plays, before an eventual reconciliation found its literary manifestation in the later romances. But even this resolution cannot, ultimately, erase the rupture; "no later undoing," according to Stephen, "will undo the first undoing" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 251). These traumatic events left the playwright permanently scarred, and his deeply pessimistic attitude necessarily infused the plays. So it is quite possible — even likely — that Shakespeare's plays exert an intensely negative pressure on those who subsequently encounter them.

The modernist reception of Shakespeare, therefore, extended beyond routine discussions of aesthetic worth to the plays' function as a locus for ethical valuation — Stephen notes that Hamlet had "a strong inclination to evil" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 272) — and their educational value for contemporary society. My contention here is that Stephen, by considering Shakespeare not simply as an important literary influence, but as "himself the father of all his race," moves the debate into the juridical sphere, so that Shakespeare is called to answer for damages committed against society in his name and in the name of his works. The legal terminology that abounds throughout the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode is consistently directed at Shakespeare himself in an effort to prove his liability.7 An accusation against a long-dead literary figure for an ensemble of vaguely articulated transgressions ex post facto is, of course, untenable in the common law and achieves plausibility only through the trans-historical and dialectical method that Stephen adduces throughout the book; nevertheless, Stephen not only suggests an analogy between the actions perpetrated in Hamlet and by the biographical Shakespeare, but also argues for a direct transference between the two. The author must answer for unanticipated actions damaging to the general social well-being that are being perpetrated by http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 8 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

those significantly influenced by his literary progeny.

Stephen's prosecution depends on a materialist understanding of art, constantly and intimately engaged with the world and capable of producing manifold effects — both positive and negative — on a diverse variety of individuals. By rejecting A. E. (Russell's) idealist conviction that "art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences [and that] . . . the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom," Stephen argues against the deliberate exclusion of non-aesthetic criteria and suggests that literary works cannot be understood outside of particular social contexts; they have an iterative existence and are reenacted afresh by subsequent generations of readers (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 236). Once Hamlet is no longer considered a vessel for the transmission of universal truths and timeless ideals, the text becomes decidedly less profound, even sinister, and is no longer recuperable for Kantian aesthetics or Hegelian teleology. Instead, Stephen imagines this almost banal Pièce de Shakespeare performed in a French provincial town before a plebeian audience, for whom the twists of the plot and the deeds of the characters are significantly more interesting and provocative than any philosophical speculation they engage in. Before this decidedly more representative audience, the play's dark overtones are focused more clearly and its abundant violence unavoidable: Hamlet is "a sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder" and Shakespeare "a deathsman of the soul" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 239; cf. also Chapter 15, 673). In yet another context, Hamlet evokes a much more current tragedy: Nine lives are taken off for his father's one, Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr. Swinburne. (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 239-40) Concentration camps and khakis, both innovations of the Boer War (1899-1902), amplify and economize death; the former allow an occupying force to incarcerate swiftly and efficiently their political enemies and the indigenous populations who support them, albeit with alarming collateral damage, while the latter represents the anonymous veneer of modern warfare. In reaction to Algernon Charles Swinburne, an English poet and literary critic who justified the high mortality rates in South African concentration camps as a necessary consequence of armed conflict and the imperialism that spawned it, Stephen abhors needless violence. Unlike Swinburne, who thought Hamlet was similarly pragmatic, that his disposal of Polonius, Rosencrantz, and http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 9 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

Guildenstern were all part of an elaborate scheme to exact vengeance on Claudius where the end result justified the needless loss of life along the way — the epitome of a khaki Hamlet who "doesn't hesitate to shoot" (Clissold 1997, 47)8 — Stephen thinks the social cost exacted by Hamlet's idiosyncratic and solipsistic retribution is too grievous and provides an alarming precedent for subsequent generations.

Stephen suggests that Hamlet's orgy of violence originates ultimately with the ghost, an image of the father who confronts Hamlet with dual, equally binding, imperatives: to remember and to avenge. The demands imposed by the spectral presence of Hamlet in successor cultures are also twofold and no less compelling. Given the macrotemporal notoriety of the author and the play's saturation throughout Western society, any performance of Hamlet automatically facilitates, and even necessitates, a powerful awareness of cultural memory. Hamlet also, according to Best, "is a ghoststory" whose spirits haunt subsequent generations and, indubitably, enjoin some kind of response. Passive remembrance begets active revenge. For Stephen, a ghost is "[o]ne who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 240). But far from completely disappearing and thereby vitiating any tangible influence over subsequent readers, this spectral existence, "returning to the world that has forgotten him," amplifies cultural influence through his very incorporeality and becomes "himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson" (267). Lacking a fixed identity in the usual sense, the ghost carries out his purgatorial mission with relative impunity. This ghost's mission, moreover, is not one of enlightenment or social emancipation; he was designed to "make our flesh creep." And, due to the strong correspondence between the ghost of Hamlet's father and the playwright, Stephen thinks that Shakespeare "passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed" (252). Because of the poet's underlying and pervasive negativity, Shakespeare's legacy is ultimately irredeemable, prone to underwrite senseless violence, fratricide, and widespread disorder precisely because of his ubiquity as a paternal figure in the cultural sphere.

But how can Shakespeare, as an intentional agent, be considered liable for these atrocious and inconceivable developments in modern warfare? According to Dedalus' idiosyncratic Aristotelian logic, literary authorship is a process of continuous recreation, and the author, himself a paternal figure, is bound in a very intimate ethical relationship to his http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 10 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

literary progeny. Shakespeare, in this view, embodies both the ghost of Hamlet's father as well as Hamlet himself: "the son [is] consubstantial with the father," and "the Father was Himself his own son" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 252, 267). In addition to rehearsing Catholic doctrine concerning the trinity, Stephen's theory implies that Shakespeare is, in a very meaningful sense, many people simultaneously, that characters literally embody their authors.9 His theory substitutes a metaphysical understanding of fatherhood for a biological one, claiming that parent and child are different stages in a single life taken in its entirety and should not be understood as two radically different or separate entities (Michels 1982, 177). Literary paternity functions in a similar way; each performance or readerly instantiation of a given work operates discretely, separable from the others, yet functionally related to and traceable to an orignary source that sponsored it. On this view, Shakespeare, as the ethical progenitor of Hamlet, initiated a process of continued renewal over time that, in some of its forms, has asserted a pernicious social influence and justified certain insidious practices utterly incomprehensible and unknowable to the author. But even given this possibility, Shakespeare, of course, would not be liable for the murderous tendencies of his dramatic progeny as an intentional agent. The playwright was simply the accidental originator of something he could not possibly foresee and cannot be held responsible for: "The world believes," argues Eglinton, "that Shakespeare made a mistake . . . and got out of it as quickly and as best he could." But Stephen refuses to accept this logic and continues his indictment: "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery" (Joyce 1968, 243, italics added).

Relying on an elaborate rehearsal of Aristotelian logic, Dedalus' contention is that the efficient cause, according to Aristotle (another spectral figure throughout the chapter),10 is ultimately inseparable from and ethically connected to the final cause, the effect or influence on the reader or audience. Stephen's argument here depends on a tendentious understanding of entelechy,11 or what he calls the "form of forms," an Aristotelian concept fiercely debated throughout Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In De Anima, Aristotle claims that the most essential characteristic or essence of living substances is the animating force: "the soul in animals, like the fruit in plants, is that which is potentially such and such a body . . .The body, on the other hand, is simply that which is potentially existent" (1907, 412b 22-413a 22: 10-11).12 Scientists found in these Aristotelian precepts a ready, malleable, and, most of all, authoritative justification for a stable conception of the soul as the decisive origin of all future action in any http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 11 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

living being, a kind of "intelligent design" that allows for divine agency even within a Darwinian paradigm of natural selection. By justifying a strong causal link (in addition to a merely formal resemblance), Stephen, in this scholarship, finds a useful counter to a Platonic cultural logic, a logic that persists in the formalist aesthetics of Kant and his followers, that regards literature as timeless and immutable and in so doing, forecloses the possibility of authorial liability in any meaningful sense.

By denying mechanistic and accidental accounts of literary reception, Stephen implicitly argues that Shakespeare's plays are pure potential and might therefore generate (or degenerate into) any number of material or ideological possibilities. The forecast of the concentration camp is embryonic in Hamlet's much different emphases on alternate forms of justice and revenge, which can — and should, according to Stephen's logic — be ascribed to Shakespeare as its creator. The armature of violence that pervades the plays exists "between the lines of his . . . written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her [Anne Hathaway's] four bones are hidden. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 272; cf. Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.239-41). Stephen's deliberate contortion of these lines from Antony and Cleopatra discloses a macabre narrative written "between the lines" of Shakespeare's plays when taken out of context, as they must be in a very different cultural milieu. Shakespeare's plays, just like the methods used to perpetrate violent acts, change with the times.

III So are we ultimately to believe Stephen's convoluted description of literary paternity and, consequently, indict Shakespeare for the malevolent social consequences allegedly condoned and perpetuated by his works? Of course not. Neither did he.13 Nevertheless, we have every reason to take seriously the related charge that Hamlet has the potential to influence negatively future generations when taken to represent and rationalize an ethos of violence and revenge. Politics is frequently aestheticized, and artistic productions have consistently been enlisted to support various caustic political regimes and justify their totalitarian projects. The operas of Richard Wagner and elements of German and Christian mythology notoriously depicted in Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will (1934) were readily assimilated into the Nazi propaganda machine throughout the 1930s. Today, a

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significant portion of the legislative effort designed to mitigate the deleterious effects of violence on television or in the cinema calls for producers to regulate content and to adopt a more socially responsible marketing strategy. The pervasiveness of these kinds of arguments in the popular imagination attests to an ongoing awareness of the potentially harmful consequences of artistic works and a concomitant desire to minimize the social ills they might cause, even in relatively free and open societies.

Despite the no-doubt intentional hyperbole, Stephen's argument against Shakespeare seems to make sense — that is if we can accept for a moment the questionable premises on which it rests. His allegations, however, collapse entirely and seem transparently self-serving when we consider the reception of Ulysses. Joyce himself was found subject to a similar offense when a New York District Court upheld the ban against Ulysses, and 500 copies of the novel were detained by state post office authorities in October 1922. The book was also censored in Great Britain. Out of two print runs (1000 copies published by Shakespeare and Company in February 1922 and 2000 more published in Paris, under the imprint of the Egoist Press, London), for a total of 3000 copies, augmented by a special order of 500 to redress the original American seizure, due to the ongoing legal difficulties only 250 books ever reached their prospective owners. Are these two situations really analogous? Many would claim that the Ulysses scandal lacks the premeditated intent that Stephen imputes to Shakespeare, that censorship of Joyce's text was entirely beyond the author's control and carried out by the book's American detractors only after the novel was substantially complete. The publication history of Ulysses, however, begins well before 1922. Commencing in 1918, the book was published serially in The Egoist in London and The Little Review in New York (although it was printed in France). Certain installments of the latter magazine were periodically denied entry into the United States when parts of "Lestrygonians" (in January/February 1919) and "Cyclops" (in January/February 1920) were deemed offensive, according to postal authority regulations (Vanderham 1998, 31-33).

A charge of obscenity in federal law soon followed. First raised by The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in December 1920 in response to the allegedly lurid description of Bloom masturbating at the sight of Gerty MacDowell in "Nausicaa" (published in the Little Review, July/August 1920), Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, the group's leaders, argued that Ulysses ran afoul of the prevailing legal standard for obscenity, first articulated in British Common Law in http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 13 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

Regina v. Hicklin in 1868. The decision stated that a work might be deemed obscene and therefore subject to censorship if certain parts of the work, taken separately, tended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" (3 QB 360, Joyce 1992, italics in original).14 This case, and the legal test subsequently derived from it, epitomized the conservatism of Victorian sexual morality by implicitly identifying susceptible youth as the arbiters of obscenity, even in the most abstruse of literary works that most educated adults, let alone children, fail to fully understand. As a result of the decision in favor of the libellant, serial publication ceased in 1920, nearly two years before Ulysses was published in monograph, allowing Joyce ample opportunity to revise or delete the offensive passages. Joyce's decision not to do so is usually hailed as a triumph of artistic sensibility and authorial discretion over against the homogenizing tendencies of public decorum and political conservatism. But in failing to emend Ulysses satisfactorily, Joyce — if he was not already — certainly became aware of consequences for future distribution, as the periodicals that first brought out the work suffered a serious decline in advertising revenue, and numerous other potential publishers were reticent to publish something that was already subject to criminal prosecution and boycotted by a large readership (Vanderham 1998, 36; Arnold 1991, 4- 5). Far from a disinterested observer concerned primarily with his own integrity as a creative artist, Joyce was obsessed with the ongoing censorship of the book and its potential ramifications; an anxious letter from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver (editor of The Egoist and Joyce's patron) on 22 December 1922 expresses regret for the ban and desire to see these difficulties resolved with all possible alacrity, and betrays an intricate knowledge of the vicissitudes of the case, as well as an uncommon grasp of the legal and procedural principles involved (Joyce 1957, 1:199).15

The rationale for censorship, then, essentially followed the same logic as Stephen's attack on Hamlet. Ulysses, like Shakespeare according to Dedalus, was found by the courts to contain material that was "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, or disgusting" and therefore threatened the probity of its potential American readers (NY Penal Code § 1141, Consol. 1909; Joyce 1992). Lawyers for Random House, Joyce's American publisher, argued that the burden of proof finally rested with the courts in determining not only whether the book contained the offensive material, but also that this material posed a reasonable threat to the morality of its readers and therefore to society in general. They also argued that, according to the Supreme Court's 1897 decision in Dunlop v. US (165 US 486, 488), to sustain a guilty http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 14 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

verdict, the defendant must have consciously intended to induce such malignant tendencies in readers. Although the court demurred to the defendant's construction of the statute, they found that the author was indeed conscious of the offensive material, that its publication was therefore intentional, and that the stationers were liable to prosecution. Despite the court's verdict against Joyce's publishers, the principles used in the decision signaled a shift away from strict content to intention and effect in adjudicating obscenity, paving the way for an eventual reversal.

The decision by District Court Judge John M. Woolsey that eventually permitted the importation, copyright, and subsequent publication of Ulysses in the United States was based on a revised statute that, in part, redressed the procedural ossification in prevailing case law. According to the Tariff Act of 1930, only those materials that, taken in their entirety, could be deemed offensive by any reasonable person according to prevailing community standards were prohibited (19 USC 1305).16 Here the determination of malfeasance turns on the triangular relationship between author, work, and the general public rather than on a hypothetical readership. More important for my purposes, a reasoned and balanced consideration of the author's intention becomes the most important basis for absolving Ulysses of the obscenity charges. The work's sensual content is secondary to Joyce's "attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective": because "Joyce did not write Ulysses with what is commonly called pornographic intent" (Joyce 1992), neither the work nor its author can be held liable for any charges leveled against it when taken out of context. Any pornographic tendencies present in the work are therefore not deliberate because they are an important component of the high artistic pretensions of the author; they were not intended to evoke a debased, physical arousal nor can they, of themselves, constitute a justifiable basis for prosecution. On Woolsey's view, an author's volition encompasses only those aspects of his artistic project of which he is self-consciously aware and are not, as Stephen would have it, the "portals of discovery" used to commune with future generations.

Following the libellant's argument, in adjudicating United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses" Judge Woolsey adopts precisely those abstracted aesthetic criteria that Stephen rejects as insufficient when considering the ethical character of Hamlet in contemporary society. The normative force of Stephen's claim against Shakespeare's corpus is precisely that literary works must ultimately be judged according to functional criteria drawn from an intersubjectively meaningful public sphere rather than a http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 15 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

hypothetical and autonomous formal realm. He recognizes that the potential agency of "classic" works encompasses an ethical and political dimension in addition to a literary one. The Woolsey decision forecloses this possibility. For him, any work written with artistic intent cannot be deemed morally repugnant, at least not in any legally binding sense: The reputation of "Ulysses" in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written . . . that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity. In writing "Ulysses," Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre . . . [H]is attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty. (5 F. Supp. 182 [SDNY 1933], Joyce 1992, xiv)

In short, Woolsey practices the same kind of discursive relativism that blinds Russell and Eglinton to the difficult ethical problems posed by Hamlet in a modernist context. Neither is the judge willing to admit any kind of broader definition of intention, such as the one offered by Stephen, who suggests that immoral intentions are a form of self- deception used by artists to augment their creative powers. For Woolsey, intentions can refer only to consciously-held mental states, a significantly more stringent designation than usually required by the law.17 The "leer of the sensualist" becomes the arbiter of obscenity as if a strong predisposition to lewdness is the only plausible determination of the inclination to convey an erotically charged meaning. In an overriding effort to protect and preserve artistic freedom, the judge falls victim to a number of logical fallacies that effectively subordinate jurisprudence as a branch of intentionalist literary criticism (Vanderham 1998, 126-28).

Read in light of the Woolsey decision and Joyce's keen interest in its outcome, Dedalus' vehement and litigious critique of Shakespeare's long-term reception is in some ways extremely puzzling. He would seem to justify the banning of certain works based on an estimation of their tendency to corrupt readers in some unknowable future: "If the poet must be rejected, such a rejection would seem more in harmony with — what shall I say? — our notions of what ought not to have been" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 251). Stephen is in fact extending the scope of potential censorship to exclude certain works for the retrospective benefit of society. On these criteria, there would be little

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argument for not suppressing Ulysses if even a small percentage of a hypothetical readership could allege a deleterious influence.

On the other hand, Stephen's rejection of Shakespeare's oeuvre makes perfect sense as commentary on the paternalistic character of literary history. By dismissing the works of Shakespeare as immoral or obscene, Stephen highlights, in a literary sphere, the same ambivalent relationship many children bear to the obligations imposed by their fathers. Just as Hamlet, despite his own misgivings, was compelled to recognize and observe the will of his father, so Joyce finds Shakespeare's influence inescapable and even essential for his own creative productivity; his long-term literary success depends upon this connection to a literary forbear, just as Shakespeare's genius is predicated on his own personal travails.18 But both these parents are also ghostly devils that frequently exact a tremendous personal and social cost, leading to extreme hardship for their children.19 A kind of eucharistic connection exists between Ulysses and Shakespeare, one that exemplifies the transfer of literary vitality from one generation to the next, but also one that maddeningly entails its own specific demands that children must heed in order to participate in the ongoing tradition.

Shakespeare's quasi-divine corpus is transubstantiated into something much different with the ground-breaking publication of Ulysses, a work clearly undertaken in the memory of Shakespeare, Homer, and other literary predecessors (see Luke 22:19). Unfortunately, as the faults of the parent are too often repeated by their offspring, Ulysses could not escape the same corrupting tendencies that its father noticed in his own original; accordingly, the work was prosecuted, but eventually redeemed by Judge Woolsey with recourse to the same aesthetic criteria so often adduced as the hallmark of Shakespeare's own cultural value. The acute anxiety of influence registered here, most deeply and painfully intuited and articulated by those of artistic sensibility, like Stephen and Joyce, though enabling literary success, does not necessarily break away from the potentially negative impact of its progenitors (Bloom 1973, 78). Since literary anxiety might only be channeled through the concrete mechanisms available to writers of various periods, Joyce's Ulysses, in seeking to supplant Shakespeare and to rectify the potentially harmful entailments contained in his textual legacy, is subject to different, but no less harmful impediments to the achievement of long-term cultural value. Finally, then, Stephen's prosecution of Shakespeare and his plays may be a vital — even inevitable — component in a larger aesthetic strategy for a very http://borrowers.uga.edu/782397/show Page 17 of 26 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(28 PM

different reason. He uncovered, or rather imputed, in the biographical circumstances surrounding Shakespearean authorship a theory of literary production in which success is directly related to adversity. Joyce obviously benefited in a similar way: notwithstanding the obvious short-term hardships imposed by the censorship of Ulysses, his legal difficulties probably did more to generate widespread interest in that novel than did ordinary forms of literary publicity and endorsement.

Despite Stephen's tactile questioning of the moral value of Hamlet and other plays, these accusations did relatively little to dilute the overwhelmingly positive consensus on the probity of Shakespeare's works. Joyce and other modernists continued to revere Shakespeare and were largely responsible for constructing the critical infrastructure through which his plays were appreciated during much of the twentieth century (Grady 1991, 149). There were changes, though. No longer was the study of Shakespeare primarily philological, and governed by unrestrained adulation. Formalism and New Criticism, two self- proclaimed "scientific" approaches to reading literary texts that modernist authors like Eliot and Joyce did so much to invigorate, concentrated on what they believed was an objective engagement with the plays that left little room for unqualified value judgments. In performance too, noteworthy twentieth-century productions of the plays by vaunted cultural institutions around the world20 were decidedly darker, politically-motivated, and more oppositional, strongly inclined to highlight the grotesque violence, social instability, and inherent contradictions in the original texts and so visible in the social, economic, and political dislocations of twentieth century Europe (Kott 1974). These novel ways of approaching Shakespeare did not ultimately entail his rejection or prosecution, as Stephen anticipates; they did, however, alert readers to alternate models of literary reception and the ways in which the works of the past have tangible repercussions in an ensemble of material circumstances. Ghoststories don't always have happy endings.

NOTES 1. The discussion of Shakespeare in this episode has elicited remarkably wide-ranging critical commentary. Observers have characterized Joyce's engagement with both the plays and the various — and often inaccurate — biographical details of the playwright's life alternately as

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"usurpation" (Sword 1999, 184), "genuine admiration" (Fitzpatrick 1977, 65), "specifically Freudian . . . psychosexual fiction" (DiPietro 2006, 69-70), "intensely personal" (Shutte 1957, 84), "severe" (Bristol 1997, 230), or simply misunderstood (Gifford 1988, 192), to provide only a sampling of the diverse opinion on this highly unusual chapter. 2. See Bloom 1994, 417. External evidence also supports the notion that, especially with regard to his views on Shakespeare, the author's opinions were remarkably similar to Stephen's. Many of the same sources used by Stephen in constructing his theory of Shakespeare were integral to Joyce's own lectures on the topic in Trieste in 1912 and 1913 (DiPietro 2006, 73). 3. John Dryden, "Preface" to All for Love in Works 1956-2000, 13:18; the term "lay bible" is quoted in Marder 1963, 18, while the idea of Shakespeare as a religion originates with Arthur Murphy, as quoted in Kastan 2001, 97. For Shakespeare's vaunted estimation in literary (as opposed to theatrical) circles throughout the period, see also Dobson 1992, Chapter 4, passim and, especially for the influence of Steele and Addison, Taylor 1989, 62-68. 4. In Ulysses, Stephen uses the same metaphor to note the persistence of various critical statements on Hamlet: "that mole is the last to go," in response to Best's claim that Hamlet is consistently portrayed as "quite young" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 249). For an illuminating discussion of the teleological character of Shakespearean scholarship and the use of Hamlet's "mole" in philosophical discourse, see de Grazia 1999. For the importance of the Romantics in constructing the parameters for a subsequent understanding of Shakespeare, see Bate 1998, Chapters 8 and 9, passim. 5. Emerson goes on to suggest that Shakespeare's normative force in shaping society and securing it on a progressively moral and enlightened trajectory is akin to that of Christianity. For Emerson's influence on subsequent Shakespearean criticism, especially in America, see Bristol 1991, 123-30. 6. Despite these heretofore heretical statements on Shakespeare, or perhaps in an effort to be taken seriously in his own critical milieu, Eliot ultimately felt the need to reiterate the seemingly unassailable sentiment that "I have as high an estimation of the greatness of Shakespeare as anyone living" and that "I certainly believe there is nothing greater" (Eliot 1964, 108). And, of course, coming to terms with Shakespeare as the epicenter of the literary tradition is essential in the development of a truly individual talent and its assimilation in literary history. 7. The prosecution is carried out by Stephen, with whom, as in ordinary

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criminal trials, "the burden of proof" rests (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 260), presided over by "Judge Eglinton" (272), with the other interlocutors acting as jury. The disputation also takes on many of the nuances of legal proceedings; Stephen realizes he must prove that Shakespeare's actions were premeditated, whether it is "possible . . . or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical consequences of these premises" (241), that Shakespeare "had no truant memory" (244), thereby rendering his actions deliberate, and understood the juridical ramifications since "his legal knowledge was great" (260). Stephen notes, almost as a summation of his case, that Shakespeare's exploits are destined for "the criminal annals of the world" (266). 8. Swinburne outlined this pragmatic view of Hamlet in A Study of Shakespeare (1880). His feelings on the Boer War and the deployment of concentration camps in that conflict are encapsulated in a sonnet entitled "The Death of Colonel Benson" (1901), which characterizes Boer women and children as the "whelps and dams of murderous foes." Elsewhere, he declared that the concentration camps were "monuments to our [British] leniency." In many ways, Stephen's condemnatory views on the South African concentration camps represent prevailing public opinion in Ireland. The Irish were decidedly pro-Boer; they saw English interventions in that country as analogous to their ongoing presence in Ireland. Not surprisingly, Swinburne was a vehement opponent of Gladstone and Irish home rule (Gifford 1988, 202; Clissold 1997, 47). For the etymology of the word "khaki," see OED adj. C. 9. If we are to take this idea seriously, it would invite us to identify Stephen with Joyce, an autobiographical connection forcefully suggested by Richard Ellmann, Joyce's most influential biographer (1982, 589). 10. Aristotelian terminology abounds throughout this episode whose argument, among other things, implicitly "compares Aristotle with Plato" using "dagger definitions" derived from these bifurcated philosophical traditions. Stuart Gilbert's architectonic diagram of Ulysses' structure lists "dialectic" as the chapter's "technic" and "literature" as its "art" while the Linati schema adumbrates Aristotle (as well as Hamlet and Shakespeare) as its overriding symbols (Gilbert 1963, 38; Gifford 1988, 192). In a letter to his mother of 20 March 1903, Joyce reports that "I am at present up to my neck in Aristotle's Metaphysics, and read only him and Ben Jonson" (1957, 2:38). 11. The term entelechia is most often rendered as "actuality," though translators often recognize the inadequacy of the English word. The concept seeks to describe the relation of the soul, or animating life-

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force, that will eventually develop into an exact replica of the body and intellect. "Entelechy" is thus the vital life element that controls and promotes maturation that transcends mechanistic or material causation. 12. Interpreting this passage, later theorists in the Aristotelian tradition made the stronger claim that entelechy was, in fact, teleological, that the existence of the original kernel automatically presupposed the eventual disposition of the being. Contrary to advocates of Darwinian natural selection, these biologists suggest that an organism does not adapt, it becomes what it has inherently inside it (Driesch 1914, 152). This meant that, as a precondition of experience, living beings must be able to 1) impart a causal chain on any series of events; and 2) understand the role their own volition plays in affecting that series. 13. "—— You are a delusion," said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen, "you have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?" "—— No," Stephen said promptly" (Joyce 1968, Chapter 9, 274). Richard Ellmann, however, records that Joyce himself took Stephen's theory very seriously and never recanted it (cited in Bloom 1994, 414). 14. This case subsequently became a mainstay of American jurisprudence, cited in US v. Bennet (24 Fed. Cas. 1093; Cir. SDNY 1879, the same court that would later consider the Ulysses case), Rosen v. US (161 US 29, 1896), and numerous other decisions in state supreme and appellate courts, especially in Massachusetts (see Pagnattaro 2001, 218-23). 15. Joyce's letters prior to and during the 1933 trial suggest a much more pragmatic reason for his concern with the ongoing censorship. By this time, Joyce was undergoing acute financial hardship and hoping to use the revenues from an American edition of Ulysses to settle his hemorrhaging debts. On 20 June 1932 in a letter to T. S. Eliot, after complaining that his fiscal situation prohibited travel, Joyce, desperate for money, hopes to profit from a pirated Japanese edition. When the novel was finally cleared for publication, copies could not be printed fast enough (21 October 1934, Joyce 1957, 1:349; 7 April 1935, 1:361; 1 May 1935, 1:365). Worry over the ongoing legal and contractual situation severely curtailed Joyce's productivity during this period (1:353). Joyce even came to interpret the ongoing legal difficulties of Ulysses and his other work as a personal conspiracy against him (3:242-44). 16. Note that the "reasonable person" reagent common in the law of torts replaces the implied juvenile ("those whose minds are open to immoral influences") from Regina v. Hicklin. In addition, the printed

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matter in question itself became the claimant in such cases, rather than the author, publisher, or their representatives. For many years Woolsey's decision was featured as a testimonial to the Random House edition of Ulysses and has itself been described as an important contribution to literary criticism (Arnold 1991, 61). 17. See, for instance, Holmes: "The test of foresight is not what [a] criminal foresaw, but what a man of reasonable prudence would have foreseen" (1991, 54) and Chapter 2, passim. 18. Cary DiPietro reads this as indicative of the modernists' Nietzschean ability to transform their disillusionment with the world into creative expression: "Shakespeare is portrayed in Stephen's theory as an artist who achieves salvation by embracing the morbid conditions of his existence" (2006, 80). Heavily reliant on Freud's theory that the sexual history of the child persists in the actions of the adult, DiPietro, like Bloom, elides the material conditions of authorship that so impinged on Joyce's publication of Ulysses. 19. When the ghost in Hamlet first appears, all characters immediately consider it a damned spirit. Horatio reacts to it by making the sign of the cross, a common action used to ward off evil spirits (1.1.108); the ghost only appears at night, suggesting that it is of the devil and cannot function in daylight (1.1.119); finally, Hamlet appeals to " [m]inisters and angels of grace [to] defend us" (1.4.20), and his first words to the ghost question his nature: "Be thou a spirit of health or a goblin damned, / Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts form hell, / Be thy intents wicked or charitable" (1.4.21-23), emphasizing the extreme ambivalence evinced by this familiar, but altogether fearsome spirit. For a lucid survey of the ways spectators might have apprehended the ghost, see Greenblatt 2001, passim. 20. The Royal Shakespeare Company (founded by Peter Hall in 1960), Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble (1949), and the Stratford (Ontario) Festival (1953) increasingly adopted the more experimental performance values of smaller troupes, garnering a reputation for themselves as avant-garde (Taylor 1989, 298-311; Hortmann 1998, 56). Critics, too, became skeptical of Hamlet's speculative genius: for G. Wilson Knight in 1930, for instance, Hamlet was "the ambassador of death walking within life" (1930, 48). For a summary of anti- humanist, even confrontational, readings of Hamlet during the twentieth century, many of which take up some of the ideas outlined by Stephen (albeit for political purposes), see Goldstein 2001, Chapter 2. Of course, these studies consider the play as a literary text and none extends the critique to Shakespeare himself.

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REFERENCES Aristotle. 1907. De Anima. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnold, Bruce. 1991. The Scandal of Ulysses. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Bate, Jonathan. 1998. The Genius of Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press. Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bristol, Michael D. 1997. Big-Time Shakespeare. New York: Routledge. Bristol, Michael D. 1991. Shakespeare's America/America's Shakespeare. New York: Routledge. Clissold, Bradley. 1997. "Fingerpondering Shakespeare, Swinburne, and the Concentration Camps." Shakespeare Newsletter 47: 47-48. De Grazia, Margreta. 1999. "Teleology, Delay, and the 'Old Mole.'" Shakespeare Quarterly 50: 251-67. DiPietro, Cary. 2006. Shakespeare and Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dobson, Michael. 1992. The Making of a National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Driesch, Hans. 1914. The History and Theory of Vitalism. Translated by C. K. Ogden. London: Macmillan. Dryden, John. 1956-2000. The Works of John Dryden. Edited by Edward Niles Hooker et al. 20 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duncan, Edward. 1950. "Unsubstantial Father: A Study of the Hamlet Symbolism in James Joyce's Ulysses." University of Toronto Quarterly 19: 126-40. Eliot, T. S. 1964. Elizabethan Essays. New York: Haskell. Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1883. Representative Men. 1855; Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Fitzpatrick, W. P. 1977. "Joyce's Shakespeare: Reflections in Circe's Mirror." Modern British Literature 1: 64-74. Gifford, Don. 1988. Ulysses Annotated. Revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilbert, Stuart. 1963. James Joyce's Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goldstein, Phillip. 2001. Communities of Cultural Value: Reception Study, Political Differences, and Literary History. Lanham, Md: Lexington. Grady, Hugh. 1991. The Modernist Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2001. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hegel, G. F. W. 1962. Hegel on Tragedy. Translated by Anne and Henry Paolucci. New York: Anchor. Hegel, G. F. W. 1896. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Translated by E. S. Haldane and Fancis H. Simson. 3 vols. London: Routledge. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. 1991. The Common Law. Edited by Sheldon Novick. 1861; New York: Dover. Hortmann, Wilhelm. 1998. Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jay, Martin. 1993. Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique. New York: Routledge. Jay, Martin. 1988. Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time. London: Athlone. Joyce, James. 1992. Ulysses: The 1934 Text, as Corrected and Reset in 1961. New York: Random House. Joyce, James. 1968. Ulysses. 1922; London: Penguin. Joyce, James. 1957. The Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Stuart Richard Ellman. 3 vols. New York: Viking. Kant, Immanuel. 1970. The Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner Pluhar. 1790; Indianapolis: Hacket. Kastan, David Scott. 2001. Shakespeare and the Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knight, G. Wilson. 1930. The Wheel of Fire. London: Oxford University Press.

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Kott, Jan. 1974. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. New York: Norton. Marder, Louis. 1963. His Exits and Entrances. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Michels, James. 1982. "'Scylla and Charybdis': Revenge in James Joyce's Ulysses." James Joyce Quarterly 20: 175-92. Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne. 2001. "Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and Ulysses." Twentieth Century Literature 47: 217- 40. Peterson, Richard F. 1989. "Did Joyce Write Hamlet?" James Joyce Quarterly 27: 365-72. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. Shutte, William M. 1957. Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sword, Helen. 1999. "Modernist Hauntology: James Joyce, Hester Dowden, and Shakespeare's Ghost." Texas Studies in Language and Literature 41.2: 180-201. Taylor, Gary. 1989. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press. Vanderham, Paul. 1998. James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses. New York: New York University Press.

ABSTRACT | I | II | III | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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"Nothing like the image and horror of it": (/current) King Lear and Heart of Darkness

RICHARD MEEK, UNIVERSITY OF HULL (/previous)

ABSTRACT | I | II | III | IV | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) There are several allusions to King Lear at the end of Heart of Darkness, suggesting that Joseph Conrad might have had Shakespeare in mind during the composition of his novella. Both texts are concerned with the difficulty of producing meaning in the face of unspeakable horrors, and the problems involved in constructing an intelligible or meaningful "report." Heart of Darkness thus emerges as a sophisticated and skeptical "reading" of Shakespeare's tragedy: both texts reveal narrative to be a kind of confidence trick, while at the same time demonstrating the power of narrative and our need for coherent ends.

In Unreliable Memoirs (1981), the first volume of his autobiography, the Australian critic and broadcaster Clive James recalls the death of his grandfather and the experience of seeing his dead body: "I was encouraged to take a look at the corpse — a wise decision, since it immediately became clear to me that there are more terrible things than dying a natural death. The old man merely looked as if he had been bored out of existence. Perhaps I got it all wrong then and have still got it all wrong now. Perhaps he died in a redemptive ecstasy after being vouchsafed a revelation of the ineffable. But I doubt it. I think he just

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croaked" (James 1981, 24). Here, James offers a detached and gently humorous account of the death of his grandparent, an old man who may have died after a divine revelation, or, more likely, simply passed away. But the passage is also suggestive inasmuch as it highlights the ambiguity of death, while the humor of the passage depends upon the fact that James — both the child who saw his grandfather's corpse and the adult who writes about the experience — may have been mistaken about his interpretation.1 Certainly, the old man "looked as if he had been bored out of existence," but James admits that this is only one interpretation: "Perhaps I got it all wrong then and have still got it wrong now." There is, however, no way of knowing for sure, for James's grandfather is — for obvious reasons — no longer in a position to resolve these ambiguities. Reading James's suggestion that his grandfather may (or may not) have died in a "redemptive ecstasy," we might also recall the death of another old man: King Lear. It is unclear, however, whether this moment constitutes a conscious allusion to the end of Shakespeare's tragedy, an unconscious echo, or simply an intriguing coincidence. Nevertheless, this connection remains available to the reader, and — given the extraordinary power and pervasiveness of Shakespeare's afterlife — it is perhaps inevitable that some readers will recollect King Lear when reading this passage. But does the possibility that this connection exists only in the minds of certain readers, rather than the mind of the author, make it any less meaningful? Attempting to establish a Shakespearean connection with this passage thus highlights the extent to which reading certain literary texts — like interpreting someone's death — can be a process of both constructing and imposing meaning.

The ending of King Lear, and the ambiguous end of the play's main character, has certainly proved a matter of interpretation and debate. For several critics in the first half of the twentieth century, most notoriously A. C. Bradley, Lear does indeed die in a "redemptive ecstasy": he dies of joy, believing Cordelia still to be alive.2 Yet some critics have suggested that Lear dies of grief, or in painful agony, and others that Lear's death is too ambiguous for us to come to any definite conclusion about it. Is it possible that Lear dies meaninglessly — or, to use James's formulation, "just croak[s]"? In this essay, I want to approach these questions via Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, another text that is preoccupied with death, storytelling, and interpretation, and that at several moments seems to echo King Lear. I argue that the narrative indeterminacy that recent critics have located in Conrad's novella might be linked to, or even indebted to, Shakespeare's tragedy. The essay thus raises a series of wider questions concerning Shakespearean influence. http://borrowers.uga.edu/782425/show Page 2 of 20 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

Given that King Lear and Heart of Darkness are so concerned with the problems of interpretation and the construction of meaning, is it necessary — or even desirable — to "prove" the existence of a direct link between them? To what extent is it valid to consider the possibility of "unconscious" echoes and allusions, whether in literary or critical writings? Does it depend upon the model of intertextuality one uses? The present essay does not claim, then, that Shakespeare's tragedy is an indisputable source of Heart of Darkness, but rather that there are several striking correspondences between the two texts, and that Shakespeare's tragedy is just as preoccupied with — and troubled by — the question of narrative as Conrad's novella.

I Several critics have noted Joseph Conrad's interest in Shakespeare, an interest that Conrad clearly inherited from his father, Apollo Korzeniowski. Apollo published an essay entitled "Studies on the Dramatic Element in the Works of Shakespeare" in 1868, and translated five of Shakespeare's plays — The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Othello, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing — into Polish (see Karl 1979, 66-68). It was no coincidence, then, that Shakespeare became the first English writer that Conrad ever read. Conrad recalls the experience in A Personal Record, during what can only be described as a period of almost Hamletian mourning: "My first introduction to English literature [was] the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' and in the very MS of my father's translation. It was during our exile in Russia, and it must have been less than a year after my mother's death, because I remember myself in the black blouse with a white border of my heavy mourning" (quoted in Batchelor 1994, 6). Later, in England, Conrad carried a single volume edition of the plays around with him, and recounts reading it in Falmouth "at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment of caulkers' mallets driving oakum into the deck seams of a ship in a dry dock."3 Given this immersion in Shakespeare's works, it was perhaps inevitable that they would find their way into Conrad's own writings. As Frederick Karl has noted, "Shakespeare appears in numerous verbal guises throughout Conrad's vocabulary, associations, and rhythms" (Karl 1979, 67-68). And John Batchelor goes further in describing this intertextual relationship, suggesting that "in much of his work . . . Conrad displays a desire to do homage to Shakespeare" (Batchelor 1994, 6). Of all English writers, then, Shakespeare seems to have had the greatest influence on Conrad, while Conrad's writings often point to Shakespeare's cultural significance and value. In Lord Jim, for example, Jim — not unlike

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Conrad himself, perhaps — carries a copy of Shakespeare to Patusan with him; and at one point in the novel Marlow offers to have "a Shakespearian talk" with Jim (Conrad 1986, 237). Thus Conrad's characters seem to have felt the influence of Shakespeare as well.

More generally, several of Conrad's works have been read as responses to Shakespeare's plays, in particular Shakespeare's tragedies. Various critics have argued for a significant link between Lord Jim and Hamlet; while The End of the Tether recollects King Lear, inasmuch as it recounts the story of Captain Whalley, an old and distinguished seaman, who conceals his blindness to keep working in order to sustain his estranged daughter in Australia.4 As John Lyon has written, "much of the starkness and power of The End of the Tether stems from its portrayal of Whalley as a reticent, restrained and — admittedly — simplified King Lear."5 But if The End of the Tether can be read as a simplification of King Lear, I want to suggest that Heart of Darkness — which was originally published in book form together with Youth and The End of the Tether in 1902 — represents a far more complex response to King Lear. For while The End of the Tether shares an obvious resemblance with King Lear in terms of its plot and main character, the relationship that Heart of Darkness has with King Lear is both more intricate and more submerged.6 Indeed, to think of Lear simply as a "source" for Heart of Darkness may be to employ a somewhat narrow model of intertextuality, and perhaps this is especially the case where Shakespearean influence is concerned. We might, then, conceive of this relationship in Bloomian terms, with Conrad grappling, perhaps anxiously, with a powerful Shakespearean precursor; but we might also conceive of this relationship in Barthesian terms, with King Lear one of many "off-stage voices" that we might be tempted to hear in Conrad's text (see Barthes 1990, 21).7 As Barthes writes: "The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the 'sources,' the 'influences' of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas" (Barthes 1977, 160, italics in original).

This is not to say, however, that there is no textual evidence to support claims for a link between these two texts. For there is an allusion to King Lear at the end of Heart of Darkness, suggesting that Shakespeare's tragedy may have been in Conrad's mind when he wrote his novella. When Marlow encounters Kurtz's Intended, he tells her the story of Kurtz's demise and offers her his reassurance that Kurtz's words http://borrowers.uga.edu/782425/show Page 4 of 20 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

will survive: "His words will remain," I said. "And his example," she whispered to herself. "Men looked up to him, — his goodness shone in every act. His example —" "True," I said; "his example too. Yes, his example. I forgot that." "But I do not. I cannot — I cannot believe — not yet. I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never." (Conrad 1995, 146) The Intended's "never, never, never" echoes the final scene of King Lear, and Lear's cry over the body of the dead Cordelia:8 LEAR And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never. (King Lear, 5.3.281-84) Lear's cry of "Never, never, never, never, never" represents his attempt both to articulate his grief and to express the utter finality of Cordelia's death; yet the very repetitiveness of Lear's utterance simultaneously enacts the futility and redundancy of this attempt.9 For our purposes, however, what is striking is Conrad's apparent recollection and appropriation of this moment of Shakespeare's tragedy. Repeating the word "never" in the context of a loved one's death cannot help but make us think of Lear's powerful — and powerfully canonical — cry.10 King Lear thus begins to look like a terrible and powerful intertext lurking behind Conrad's novella. At this moment, Shakespeare's bleakest tragedy — which ends with an aged father attempting to express his grief at the death of his beloved daughter — comes to the surface, as a young woman attempts to express her grief at her beloved's death. Yet this allusion, as I have suggested above, points to a complicated and covert relationship between King Lear and Heart of Darkness. For both texts not only explore the failure of language, but also offer a skeptical critique of narrative and the act of storytelling, and our attempts to attach meanings to unspeakable — or untellable — events. Indeed, when we turn to critical readings that have approached either Lear or Heart of Darkness from this perspective, the relationship between the two texts becomes still more entangled and complex.

II Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow's journey up the Congo to

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find the famed and enigmatic Mr. Kurtz. But of course, Heart of Darkness is also about Marlow's attempt to tell this story and employs a framing device that represents Marlow's act of storytelling on board the Nellie, a boat on the Thames, recounting his tale to a select audience, including the anonymous narrator of Heart of Darkness. Several recent critics have explored the tale's status as an "unreadable report" and have emphasised its self-consciousness and skepticism regarding the organizing features of conventional narrative.11 These critics note that Marlow's narrative breaks down at several key moments and argue that his attempts to imbue his tale with a clear and definitive "meaning" fail to convince. Peter Brooks, in what is perhaps the most influential of these critical accounts, has written the following about the limits of language and its inability to represent unspeakable horrors: "Marlow continually seems to promise a penetration into the heart of darkness, along with a concurrent recognition that he is confined to the 'surface truth.' There is no reconciliation of this standoff, but there may be the suggestion that language, as interlocutionary and thus as social system, simply can have no dealings with an ineffable. For language, nothing will come of nothing" (Brooks 1984, 252). Intriguingly, Brooks's essay — like the text he is discussing — echoes King Lear. As Lear says in the first scene of the play, following Cordelia's refusal to express her love for him: "Nothing will come of nothing" (King Lear, 1.1.90).12 Brooks is discussing the fact that Marlow has to keep talking, despite the fact that the events he describes are terrible or — paradoxically — inexpressible. Yet of course, this paradox is also a central feature of Shakespearean tragedy, and King Lear in particular. The play repeatedly asks whether it is possible to turn terrible events into language successfully; and whether we can ever "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say" (5.3.300). It seems appropriate, then, that Brooks's discussion of the limits of language should recall the language of Shakespeare. But perhaps this echo is even more apt than Brooks realizes, given the allusion to King Lear in Heart of Darkness that we have noted above. Indeed, Brooks seems once again to allude to Shakespeare's tragedy towards the end of his essay: "In the lack of finality of the promised end, Marlow must continue to attach his story to Kurtz's, since to detach it would be to admit that his narrative on board the Nellie is radically unmotivated, arbitrary, perhaps meaningless" (Brooks 1984, 254, italics added).

In these two apparent echoes of Lear, then, Brooks may be consciously hinting at a significant relationship between the two texts and suggesting that both are concerned with the problems of expressing the inexpressible and the flouting of narrative conventions. But another http://borrowers.uga.edu/782425/show Page 6 of 20 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

possibility is that the allusion to King Lear in Heart of Darkness — and their shared concerns — led Brooks to make an unconscious link between the two texts. One might object, of course, that to suggest that these intertextual links may be unconscious on the part of the critic as well as the author might be somewhat tenuous. And yet, the fact that one can locate a vein of Shakespearean discourse within Brooks's account of Heart of Darkness seems particularly suggestive. For it reveals the extent to which Shakespeare's "afterlife" is not only confined to literary texts, but also encompasses critical texts. Yet it also suggests that the indeterminacy and ambiguity that Brooks locates in Conrad's novella can also be found in his own essay.

What is even more striking, perhaps, is that James L. Calderwood — in an essay on the limits of language and narrative in King Lear — makes an explicit comparison with Heart of Darkness: "Like the Fool, [Edgar] cannot accompany Lear into what Conrad calls the heart of darkness, though like Marlow he can return to tell us about it in words we know are incommensurate to their subject" (Calderwood 1986, 11). Certainly the characters of King Lear, especially Edgar, often attempt to impose a narrative structure upon the play's events and attach meanings to them. As Graham Bradshaw has written, Edgar "is both a participant in a stubbornly unconventional 'tragedy,' and a surrogate critic or commentator, who is continually struggling to make sense of, or impose sense on, arbitrary and contingent horrors" (Bradshaw 1987, 88). Yet what Calderwood suggests, in his brief, but provocative reference to Heart of Darkness is that Marlow's attempts to convert his experiences into a coherent narrative correspond to Edgar's role in King Lear as the play's principal "reporter." Like Edgar, we might say, Marlow continually struggles to impose sense on "arbitrary and contingent horrors." Here, then, we have a critic of Shakespeare's play referring to Heart of Darkness, and a critic of Conrad's novella echoing King Lear. But what do these undeveloped connections that these critics have made tell us about the two texts and their relationship? We might suggest that the fact that both texts are so ambiguous and unsettling leads critics (including myself perhaps) to turn to other narratives in order to make sense of them. Ironically, however, as though aware of the futility of the attempt, we can only turn to narratives that are themselves ambiguous and unsettling. In other words, critics — like the characters — attempt to make sense of what happens in both texts through stories, while simultaneously implying that this attempt to construct meaning may itself be arbitrary.

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If we turn now to Heart of Darkness itself, we find that the text continually explores Marlow's desire to find meaning, and his attempts to reconcile Kurtz's great reputation with the strangeness of their encounter. For example, when Marlow finally meets Kurtz, the "magnificent eloquence" (Conrad 1995, 121) that Marlow has heard so much about fails to materialize. Marlow seems to think that Kurtz will talk well at the end of his journey, and that there will be a transference of meaning and wisdom. But all Marlow gets is ambiguity: "He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with a mingled expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer, but I saw a smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on his colourless lips that a moment after twitched convulsively" (134). Kurtz does not answer Marlow at this point and remains hard to interpret, with his "mingled expression of wistfulness and hate" and his smile of "indefinable meaning." Marlow might be forgiven for thinking that Kurtz's words will clear up these ambiguities; yet even when Kurtz does speak, Marlow is not sure what he has heard, or what it means: He was lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew quietly, but I heard him mutter, "Live rightly, die, die . . . " I listened. There was nothing more. Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article? He had been writing for the papers and meant to do so again, "for the furthering of my ideas. It's a duty." (136) Kurtz's utterance ("Live rightly, die, die . . . ") sounds like the abortive beginning of a pithy phrase that might serve as someone's last words. Indeed, we might be forgiven for trying to imagine what the whole utterance might have been — perhaps something along the lines of "Live rightly, die well."13 However, the final part of the phrase fails to materialize. Marlow admits that he is not sure what the origin or significance of what Kurtz says might be: "Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article?" Given that the phrase might be a half-remembered quotation, perhaps it might be misguided even to attempt to make a coherent phrase out of this fragment. Yet it is hard for us, as readers and critics, to avoid tying to find significance in Kurtz's last words. In the context of the present discussion, when Marlow reports Kurtz saying that "I am lying here in the dark waiting for death" (136), it is tempting to hear another echo of King Lear. Do we think here of Gloucester? Or Lear's "while we / Unburdened crawl towards death" (King Lear, 1.1.40-41)? In this way, Heart of Darkness seems concerned to explore the act of interpretation itself, and, in particular, the need to imbue death

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with import and significance. For rather than finding Kurtz's final moments disturbing, Marlow seems fascinated by the very proliferation of meanings that he finds: Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — "The horror! The horror!" (136-37) The more Marlow considers Kurtz's "ivory face," the greater number of possible expressions and emotions he seems to find in it: a combination or succession of pride, power, terror, and despair. Marlow observes that Kurtz may have "live[d] his life again [ . . . ] during that supreme moment of complete knowledge," but this possibility is phrased as a speculative question. Kurtz's final utterance, despite Marlow's protestations, remains pointedly unclear and disturbing. According to Marlow, Kurtz's "The horror! The horror!" is a response to some image, or some vision — but do we even know if this is the case? Could Kurtz merely be quoting another fragment? Certainly Kurtz's phrase suggests that he has seen some sort of horrifying image, but that he cannot find the words adequately to represent it. It is impossible for us to say precisely what it is that Kurtz sees, or thinks he sees, but certainly the ambiguity of this phrase complicates Marlow's attempt to retell this part of his tale. Indeed, the fact that Kurtz's words are reported by Marlow and then reported to us by the anonymous narrator of Heart of Darkness creates a further distance between us and the horrifying image that Kurtz struggles to describe.

We might also note that this passage, too, seems to contain another echo of Shakespeare's tragedy. In the second scene of King Lear, the deceitful and ambitious Edmund informs Edgar that he has offended their father and should avoid his sight: "Brother, I advise you to the best. I am no honest man if there be any good meaning toward you. I have told you what I have seen and heard but faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it. Pray you, away" (King Lear, 1.2.161-65). Edmund has attempted to convey his experience of the event — "what I have seen and heard" — but he has only done so "faintly"; it is merely a retelling of the "actual" events. Edmund admits that his verbal http://borrowers.uga.edu/782425/show Page 9 of 20 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

description is inadequate, and does not have the visual immediacy — and the aural distinctiveness — of the thing itself; it is "nothing like the image and horror of it." Edmund's words "image" and "horror" are repeated in the exchange between Kent and Edgar in the play's final scene: "Is this the promised end? [ . . . ] Or image of that horror?' (5.3.238-39). Edgar's description, then, not only anticipates the final scene's tragic tableau, but also relates to Shakespeare's attempts to create a horrifying picture through language.14 Yet these words also appear in Marlow's description of Kurtz's end: "He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — "The horror! The horror!" (Conrad 1995, 136-37, italics added). The close proximity of these words thus recalls these two moments from Lear, linking Edmund's description of his father's anger with Kurtz's terrifyingly ambiguous last words. It is worth emphasising, however, that the horrifying picture that Edmund describes never existed. By admitting the insubstantiality of his account, Edmund distracts Edgar from the possibility that there were no "actual events" in the first place. Thus, King Lear alerts us to the duplicity and unreliability of narrative. Yet the fact that Edmund's description anticipates the language of the final scene of the play might tempt us to draw a parallel between Edmund's artistry and that of the playwright. This suggests that Shakespeare's art is also a kind of confidence trick, or illusion. Like Conrad, perhaps, Shakespeare deliberately avoids attempting to represent the most disturbing moments in his text and leaves gaps for us to imagine a horrifying image that can never be shown. We might say that what is at the heart of King Lear — and at the heart of Heart of Darkness — is unsayable, or untellable.

IV When we come to examine the endings of the two texts, however, we find that neither Marlow nor Edgar can resist tying up their respective acts of storytelling with comforting and conventional endings. In the final scene of King Lear, Edgar provides a highly self-conscious and rhetorical account of his father's death. Albany invites Edgar to give a narrative account of what has taken place — "Where have you hid yourself? / How have you known the miseries of your father?" (King Lear, 5.3.171-72) — and Edgar is all too happy to oblige: "By nursing them, my lord. List a brief tale, / And when 'tis told, O that my heart would burst!" (5.3.173-74). Edgar promises that his tale will be "brief," and yet, according to Albany at least, it goes on for far too long. Furthermore, Edgar's narration appears to be intended to elicit such an emotional response and designed to justify his role in the play, as he

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evades all of the difficult questions that critics have asked about him: The bloody proclamation to escape That followed me so near — O, our lives' sweetness, That we the pain of death would hourly die Rather than die at once! — taught me to shift Into a madman's rags, t'assume a semblance That very dogs disdained; and in this habit Met I my father with his bleeding rings, Their precious stones new-lost; became his guide, Led him, begged for him, saved him from despair; Never — O fault! — revealed myself unto him Until some half hour past, when I was armed. (5.3.175-85) Edgar's aside ("That we the pain of death would hourly die / Rather than die at once"), which appears near the start of his account, seems designed to guide his listeners' response. But do we submit to his rhetorical performance, or do we want to resist and ask questions? Did Edgar really save his father from despair? After all, in the previous scene Gloucester had resisted Edgar's moralizing sentiments, commenting that they are only one way of interpreting the play's events: "And that's true, too" (5.2.11). Edgar's "O fault!" sounds like an admission of guilt, giving his tale the tone of a confession. In the Quarto text, however, Edgar says "O father!" a slightly more neutral statement that does not draw as much attention to his moral defects.15 Yet while the Folio text might alert us to Edgar's shortcomings more explicitly, in neither text does Edgar explain why he did not reveal himself to his father sooner. As Harry Berger, Jr. has commented, Edgar's tale "drastically foreshortens his performance on the heath, edits out all his darker moments, and stresses his devoted tendance" (Berger 1997, 64). Disturbingly, there is also the implication that Edgar only revealed himself to his father when he was sure of his own safety, "when [he] was armed" (5.3.185). Edgar then attempts to explain how and why his father died: I asked his blessing, and from first to last Told him our pilgrimage; but his flawed heart — Alack, too weak the conflict to support — 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (5.3.187-91) This is a highly self-reflexive piece of Edgar's narrative, a story about the power of storytelling. Edgar tells his father the story of their trials, revealing to him — finally — who he is; but the imparting of this

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knowledge, in the form of a narrative account, breaks Gloucester's heart. Edgar interprets Gloucester's death in a relatively positive light, stating first that he was suspended between joy and grief, but then that his heart "[b]urst smilingly." But do we believe this interpretation? After all, we know that Edgar has constructed artful, but deceptive narratives before, not least in his vivid, yet entirely fictitious description of Dover cliff. Moreover, in act 4, Edgar expresses a healthy degree of skepticism regarding the ability of narrative to convey the play's most tragic events: "I would not take this from report; it is, / And my heart breaks at it" (4.5.137-38). Here, however, he seems perfectly happy to offer an optimistic, even redemptive reading of his father's death, and one that seems to conceal as much as it discloses.

Similarly, in Heart of Darkness, we find that Marlow interprets Kurtz's death in a positive and optimistic light. Marlow attempts to describe the significance of Kurtz's final words, and suggests that they represent a profound assessment of his life: "This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it" (Conrad 1995, 138). Nonetheless, Marlow — not unlike Edgar in his description of Gloucester's death — implicitly admits the ambiguity of Kurtz's death, stating that the utterance represented a "strange commingling of desire and hate" (138). We might suggest that Marlow implies that Kurtz's death was, in fact, suspended between two (or more) readings. Yet Marlow goes on to read Kurtz's final words as a kind of triumph: perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry — much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! (138) It is far from clear, however, how this affirmative interpretation of Kurtz's "summing-up" — in which Marlow is at pains to emphasize that these were more than merely words of "careless contempt" — relates to Kurtz's deeply ambiguous utterance. Marlow tries to suggest that Kurtz's death represented a moment of wisdom, truth, and sincerity, even describing it as a "moral victory"; yet the rhetorical tone of this passage might suggest that, like Edgar, Marlow is protesting too much, and that he may well have doubts about his own interpretation of the death that he describes.

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When Marlow finally encounters Kurtz's Intended, he cannot bring himself to repeat Kurtz's final words, and finds that he has to lie to her: "The last word he pronounced was — your name" (Conrad 1995, 147). This is, of course, precisely what the Intended wants to hear: "I knew it — I was sure" (147), she says. Marlow cannot tell the truth about Kurtz's death because it would be troubling, ambiguous, or devoid of meaning. In other words, the story that Marlow does tell about Kurtz's death is merely a story — it is a lie; a fiction. Heart of Darkness thus asks whether it is possible to convert death into something tellable without making it into a fiction, or a lie. As Peter Brooks comments, "To present 'the horror!' as articulation of that wisdom lying in wait at the end of the tale, at journey's end and life's end, is to make a mockery of storytelling and ethics, or to gull one's listeners — as Marlow seems to realize when he finds that he cannot repeat Kurtz's last words to the Intended, but must rather cover them up by a conventional ending" (Brooks 1984, 250). But once again, this seems particularly relevant to the ending of King Lear and to our interpretation of the deaths of Lear and Gloucester. We might ask, then, whether we can be sure that Edgar's account of Gloucester's death is not as deceitful as the account of Kurtz's death that Marlow offers to the Intended. Does Shakespeare's tragedy "make a mockery of storytelling and ethics" in a similar way, or even gull its listeners?

The death of King Lear offers yet another perspective on these issues. The conclusion of Shakespeare's tragedy — with the deaths of Lear and Cordelia — is notoriously unbearable, and this is perhaps related to our expectations of a conventional ending.16 Yet there is also an implicit contrast between Edgar's narrative account of his experiences, and the raw, unexplained sight of Lear and the dead Cordelia.17 The scene's power owes much to our inability to understand what is going on, and there are several references in these final moments of the play to "uninterpreted seeing" (Calderwood 1986, 16). Towards the close of the Folio text of the play, Lear tells the onlookers to "look," but we are unable to "see" or understand because we are not told what we are supposed to be looking for. Indeed, it is not clear whether Lear thinks Cordelia to be dead or alive. One moment he states that "She's gone for ever. / I know when one is dead and when one lives. / She's dead as earth" (King Lear, 5.3.234-36), but then asks for a looking glass: "If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives" (5.3.237- 38). This uncertainty as to whether Cordelia is dead thus belies Lear's earlier declaration that he knows "when one is dead and when one lives" (5.3.258). Consequently it is extremely difficult to know how to interpret Lear's dying moments, even more so given the disparity http://borrowers.uga.edu/782425/show Page 13 of 20 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

between the two texts of the play. Here is Lear's death as it appears in the Folio text: [to Kent] Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir. Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. Look there, look there. He dies. (5.3.285-87) What is Lear looking at? And what is the meaning of what he sees? A. C. Bradley writes that "it seems almost beyond question that any actor is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear's last accents and gestures and look, an unbearable joy" (Bradley 1991, 269, emphasis in original). But it is not clear to which text Bradley is attempting to be true. In the Quarto text, Lear remains alive long enough to deliver the line, "'Break, heart, I prithee break" (The History of King Lear, sc. 24, l. 306), suggesting that he dies in a state of grief. However, in the Folio, this line is spoken by Kent, and Lear's last line before the stage direction "He dies" is "Look there, look there" (5.3.287). Thus, Lear's death in the Folio is more ambiguous, and it is even possible that Lear dies in the same manner as Gloucester, "'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief" (5.3.190). In the Folio text, the two lines before Lear's death might be of despair and not joy, and they could be read as conforming to the previous pattern of Lear's veering from certainty to possibility, and not knowing when one is dead and when one lives. Alternatively, the Folio text could suggest that Lear does now know the difference between life and death, with the additional "no" in "No, no, no life?" (5.3.281), and the additional two "nevers" in "Never, never, never, never, never" (5.3.284), suggesting the certainty of death. Indeed, the ambiguity of Lear's death retrospectively implies that Edgar's narrative account of Gloucester's death might be suspect. For if Gloucester's death was anything like that of Lear, or indeed Kurtz, then for Edgar to say that his father died betwixt "joy and grief" comes to sound like a rather dubious interpretation, not an accurate and objective account of the event. Perhaps any account of a man's death remains an interpretation.

To conclude, then, both King Lear and Heart of Darkness offer incisive critiques of the act of storytelling, and both implicitly question our attempts to find meanings in — or attach meanings to — a person's death. Thus the narrative indeterminacy and skepticism that recent critics have identified in Conrad's novella is not something that appears abruptly with the advent of modernism, but is rather a phenomenon that can be traced back to Shakespearean tragedy. Conrad's novella, with its emphasis upon duplicity and uncertainty, prompts us to reconsider the representation of storytelling in King Lear and to question the attempts http://borrowers.uga.edu/782425/show Page 14 of 20 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

of readers and critics to construct coherent or comforting interpretations out of Lear's death.18 Whether or not the verbal correspondences that I have noted constitute conscious echoes of King Lear, this literary relationship highlights the extent to which Shakespeare presents us with a deeply skeptical and ambivalent account of art and narrative. And rather than trying to prove the existence of a direct or unequivocal intertextual relation between Lear and Heart of Darkness, we might suggest that Shakespeare has fashioned an eloquent language of negation and negativity that later writers are unconsciously fluent in, whether they realize it or not. Yet, as we have seen, it is also critics who have found themselves caught up in this intertextual web. Indeed, considering the possibility of this literary relationship prompts us to reflect upon our own status as interpreters of both texts, which both explore and expose our desire for interpretive closure and for coherent (and conventional) endings. On the one hand, Lear and Heart of Darkness suggest that narrative is a form of deception, a lie that we know is not really there, while, on the other, both texts demonstrate the need for the comfort and sense-making power of storytelling. We know that narratives are an illusion in that they exist only in language, but we still need to invest in and attach value to them. In this way, both King Lear and Heart of Darkness explore the difficulty of making sense of the ambiguous "image[s]" and "horror[s]" with which they present us.

NOTES 1. For some suggestive reflections on the relationship between death and storytelling, see Walter Benjamin's classic essay "The Storyteller" (Benjamin 1970). Benjamin comments that "Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell" (93). 2. In his Arden 2 edition of King Lear (Muir 1972), Kenneth Muir has the following note to 5.3.309, by way of explaining Lear's death: "Lear dies of joy, believing Cordelia to be alive (Bradley)." This suggests something of the authority that Bradley's account of the play had amongst editors and critics in the first half of the twentieth century. For a judicious account of the play's critical reception, see Foakes 1993, 45- 77; and for a recent collection of essays on the topic of "King Lear and Its Afterlife," see Holland 2003. 3. Quoted in Karl 1979, 67. Conrad goes on to note the ways in which his experience of Shakespeare's works was bound up with his experience of death: "Books are an integral part of one's life and my Shakespearean associations are with that first year of our bereavement, the last I spent

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with my father in exile [. . . ], and with the year of hard gales, the year in which I came nearest to death by sea" (Conrad 1925, 73). 4. On the relationship between Lord Jim and Hamlet, see Batchelor 1988; Hay 1992; and Batchelor 1992. For other considerations of Conrad's indebtedness to Shakespeare, see, for example, Lodge 1964; Gillan 1976, 41-141; Felperin 1978; Moore 1991; and Paccaud-Huguet 1996. 5. John Lyon, Introduction to Conrad 1995, xiii-xiv. All quotations from Heart of Darkness will be taken from this edition. J. H. Stape also makes a connection between The End of the Tether and King Lear, although he seems to forget that in Shakespeare's play, it is Gloucester rather than Lear who loses his sight: "Whalley and Lear share a physical blindness that symbolizes a self-absorption and self-deception so complete that they literally shut out the surrounding world" (Stape 2000, 346). 6. Adam Gillan offers a brief treatment of this relationship in Gillan 1976, 123-41, commenting that "the imaginative tapestry of this short novel parallels the linguistic and the philosophical revelations of Shakespeare's great tragedy" (127). However, his approach is markedly different from that of the present essay, suggesting rather optimistically that "[Lear's] followers, like the loyal Marlow, know the truth and must speak it before each story is brought to an end" (134). 7. Harold Bloom's theory of literary influence is set out in Bloom 1973. In recent years, Bloom has increasingly emphasised Shakespeare's cultural and canonical centrality. For example, in The Western Canon Bloom has argued that "we cannot rid ourselves of Shakespeare, or of the Canon that he centers. Shakespeare, as we like to forget, largely invented us; if you add the rest of the Canon, then Shakespeare and the Canon wholly invented us" (Bloom 1994, 40). 8. Quotations from Shakespeare's works are taken from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (edited by Wells and Taylor 1986). King Lear is quoted from the Folio version, The Tragedy of King Lear, unless otherwise stated. 9. Anne Barton comments that "Lear's five-times-repeated 'Never' in the last scene is like an assault on the irrevocable nature of death, an assault in which the word itself seems to crack and bend under the strain," in "Shakespeare and the Limits of Language" (Barton 1971, 26). 10. R. A. Foakes describes it as "perhaps the most extraordinary blank verse line in English poetry" in his Arden 3 edition of King Lear (Foakes 1997, note to 5.3.307). 11. See, for example, Stewart 1980; Brooks 1984; Stewart 1984, especially 146-52; Todorov 1989; and Greaney 2002, especially 57-76. 12. The idea recurs throughout the play: in 1.4, the Fool asks Lear, "Can

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you make no use of nothing, nuncle?" (King Lear, 1.4.129-30), and Lear tells the fool that "Nothing can be made out of nothing" (1.4.131), echoing his comments in the opening scene. 13. Garrett Stewart points out that Conrad's original manuscript read "Live rightly, die, die nobly" (Stewart 1980, 148). 14. Often in his tragedies Shakespeare gestures towards an unseen, terrifying image that is never actually shown to us, but which is all the more disturbing for that. For example, Macbeth asks what the "horrid image" is which "doth unfix [his] hair, / And make [his] seated heart knock at [his] ribs / Against the use of nature?" (Macbeth, 1.3.134-36). However, it is unclear precisely what this terrifying mental image — which Macbeth does not describe in his self-report — might be. Similarly, Old Hamlet's ghost says that he could tell Hamlet a tale "whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, / Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, / Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part, / And each particular hair to stand on end / Like quills upon the fretful porcupine" (Hamlet, 1.5.15-20). Once again, this description of its effects is an admission that the thing the Ghost describes cannot be shown: it can only be gestured at. 15. See The History of King Lear, scene 24, l. 189. See also Foakes's note to 5.3.191 (Foakes 1997). 16. While Shakespeare does not allow the play to end like an old tale, the Restoration redaction by Nahum Tate, which was acted for 150 years afterwards, does indeed have a happy, storybook ending. Tate's version, The History of King Lear (1681), can be read in Clarke 1997. Clarke comments that "where Shakespeare's play is open, ambiguous, multi-faceted, Tate's operates to restrict meanings and render the rough places plain" (lxviii). Norman Rabkin writes that "Shakespeare's tragedies define the genre for us; whatever successes his redactors achieved they achieved by making the plays into something other than tragedy, something more reducible to rational explanation" (Rabkin 1981, 114). 17. James Calderwood writes that "Lear's dying moments [ . . . ] are harrowing to an audience in part because they are presented as immediate, uninterpreted experience. We must make of them what we can. But Gloucester's death comes to us more comfortably because its rawness has been filtered, ordered, and endowed with meaning by Edgar's long report of it" (Calderwood 1986, 10). 18. Conrad read Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy in 1914, pronouncing it "very good" (Letter to Richard Curle, 30 March 1914, in Karl and Davies 1983—, 5:369). Yet we might see Heart of Darkness as offering an earlier, more skeptical account of King Lear than the one

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that Bradley's study contains.

REFERENCES Barthes, Roland. 1990. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. 1974; reprint, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Barthes, Roland. 1977. "From Work to Text." In Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. Barton, Anne. 1971. "Shakespeare and the Limits of Language." Shakespeare Survey 24: 719-30. Batchelor, John. 1994. The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Batchelor, John. 1992. "Conrad and Shakespeare." L'Époque Conradienne 18: 125-51. Batchelor, John. 1988. Lord Jim. London: Unwin Hyman. Benjamin, Walter. 1970. "The Storyteller." In Illuminations. Translated by Hannah Adendt. London: Jonathan Cape. 81-107. Berger, Harry, Jr. 1997. "Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance." In Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 50-69 . Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. London: Macmillan. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. Bradley, A. C. 1991. Shakespearean Tragedy. 1904; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bradshaw, Graham. 1987. Shakespeare's Scepticism. Brighton: Harvester. Brooks, Peter. 1984. "An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness." In Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 238-65. Calderwood, James L. 1986. "Creative Uncreation in King Lear." Shakespeare Quarterly 37: 5-19. Clarke, Sandra, ed. 1997. Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. London: Everyman.

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Conrad, Joseph. 1995. Youth, Heart of Darkness, and The End of the Tether. Edited by John Lyon. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Conrad, Joseph. 1986. Lord Jim: A Tale. Edited by John Batchelor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conrad, Joseph. 1925. A Personal Record, in The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions. London: John Grant. Felperin, Howard. 1978. "Romance and Romanticism: Some Reflections on The Tempest and Heart of Darkness, or When Is Romance no Longer Romance?" In Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered. Edited by Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 60-76. Foakes, R. A., ed., 1997. King Lear. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Foakes, R. A. 1993. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillan, Adam. 1976. Conrad and Shakespeare and Other Essays. New York: Astra. Greaney, Michael. 2002. Conrad, Language, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hay, Eloise Knapp. 1992. " Lord Jim and Le Hamlètisme." L'Époque Conradienne 18: 9-27. Holland, Peter, ed. 2003. " King Lear and Its Afterlife." Shakespeare Survey 55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Clive. 1981. Unreliable Memoirs. London: Picador. Karl, Frederick R.. 1979. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. London: Faber and Faber. Karl, Frederick R., and Laurence Davies, eds., 1983—. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. 8 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lodge, David. 1964. "Conrad's Victory and The Tempest: An Amplification." Modern Language Review 59: 195-99. Moore, Gene M. 1991. "Conrad's Under Western Eyes." Explicator 49: 103-104. Muir, Kenneth, ed. 1972. King Lear. Revised edition. London: Methuen.

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Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane. 1996. "Under Western Eyes and Hamlet: Where Angels Fear to Tread." Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 28: 83-85. Rabkin, Norman. 1981. Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Stape, J. H. 2000. "William Shakespeare." In The Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad. Edited by Owen Knowles and Gene M. Moore. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Garrett. 1984. Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Stewart, Garrett. 1980. "Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness." PMLA 95: 319-31. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1989. "Knowledge of the Void: Heart of Darkness." Conradiana 21: 161-72. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, gen. eds. 1986. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

ABSTRACT | I | II | III | IV | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Introduction

(/current) MARK BAYER, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO

REFERENCES (/previous) "But, because loss is his gain, [Shakespeare] passes on towards (/about) eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed." — James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) (/archive) Much like the ghost of Hamlet's father, Shakespeare haunts literary history. In the 400 years since his plays were first performed, no author has been invoked as frequently by writers or in such a plurality of literary works, even as his plays and characters have served as models for countless novels and poems. Sometimes Shakespeare is the subject of reflexive and uncritical praise and adulation, a model to be emulated and the signifier of literary achievement qua non. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1849, Shakespeare was representative of all poets, a transhistorical genius and the author who "wrote the text of modern life." Others, however, were considerably more circumspect about the legacy bequeathed by the playwright; T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, for instance, understands himself in opposition to Shakespeare's best- known character: "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be." For some, like Jane Smiley who transposes Lear's Britain to an Iowa farmstead, Shakespeare is not a writer of historical interest whose literary merits might be debated retrospectively, but a living part of the present, an integral part of both the form and content of contemporary novelistic practice.

Some have seen Shakespeare as the representative of high culture and a marker of cultural distinction: the duke, in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, notes that "these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn't come up to

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Shakespeare, what they wanted was low comedy." Others, like Mr. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, disparage the cultural hegemony that Shakespeare has been crucial in constructing, grumpily observing (and secretly hoping) that "the very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare," failing to understand the irony of making such a statement in a work consciously understood by its author as contributory to an elitist Modernist aesthetic. Regardless of the precise valence attributed to Shakespeare and his works, the plays remain a durable cultural referent that many writers find not simply difficult to ignore, but essential to their own creative practice and social commentary.

Not surprising to readers of this journal, this cluster of essays seeks to capitalize on the growing interest in the remarkably eclectic adaptations, revisions, and other uses of Shakespeare's plays in an equally varied ensemble of media over the centuries. Rather than looking at the more familiar staged adaptations or filmed versions of Shakespearean plays, these four essays concentrate on allusions to and subtexts of Shakespeare in self-consciously literary works. These afterlives offer a more deliberative and formally complex way of rethinking the playwright's legacy precisely because they actively and self-consciously participate in the construction of a literary tradition by using perhaps the most central figure in that tradition. When an author invokes Shakespeare in a work that is culturally assumed to have achieved the status of literature (or at least has pretensions to that category), she simultaneously affirms the enduring aesthetic value of the plays, even while calling attention to the literary status claimed by the host text. Looking at these afterlives — whether brief verbal echoes or more extended and complex intertexts — requires that we see these works, their their local historical significance aside, as literary contributions in their own right. Unlike other forms of adaptation, literary allusions function both synchronically (they help us understand how a given text resonates at a particular historical moment) and diachronically (they show us what works have been culturally selected, given contemporary significance, and bequeathed to subsequent generations).

Looking at these allusions and intertexts raises important methodological and theoretical questions. How can this vein of study embody some kind of scholarly rigor beyond pointing out various verbal, textual, and characterological echoes? How can we say something meaningful about Shakespeare's literary afterlives that is not at the same time true of Shakespearean appropriation more generally? http://borrowers.uga.edu/782387/show Page 2 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

Where do we locate the differences between rewritings of a Shakespeare play in a poem or a novel as opposed to a staged performance, film (or critical essay, for that matter)? These questions — when they have been addressed at all — have typically been approached as a matter of aesthetics or literary influence, either as a proleptical and formal question associated with Kantian aesthetics and its New Critical avatars (both often presumed to be deeply conservative), or, alternatively, a deeply psychoanalytic reading that stresses authors' intense anxiety when approaching the legacy of Shakespeare. Harold Bloom's now famous formulation is no doubt a powerful resource with which to analyze this topic, not least because Bloom has situated Shakespeare as the "center of the canon," with subsequent authors attempting to negotiate their relationship with this paternal figure.

While the cogency of both these models has been challenged for their reliance on abstracted aesthetic criteria that are not universally shared and for their failure to consider any kind of context in sorting out the vicissitudes of literary influence, they remain the best-known attempts to understand Shakespeare's literary afterlives even when they are the object of repeated rebuke. I would also argue that the theoretical resources that they draw upon remain indispensable for an attempt to characterize Shakespeare's literary afterlives over against other forms of adaptation and appropriation. Studying Shakespearean resonances in these works, for one, demands that we recognize the uniqueness of literary form, its highly deliberative stylistics, and its self-referentiality, as a vehicle for commenting on Shakespeare. Works of literature, unlike productions that use pre-existing playscripts, however adapted, are autonomous works of art, even though they heavily invoke and even rely upon Shakespeare's plays. We must recognize to some degree, with Eliot, the existence of a literary "tradition," that literary works are connected to other literary works in special and more palpable ways than the linear progress of ordinary historical events. Yet how can we recuperate the importance of literary form without falling prey to a reductive, even oppressive, aestheticism that ignores the rich historical contexts that lend so many of the afterlives discussed in these papers their unique contribution to the history of Shakespearean reception?

While various forms of "new" historicism, cultural studies, and related methodologies have waxed ascendant in literary studies over the last several decades, a growing minority of commentators have worried that these commitments to various cultural issues have evacuated some of the close reading skills and reflection on the literariness of the text http://borrowers.uga.edu/782387/show Page 3 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

traditionally thought to be indispensable to our discipline. In opening ourselves up to the broader context surrounding literary works, we have attenuated our focus on the text, treating them instead as vessels of historical and cultural content. Nowhere, perhaps, is this turn more apparent than in the study of Shakespeare more generally, and the afterlives of his plays in particular. While I don't wish to call into question the scholarly merit of these cultural studies approaches, I would suggest that dealing with uniquely literary afterlives requires a slightly different approach. To quote Marjorie Levenson, we need to recognize "the critical (and self-critical) agency of which artworks are capable when and only when they are restored to their original, compositional complexity" (2007, 560).

These "new formalists" call for the continued relevance "of such aesthetic criteria as autonomous form, disinterest, and embodiment as they were worked out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most centrally by Kant" (Loesberg 2005). This is not a call to return to the ahistorical formalism often associated with the New Criticism, now so thoroughly discredited, but a dedication to "examining the social, cultural, and historical aspects of literary form, and the function of form for those who produce and consume literary texts" (Bruster 2002, 44). These scholars believe that the disparaging of literary form, predominantly by those who believe that these aesthetic categories are ideological mystifications in the service of bourgeois values, has oversimplified the Kantian and Hegelian antecedents of these ideas and impoverished our own critical practice by evacuating anything intrinsically unique in works that have attained a literary status. Historicism, at times, has become a deliberate anti-formalism, blinding us to the nuanced techniques and critical value of this kind of reading. New formalists believe that negligence of — and indeed, hostility towards — form and its theoretical underpinnings have diminished our ability to engage with other important issues by "obscuring the way formal choices and actions are enmeshed in, and even exercise agency within, networks of social and historical conditions" (Wolfson 2000, 7).

This "return to form" is important to the authors of these essays, and, I would argue, for interrogating Shakespeare's literary afterlives as an important and distinct subspecies of Shakespeare appropriation. For all of the authors discussed in these papers — Rossetti, Conrad, Joyce, and Nabokov — issues of aesthetic value, artistic autonomy, and literary agency temper their engagement with Shakespeare, not the political and social concerns that animate many other appropriations of the plays. Unlike many more pointedly political treatments of Shakespeare's http://borrowers.uga.edu/782387/show Page 4 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

plays, these literary afterlives have no explicit use value; any estimation of their worth can only take place in the future using necessarily abstracted criteria. The works discussed in these essays envision an audience that transcends present historical conditions and geographical location, imagining their true fulfillment — and critical reckoning — only in the fullness of time. This, of course, does not mean that we should or could abandon our commitment to context and sociohistorical study, but that in paying attention to form as an essential component of the structure of these afterlives, we unearth new and important contexts for understanding them.

Issues of form are important in a discussion of these particular literary uses of Shakespeare for two reasons. For one, adopting a post Romantic aesthetic that privileges the autonomy and sanctity of a uniquely literary value, the authors discussed in these essays were the inheritors of and advocates for an idealist Kantian aesthetics that many now see as politically oppressive and complicit in the construction of a bourgeois ideology and elitist culture. However noxious these notions have become to subsequent generations, they were an important historical context for these writers and many of the essays here deconstruct the inherently conservative values imbedded in these texts and in their engagement with Shakespeare.

Perhaps more importantly, these texts, by their invocation of Shakespeare, ask that we revisit the problematic of form itself to develop a theoretical vocabulary for examining literary afterlives. When the authors discussed here invoke Shakespeare, they do so not to appropriate his perceived cultural authority as a durable global icon, but to draw on an assumed reservoir of transcendent literary value, and do so in constructing their own self-consciously artistic contributions. Shakespeare is repeatedly enlisted in the project of manufacturing, evaluating, and commenting on how artistic capital is reproduced over time, without explicit regard to more parochial historical circumstance. John Shade, Nabokov's fictional author in Pale Fire, chooses Timon of Athens as a subtext because of the literary cache of its author, using it to gain entrée into a conversation among (both fictional and real) professional critics, as distinct from ordinary historical agents. In Ulysses, Shakespeare is the subject of another conversation about aesthetic value. And even though Stephen Daedalus' take on Shakespeare is decidedly more negative, appearing to argue against those formal features that have forged Shakespeare's literary reputation, by doing so in a work whose attention to literary language and modernist experimentation is legendary, he ends up reifying http://borrowers.uga.edu/782387/show Page 5 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(29 PM

Shakespeare's literary value. The ideas so centrally at stake in these conversations are ruminations on literary value and the abstracted aesthetic qualities that are its necessary productive features. In both cases, moreover, it is through attention to the dynamics of formal stylistics that the authors discussed here perceive and rework various Shakespearean texts and through which we are invited to critically understand their relationship to Shakespeare's plays.

Finally, each of the essays included here is interested in determining how Shakespearean intertexts have contributed to both the critical opinion and popular reputation of the plays themselves. Shakespeare is, of course, unique among English authors for having achieved canonical status as a literary figure while at the same time saturating popular culture. These two facets of Shakespeare's cultural authority, though sometimes understood in isolation, reinforce one another; Shakespeare's broader cultural appeal is predicated on and sustained by his literary reputation. It is our hope to show how Shakespeare's further integration into the literary canon through the work of other writers has contributed to Shakespeare's own broader celebrity. In short, we hope that understanding something of the shapes Shakespeare has taken in literary texts will generate some new answers to the perennial question, "Why Shakespeare?"

REFERENCES Bruster, Douglas. 2002. "Shakespeare and the Composite Text." In Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements. Edited by Mark David Rasmussen. New York: Palgrave. 43-66. Levinson, Marjorie. 2007. "What is New Formalism?" PMLA 122: 558-69. Loesberg, Jonathan. 2005. A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wolfson, Susan. 2000. "Reading for Form." Modern Language Quarterly 61: 1-16.

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The Question: Hamlet's Life After Life

(/current) MARK ROBSON, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

(/about) ABSTRACT

(/archive) What exactly does it mean to say that Hamlet has an afterlife? Taking seriously the notion of "life" embedded in the idea of a literary afterlife, this essay pursues the living-on or, in Derrida's terms, sur-vival of Hamlet through two of its many literary incarnations: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem The Question (1882) and Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). These texts are forms of "translation" — that is, they simultaneously ensure the survival of the source text and confirm the need for it to be carried over from one space to another. The resulting afterlives are thus best understood as uncanny; they are recognizably versions of a seemingly pre-existing text, and yet there is something unfamiliar, or even more peculiarly, strangely familiar about them.

Is a literary afterlife a repetition? To some extent, the answer to this question has to be "yes." There must be something about a literary afterlife that strikes a reader or an audience as familiar; it has to possess some quality in common with that which it follows, with some putative "original" such that the original may be rendered identifiable. Common sense suggests that the afterlife cannot be exactly the "same" as the original — assuming for a moment, and despite all the evidence, that this identification of sameness would be possible, and that common sense has any role to play here — since the afterlife has to be identifiable as something other than a http://borrowers.uga.edu/782444/show Page 1 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

reappearance of the original, which means that there has to be some alteration of the original such that the afterlife cannot be thought of as more than similar. At best then, there can only be iteration rather than pure repetition (in Derrida's sense of iteration as repetition plus difference); that is, there has to be an element of transformation, and thus there would appear to be an uncanny quality to this sense of strange familiarity.1 What this suggests is that we have to be able to tell the difference between similarity and sameness. It is all a question of identity and identification.2 A first proposition, then: Afterlives are uncanny.3

If for no other reason, Hamlet becomes the obvious play to address in this context; it is, after all, a play that begins with the question "Who's there?" This call for a response — this call for those who hear it to identify themselves — has not lacked answers (and it is hard to overstate the level of understatement involved in making such a statement).4 Relating Hamlet to questioning is not a new idea, either. Harry Levin, for example, suggests that Hamlet is itself a question, but not one that can or should be explained away (Levin 1970). So, for anyone wishing to produce a response to the question that Hamlet raises and that for some critics simply is — and this includes those wishing to produce or understand an afterlife — there is a double necessity: to respond to the call for identification and to identify who or what it is that is being responded to. There is, of course, nothing less simple than the "simply is" when it comes to Hamlet. The weight of commentary alone suggests that. As Derrida puts it: "One shouldn't complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity where there is none. If things were simple, word would have gotten around, as you say in English" (Derrida 1988b, 119).5 What I am describing here as a process of doubled identification is more usually called reading, and it is reading that allows for complexity to be recognized. All rewritings of Hamlet, then, are first of all readings of Hamlet to the extent that they constitute a response and recognize their responsibility to respond (this is where ethics becomes an aspect of the question). This might lead us to a second proposition: All afterlives are readings as much as they are (re)writings.

What, then, is what I have been calling a literary "afterlife"?6 Several possibilities present themselves, most obviously forms of adaptation and appropriation — including translation — and in the context of drama this must also include performance, even if it is not always necessarily appropriate to think of performance as "literary." So here I will focus on a certain understanding of translation, thinking not only of the movement of a text from one "language" into another (say, from English to German or French), but also extending that idea of language into thinking about other 7 http://borrowers.uga.edu/782444/show Page 2 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

genres, and other forms of readable objects, such as visual images.7 My central example in this essay will be Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which is a case of an afterlife remaining within the same broad category of drama, and yet being written in a way that would not have been possible without the intercession of material that comes from a linguistic and cultural domain that is not that of the "original," which is why I think it remains appropriate to use the term translation.8 Like any question of the "What is . . . . " form, to ask a question about the status of an afterlife is really to pose a question about presence, about what Derrida calls the sur-vie, literally a living-on, that is, a parasitic survival that depends upon some sign of life: "Living on can mean a reprieve or an afterlife, 'life after life' or life after death, more life or more than life, and better" (Derrida 1994a, 77). Or, as he puts it elsewhere: A text is original insofar as it is a thing, not to be confused with an organic or a physical body, but a thing, let us say, of the mind, meant to survive the death of the author or the signatory, and to be above or beyond the physical corpus of the text, and so on. The structure of the original text is survival . . . To understand a text as an original is to understand it independently of its living conditions — the conditions, obviously, of its author's life — and to understand it instead in its surviving structure. (Derrida 1988a, 121-22, italics in original) These remarks stem from a consideration of Walter Benjamin's famous essay on translation, and Derrida is keen to underline this sense of survival as itself a matter of translation.9 The French verb survivre, like the English "survive," is used to render two German terms in Benjamin's text: Überleben as a form of survival that rises above life, and Fortleben, which carries the sense of a prolonging of life. Which of these forms of survival, then, is most promising in thinking through the idea of a literary afterlife? I will only be able to give a tangential answer here.

It should be obvious why this quotation from Derrida concerning the structures of survival might lead me to think of Hamlet, a play that is itself obsessed with notions of living on, of life after life, of life after death, and of more life or more than life.10 Indeed, this is a play that seeks to phenomenalize the conception of an afterlife, to make it present on the stage and page, perceptible to the spectator or reader, however impossibly. This leads us from the opening apparition of the ghost, and the demands that it makes on the characters within the play as well as on the audience, to Hamlet's impossibly pseudo-posthumous "Horatio, I am dead" (Hamlet, 5.2.343).11 Translations of the play may be read in these terms, offering a reprieve, a life after life, for the play. But as Paul de Man proposes in his discussion of Benjamin's essay on translation, the process of translation has http://borrowers.uga.edu/782444/show Page 3 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

a disquieting effect on the "life" of the original: "The translation belongs not to the life of the original, the original is already dead, but the translation belongs to the afterlife of the original, thus assuming and confirming the death of the original" De Man 1986, 85, italics added). In the case of a play such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, then, we might say that Hamlet is — if not missing — then certainly presumed dead: such, at least, might be read from the title alone. Stoppard's use of this phrase as a title raises the problem of repetition again: is it a descriptive statement or a quotation? And what about the problematic nature of the presence of its central characters that the verb "are" implies? I will return to these questions later.

In the light of de Man's suggestion regarding the status of the original for a translation, I want briefly to examine an exemplary translation of Hamlet (in a broad sense) in order to provide a framework for my reading of Stoppard's play. As I have argued elsewhere, it is possible to trace a line that develops from the German Romantic reception of Hamlet (and of tragedy, more widely), through the French Romantic and Symbolist readings and representations and into the later nineteenth and twentieth-centuries in England and Europe. In this movement across cultures and languages, Hamlet becomes the locus for two opposed ways of reading tragedy, which for simplicity I call the "heroic" and the "anti-heroic." Both of these readings of tragedy stem from a certain conception of Greek art, and in particular the version of that concept that has come to be known as "the German dream of Greece."12

Having sketched an outline of this Romantic interpretation and translation of the play, I want to focus briefly on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem and painting, entitled The Question, before moving on to Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Each of these texts might be read as a response to the Romantic treatments of Hamlet in Germany and France, and each attempts to negotiate ideas of life, death, and authenticity.13 As such, the stakes of tragedy in its political dimensions become apparent, where the aesthetic, and thus implicitly philosophical, reading of the play becomes part of a wider movement towards a nationalist-heroic interpretation of tragedy. Ultimately — and it will only be possible to sketch a trajectory within the confines of this discussion — I want to read the play against this tragic-heroic conception in order to gesture towards another reading of tragedy that is evident in Hamlet's afterlife.

"ROMANTIC" READINGS: TRAGEDY AND THE HERO Let me repeat a familiar story. One of the dominant ways of thinking about

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tragedy is what has become known as the "tragic-heroic paradigm."14 This emerges from a connection between Greek tragedy and attempts to define a Romantic form of art that would be able to unify subject and object in consciousness (which, for shorthand, we might call the central aspect of Kant's Critical project). Modern poetry and drama are, then, praised for their ability to capture the power of Greek drama, which is held up as the prime example of this fusion of human, natural, and divine. Among modern writers, Shakespeare is frequently privileged in this connection to Greek drama — particularly that of Sophocles — by German and French romantic writers (and the English who follow them). In the commentaries of the Schlegels, Herder, Lessing, Tieck, and others, Hamlet is praised precisely because its main character is taken to be representative of philosophical self-consciousness, at the heart of which is a specific understanding of destiny. Shakespeare's play is related to the Greek Sphinx, and thus to the riddle that confronts Oedipus, and to which the answer is "man" or "himself." As such, the connection between the Oedipal riddle and Shakespeare's dramatization of the pale cast of thought falls squarely into the philosophical dramatization of human consciousness in which man is both object and subject for reason.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe suggests an explanation for the specific political charge that tragedy takes on in this location:15 Tragedy had been thought, in any case in the whole tradition of German idealism, to be the political art par excellence. That it had been, historically, a sort of political religion is not in doubt, but it acquired this reputation in the German dream of Greece . . . essentially because it was understood as the ideal and unsurpassed presentation of the great mythic figures, with whom an assembled people could identify and thanks to whom its identity was properly constituted or organized. (Lacoue-Labarthe 1994, xxi) Lacoue-Labarthe is not suggesting that tragedy only becomes political within the ambit of German idealism. Elsewhere, he reminds us that, even in Aristotle's Poetics, the emotions of pity and fear that tragedy is supposed to evoke are primarily political in significance, rather than confined to an individual psychological state, and are produced in response to the essentially political disruption that tragedy stages.16

In the context of post-Kantian idealist thought, tragedy operates in the space between freedom and necessity, between a sense of the predictable and unchangeable often associated with the past (history, destiny, fate, and so on) and a future that offers a glimpse of a freedom that hinges on the idea that the future might be otherwise. This other future runs counter to the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782444/show Page 5 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

tragic-heroic paradigm, which might best be thought of as an over-valuation of the end of life — of the end of life as the end of life — in which the sacrificial death slides into a disastrous form of political philosophy. This is not the necessary end of the meeting of philosophy and politics in aesthetics. As Simon Critchley suggests of the tragic paradigm in which aesthetics takes on the role formerly accorded to religion in answering the question of the meaning or purpose of life, while the tragic paradigm does offer a way of thinking through finitude, "it is a thinking-through which disfigures finitude by making the human being heroic" (Critchley 1999, 220, italics in original). For Critchley, the way of thinking this inheritance otherwise is to be found in humor. He argues that it is in a particular kind of humor — especially that found in Samuel Beckett, who is of course one of the most frequently cited sources of inspiration for the humor of Stoppard — that any tragic or heroic sense of the world evaporates through a laughter that cancels idealism. What I would like to propose, alongside this concept, is a rethinking of community, and in particular of those forms of community revealed in and as the aesthetic. As Jacques Rancière has proposed, the aesthetic is a necessarily political category to the extent that it involves a sharing and a sharing out (in French the term is partage) of what within a given culture is to be taken into account — that is, to be perceived as meaningful in terms of aesthesis (see Robson 2005). In political terms, this extends to the division of the political space such that certain voices are seen to "count." For Rancière, aesthetics "is the originary knot that ties a sense of art to an idea of thought and an idea of the community," and it is this sense of its originality that runs counter to any notion of the aestheticization of politics (Rancière 2000, 33).

(An aside or, more likely, a glimpse of a different scene altogether: in terms of the play, such a reading would begin from a sense of death as common in Hamlet, 1.2.64-106. While this passage is often read through the emergence of a distinct and modern notion of individuality — emphasising Hamlet's "that within which passes show" and his comments distinguishing being and seeming — what is given less weight is the fact that this is as much a debate about kinship, relation, community, and sociality. This debate centers not on individuality, but on death as the communal, offering a disfigured vision of social bonds in the context of the death of Hamlet's father and its individual and collective consequences. In the larger project of which this essay is a part, I extend this apparently dialectical sense of the relation between individuality and community in light of Jean-Luc Nancy's proposal that "the individual is merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community" [Nancy 1991, 3].)17

ROSSETTI'S THE QUESTION http://borrowers.uga.edu/782444/show Page 6 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

If, on the occasion of any public performance of Shakspere's great tragedy, the actors who perform the parts of Rosencranz and Guildenstern were, by a preconcerted arrangement and by means of what is technically known as "gagging," to make themselves fully as prominent as the leading character, and to indulge in soliloquies and business strictly belonging to Hamlet himself, the result would be, to say the least of it, astonishing; yet a very similar effect is produced on the unprejudiced mind when the "walking gentlemen" of the fleshly school of poetry, who bear precisely the same relation to Mr. Tennyson as Rosencranz and Guildenstern do to the Prince of Denmark in the play, obtrude their lesser identities and parade their smaller idiosyncrasies in the front rank of leading performers. (Buchanan 1871, 334) So opens a review of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poems of 1870. While Tennyson and Browning alternate the lead role, Rossetti is given the part of Osric. Published under the name of Thomas Maitland, this attack by Robert Buchanan launched a notorious battle over the nature of poetry and the status of those attacked. But what is less often noted is the opening gambit of framing the attack through Hamlet. As one of the "lesser identities," Rossetti's poetic pretensions are equivalent to a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern becoming as prominent as Hamlet, offering a strange foreshadowing of Stoppard's play, in which precisely that happens.

Oddly, Buchanan's suggestion is to some extent taken seriously by those he seeks to undermine. Rossetti's responses to this attack led him to think again about the play — including writing at least one parody of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy in which Buchanan is figured as Hamlet — but this only amplifies a process already at work, since he had by this time already produced several drawings and paintings inspired by Shakespeare's text, most obviously a drawing entitled Hamlet and Ophelia of 1854 and a watercolor of the same scene in 1866 (see McGann 2006). Hamlet and Ophelia depicts a Hamlet who echoes precisely the Romantic reading of him as one "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and the drawing embeds images which include the Tree of Knowledge and a paradise lost, which Rossetti describes in a letter as "symbols of rash introspection" (Poole 2004, 63-65). This is the Hamlet of Goethe (for whom the play presents "a heavy deed placed on a soul which is not adequate to cope with it"); of A. W. Schlegel ("a calculating consideration, which exhausts all the relations and possible consequences of a deed, must cripple the power of acting"); of Coleridge (who notes Hamlet's "endless reasoning and urging — perpetual solicitation of the mind to act, but as constant an escape from action"); and of Laurence Olivier (whose film notoriously begins with the

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voiced-over statement, "This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind") (Goethe 1989, 146; Schlegel 1815, 337; Coleridge 1971, 124; and Hamlet 1948).18

In 1875, Rossetti produced a drawing in preparation for an intended, but never completed painting, and it was later accompanied by some verses. The text, dictated by Rossetti on his death-bed in April 1882 — and thus becoming a kind of "dying voice" — explains and extends the image: This sea, deep furrowed as the face of Time, Mirrors the ghost of the removed moon; The peaks stand bristling round the waste lagune; While up the difficult summit steeply climb Youth, Manhood, Age, one triple labouring mime; And to the measure of some mystic rune Hark how the restless waters importune These echoing steeps which chime and counter-chime. What seek they? Lo, upreared against the rock The Sphinx, Time's visible silence, frontleted With Psyche wings, with eagle plumes arched o'er. Ah, when those everlasting lips unlock And the old riddle of the world is read, What shall man find? or seeks he evermore?

II Lo, the three seekers! Youth has sprung the first To question the Unknown: but see! he sinks Prone to the earth — becomes himself a Sphinx, — A riddle of early death no love may burst. Sorely anhungered, heavily athirst For knowledge, Manhood next to reach the Truth Peers in those eyes; till, haggard & uncouth Weak Eld renews that question long rehearsed. Oh! and what answer? From the sad sea brim The eyes o' the Sphinx stare through the midnight spell, Unwavering, — man's eternal quest to quell: While round the rock-steps of her throne doth swim Through the wind-serried wave the moon's faint rim, Sole answer from the heaven invisible. (McGann 2006) It is, perhaps, not obvious what this has got to do with Hamlet. But in a letter to F. G. Stephens, Rossetti explains his inspiration: "In the symbolism

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of the picture (which is clear and gives its title founded on Shakespeare's great line, 'To be or not to be, that is the question'), the swoon of the youth may be taken to shadow forth the mystery of early death, one of the hardest of all impenetrable dooms" (quoted in Surtees 1971, 140). Rossetti's portrayal of the three figures of man as Youth, Manhood, and Age echoes but modifies the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, with Youth falling to his knees to make the image work visually. Nonetheless, a tension persists that always troubles attempts to translate a literary or dramatic text into a visual image. The image is presented as a single moment in time; despite the use of perspective to position them relative to each other, the three figures cannot be shown as a progression or sequence, and the drawing is thus unable to avoid freezing that which in the text (or in dramatic performance) is unfolded through time. The drawing, then, falls into the temporality of the Sphinx, what Rossetti calls in the poem "Time's visible silence," and the second stanza links the being of the creature to death as Youth becomes another Sphinx.

Clearly, one aspect of the interest for modern readers is in the connection that Rossetti makes between the Sphinx and Hamlet. In the wake of Freud's claims to originality in his reading of the play in terms of the Oedipus Complex, it is easy to forget that this link between the Greek figure and Shakespeare's play was already being made some years before Freud's great "discovery" (Freud 1990, 126). Indeed, Rossetti was himself following (although perhaps unwittingly) the French painter Gustave Moreau, whose own Oedipus and the Sphinx of 1864 had been praised by Théophile Gautier for its depiction of "un Hamlet Grec" (Chaleil 1998, 126). Certainly, Rossetti drew upon Ingres's well-known Oedipus and the Sphinx of 1849, and it has been claimed that his drawing anticipates some Symbolist work, including Moreau's Oedipe voyageur (see Marsh 2005, 486-87). But what this account misses is Moreau's earlier painting, and in fact Rossetti was in Paris in 1864, and so could have seen or heard about Moreau's image, which had been exhibited at that year's Salon and was itself indebted to Ingres.19

That a commentator such as Gautier is able to detect the presence of Hamlet in an image of Oedipus seems to be explicable by the frequency and specific nature of the connection in Romantic thought. The Oedipus who solves the riddle of the Sphinx and who becomes the image of the philosopher per se becomes as well a version of the hero of the tragedy of thought (see Goux 1993). The threat posed by the Sphinx is thus doubled: literal death, which awaited those unable to solve the riddle; and an annihilating lack of self- knowledge. But this self-knowledge, or at least the quest for it, could be seen as disabling, reducing the thinker-poet to an immobile figure, locked eternally to the gaze of the Sphinx. What Rossetti's poem calls the "eternal http://borrowers.uga.edu/782444/show Page 9 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

quest," the "question long rehearsed," is figured in these images as the hero transfixed before death. The poem inserts motion into the image: the human figures "climb," the waters are "restless," and all is measured by the chiming and counter-chiming of an echo that itself enacts a repetition that is faced down by the implacable silence of the Time of the Sphinx. At the entry of the Sphinx into the poem, there is a shift towards the future — "What shall man find? or seeks he evermore?" — that is itself countered by the invocation of the "old" riddle, the "shall" of the question immobilized by the familiarity of the always already-known answer. The problem facing the reader of Rossetti's image is not the enigmatic nature of the riddle, but instead the fact that, as the second stanza tells us, the question is "long rehearsed," and we should note the theatrical echo of what in French is called a répétition. "To be or not to be" becomes a rhetorical question, since death is inevitable. This is where Rossetti's image comes closest to a Romantic sense of tragedy: death is seen as a necessity. Indeed, it is the confrontation with the inevitability of death that renders the hero heroic.

STOPPARD AND THE REPRIEVE One way of reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is (recalling Derrida's conception of the afterlife) to see it as a reprieve, as an offer of life after death for two of the original play's minor characters. But the play contains suggestions that this may not be quite right. As I proposed earlier, even before the play begins, the title suggests that the eponymous pair are dead; they are dead in the present tense, they are "present" as already dead. Thus, this might be seen as closer to the confirmation of the death of the original of which de Man speaks. As Rosencrantz disconsolately puts it towards the end of the play: "They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning" (Stoppard 1976, 89). It is written, as we are told by the Player, so that the characters are "marked for death" before their performance begins. Consequently, when the Ambassador arrives too late to report their deaths to an already-dead Hamlet, his words are rendered even more hollow in Stoppard's play than in Shakespeare's by the repetition; we already know, we have known "right from the beginning," even if Stoppard prevents us (as does Shakespeare) from seeing their deaths enacted.20 Rosencrantz's realization of his shared fate, however, only complicates matters. When exactly was "the beginning" for them? Was it the opening of Stoppard's play? Was it the arrival of the messenger to wake them, which they return to at several points in the play, but which remains a hazy event? Or was the beginning (in) Hamlet? (Let us ignore, for the moment, the supplementary complication of Hamlet's unoriginality as a play, and its dependence on Saxo, Belleforest, Der Bestrafte Brudermord, a putative Ur- Hamlet, and so on, and also the problems of dating it precisely, either for

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original composition or revision. In thinking about three Hamlets, as modern editors now insist we do, the common refusal to prioritize one version over another reinforces the sense that, rather than three originals, we have inherited three equally unoriginal texts.)

All of this speculation is caught up in a conscious economy of representation within Stoppard's play. The Tragedians are consummate performers of death, exemplary in the variety with which those deaths may be performed, and as the Player tells them, "There's nothing more unconvincing than an unconvincing death" (Stoppard 1976, 55). Guildenstern, however, objects, first by doubting the very possibility of miming death — "I'm talking about death — and you've never experienced that. And you cannot act it" (89) — and then by contrasting the exquisite performance of death with that which awaits them:21 No . . . no . . . not for us, not like that. Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over . . . Death is not anything . . . death is not . . . It's the absence of presence, nothing more . . . the endless time of never coming back . . . a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound. (90-91, italics in original) Guildenstern rejects the heroic, sacrificial death, the death that is justified by reference to a cause, and it is this form of death that the two present: they simply disappear. Death is not a telos, it is the end without end, "the endless time of never coming back." Rather than an afterlife, more life as the more than life, Guildenstern's death is "nothing more." Their dying is not romantic, but neither is it Romantic. In fact, there is a deliberate sense that the end is not the end, that it is at best only another form of displacement. Guildenstern clings to the idea that he and Rosencrantz can learn from their experience such that things could have been and thus could still be different: "Well, we'll know better next time" (91). Just as the "beginning" is indeterminate, so too the end is equally inconclusive.

In the world of Stoppard's play, part of the problem lies in the nature of questioning itself. Rosencrantz evinces a certain nostalgia for a period prior to the emergence of the question, and yet, as Guildenstern immediately rejoins, this is to mistake their position: ROS: I remember when there were no questions. GUIL: There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter. (28) Indeed, as the play suggests at more than one point, the key is to keep asking questions. The central metaphor is their "playing at questions" at the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782444/show Page 11 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

end of act 1. Avoiding statements, repetition, synonyms, rhetoric, and non sequiturs, in rehearsing their game Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reveal the problematic status of the question with respect to the philosophical self- consciousness prized by the Romantic readers of Hamlet. Their forms of questioning recall the confrontation with death of Rossetti's figures, but in a decidedly non-heroic manner. Indeed, their ineptitude leads them to doubt that they know the rules to their own game; their performance against Hamlet — who presumably does not even know that he is playing — is hopeless. They are led to conclude that what they gained from Hamlet was more than outweighed by what he scored against them. As Rosencrantz puts it, disconsolately: "Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all" (40). We are led to the notion — shared with the Romantic readers of Hamlet — that Hamlet is the one who knows, and that the play might tell us . . . something. But what? In the absence of a belief in the connection between human life, nature, and the divine, the knowledge that the play and its protagonist promise must itself remain suspended. (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern express a mixture of at least some degree of incomprehension and disbelief throughout Stoppard's play: the laws of nature undermined by the suspension of the laws of probability and by the impossibility of determining any sense of direction; the absence of any benign deity, and probably of any sense to the universe at all beyond the necessities of death and dramatic structure; the constant confusion of identities and motives; and so on.)

This brings us back again to Derrida and towards another politics of tragedy. In an essay that draws together the insights of his Specters of Marx with a reading of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Derrida suggests: In sum, Hamlet, surviving witness, is also the one who has seen death. He has seen the impossible and he cannot survive what he has survived. After having seen the worst, after having been the witness of the worst disorder, of absolute injustice, he has the experience of surviving — which is the condition of witnessing — but in order to survive what one does not survive. Because one should not survive. And that is what Hamlet says, and that is what Hamlet, the work, does. The work alone, but alone with us, in us, as us. (Derrida 1995, 36, italics in original) As Derrida notes, Nietzsche's reading of Hamlet "seems to disturb all the great interpretations, notably the psychoanalytic readings (Freud, Jones) of Hamlet and of Oedipus" (34). Beginning with the Romantic reading of Hamlet as one incapable of action, Nietzsche then rejects the usual form of this explanation. Hamlet is not overwhelmed by reflection, by the myriad possibilities, but instead, by what he calls "true knowledge, insight into the terrible truth, which outweighs every motive for action — there is a longing http://borrowers.uga.edu/782444/show Page 12 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

for a world beyond death" (Nietzsche 1999, 40). Only art, says Nietzsche, is able to produce representations of that terrible truth with which it is possible to live. Survival, or afterlife, life beyond death or simply more life (remembering Benjamin's use of both Überleben and Fortleben), is what Hamlet both represents and presents, bearing witness to this true knowledge in the hope of doing justice to it. As Derrida concludes: "Here then is its chance and its ruin. Its beginning and its end. It will always be given thus as the common lot [en partage], it will always have to be at once threatened and made possible in all languages by the being out of joint: aus den Fugen" (Derrida 1995, 37, italics in original). There is in this necessarily doubled potential, an expression of the need for an afterlife for Hamlet and Hamlet to be both a promise and threat. It is only on the condition of this doubling of potential — and of this potential doubling — that Hamlet might have a future. It is necessary to remember this future. But the odds might appear to be stacked against us. A final thought for and from Stoppard: GUIL: What's the first thing you remember? ROS: Oh, let's see . . . The first thing that comes into my head, you mean? GUIL: No — the first thing you remember. ROS: Ah. (Pause.) No, it's no good, it's gone. It was a long time ago. GUIL (patient but edged): You don't get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you've forgotten? ROS: Oh I see. (Pause.) I've forgotten the question. (Stoppard 1976, 11)

NOTES 1. The most convenient source for Derrida's thinking here would be the essays in Limited Inc. (1988b). 2. Hamlet and Hamlet have always prompted identification. From William Hazlitt to Steven Berkoff, writers, performers — and critics — have identified themselves with the central character. It is perhaps also this sense of identification that in part explains the attraction of the play for psychoanalysis, which itself is predicated upon notions of identification. I have addressed some aspects of this subject in "'Trying to pick a lock with a wet herring': Hamlet, Film, and Spectres of Psychoanalysis" (2001). For an intriguing discussion of the relation between translation, identification, and questioning, see Derrida's commentary on Heidegger's statement, "Tell me what you think about translation and I will tell you who you are," in Of

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Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1989). 3. In employing this heavily-laden term, I am aware of the difficulties that assuming too much might raise. In place of a fuller discussion, I can only refer the reader to Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (2003), Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (2003), and two essays by Samuel Weber, "Uncanny Thinking" and "The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment," in his The Legend of Freud (2000, 1-31 and 207-35). 4. For those unfamiliar with this history, in lieu of the extensive list that should appear here, please see the chapter entitled "The Afterlife of Hamlet," in Thompson and Taylor 1996, 51-61. 5. And note in passing, that in order to put this in the simplest way, Derrida has to change languages. 6. The term "afterlife" was, of course, carefully chosen by the editor of this essay cluster from among several other, perhaps more obvious, alternatives (adaptation, appropriation, and so on). For an incisive account of these different terms, see Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (2005). 7. There are reasons to be suspicious about the suggestion that it is possible to move from one language to another, such objections hinging on the status of the "one." As Jacques Derrida comments, we always inhabit more than one language, and yet we can never claim to "possess" more than one — or even one — language. See, in this respect, his Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin (1998) and the commentary by Marc Crépon, Langues sans demeure (2005). 8. An aspect of this intercession that I will not pursue here is Stoppard's overlaying of Shakespeare with or on much more contemporary dramatic exemplars, particularly Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. On this, see Neil Sammells,"The Early Stage Plays" (2001) and Sanders (2005), 55-57, who terms Stoppard's play a "graft." It would be possible to link this idea to Derrida's sense of the relationship between graft and iteration in Limited Inc. 9. Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" (1996-2003); Derrida also reads this essay in "Des tours de Babel" (2007). 10. Derrida addresses Hamlet directly in Specters of Marx (1994b); in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996); and in an essay, "The Time is Out of Joint" (1995), cited below. See also Peggy Kamuf's essay, "The Ghosts of Critique and Deconstruction" (2005), in which she describes Specters of Marx as, at least in part, a translation of Hamlet (233). In the space of this essay, it is impossible to deal adequately with these texts, so I will do no more than register my indebtedness to, or my inheritance of Derrida's profound elaboration of the question of inheritance with respect to Hamlet. 11. All references will be to Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins (Shakespeare 1997).

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12. I have traced an outline of this material elsewhere, so my discussion of it here will be necessarily telegraphic. See my "Oedipal Visuality: Freud, Romanticism, Hamlet" (Robson 2009); see also E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries (1935) and Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (2001). 13. The concept of authenticity — if it is one — carries a certain charge in the context of German thought, especially that which leads towards a heroic version of myth and tragedy often associated with National Socialism and ultimately with Heidegger. For a hostile reading of the Heideggerean and existentialist use of "authenticity," see Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (2003). 14. This paradigm — and resistance to it — are central to Simon Critchley's recent work. The paradigm first emerges in Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997) and is pursued up to his Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2007). 15. See also Lacoue-Labarthe, "Oedipus as Figure" (2003). 16. See Lacoue-Labarthe's comments in Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Postmodernism: ICA documents (1989), 17. 17. See also my essay, "'A Little More than Kin': Hamlet's Communities" (in preparation). 18. In focusing his film version on Hamlet, Olivier opts to cut Rosencrantz and Guildenstern entirely. 19. Moreau did produce some images based directly on Hamlet. These are reproduced in Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau (1977), 34-35 and Jane Martineau et al, eds. Shakespeare in Art (2005), 189. 20. A more formal reading of the play would note the use of repetition, including most obviously the quotation of lines from Hamlet. The play is indeed beset by repetition, and Stoppard has noted that it may be too repetitive at the level of dialogue. See Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (1994), 12, 47, 236. 21. For a rather different reading of this passage, see Griselda Pollock, "Deadly Tales" (2000).

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor. 2003. The Jargon of Authenticity . Translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. 1964; London: Routledge. Appignanesi, Lisa, ed. 1989. Postmodernism: ICA Documents. London: Free Association.

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Benjamin, Walter. 1996-2003. "The Task of the Translator." In Selected Writings. Edited by Michael W. Jennings. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press. 1:253-63. Buchanan, Robert. 1871. "The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti." The Contemporary Review 18: 334-50. Butler, E. M. 1935. The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaleil, Frédéric ed. 1998. Gustave Moreau par ses contemporains. Paris: Editions de Paris. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1971. Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of 1811-12. Edited by R. A. Foakes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Crépon, Marc. 2005. Langues sans demeure. Paris: Galilée. Critchley, Simon. 2007. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. Critchley, Simon. 1999. Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought. London: Verso. Critchley, Simon. 1997. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London: Routledge. Delaney, Paul, ed. 1994. Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. De Man, Paul. 1986. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2007. "Des tours de Babel." Translated by Joseph F. Graham. In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1. Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 191-225. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. "The Time is Out of Joint." Translated by Peggy Kamuf. In Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political. Edited by Anselm Haverkamp. New York: New York University Press. 14-

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38. Derrida, Jacques. 1994a. "Living On: Border Lines." Translated by James Hulbert. In Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum. 75-176. Derrida, Jacques. 1994b. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge. Derrida Jacques. 1989. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988a. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Edited by Christie McDonald. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988b. Limited Inc. Edited by Gerald Graff, translated by Samuel Weber. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1990. Art and Literature. In Volume 14 of The Penguin Freud. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goethe, J. W. 1989. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In Volume 9 of The Collected Works. Edited and translated by Eric A. Blackall. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1993. Oedipus, Philosopher. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hamlet. 1948. Director Laurence Olivier. UK. Two Cities Films. Kamuf, Peggy. 2005. "The Ghosts of Critique and Deconstruction." In Book of Addresses. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 219-37. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 2003. "Oedipus as Figure." Translated by David Macey. Radical Philosophy 118: 7-17. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1994. Musica ficta (Figures of Wagner). Translated by Felicia McCarren. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levin, Harry. 1970. The Question of Hamlet. 1959; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marsh, Jan. 2005. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet. London: Phoenix. Martineau, Jane, et al., eds. 2005. Shakespeare in Art. London: Merrell.

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Mathieu, Pierre-Louis. 1977. Gustave Moreau: Complete Edition of the Finished Paintings, Watercolours, and Drawings. Translated by James Emmons. Oxford: Phaidon. McGann, Jerome J. 2006. The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive. Available online: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti) [accessed 5 December 2010]. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy, and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pollock, Griselda. 2000. "Deadly Tales." In The Limits of Death: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Edited by Joanne Morra, Mark Robson, and Marquard Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 220-33. Poole, Adrian. 2004. Shakespeare and the Victorians. London: Thomson. Rancière, Jacques. 2000. "What Aesthetics Can Mean." In From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art, and the Senses. Edited by Peter Osborne. London: Serpent's Tail. 13-33. Robson, Mark. 2009. "Oedipal Visuality: Freud, Romanticism, Hamlet." Romanticism 15.1 (2009): 54-64. Robson, Mark. 2005."Jacques Rancière's Aesthetic Communities." Paragraph 28.1: 77-95. Robson, Mark. 2001. "'Trying to pick a lock with a wet herring': Hamlet, Film, and Spectres of Psychoanalysis." EnterText 1.2: 242-58. Special issue: Hamlet on Film, edited by Gabriel Egan. Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sammells, Neil. 2001. "The Early Stage Plays." In The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Edited by Katherine E. Kelly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 104-19. Sanders, Julie. 2005. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Schlegel, A. W. 1815. Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Translated by John Black. London.

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Schmidt, Dennis J. 2001. On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomas Nelson. Stoppard, Tom. 1976. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. London: Faber and Faber. Surtees, Virginia. 1971. The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonée. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor. 1996. William Shakespeare: Hamlet. Writers and Their Work. Plymouth: Northcote House/British Council. Weber, Samuel. 2000. The Legend of Freud. Expanded edition. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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"A Mistaken Understanding": Dunsinane and New (/current) Writing at the RSC

EMILY LINNEMANN, THE SHAKESPEARE INSTITUTE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) This review uses David Greig's sequel to Macbeth as a case study to consider the place of new writing at the Royal Shakespeare Company. It examines Dunsinane within a context of previous new writing productions and in the light of the RSC's new writing manifesto. The cultural values surrounding new writing at the RSC come from a variety of sources, including directors, playwrights, and RSC management. These values include the desire for relevance, a need for political and social commentary, and a nostalgia surrounding the RSC's traditional role as a new writing company. Always, Shakespeare remains at the heart of the new writing project. Plays like Dunsinane are intended to illuminate Shakespeare's works and stand as a testament to his universality. This review argues that these demands do not fully encourage artistic and aesthetic independence. However, Greig's play manages to achieve such autonomy by challenging conceptions of Shakespeare and Macbeth. Dunsinane consitutes an important part of the RSC's 2010 repertory because of this challenge. Its illumination of Shakespeare is also a statement of its independence from him.

Dunsinane, by David Greig. Royal Shakespeare Company. Director, Roxana Silbert. Designer, Robert Innes Hopkins. Lighting, Chahine Yavroyan. Music and Sound, Nick Powell. Movement, Anna Morrissey. Company Dramaturg, Jeanie O'Hare. Music Director, Alex Lee. Stage Manager, Kristi Warwick. http://borrowers.uga.edu/782405/show Page 1 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

Performers, Malcolm (Brian Ferguson), Siward (Jonny Phillips), Gruach (Siobhan Redmond). Hampstead Theatre, London. 10 February - 6 March 2010.

In one of the initial scenes of playwright David Greig's Dunsinane, the body of Macbeth is brought onto the stage — except that it is not signified as the body of "Macbeth." It is referred to as the "tyrant," and the audience do not see it. We see instead a bulky stretcher shrouded in a rich cloth. Macbeth's wife asks to be able to accompany his body to Iona in the tradition of their people. "No," Siward tells her, "The grieving is finished" (Greig 2010, 35). Our encounter with Macbeth ends just as abruptly. His body is carried from the stage and the shadow that he casts over the play goes with it. Dunsinane is a play about strangeness, about feeling alien in a society, culture, and landscape that is different from one's own. As Macbeth is transported from the stage during the performance of a play that he inspired, but in which he is never named, the effect of strangeness is all too apparent. This sequel to Shakespeare's Macbeth was not behaving like a sequel. It seemed to be offering up a challenge to its audience and a distortion or refraction of its predecessor. But why? What were the creative impulses behind Greig's play, and how do they coalesce with and confront the cultural values attached to new writing at the Royal Shakespeare Company?

One of these questions entered my mind an hour earlier as I stood waiting in the foyer for the play to begin. I was impressed by the relatively youthful crowd that Dunsinane had attracted to Hampstead Theatre on a cold Monday night in February. For a playgoer more used to the RSC's Stratford audiences of devoted locals and eager tourists, the Hampstead set seemed arty, edgy, cool. Then, a voice over the tannoy announced that Start Night, a "fast and furious new writing initiative," was beginning in the Michael Frayn space in five minutes. As the foyer bar cleared and I was left standing with the usual suspects, I began to feel slightly cooler and a little more edgy myself. I started to wonder if this issue of audience demographic gets to the heart of what the RSC's new writing program is about. Why should a company that is dedicated to a 400-year-old playwright encourage and even stage new works? Is it an obligation imposed by public subsidy, or does it arise from a sense of artistic duty? What are they hoping to achieve by supporting such creativity, and what limitations do they impose? Do they hope to attract newer, younger audience members — audience members who, on the night I saw the play, were downstairs in the Michael Frayn space, watching Start Night? Or is there another project behind it?

For me and other RSC aficionados, seeing Dunsinane could never be about watching an individual play. My ears were alert to any Macbeth-esque lines. I compared the squashed seat in Hampstead with the more spacious ones at the

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temporary Courtyard. I found myself thinking about how much Jonny Phillips (Siward) resembled the RSC's most recent Richard III (Jonathan Slinger).1 I was always aware that I was watching the RSC and constantly considering what Dunsinane's place was in their repertory and in British drama in general. I wondered if the play would be likely to be performed outside of this short run and whether another theater company would ever take it up. Was it an independent piece of new writing, or did it rely on the cultural values of the RSC for its reception and its theatrical success?

That the performance of the play encouraged me to reconsider and analyze new writing and its place at the RSC is testament to its theatrical effectiveness and ability to promote dialectic. Theater's value as a dialectical space is alluded to by both theorists and practitioners. Stephen Purcell, taking his cue from Robert Weimann's assertion that theater is not about confrontation, but "interplay," describes it as a place where "inconsistent and contradictory attitudes can exist without synthesis" (Purcell 2009, 36; Weimann 1978, 81). Eugenio Barba evokes a similar image when he imagines the spectator "for whom the theatre is essential precisely because it does not present them with solutions, but knots" (Barba 1995, 96). In this sense, the questions and considerations about the cultural context of new writing in a theater dedicated to Shakespeare not only inform my response to Dunsinane, but enrich it. I will begin with a brief overview of some of this context before I turn to the review proper.

According to the RSC, new writing is "at the heart" of their work and is "as important" to their repertory as Shakespeare. To read the new writing manifesto on their website is to imagine a company in which new writing and Shakespeare sit side by side, neither one privileged above the other. They emphasise the "symbiosis" of the relationship and underline new writing's place in the company's history. In describing the relationship between new writing and Shakespeare, the RSC draws on the cultural values of Shakespeare's relevance and universality: "New plays have the ability to reflect Shakespeare, to transform him and to illuminate meaning. Plays about contemporary experience sit alongside Shakespeare's universality as much as adaptations of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries reflect recognisable modern experience" (Royal Shakespeare Company, "New Writing at the RSC" 2009b, para. 6 of 6). Yet, despite references to Shakespeare's universality and a suggestion that Shakespeare can be "transform[ed]" into multiple new cultural objects, the RSC's new writing is not presented as entirely plural and divergent. Instead, it is always subordinated to Shakespeare. It draws on his narrative, aesthetic, and dramatic qualities in order to "illuminate" the meaning of his plays. New plays are presented as aiding our understanding of Shakespeare rather than as independent entities. They are passive reflections and responses. Even the more active noun "transformation" suggests that Shakespeare will always sit http://borrowers.uga.edu/782405/show Page 3 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

alongside RSC new writing.

Roxana Silbert, the director of Dunsinane, sees it a little differently. For her, the tradition and heritage of the RSC are bound up with its commitment to new writing: "The RSC had always had . . . an experimental heart" (Silbert 2010, para. 4 of 11). Silbert constructs a nostalgic narrative of the RSC's new writing, remembering a company who "at its height had . . . blended technique, intelligence and the urgency of the new better than anyone" (para. 4 of 11). Silbert associates the new writing program with the RSC's golden years and believes that a return to new writing under Michael Boyd will re-energize and reinvigorate the company. She endows new writing with a purpose beyond illuminating Shakespeare's works. It is intended to create a future for the company that blends the classic and the contemporary and is thus "unpredictable and limitless in dramatic possibility" (para. 6 of 11). It is not surprising that Silbert would champion new writing. She was formerly artistic director of Paines Plough, a company that has "the playwright always at the heart of everything we do" (Paines Plough 2010, para. 2 of 4). This is Silbert's directorial debut with the RSC and follows her recent appointment to the role of associate director with the company. The relationship among director, writer, and new writing is crystallized in Silbert's professional experience. Appointing a director who specializes in new writing productions signals to audiences that the RSC is willing to take artistic and aesthetic risks. According to this new associate director, it is the cultural values of innovation and experiment that motivate the RSC's new writing program. The relationship between Shakespeare's work and that of the twenty-first-century writers is, therefore, reciprocal, interactive, and mutually beneficial.

Yet, elsewhere concerns about the quality and scope of the RSC's new writing program are voiced. Events such as the 2004 and 2005 New Work Festivals were criticized by playwrights (Costa 2004, para. 11 of 20). These festivals were designed to showcase the RSC's portfolio of writers and were curated by Dominic Cooke. The plays staged during the festival were nearly all performed in small studio spaces for limited runs, and mainly as matinees. Plays such as Breakfast with Mugabe, directed by Anthony Sher, were performed in the Swan, but none of the new plays was staged in the RST. During this time the RSC's main stage remained devoted to Shakespeare. The Soho Theatre, where the plays were staged in London, is another example of a small, studio-like space. The new writing that the RSC champions in theory seems to be marginalized in practice.

Despite its apparent marginalization at the RSC, Dominic Cooke sees new writing as a responsibility of the UK's national theater companies:2

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We have a responsibility to be talking about the state of our nation . . . More than that: they have a responsibility not just to commission the tried- and-tested political writers, but to give a home to the younger generation of writers who are still seeking the voices in which they might address the world. (Costa 2004, para. 20 of 20) Once again, the cultural value of relevance is applied to new writing, suggesting that it is more difficult to apply to classical drama. However, Cooke couples this with an obligation to comment on the most important political issues of the day. It is not enough for RSC new writing to embrace youth culture or be written in street slang. It must also encourage its audience to consider and reconsider the biggest global problems. Thus, Shakespeare is co- opted into a project of social, cultural, and political regeneration that seems to constitute a testament of his "universality," as championed by the RSC in their new writing manifesto.

The RSC's new writing has a large burden to shoulder. It must illuminate Shakespeare's work, but also reinvigorate our approach to that work. It must be relevant whilst remaining true to the traditions of the RSC. It must be innovative and yet reflective of Shakespeare. Many of the cultural values surrounding Shakespeare, the RSC, and new writing seem contradictory. However, it is the process of negotiating these tensions that allows writers to create successful and meaningful work. Theater is a place where opposing attitudes, ideas, and aesthetics can exist in the same moment and, most importantly, "without synthesis" (Purcell 2009, 36). The synthesis of opposing ideas is problematic within the theater because it occludes the opportunity for a dialectic to be created. This dialectic should allow audiences and performers the space and time to think about the issues with which they are being faced. Thus, theater's value as a dialectical space is heightened in the RSC's new writing program. An approach to theater that embraces both tradition and radicalism, contemporary relevance and historical drama, will always be inherently contradictory. New writing at what is nominally Shakespeare's theater will always have the opportunity to act as a catalyst for debate and offer up a valuable challenge to Shakespeare's cultural hegemony.

Whether recent new writing has fully delivered on its potential value is another point entirely. The evidence of recent years suggests that new plays have tried to embrace their role as political and social commentary, but are less inclined to challenge our reception and conception of Shakespeare. At the 2006-2007 Complete Works Festival, the RSC's new writing included Days of Significance (Roy Williams), The Indian Boy (Rona Munro), One of These Days (Leo Butler), and Regime Change (Peter Straughan). These plays dealt, respectively, with young soldiers fighting in Iraq, property development in a local woodland,

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the English invasion of Ireland in 1775, and a political coup in an unnamed state. Echoes of twenty-first-century political and social conflicts are more or less evident in each of these plays. Since 2007, Adriano Shaplin, an embedded writer with the company, has written The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes, and two new Russian plays have been commissioned. Days of Significance was revived for a brief London run, but aside from these plays, the repertoire has remained largely Shakespearean. David Greig's Dunsinane and Dennis Kelly's The Gods Weep thus represent the first RSC-backed, Shakespeare-focused new writing since 2008.

Both plays live up to the expectations of new writing at the RSC. They are undeniably connected to Shakespeare, contain echoes of contemporary events, and hence seem to provide evidence of Shakespeare's universality. The Gods Weep, inspired by King Lear, deals with the fallout from the credit crunch, whilst Dunsinane is a sequel to Macbeth. The marketing literature for Dunsinane is suggestive of its topical relevance: "Late at night in a foreign land, an English army sweeps through the landscape under cover of darkness and takes the seat of power" (Royal Shakespeare Company, London Season, 2009a, 4). This play, the leaflet suggests, will use eleventh-century Scottish history to comment on current conflicts. Yet, if I was expecting a simplistic reading of either the Iraq war or the eleventh-century Scottish conflict, I was mistaken. Dunsinane offers more to audiences than anti-war polemic or a clumsy "contemporization" of Macbeth. This is not to suggest that reading the play in terms of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is misguided. Greig himself admits that these wars were at the back of his mind during the creative process. His inspiration for the play came from several recent productions of Macbeth that had sprung up after the invasion of Iraq. However, what interests him about the play is not the overthrow of a tyrant, but what happens to the country after the overthrow has been achieved. He "began the play very clearly wanting to talk about the present day and the conflicts we were involved in," but this focus shifted during the writing process (Royal Shakespeare Company, "Interview with David Greig," 2009c). He became more interested in the story he was telling, and he asserts that parallels with current affairs ultimately arose as a by-product of Dunsinane's narrative. Rather than presenting his audience with simplified allegory, Greig manipulates the value of relevance and inverts the usual process of reading contemporary events through historical foils: "In a way, I would like people's knowledge of Afghanistan to help them think about tenth [sic] century Scotland" (2009c). The contemporary is clearly visible in Greig's play, but it is not the sole guiding principle of the narrative. This play challenges our conceptions of contemporary relevance just as it challenges our conceptions of a Shakespeare sequel.

While Greig has avoided making clichéd and overt comparisons between the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782405/show Page 6 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

war in Scotland and the wars in the Middle East, echoes and resonances abound throughout the play. The head-scarved women who attend on Gruach, the factious warring clans, and Siward's inability to see nuance in political situations all subtly echo present global circumstances. Less obvious is something that occurred to me a few days after watching the play. It is an echo, a reverberation with The Hurt Locker (Boal 2009). Of course, both the film and the play are, to a greater or lesser extent, about current conflicts in the Middle East. But it is both works' emphasis on the alienation of soldiers from their war- torn landscape that seems most poignant. Watching the film, I began to think again about Dunsinane and realized that the play is not simply an allegory, but also an evocation of the strangeness and alienation felt by invading soldiers. In turn, this alienation is felt by the audience as we are led further and further from the Macbeth narrative we recognize.

And so, with this alienation in mind, I return to 22 February 2010 and the night of the performance. A young soldier enters the playing space. From the outset, this play exposes the fear, uncertainty, and alienation of the young English army, many of whom are facing battle for the first time. The young soldier is played by Sam Swann, an actor still training at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art). His youth and inexperience mirror that of his character, and his soldier's description of the army on the shores of Essex is evocative of his own naivete and that of the audience: We stood on the Essex shore a mess of shingle, Some of us new and eager for a fight and others Not so sure but all of us both knowing and not knowing What lay ahead of us. (Greig 2010, 9) Like the Boy Soldier, we are unaware of the surprises to come. Like him, we will soon learn that in Greig's Scotland "nothing is solid" (Greig 2010, 40); nothing is as we would expect it to be. The soldiers feel lost in the Scottish landscape. It is colder and wetter than anything they have ever known. The harshness and cruelty of the landscape are evident in the soldiers' complaints and their imagined letters home to their mothers. It is made apparent to the audience in the jagged stage that juts awkwardly into the theater. Set into the right hand corner of the auditorium, the stage is surrounded by an oval of seats. The audience, used to looking at a stage straight ahead of them, are required to crane their necks, swivel in their seats, and adopt an uncomfortable position. (At least, this is true for me, sitting in one of the highest seats with my legs forced into the aisle.) Like the soldiers, we are uncomfortable and in unfamiliar territory.

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in the sense that the action begins in the closing moments of Shakespeare's play and tells the story from this point onwards. Yet, the play that we leave in the opening moments of Dunsinane is not the play we thought we knew. We have been misled. Shakespeare has misled us. At the end of Macbeth, we are certain of several things: Macbeth and his wife are dead; Malcolm is king; Malcolm will be a wiser, fairer, and better king than his predecessor. In Greig's version of events, most of our suppositions turn out to be false. "It turns out," as Malcolm says, that there has been "a mistaken understanding" (Greig 2010, 29). Siward and his English army have been misled; "in a sense, they've been told what we know from Shakespeare" (Royal Shakespeare Company, "Interview with David Greig," 2009c). In a sense, we have been misled, too. This play is not only a sequel to Macbeth; it is a challenge. It asks its audience to question the power of those who write history and those who make it. It demands that we rethink the story from different points of view. These new angles on the play operate in two interconnecting ways. First, there is an increased focus from within drama on the lives of ordinary people, as opposed to the aristocracy depicted in Macbeth. The glimpses that Shakespeare offers us into this world through the characters of the Porter and the Old Man are, in Greig's play, turned into an extended commentary from the soldiers. It is their interpretation of events that is relayed to the audience. This in turn allows Greig to shape the audience's interpretation of both Dunsinane and its predecessor. We are asked to reconsider Shakespeare's status as cultural and historical authority and to see Macbeth as one version of events, which has been used to promote a particular kind of history. The English thus become an invading force rather than a source of salvation, and Dunsinane shows how the Scots react to what is, to all intents and purposes, an invasion of their land.

The invasion and manipulation of Scottish land begins in Birnam Wood. The young soldiers are struggling to become the forest that their commanding officer wants them to be. The humor in the scene arises from its resemblance to an amateur dramatics group searching for their characters' motivations. Physically, the soldiers' attempt to imitate the flora and fauna of the woodland raises laughter from the audience. However, there is a darker undertone to this transformation as the invading soldiers appropriate and manipulate the landscape they are conquering.

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Soldiers at Birnam Wood The scene shifts to the castle of Dunsinane. A Scottish soldier speaks in hurried Gaelic to a red-haired woman, ushering her from the door. He tries to defend the castle, but is eventually killed by three English soldiers, who enter and check for enemies in language that seems to belong in a twenty-first-century war movie: "clear" (Greig 2010, 14). They are followed into the castle by Egham, the lovable rogue of this drama, who is currently in agony from the arrow in his shoulder. It is only after Siward has arrived, removed the arrow from Egham, and learned of his son's death that the red-haired woman reveals herself. Siward asks her for her name and her role in the castle: Siward: What is your name? Gruach: Gruach. Siward: Gruach, what work do you do here in Dunsinane? Gruach: Work? Siward: What is your place here? Gruach: My place here is Queen. (Greig 2010, 27) From this moment on we know that our understanding of what this play is and what it means cannot be dictated by our reading of Macbeth. Like Siward, we are plunged into a world of misunderstandings and half-revealed truths that impinge on our conception of Shakespeare's play and interrupt any misconceptions that we have formed about Greig's. The play is a sequel, but it is a sequel to a play we don't know or, at least, do not fully understand. Dunsinane reveals to its audience the danger of reading history through one person's interpretation and accepting the conquerors' understanding of a http://borrowers.uga.edu/782405/show Page 9 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

conflict.

Once Gruach has revealed herself, the play begins to chart a course that could not have been predicted from Malcolm's final speech in Macbeth. The thanes and kinsmen whom Malcolm names as the first earls of Scotland turn out to be the heads of feuding clans, many of whom remain loyal to Gruach. Malcolm is a Scotland-hating, greedy, vengeful man who is willing to take bribes and slaughter enemies and friends alike. Scotland is not a country shaking off the yoke of tyranny, but a warring collection of fiefdoms determined to choose their own ruler. Malcolm's claim to the throne is disputed by Gruach. She has a son by her first marriage and claims that he is the true heir to the throne. Siward, charged with bringing peace to the country by the English king, is determined to reconcile the clans and cement Malcolm's position. He becomes Gruach's lover, but tries to persuade her to marry Malcolm.

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Siward and Gruach She consents, but on the wedding night soldiers bearing her colors attack the castle and rescue her. Siward begins a year-long quest to find her and her son and put an end to the struggles for the throne. The boy is eventually found and killed, but when Siward finds Gruach on an isolated island in the cruel Scottish winter, he discovers that she has a grandchild. Gruach's family's claim to the throne continues, and Siward's desire for certainty and completion cannot be realized.

Theatrically, Dunsinane feels like an RSC production. Silbert's directorial

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stamp seems to have been cast in the RSC mold. The play is an ensemble work punctuated by three memorable characters. The historical setting and the wartime narrative are reminiscent of many Shakespeare plays. The costumes are sumptuous, and the minimal set provides a flexible, but iconic backdrop to the action. The final scene takes place in the flurry of a snowstorm in which both actors and stage become covered in a white blanket of powder. Live music is provided by three musicians sitting off-stage with the audience. The music, a strange blend of contemporary rock and traditional folk, is accompanied by haunting melodic singing from Gruach's attendants. These flourishes of design and musical technique contribute to the production values and, ultimately, the audience's experience. The moments when the play becomes truly an ensemble piece remain the most memorable — the wedding night ceilidh which fills the stage with music, dancing, and singing being one example.

Unusually for twenty-first-century RSC new writing, Dunsinane has been a theatrical success. It has received glowing reviews from the majority of critics. "Thrilling," "crackling," "superb" (Mountford 2010, para. 1 of 8); "exciting" (Koenig 2010, para. 4 of 4); "intellectually sumptuous" (Ferguson 2010, para. 1 of 3); the hyperbole goes on. One critic even noted with surprise that she had enjoyed a night at the theater watching new writing produced by the RSC (Mountford 2010, para. 1 of 8). In terms of critical acclaim, this production was a success. What I am particularly interested in, though, is the production's independence from Shakespeare and its ability to stand outside of Shakespeare's work and aside from the RSC as a convincing and powerful piece of drama.

Dunsinane's connection to Shakespeare is overt in that it uses the same characters, setting, and initial narrative as Macbeth. However, the reflection of Shakespeare's work ends there. Dunsinane was a challenge to Shakespeare and a challenge to its audience. As I read the cast list in the bar before the production, I was baffled by the character Gruach's designation as "Queen." I thought, perhaps, she might be Malcolm's wife. I certainly didn't expect her to be Lady Macbeth. Dunsinane may not exactly reflect Macbeth, but its refraction of the play illuminates Shakespeare's role as a writer of history. Today, Shakespeare's narrative takes precedence over Holinshed's; we think of Banquo as the noble friend of Macbeth, not a co-conspirator. Greig's play suggests that we need to rethink our reading of Macbeth and reconsider where authority lies. While there is a long and complex tradition that argues for a reconsideration of Shakespeare's authority within the academy, Dunsinane constitutes an attempt to put this argument to new audiences through a different medium.

Often in the theater, adaptations or appropriations of Shakespeare's plays

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implicitly believe in or trade off Shakespeare's cultural authority. Plays such as Joe Calarco's Shakespeare's R&J (2003) and Malachi Bogdanov's Macbeth Kill Bill Shakespeare (2007) are examples of the process that Julie Sanders describes as "citation infer[ring] authority" (2006, 9). Dunsinane, on the other hand, works against this authority, implying that Shakespeare's version of the story is just that: another version, refraction, or transformation of the same historical event. The RSC values new writing because of the light it sheds on Shakespeare's plays. In this sense, Greig's production was hugely effective, disconcerting its audience in order to make them rethink their relationship with Macbeth and with Shakespeare as a history-maker.

Dunsinane's genre is hard to pin down. Although Siward is the closest Greig provides to a hero, he encourages the audience to shift allegiances constantly. At the beginning of the play, Siward seems to represent the voice of reason in a chaotic world. Malcolm, insistent on revenge and vehemently political, could be co-opted into the role of villain. However, as Siward's relationship with Gruach alters from that of protector to lover and then to enemy, he seems to unravel. He becomes obsessed with chasing Gruach through the wilds of Scotland. He puts troops of men in danger in order to hunt down her son. When he does eventually find and kill the young boy, Siward no longer clearly resembles a war hero. Throughout the play, Siward continues to misunderstand the social and cultural context in which he finds himself. At the end, it is Malcolm who is the voice of reason. The poetry of his line — "You can no more force peace into existence than you can wander across the surface of the sea stamping the waves flat" (Greig 2010, 126) — seems to send ripples across the audience. It echoes through the centuries and is at once relevant to Siward's unrelenting quest for "definition" and George W. Bush's and Tony Blair's War on Terror.

Yet, Greig does not guide his audience's opinion. We are not told to agree with Malcolm, Siward, or Gruach. Instead, he exposes the weaknesses and follies of each character while allowing these to be tempered by their strengths. This is not anti-war protest theater. It is a play that subtly highlights the various trials and tragedies that a military occupation can bring to its generals, soldiers, and citizens. The audience, aware of contemporary echoes and without clear genre markers, is able to consider the play's issues for themselves. The ambiguity of the play's form allows for ambiguity in its reading of war. In Macbeth, a great man destroys his country by acting on desires that he knows are wrong. In Dunsinane, we watch the destruction of a country through the good intentions of another great man. Which man is ultimately a villain and which a tragic hero? Dunsinane may contain hints of an enduring Bradleyan reading of Macbeth, but the play is more complex than that and is certainly relevant to contemporary issues. It encourages the audience to reconsider their position on http://borrowers.uga.edu/782405/show Page 13 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

the issues surrounding war and its morality. Whether it fulfilled the RSC's objective to illuminate the contemporary in Shakespeare is another question, and in considering it, I begin to answer my own question about Dunsinane's artistic independence.

Dunsinane is not an adaptation, rewriting, or restyling of Macbeth. It is, ostensibly, a sequel, but it does not rely on Macbeth for characterization or narrative thrust. It is the wild and untameable Scottish landscape that is most reminiscent of Shakespeare's play. In Macbeth, "nothing is / But what is not," and the natural world is disrupted by the strangeness of the supernatural (1.3.140-41).3 Macbeth's Scotland is a land of witches that "look not like th'inhabitants o th' earth / And yet are on't" (1.3.39-40), where the "earth hath bubbles as the water has" (1.3.77), and where, after Duncan's death, "dark night strangles the travelling lamp" of day (3.1.7). However, whereas Banquo and Macbeth encounter and take note of the weather that is at once both "foul and fair" (1.3.36), Dunsinane's soldiers comment on the physical ground beneath them. The supernatural events of Macbeth become the actual, physical reality of Dunsinane. The play Dunsinane thus acquires independence as it develops, shifts, and moves away from Macbeth. As a play and a performance it offers far more to the audience than a simple continuation of Shakespeare's narrative. Its meditations on military occupation, psycho-geography, maternal love, and the ambiguity of conquest may be inspired by Macbeth, but a knowledge of that play is not a prerequisite to understanding Greig's Dunsinane.

Like the mutable and disconcerting Scottish landscape, from the outset Greig's play is not what it seems. This could suggest that it is an entirely independent aesthetic work that can exist outside of Shakespearean theater. And to some extent, this is true. However, to lose the connection between Dunsinane and Macbeth would be to lose a great part of what Greig's play is: a challenge to its audience and to its characters. It asks us to rethink the way in which the narrative of history is told to us and inspires us to question our own constructions of both the past and the present. We enter the theater with preconceived ideas of how a response or sequel to Macbeth should look. We have all mistakenly understood: You look at the ground ahead of you and you guess And you make a jump and suddenly you're up to your waist in mud, You think this forest floor can take your weight, You think over there's a lake, But one's mud and the other's rock. (Grieg 2010, 40) As an RSC commission, this play can never be completely independent. It will always be viewed through a predetermined set of cultural values. However, by offering its audience the challenge of a sequel and suggesting that we may have http://borrowers.uga.edu/782405/show Page 14 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/13/20, 11(30 PM

been misled in our assumptions, Greig is able to produce an autonomous play in which we can use our knowledge of Macbeth to inform our reading of Dunsinane or, alternatively, use our knowledge of contemporary war-scapes — gained through a constant barrage of highly mediated images — to read "tenth- century [sic] Scotland." This production does not passively illuminate Shakespeare or confirm his universality because in Greig's work, there is a more active and equal relationship between sequel and predecessor. Like the strange Scottish landscape, this play does not do what we expect. Without a knowledge of Macbeth and a conception of the RSC's role in play-making, we lose the challenging nature of Dunsinane. What is significant about Greig's work is that it allows interpretation, from both sides: the relationship between Macbeth and Dunsinane, Greig and Shakespeare, is symbiotic. What Dunsinane is and what it is not is enriched by what we think Macbeth is, who we want the RSC to be, and how we conceive of Shakespeare. Greig's illumination of Shakespeare is also a statement of Dunsinane's independence from him — an independence predicated on a continuing, if barely tangible, connection to the RSC and their house playwright.

NOTES 1. And I was not the only one — a friend made the same observation entirely independent of me. 2. The Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. 3. All quotations from Macbeth are taken from The Oxford Shakespeare, second edition (Shakespeare 2005).

REFERENCES Barba, Eugenio. 1995. The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology. Translated by Richard Fowler. London and New York: Routledge. Boal, Mark. 2009. The Hurt Locker. Director Kathryn Bigelow. Summit Entertainment. Bogdanov, Malachi, dir. 2007. Macbeth Kill Bill Shakespeare. South Hill Park Arts Centre and The Wales Theatre Company: UK Tour. Calarco, Joe, dir. 2003. Shakespeare's R&J. London: Methuen. Costa, Maddy. 2004. "Where have all the playwrights gone?" Guardian. 7 October. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/oct/07/rsc.theatre (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/oct/07/rsc.theatre) [cited 20 December

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2010]. Greig, David, 2010. Dunsinane. London: Faber and Faber. Ferguson, Euan. 2010. "Dunsinane/RSC." Observer. 28 February. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/feb/28/dunsinane-hamstead-theatre- review (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/feb/28/dunsinane-hamstead- theatre-review) [cited 20 December 2010]. Koenig, Rhoda. 2010. "Dunsinane, Hampstead Theatre, London." Independent. 23 February. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre- dance/reviews/dunsinane-hampstead-theatre-london-1907318.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre- dance/reviews/dunsinane-hampstead-theatre-london-1907318.html) [cited 20 December 2010]. Mountford, Fiona. 2010. "Thrilling Production of Dunsinane." Evening Standard. 19 February. Available online: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/review- 23807982-thrilling-production-of-dunsinane.do (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/review-23807982-thrilling-production- of-dunsinane.do) [cited 20 December 2010]. Paines Plough. 2010. Available online: http://www.painesplough.com/about- us/introduction (http://www.painesplough.com/about-us/introduction) [cited 31 December 2010]. Purcell, Stephen. 2009. Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Royal Shakespeare Company. 2009a. London Season 2009-2010. Stratford-upon- Avon: RSC. Royal Shakespeare Company. 2009b. "New Writing at the RSC." Available online: https://www.rsc.org.uk/supportthersc/6674.aspx [link disabled 31 December 2010]. Royal Shakespeare Company. 2009c. "Interview with David Greig." Series of video interviews. Available online: http://www.rsc.org.uk/whatson/9554.aspx [link disabled 31 December 2010]. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Shakespeare, William. 2005. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Edited by John Jowett et al. Second edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Silbert, Roxana. 2010. "The Feature." Official London Theatre Guide. 15 February. Available online: http://www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk/news/the- feature/view/item109619/Exclusive%253A-Roxana-Silbert-on-the-RSCs-

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commitment-to-new-writing/ (http://www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk/news/the- feature/view/item109619/Exclusive%253A-Roxana-Silbert-on-the-RSCs- commitment-to-new-writing/) [cited 20 December 2010]. Weimann, Robert. 1978. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Translated by Robert Schwartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

PERMISSIONS Photos by Simon Annand. Copyright Royal Shakespeare Company.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Contributors

(/current)

Mark Bayer is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas (/previous)at San Antonio. He is the author of Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London (University of Iowa Press, 2011) and numerous articles on early modern literature and the worldwide (/about) cultural authority of Shakespeare's plays.

Emily Linnemann is a Ph.D. student at The Shakespeare Institute, the (/archive) University of Birmingham. Her thesis, "The Cultural Value of Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Publicly-Funded Theatre in England," has recently been submitted for examination. The thesis forms part of a wider Arts and Humanities Research Council project, "Interrogating Cultural Value: The Case of Shakespeare." Her research interests include the relationship between culture and the market, value creation in Shakespearean adaptations, the generation and maintenance of cultural value within institutions, the utopianzation of theater, and the cultural value of arts festivals.

Richard Meek is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Hull. He has published articles in SEL, English, Literature Compass, and FMLS, and his monograph, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare, was published by Ashgate Press in 2009. He has co-edited a collection of essays exploring the notion of a "literary" Shakespeare, entitled Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing, and Reception (Manchester University Press, 2008). He is also interested in representations of sympathy and empathy in early modern literature, and his current research project is a monograph on this topic, provisionally entitled The Relativity of Sorrows.

Gretchen E. Minton is an Associate Professor of English at Montana State University in Bozeman. She is the co-editor of the Arden 3

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edition of Timon of Athens and has published articles on Augustine, Erasmus, John Bale, John Foxe, and contemporary film and drama. She is currently working on a critical edition of John Bale's The Image of Both Churches and the Norton 3 edition of Troilus and Cressida.

Mark Robson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include The Sense of Early Modern Writing: Rhetoric, Poetics, Aesthetics (2006; paperback 2011) and Stephen Greenblatt (2008).

Joseph R. Teller is an Edward Sorin Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame. His recent publications include an essay on sacramental poetics in the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings in Christianity and Literature and an essay on John Milton and prophetic performance in Prose Studies. He is currently developing a project on the poetry of the passion in seventeenth-century English literature.

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