The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'39 PM

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Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'39 PM

ISSN 1554-6985 VOLUME XI · (/current) NUMBER 2

SPRING 2018 (/previous)

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

CONTENTS

On Gottfried Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare Adaptation in General (/783959/show) Balz Engler (pdf) (/783959/pdf)

"To build or not to build": LEGO® Shakespeare™ Sarah Hatchuel and the Question of Creativity (/783948/show) (pdf) and Nathalie (/783948/pdf) Vienne-Guerrin

The New Hamlet and the New Woman: A Shakespearean Mashup in 1902 (/783863/show) (pdf) Jonathan Burton (/783863/pdf)

Translation and Influence: Dorothea Tieck's Translations of Shakespeare (/783932/show) (pdf) Christian Smith (/783932/pdf)

Hamlet's Road from Damascus: Potent Fathers, Slain Yousef Awad and Ghosts, and Rejuvenated Sons (/783922/show) (pdf) Barkuzar Dubbati (/783922/pdf)

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Vortigern in and out of the Closet (/783930/show) Jeffrey Kahan (pdf) (/783930/pdf)

"Now 'mongst this flock of drunkards": Drunk Shakespeare's Polytemporal Theater (/783933/show) Jennifer Holl (pdf) (/783933/pdf)

A PPROPRIATION IN PERFORMANCE

Taking the Measure of One's Suppositions, One Step Regina Buccola at a Time (/783924/show) (pdf) (/783924/pdf)

S HAKESPEARE APPS

Review of Stratford Shakespeare Festival Behind the M. G. Aune Scenes (/783860/show) (pdf) (/783860/pdf)

B OOK REVIEW

Review of Nutshell, by Ian McEwan (/783862/show) Giorgia De Santis (pdf) (/783862/pdf)

C ONTRIBUTORS

Contributors (/783888/show) (pdf) (/783888/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

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On Gottfried Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet and (/current) Shakespeare Adaptation in General

BALZ ENGLER, UNIVERSITY OF BASEL, SWITZERLAND (/previous)

(/archive)

ABSTRACT The article suggests a re-thinking of how adaptation should be discussed, using the example of Gottfried Keller's tale A Village Romeo and Juliet, one of the great works of European literature, which is commonly considered to be an adaptation of Shakespeare's play. After discussing it as such the article shows, on the basis of Keller's own statements, that the relationship between the tale and Shakespeare's play is more complex. Both Shakespeare and Keller draw on a shared myth, and their versions are items in a long and rich tradition that does not necessarily progress in a linear fashion and does not include only literary texts but all kinds of artifacts.

INTRODUCTION Adaptation has been an important topic in recent years, in literary studies in general (Hutcheon 2006 and Hutcheon and O'Flynn 2013; Sanders 2006), and in Shakespeare studies in particular (Huang and Rivlin 2014). There has been an attempt to move away from the "'fidelity debates' . . . when adaptations were being judged in terms of quality by how close or far they were from their 'original' or 'source' texts" (Hutcheon and O'Flynn 2013, xxvi). What has usually remained, not surprisingly, is the focus on the relationship between a source and its adaptation, http://borrowers.uga.edu/783959/show Page 1 of 14 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'39 PM

albeit not in terms of fidelity (Sanders 2006, 18-19), but rather, for example, in terms of dialogue with each other (Desmet 2014).

Daniel Fischlin, in "A Note on Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet," offers the following definition: Adaptation . . . requires interpretation and some form of creative engagement with or disengagement from a source text, the latter being a point of departure for the adapter. Adaptation allows for a full continuum of possibility, from the most radical remaking of a text to the most conformist recreation of the same text. When an adapter begins the process of engaging with a prior text, anything is possible and that fact makes adaptation a place where different forms of artistic vision, different forms of interpretation come into being, and frequently, into conflict. (Fischlin 2007) Romeo and Juliet is probably the Shakespeare play that has most frequently been adapted. Fischlin, in his note of thirteen closely printed pages, lists examples from opera, ballet, music, cinema, television, the stage, computer games, and, yes, literature. Here, just one of the texts he mentions will be discussed, Gottfried Keller's "Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe," or in its English version (which will be quoted here) A Village Romeo and Juliet. Keller's tale will be first considered as a work derived from Shakespeare's play. Based on Keller's own statements on the tale, an alternative approach will then be sketched, which casts the relationship between the play and the tale in a rather different light. This will make it possible to say something about not only adaptation but also the study of Shakespeare in general.

KELLER'S TALE Gottfried Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet is one of the classics of its genre in European literature, and has been translated into many languages. Being about young people, it is frequently dealt with in German-speaking schools, like Shakespeare's play — with the usual unfortunate results such forced reading often entails. In German criticism, the tale would be classified as a Novelle, a genre particularly popular in the nineteenth century, which is distinguished from the novel as a story of medium length, firmly plotted and concentrating on one extraordinary event, in Goethe's words, on "a shocking incident that has actually occurred" (Eckermann 2006, 29 January 1827; my translation). The tale was first published in Keller's collection Die Leute von Seldwyla [Seldwyla Folks] (1856), a collection of stories set in an imaginary Swiss town (figure 1). Most of the tales are comedies, casting a pleasantly satirical light on the foibles of Seldwyla inhabitants. A Village Romeo and Juliet is certainly an exception.

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Figure 1. Title Page, Die Leute von Seldwyla

As the tale is little known in the English-speaking world, a short summary will be offered here, which, however, also has two additional aims: it suggests the leisurely realist style of Keller's writing (perhaps encouraging readers to turn to the full text itself); more importantly, taking the knowledge of Shakespeare's play for granted, it focuses on the points that invite comparison and will be taken up afterwards. As we shall see, this comparison will lead to rather surprising results.

The story deals with two families of farmers, the Manzes and the Martis, and their children, Sali and Verena. The narrative begins with a memorable, idyllic scene near a village in the vicinity of Seldwyla: [T]here some years ago were three splendid long fields lying side by side and stretching afar over the gentle slope like three gigantic ribbons. One sunny morning in September two farmers were out plowing in two of these fields — to be explicit, the two outside ones. The middle one had apparently been lying there untilled and desolate for years, for it was covered with stones and high http://borrowers.uga.edu/783959/show Page 3 of 14 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'39 PM

weeds, and a world of little winged creatures were buzzing about in it undisturbed. (Keller 2008, 1) Both farmers gradually widen their own fields and throw stones on the one in- between. For their children, who bring them food, however, the middle field offers a playground, and Keller describes their games in some detail.

Figure 2. The Two Fields, the Children Playing (Ernst Würtenberger, 1919) He goes on: Harvest followed harvest, and each saw the children grown larger and handsomer, and the ownerless field grown narrower between its widened neighbors. With every plowing it had lost on either side the width of one furrow, and not a word had been said about it, and seemingly no human eye had noticed the crime. (Keller 2008, 9-10) The middle field actually belongs to the inheritance of a poor fellow, an outcast, who does not have the legal and financial means to claim it. When it is finally auctioned off by the authorities, both farmers bid for it, but only one of them can buy it. And "from this day forth the two farmers were in litigation with each other, and did not rest until they were both ruined" (Keller 2008, 14). They both eventually lose their

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farms.

Years later, Sali and Verena, now young adults, meet again and fall in love. But they are aware that their dream of founding a respectable family, bourgeois in the best sense, cannot come true, especially after Sali, in defending Verena against the violence of her father, has hit her father's head with a stone, which left him a cretin. In their plight, the lovers enjoy a last day together, walking in the countryside, being acknowledged as a beautiful young couple, visiting a local fair, giving little gifts to each other — time outside time, as it were. As the day passes, they are caught up again in their desperate situation.

It is then that a grotesque figure without a name, the Black Fiddler, the actual owner of the disputed field, who has intermittently appeared before, meets them and seems to offer them a way out — life among the poor, outside the well-regulated society of the well-to-do farmers, something the lovers cannot accept. Sali and Verena spend the evening at an inn in the woods, ironically called "Paradise Garden," where the poor congregate. They dance and celebrate a kind of mock-wedding, officiated by the fiddler. Then they leave, moving towards the river nearby, where a hay-boat is tied which is to serve for their wedding night. They climb it; Sali unties the boat. [A]s they sat there aloft the boat gradually drifted out into the middle of the river, and then floated, slowly turning, downstream . . . And as the morning glow appeared, a city with its towers emerged from the silver-gray stream. The setting moon, as red as gold, made a shining path up the stream, and crosswise on this the boat drifted slowly along. As it drew near the city, two pallid forms, locked in close embrace, glided down in the frost of the autumn morning from the dark mass into the cold waters. (Keller 2008, 83-84)

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Figure 3. The Hay-boat (Ernst Würtenberger, 1919)

KELLER'S TALE AS AN ADAPTATION What is the relationship between Romeo and Juliet and Keller's tale? There is obviously a double change of medium: English is turned into German, and, more importantly, the stage-play is turned into a narrative for reading. The presence of a narrator offers space for epic description and the detailed analysis of the figures' motivation.

The similarities between the two versions, suggested by the title, seem to be fairly obvious. The protagonists are of equal status. Their parents are enemies of each other. They experience love as something beyond their control. The young man commits a violent act against a member of the other family, and this makes the official coming together of the lovers impossible. A person outside the action offers them the possibility of an alternative solution; and the action ends in the lovers' suicide (see Stebner 1982). The similarities may be fairly obvious. But it is also obvious that the account has to choose its words rather carefully and to leave out significant elements.

The differences are as striking and more telling: in Keller there are no gangs of retainers fighting each other, there is no Duke, no Nurse, no County Paris, no feast,

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no banishment of the protagonist, no unfortunate coincidence and misunderstanding leading to the suicide of the lovers, and there is no peace between the families at the end. As the title of the tale indicates, the setting is moved from the city of fair Verona to the Swiss countryside, from high society to the milieu of farmers and small towns. The events are moved from the timeless present of drama to the preterit of Keller's (and his first readers') own time. The story is also moved from an imaginative Elizabethan romantic view of things (and the respective language) to the prosaic conditions of nineteenth-century poetic realism, with its emphasis on character and motivation. In Shakespeare the enmity between the two families is introduced in the Prologue as an "ancient grudge" (line 3) and then taken for granted without further elaboration.1 In Keller it is introduced in epic breadth and motivated by the greed and stubbornness of the two farmers, representatives of contemporary social conditions.

Similar things happen to the relationship between the lovers: in Shakespeare it is love at first sight that sweeps both Romeo and Juliet off their feet. In Keller their relationship develops, always well-motivated, over a long period, from childhood to young adulthood. Finally, a strange transformation happens to Shakespeare's Friar, a marginal figure in the play, who tries to help the lovers, but who, in a manner that has left many critics dissatisfied, messes up things. The analogous figure in Keller may be seen in the Black Fiddler (Clouser 1978, 162), a demonic figure, who, as the legal owner of the disputed field, is also a central figure in the tale.

Is the relationship between Shakespeare's play and Keller's tale then of the kind that warrants the term adaptation? The title certainly suggests that we should read it as such. Comparing the two versions is also bound to be suggestive, because it makes us focus on relationships, on similarities and differences.

SHAKESPEARE IS NOT THE SOURCE It may therefore come as a surprise that Keller insists, in good realist fashion, that his tale is based on an actual occurrence, one that he found reported in a Zurich newspaper: Saxony. In the village of Altsellershausen, near Leipzig, a young man of 19, and a young woman of 17, loved each other, both children of poor people, who, however, lived in mortal enmity with each other, and would not permit the betrothal of the two. On August 15 the lovers went to an inn where poor people were enjoying themselves, where they danced until 1 o'clock, and then left. In the morning the corpses of the two lovers were found in the fields, they had shot themselves. (Sautermeister 2006, 69; my translation) Other elements do not point either to Romeo and Juliet as a source: Keller's early sketches for the tale — there is one in poetic form — are based on the scene of the

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two farmers ploughing.

The title, the only explicit connection between Shakespeare's play and the tale, may well have been an afterthought: it is actually first mentioned by the publisher when the tale went to print (Morgenthaler 2014). We can try and make the thought experiment of reading the story with a different title in the style of other titles in the collection of Die Leute von Seldwyla, for example "Sali and Verena" or "The Black Fiddler." The story would lose none of its power, on the contrary, it could be argued that it gains additional force, because the title does not limit readers' expectations by giving away its ending (Rehder 1943).

Indeed, one of the early reviewers, a promoter of realist local literature ("Dorfliteratur"), Berthold Auerbach, severely criticized the title: The title of this tale seems to me to be entirely inappropriate; it imposes a mood . . . and moves us into that kind of literary literature, which is not based on real life, but on the life of print and its memories, and which I would have hoped we have left behind us. (Sautermeister 2006, 132-33; my translation) Keller responded to this criticism in a letter to Auerbach: I do have to defend the title of the tale. Firstly, what we write ourselves, is also printed on paper and thus is part of the paper world, and secondly, Shakespeare, even though printed on paper, is life itself and not a lifeless reminiscence. If I had not added a note on the actual occurrence of the anecdote and on its similarity to the Shakespearean matter, I should have been blamed for a labored and silly repetition, whereas, after the short note, the story gets a legitimate point, for those who had not even thought of Romeo and Juliet would then have considered the matter far too gross and bizarre. (Sautermeister 2006, 113; my translation) In other words, Keller included Romeo and Juliet in the title not as a source, but in order to place the tale in a specific context, to create a "dialogic interaction" (Desmet 2014, 55) with the play, one that helps readers to deepen their understanding of the tale (and the play).

The brief note at the very beginning of the tale to which Keller refers deserves closer attention. It is usually read as declaring his commitment to realism in the arts. But it goes beyond this. It says something about the relationship between different texts of a similar kind. To tell this story would be an idle imitation, were it not founded upon an actual occurrence showing how deeply rooted in human life is each of those plots on which the great works of the past are based. The number of such plots is not great, but they are constantly reappearing in new dress, and then they constrain

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the hand to hold them fast. (Keller 2008, 1)

In other words, Shakespeare's play and Keller's tale are based on a common source. The common source is one of those plots "deeply rooted in human life," i.e. in actual events, that circulate in a culture and organize the lives and perceptions of those that share it; in other words, their common source is myth — in the sense we associate with classical myth. The words "Romeo and Juliet" in the title of the tale do not refer to Shakespeare's play, but to the myth we have come to name after it.

RHIZOMATIC RELATIONSHIPS This offers an alternative account to the one-to-one relationship commonly taken for granted, which links source and adaptation directly. Now both Shakespeare's play and Keller's tale are versions in a series, sharing recurring elements in a protean fashion, where each new text may call upon all the texts that have preceded it. As one critic, perhaps casting his net somewhat widely, has summarized the myth (he calls it a legend): In its antique grandeur, the legend of the frustrated lovers who are united only through the ultimate sacrifice of their lives has retained its simple contour from the times of Hero and Leander down to Keller's novelle. Whether it be the vows of priesthood, the feud of two families, the obstacle of nature, or the ire of the fathers, which stands between the two lovers, in each case the fundamental situation is that of unconditional love attaining its consummation in the destruction of the two lovers themselves. (Rehder 1943, 416) More narrowly we may begin the series with Masuccio's Novellino (1476). In da Porto's Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (1524), the names and the setting are already the same as in Shakespeare. On the basis of Bandello's version (1554) Arthur Brooke created his English verse version The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), in which he did away with the lovers' farewell on their deathbed. Versions continue in Shakespeare's An Excellent and Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet (1597) and The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet (1599), which is 688 lines longer, texts known by Shakespeareans as Q1 and Q2, and their offshoots in later editions down to contemporary ones. Versions continue, to give a few examples, in Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Martius (1679), where Juliet's balcony appears for the first time and the farewell of the lovers on their deathbed becomes again part of the story, and, famously, Garrick's version (1748), Keller's tale (1856), Gounod's opera (1867), Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem (1870), Prokofiev's ballet (1935), Bernstein's West Side Story (1957), filmic versions, the translations into other languages, but also paintings, statues, monuments, like Juliet's house and grave in Verona, and so on. And of course all theater productions of Romeo and Juliet should also be seen in such a series. The closest analogy to the situation may be the one we find with the

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traditional ballad, where different versions have been recorded at different times and in different places.

Figure 4. Richard Giblett, Mycelium Rhizome (2009)

What does taking seriously this rich tradition mean for students of Shakespeare? Their interest will no longer be focused so much on an authoritative text and versions derived from it. Rather, they will see the development of the Romeo and Juliet story, not in terms of a line or a tree, but of a rhizome, which makes all kinds of connections possible. In a seminal essay, Douglas Lanier has developed this idea, with the help of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 2004): If we conceive of our shared object of study not as Shakespeare the text but as the vast web of adaptations, allusions and (re)productions that comprises the ever-changing cultural phenomenon we call "Shakespeare," the rhizome can offer a compelling theoretical model . . . to think rhizomatically about the Shakespearean text is to foreground its fundamentally adaptational nature — as a version of prior narratives, as a script necessarily imbricated in performance processes, as a text ever in transit between manuscript, theatrical and print cultures, as a work dependent upon its latter-day producers for its continued life. (Lanier 2014, 29)

HOW TO STUDY ADAPTATION Students of Shakespeare will take an interest in the conditions that made the emergence and the effectiveness of various versions (including the authoritative texts) possible. They will take an interest in questions of transmission between different versions (and not only between texts, but between all kinds of cultural artifacts). They will take an interest in the reasons for the similarities and differences http://borrowers.uga.edu/783959/show Page 10 of 14 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'39 PM

between the versions, to use Keller's words, between the dresses in which the myth reappears (see also Engler 1996). Studying theatrical productions, for example, they will not privilege the relationship of the production to the version available in what has become the canonical text, but pay as much attention to other theatrical versions.

Still, would they not be denying our sense that Shakespeare is the authoritative source of it all, unlike with the traditional ballad, where authorship is rarely an issue? They would not be denying Shakespeare's role, but put it in context. Here the experience of the HyperHamlet project at Basel University may be instructive. It researches Shakespeare quotations — versions on a small scale (Engler, Hohl Trillini, and Quassdorf). It emerged that surprisingly many phrases we now ascribe to Shakespeare had already been current in general discourse before him; "to be or not to be" may be the most prominent example (Hohl Trillini 2009).

We ascribe such elements to Shakespeare because of the towering importance he has gained in our culture. He has become a mythical figure himself, of which, in rhizomatic fashion, many versions exist: that of the creative genius. Even Keller, in spite of his view that there is nothing new under the sun, pays homage to him, when he says, in his letter to Auerbach, that Shakespeare "is life itself." This myth gained strength from the early eighteenth century, and reached its climax in the age of the Romantics when his words acquired a degree of sacredness, when "it was no longer the critic who judged Shakespeare but Shakespeare who judged the critic" (Engler 2003, 33). To give just one example: it was an 1845 production that — after about 100 years — did away with Garrick's very effective conversation of the lovers on their deathbed, and used the canonical Shakespeare text instead (Shakespeare 2012, 67-68).

In recent years we have gestured towards a more open understanding of Shakespeare's authorship. We may have abandoned the view that there should be a single text authored and authorized by Shakespeare, but the single text is still reinforced by the necessities of preparing popular editions. We may have come to accept the possibility of revised versions, but we still insist on the revisions having been approved by Shakespeare. We may have accepted the possibility of collaboration, but even attribution studies seem to see an important task in determining what is truly by the great author's hand. Theatrical productions use the available versions freely, but they still insist on doing so under Shakespeare's name. The authority of Shakespeare, the creative genius, is such that it continues to play an important role in shaping new versions — but it does so not as the only source, but rather as part of a rhizome, as an important resource.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that we should consider Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet the source and origin of Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet — even though Keller warns us against it.

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NOTES 1. All references to Romeo and Juliet are from the third Arden edition, edited by René Weis (Shakespeare 2012).

REFERENCES Clouser, Robin. 1978. "'Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe': Keller's Variations upon Shakespeare." The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77.2:161-82. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Desmet, Christy. 2014. "Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: a Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation." In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 41-57. Eckermann, Johann Peter. 2006. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. [Nachdr.]. Insel-Taschenbuch 500. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verl. Available online at: http://www.gbv.de/dms/faz-rez/FBUZ19990828139882.pdf (http://www.gbv.de/dms/faz-rez/FBUZ19990828139882.pdf) [accessed 9 December 2017]. Engler, Balz. 1996. "Shakespeare's Passports." In International Shakespeare: the Tragedies. Edited by Patricia Kennan and Mariangela Tempera. Bologna: CLUEB. 11-16. Engler, Balz. 2003. "Constructing Shakespeares in Europe." In Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe. Edited by Ángel-Luis Pujante and A. J. Hoenselaars, Newark, London, Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses. 26-39. Engler, Balz, Regula Hohl Trillini, and Sixta Quassdorf. 2010. "HyperHamlet." Available online at: http://www.hyperhamlet.unibas.ch/ (http://www.hyperhamlet.unibas.ch/) [accessed 25 March 2018]. Fischlin, Daniel. 2007. "A Note on Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet." Available online at: http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/folio/Sources/Source_texts_IF.pdf (http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/folio/Sources/Source_texts_IF.pdf) [accessed 9 December 2017].

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Hohl Trillini, Regula. 2009. "Hamlet and Textual Re-Production, 1550-1650." In The Construction of Textual Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Edited by Indira Ghose and Denis H. Renevey. Tübingen: Narr. 163-76. Huang, Alexa, and Elizabeth J. Rivlin, eds. 2014. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O'Flynn. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. Second edition. London, New York: Routledge. Keller, Gottfried. 2008. A Village Romeo and Juliet. Translated by Paul Bernard Thomas. New York: Mondial. Lanier, Douglas. 2014. "Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value." In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 21-40. Morgenthaler, Walter. 2014. Personal communication, October 30. Rehder, Helmut. 1943. "Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe: An Analysis." Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht 35.8: 416-34. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Sautermeister, Gert. 2006. Gottfried Keller: Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe. Erläuterungen und Dokumente. Stuttgart: Reclam. Shakespeare, William. 2012. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by René Weis. Arden Shakespeare. Third series. London: Arden Shakespeare. Stebner, Gerhard. 1982. " Romeo and Juliet im Vergleich zu G. Kellers Novelle Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe." In William Shakespeare: Didaktisches Handbuch. Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens. 3 vols, Volume 3. München: Fink. 801-27.

PERMISSIONS Figures 2 and 3: By Ernst Würtenberger (1868-1934) ("Schweizerland," Vol.5, no. 9/10, 1919) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Figure 4: Richard Giblett, Mycelium Rhizome (2009), Van Handel Collection, Melbourne. Image courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne.

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"To build or not to build": LEGO® Shakespeare™ (/current) and the Question of Creativity

SARAH HATCHUEL, UNIVERSITY OF LE HAVRE (/previous) NATHALIE VIENNE-GUERRIN, UNIVERSITY PAUL-VALÉRY MONTPELLIER 3

ABSTRACT This essay aims to explore the cultural stakes underlying the fleeting and almost incongruous Shakespearean presence in The LEGO Movie (2014), analyze the meeting of "LEGO" and "Shakespeare" in the cinematic and digital worlds, and suggest that at the heart of the connection between Shakespeare and LEGO lies the question of originality and creativity. "LEGO Shakespeare" evinces interesting modes of articulation between art and industry, production and consumption, high-brow culture and low-brow culture and invites us to study how Shakespeare is digested into and interacts with multi-layered cultural artifacts. It will be this essay's contention that Shakespeare's unexpected manifestation in The LEGO Movie is a symptom of LEGO's official re-appropriation of more playful and grass-roots productions. These creations stem from users who become "prosumers" in the participatory culture of Web 2.0 and who interact with both the LEGO world and Shakespeare's canon in a cross-over that turns the playwright into a figure that oscillates between spectrality and materiality.

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In the 3D computer-animated film The LEGO Movie (2014), Shakespeare unexpectedly appears as one of the "master builders" featured in the background story.1 His name is never uttered in the film, masking the fact that LEGO Shakespeare constitutes a world in itself, to which a few scholars have paid some attention. Christy Desmet (2009, 65) already notes that YouTube "lists nearly 50 entries for videos of Macbeth using Lego!" Peter Holland (2009, 256) mentions "My Name is Macbeth," the rap version acted out by Lego figures, as well as Logan Stromberg's "Lego MacBeth" (262). LEGO Shakespeare is part of what has come to be identified as "YouTube Shakespeare" (O'Neill 2014). However, when one searches the World Shakespeare Bibliography online, no study focusing exclusively on LEGO Shakespeare comes up; similarly, in the indexes of Stephen O' Neill's volume Shakespeare and YouTube (2014), or Alexa Alice Joubin and Charles Ross's Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace (2009), the term LEGO is not listed; nor is it mentioned in the recent Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice (2014), edited by Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan. LEGO Shakespeare is, therefore, not (or not yet) identified as an object of extensive or legitimate study.

The purpose of this article is to show how and why Shakespeare and LEGO meet in the cinematic and digital worlds and to suggest that LEGO Shakespeare is a complex example of the popular culture that Douglas Lanier has termed

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"Shakespop" (Lanier 2002). It evinces interesting modes of articulation between art and industry, production and consumption, high-brow culture and low-brow culture, and invites us to study how Shakespeare is digested into and interacts with multi-layered cultural artifacts. This article aims to explore the cultural stakes underlying the fleeting and almost incongruous Shakespearean presence in The LEGO Movie, isolate "LEGO Shakespeare" as an object of study by giving a brief panorama of the "LEGO Shakespeare" world, and suggest that at the heart of the connection between Shakespeare and LEGO lies the question of originality and creativity.

It will be this essay's contention that Shakespeare's unexpected manifestation in The LEGO Movie is a symptom of LEGO's official re-appropriation of more playful and grass-roots productions. These creations stem from users who become "prosumers" in the participatory culture of Web 2.0 and who interact with both the LEGO world and Shakespeare's canon in a cross-over that turns the playwright into a figure that oscillates between spectrality and materiality.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE LEGO MOVIE The LEGO Movie is the first full-length theatrical LEGO adventure from Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. In 2000 the LEGO Studios were created, as is narrated by Daniel Lipkowitz in The LEGO Book: In 2000, the LEGO Group teamed up with the world-famous director Steven Spielberg to create a new kind of LEGO theme. Lego Studios wouldn't just be about construction and play, but making video stories using the principle of stop-motion animation. In this process, a camera takes a single picture of a model or scene, which is then moved slightly and photographed again. By repeating this over and over and then playing back the shots in sequence, the many still pictures blend together to make an animated LEGO movie. (2009, 176)

Before The LEGO Movie, other animated movies with LEGOs had been released, but only in DVD format. The first LEGO movie on DVD was LEGO: The Adventures of Clutch Powers (dir. Howard E. Baker, 2010), followed by Lego Batman: The Movie — DC Superheroes Unite (dir. Jon Burton, 2013), and the LEGO Star Wars trilogy — The Padawan Menace (dir. David Scott, 2011), The Empire Strikes Out (dir. Guy Vasilovich, 2012), and The Yoda Chronicles (dir. Michael Hegner, 2013).

On IMDB, the story of the 2014 film is presented as a fight against immobility and rigidity, in very literal ways: "An ordinary LEGO construction worker, thought to be the prophesied 'Special,' is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil tyrant from

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gluing the LEGO universe into eternal stasis." The hero of the story, Emmet, is a "rules-following perfectly average LEGO minifigure" who is "mistakenly identified as the most extraordinary person and the key to saving the world."2 Wyldstyle, the heroine in the film, says about him: "I don't think he's ever had an original thought." The villain in the film is President Business who, because he is obsessed with order, decides to "hunt down all the master builders" who are creative enough to invent new objects and story worlds with LEGO bricks without respecting the precise rules of construction. As Business wants to glue things eternally, Emmet has found a "piece of resistance" that should restore creativity and originality. The "master builders" are inset doubles for the real-life "master builders" in the LEGO industry, who are "rigorously tested and selected for their creative construction skills." They "work at the LEGO model shops where they assemble an incredible variety of models for in-store use, parks, special projects, and events all around the world" (Lipkowitz 2009, 188). These real-life "master builders" are thus transposed in the film and turned into children's popular Superhero figures such as Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman.

Among the "master builders" that appear in the film, the spectators can recognize Shakespeare; but because he is never formerly introduced or even named, viewers need to be attentive and aware of the usual representations of Shakespeare, such as the portraits. The playwright is first presented next to a panda, a Yeti, and a pirate, among many other LEGO minifigures (see figure 1), as one of the "people of the universe" who used to be "free to travel and mingle and do whatever they wanted" and are now chased by President Business, who fears the chaos that free creation implies.

Figure 1

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In the second moment featuring Shakespeare, Emmet delivers an "eloquent speech" before the assembly of master builders (see figure 2). He is invited to do so by Vitruvius, the wise bearded old wizard (voiced by Morgan Freeman) in charge of organizing the resistance. The name "Vitruvius" immediately conjures up the figure of a great "builder": Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman architect who was a civil and military engineer as well as an urban planner in the First Century BC, and who famously wrote the multi-volume treatise De architectura as a guide for building projects. The Vitruvius minifigure thus embodies the tension found in the film between the precise "instructions" defended by President Business and a free creative spirit with a thirst for invention. The word "architect" actually derives from the Greek archi and tekton — "Master" and "builder/carpenter." To make the reference to the Roman Vitruvius even more explicit, the scene takes place in an ancient amphitheater.

When Vitruvius calls out several of the master builders, they are introduced to the viewers: Robin Hood, the Mermaid Lady, Gandalf, the 2002 NBA All-Star players, Wonder Woman, 1980-Something Space Guy, Green Ninja, Milhouse (from the Simpsons), Michelangelo (the artist) and Michelangelo (the Ninja Turtle), Cleopatra (with a serpent around her neck), and Dumbledore (from the Harry Potter saga). Among the master builders one also recognizes Abraham Lincoln, who is not named but who, seeing the quarrels and fights in the assembly, utters: "A house divided against itself would be better than this," in reference to the House Divided Speech (1858). We then briefly see the Shakespeare minifigure again (see figure 3), who, upon discovering that Emmet is "not a master builder . . . yet," shouts "Rubbish!" rolling the "r"s and angrily sending an object at Emmet's face — an object that looks like a pizza. Shakespeare appears but is never named, as though he should be recognized easily by the spectators. Like other Disney, Dreamworks, or Pixar animated films, The LEGO Movie is clearly aimed at families, audiences made of both adults and children who receive the film differently, thanks to the use of multiple layers of meaning and cultural references. Therefore, even if a child may not recognize Shakespeare, the father or mother sitting next to him or her in the cinema probably will share their knowledge and help the child decipher or decode the allusion.

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Figures 2, 3, and 4

In another brief sequence, one sees Shakespeare being arrested by President Business, together with Wonder Woman, Superman, and a few others (see figure 4). When President Business calls out the two Super Heroes, the name "Shakespeare" is still not voiced. As the playwright can be seen on screen, it is the name "Shaquille O'Neal" (another of the master builders) that can be heard, thus creating confusion between Shakespeare and the basketball legend. In yet another sequence, which shows the rebellion of the free LEGO builders, Shakespeare appears on a rocket with Lincoln and Michelangelo, saying "And don't forget us, master builders" (see figure 5).

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Figure 5 At the end of the film, which sees the victory of the creative builders over President Business, as a celebratory move the Shakespeare minifigure is seen executing a hip hop wave on the floor (see figure 6).

Figure 6

This unacknowledged, brief, and transitory Shakespearean presence throughout the film must be interrogated. Why does Shakespeare appear at all in this LEGO movie? What does his occurrence mean if one considers the issue of creativity vs immobility that permeates the story?

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If Shakespeare is in this movie, it may be because he is everywhere anyway, as any story world seems to be able to absorb him and his works; but there is more to it. As Alan Sinfield has argued, "Shakespeare is a powerful cultural token, such that what you want to say has more authority if it seems to come through him" (1992, 11). Shakespeare's cultural capital may be exploited to give cultural credence and aura to a LEGO-based production. Shakespeare's presence first invites us to identify some elements of the film as Shakespearean motifs. Vitruvius, the father- figure, dies before coming back as a Hamletian Ghost to haunt the "Special" minifigure. The prophecy that a "Special" one would save the LEGO world is revealed as false but leads to victory anyway, revealing its self-fulfilling, Macbeth- like nature. Moreover, the film plays with the frames of the story: in a reflexive mise-en-abyme, the minifigures are ultimately revealed to be played with by real- life people, a father and his son, who disagree on the way one should interact with the LEGO bricks (see figures 7, 8, and 9).

Figures 7, 8, and 9

The father defends a vision in which LEGO models are built to be fixed, glued, and admired as art works — in this, he is disclosed as the real-life President Business, while the son wants to play, mix things, and imagine action-filled adventures for the minifigures — thus standing for the inset "master builders." The "real-life" frame sometimes invades the story-world: the "Special" Emmet has had visions of a huge hand in the sky (see figure 10); the top of President Business' tower is removed as if by an outside force; and the Ghost of Vitruvius is moved like a puppet, with the help of a thread that is never hidden from the viewer (see figure 11). http://borrowers.uga.edu/783948/show Page 8 of 27 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'39 PM

Figure 10

Figure 11 The father and son appear as doubles for the directors and scriptwriters, acting literally as "hands of God" in the story world. At the end of the film, shots alternate between the very material LEGO world (see figure 12) seen by the father and the son, who "direct" the story, and the imaginary, digitally-enhanced LEGO world as experienced by the minifigures themselves, who "live" the story (see figure 13).

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Figure 12

Figure 13

In its multiple levels of fiction that collapse onto each other in constant metalepses, The LEGO Movie makes us aware of its construction and interrogates the very boundaries of the story world, as it invades the "real" in a re-enactment and updating of the motto "all the world is a (LEGO) stage."

If the film features Shakespeare and if Shakespeare has now been made a LEGO minifigure (released in the wake of the film in 2013-2014),3 which even appears in The LEGO Movie video game,4 it is not only to encourage the viewers to notice the Shakespearean themes or aesthetics in The LEGO Movie, but also to reflect on and acknowledge a media phenomenon. Shakespeare's manifestation in this blockbuster aimed at a large, family audience may be read as the sign of a corporate re-appropriation of what started as very creative amateur videos that crossed the LEGO world and Shakespeare's, while interrogating the boundaries between production and consumption.

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SHAKESPEARE BRICKS ON FILM: FROM YOUTUBE BITS TO FULL-LENGTH MOVIE The Internet and new technologies have offered readers and spectators a space of heightened imagination, blurring the frontiers between producers and consumers. For Matt Hills (2002), it is no longer possible to claim, as Michel de Certeau did in the 1980s, that boundaries are clear between the creators-producers with their powerful strategies of market anticipation on the one hand and the consumers with their small-scale tactics of appropriation on the other. This model now seems too rigid to define the present system of fan production, in which consumers have partly become producers or "pro-sumers." In these fast-developing structures of niche marketing, fans-producers now create their works alongside official productions and become creators-performers of a cultural capital that can be appropriated, copied, and parodied, sometimes influencing the official fictions. Christie Carson (2014, 227) notes that "the line which formerly split viewer and viewed, but also producer and consumer, has broken down in the digital world" and that "there has been an implosion of authority, with all the hierarchies of the twentieth-century world shifting or breaking down," while "new meaning-making structures are developing" (227). The LEGO Shakespeare phenomenon may be considered as emblematic of these new ever-shifting, fluid forms. This is all the more paradoxical, since LEGO bricks should epitomize fixity by their very materiality.

Before The LEGO Movie was released, many LEGO fans had already adapted scenes from Shakespeare, filming them in LEGO stop-motion and posting the videos on platforms such as YouTube — so much so that the LEGO Shakespeare videos now constitute a large corpus on YouTube and have become an educational tool and product. LEGO designers admittedly find their inspiration on the Internet. When the toy manufacturer had to adapt to the computer age, they had the idea of using the LEGO fans to feed their imagination, which implied working interactively with their Internet fan base.

According to John Fiske (1992), texts that are elected, among popular fictions, as "cult texts" (or "fan texts") are characterized by insufficiencies that call for re- appropriation; they need to be open enough and to include contradictions, ambiguities, and/or unresolved cultural issues that invite rewriting, re-activation, and circulation. "Shakespeare" (both the "author figure" with its mysterious and incomplete biography and his plays, full of ambiguities and ambivalences) as well as the LEGO brick-world that calls for ceaseless re-construction and re-ordering, fit Fiske's definition of "fan texts," constantly feeding the users-performers' imagination. Shakespeare's plays have been adapted to the world of "Bricks on film," which Lipkowitz describes as follows in The Lego Book:

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From official LEGO movies to themed sets that enable builders to create animations of their own, and on to an entire industry of amazing fan-made films, LEGO building and the world of movie-making have forged a beautiful friendship destined to last for years to come. (2009, 176)

An old-time material toy like LEGO, therefore, has been saved and revived by the new digital technologies. When the words "Shakespeare LEGO" are searched for on YouTube, Shakespeare is clearly revealed as part of the LEGO movie world. On 15 May 2016, 52,800 results came out. This number can only be approximate: when you skim through these results, you find that many results are, in fact, irrelevant, as is usual with Internet searches. Yet it gives an idea of the phenomenon, all the more so if you combine these results with others, such as LEGO Romeo and Juliet (31,600), LEGO Macbeth (20,500), LEGO Hamlet (25,500), LEGO The Tempest (32,400), LEGO Coriolanus (1040), or LEGO A Midsummer Night's Dream (6,600). Even if very approximate, these results are sufficient to allow us to identify a large corpus of LEGO Shakespeare videos. Now entered on Google, the search for "LEGO Shakespeare" produces 595,000 results. Shakespeare is not the only author to be "LEGOized" (LEGO Jane Austen provides 415,000 results on Google, LEGO Chaucer 367,000, while the LEGO Bible reveals more than 2 million results). Shakespeare is part of a large phenomenon of appropriation of literary classics by the LEGO world and industry that makes classic authors accessible, a trend that was emphasized when in 2014, the Waterstones bookstore chain decided to recreate "setpieces from great literature in toy bricks to coincide with the release of The LEGO Movie."5

It is possible here to delineate some specific features of this LEGO Shakespeare material. In her article "Othello/YouTube" (2015), Ayanna Thompson identifies three main trends that she considers as characteristic of YouTube Othello videos: "The Archival Impulse," "The Pedagogical Impulse," and "The Parodic Impulse."

The existence of "LEGO Shakespeare" videos first demonstrates that LEGO is used as a pedagogical tool to make the playwright accessible to pupils. Many videos explicitly claim to be part of school projects and assignments. LEGO obviously is used by teachers to attract the pupils' interest in Shakespeare and his language. Christy Desmet analyzed in 2009 the educational potential of YouTube Shakespeare, suggesting how LEGO could provide pupils with a first access to Shakespeare. For example, "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in LEGO," a ten-minute video posted in July 2012, introduces itself as a school project in English and the first "stop animation" experience of the "girlwiththeblueeyess."6 "It was created by Me and a couple of my mates please put what your views are but don't be too harsh . . . please :)," says the comment that accompanies the video, revealing the Shakespearean motif of the amateur "rude mechanicals" who are afraid to hurt and to be hurt in A Midsummer Night's Dream. These Shakespeare

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LEGO videos have much to do with the performances that Michael Dobson studies in his Shakespeare and Amateur Performance. A Cultural History (2011). These videos deriving from school projects are amateur performances of Shakespeare's plays, thanks to which Shakespeare becomes fun. Many other examples can be found on YouTube, such as "Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: Act 2: Scene 2 IN LEGO!," a five-minute video described as "A literature project my brother and I worked on for a few weeks. It's pretty good lol. Voice acting by Kendal Miller and Kenneth Nicolas, and everything else by us."7 Another one, "Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing in Lego," stages act 5, scene 3, a video again described as "My first stop motion video as a project for my Shakespeare class."8 These pedagogical videos all combine Shakespeare's words with LEGO designs, contrary to the "Shakespeare Lego Films" that are dumb shows accompanied by music but that let us hear no Shakespearean words. These silent films were probably created in the wake of The LEGO Movie, as they include the Shakespeare minifigure.9

Whether the videos are designed for schoolwork or just for fun, LEGO Shakespeare means mini-Shakespeare. The LEGO Shakespeare videos are short and provide "reduced Shakespeare" films.10 They either condense the plays, like the aforementioned Shakespeare LEGO films, or focus on just one scene, as is the case with "LEGO Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 1, Sc. 1," an eight-minute version of the play's first scene, including the text and subtitles in English.11 Posted in February 2010, this textually-oriented LEGO sequence triggered only one visible comment: "High culture," a commentary that seems to be both ironic and sincere, so that it interrogates rather than establishes the film's cultural value. The LEGO Shakespeare world privileges a scale of adaptation that puts Shakespeare into "tatters," if one is to follow an expression coined by Mariangela Tempera.12 Yet these "LEGO Shakespeare" tatters are packed with meaning and re-creative impulses.

These few-minute fanvids posted on YouTube testify to the users' desire to interact creatively and parasocially (Booth 2010) with both the Shakespeare fiction and the LEGO brick world, generating renewed sites of cultural negotiations (Hills 2002) in which personal interpretation and amateur performance can thrive (Kustritz 2014, 373). As a cross-over between the world of Shakespeare and the world of LEGO, "LEGO Shakespeare" mixes and entangles what are traditionally seen as "high-brow" and "low-brow" cultures; they call cultural hierarchies into question and redefine the boundaries between the "official" field (either governed by corporate copyright in the case of LEGO or canonicity in the case of Shakespeare) and the "non-authorized," fan-made creations.

Putting Shakespeare into LEGO amounts to playing and toying with Shakespeare. Integrated into the LEGO universe, Shakespeare and his plays are the objects of all kinds of manipulation and can be associated with such worlds as Star Wars in a

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move encouraged by The LEGO Movie itself, since Batman or Superman can meet the LEGO world effortlessly. The video entitled "Lego Star Wars Julius Ceasar" [sic], posted in March 2013, is accompanied by the following text: "This is a tragic play written by William Shakespeare. Except this time it is reenacted in LEGO and has a Star Wars theme. This was an assignment that I had to do for my English Class. Note that this may not make much sense if you have not read the story."13 In this video, the worlds of Julius Caesar and Star Wars overlap, Chancellor Palpatine being cast as 'Cassious' [sic], Anakin as Brutus, Obi-Wan Kenobi as Julius Ceasar [sic], and "Santa Clause as The Old Man." In a frenzied video that mentions a Caesar salad, Obi-Wan Kenobi's dying words are "And you too Anakin!" re- inventing the famous "Et tu Brute." Using the Star Wars LEGO minifigures to perform a Shakespearean story is a recurrent feature in these films. This combination suggests that the two worlds have much in common or are at least culturally compatible, as seems to be shown by the recent publication of Shakespeare's Star Wars by Ian Doescher (2013), a mash-up trilogy that retells the plot of George Lucas's saga in Shakespearean style. Cultural exchanges between the two diegetic worlds seem to be easy, confirming Amy Scott-Douglass's analyses of Star Wars' Shakespearean features or, should we say, of Shakespeare's Star-Warrish features.14

As Shakespeare's characters have not (yet) been turned into LEGO minifigures, LEGO/Shakespeare fans have to adapt existing figures to build Shakespeare's characters, so that they can best express their most conspicuous characteristics. "MACBETH stop motion lego" is a six-minute video presented as "A lego star wars stop motion parody video of Shakespeare Macbeth act 1 scene three."15 Posted in 2010, it represents the "Weird Sisters" as three Jar Jar Binks minifigures, thus emphasizing their strange appearance. "Star Wars Lego Romeo and Juliet," posted in 2008 and viewed more than 120,000 times so far, provides the complete Shakespeare Star Wars dramatis personae at the end of the video, with Romeo as Luke Skywalker, Juliet as "Random Lego girl," Friar Lawrence as Lego Yoda, and "bickering servants" as "Lego R2-D2 and C-3PO."16 The video thus offers a Star Wars reading of the play in which the wars become a feud and vice versa. Playing at/with Shakespeare LEGO or LEGO Shakespeare offers other forms of recreation and "reconfiguration" (Mayer et al., 2013). "Lego man talks Shakespeare," posted in January 2012, shows a LEGO medieval minifigure delivering the "To be or not to be soliloquy" in Kenneth Branagh's voice (Hamlet, 1996).17 This multi-layered appropriation in a Shakespeare-Branagh-LEGO example shows how fanvids can feed on previous film adaptations, boasting original creativity through transfer and hybridity. The Shakespearean films are "poached" (Henry Jenkins's expression [1992], borrowed from Michel de Certeau's notion of "braconnage" [1980]) as if they had become as canonical as Shakespeare's plays, as if they were Shakespeare's plays (Hatchuel 2015). In the same way, several layers of reduction-adaptation appear in a LEGO video of the Reduced Shakespeare Company Rap of Othello,18 http://borrowers.uga.edu/783948/show Page 14 of 27 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'39 PM

which seems to be part of the very process of canonization of this ironical "RSC" rap.19 Combining the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Rap, and LEGO, this video integrates Shakespeare into a tangled digital object that calls for disentanglement.

The recent creation of a LEGO Shakespeare minifigure suggests that Shakespeare already means something to many LEGO fans who are both adults and children. This recent release is bound to lead to even more Shakespearean LEGO movies in which Shakespeare himself becomes the hero. The fan-produced amateur videos that we have studied have been joined by a new wave of fanvids since the release of the much-publicized LEGO Movie and that of the Shakespeare minifigure. "LEGO Shakespeare, Where are my Pants? (Stop-Motion)"20 is based on an allusion to a recurrent satirical gag in The LEGO Movie ("Honey, where are my pants?"). "Action Bill — A LEGO Stop Motion Short Film" is a five-minute video in which "William Shatner's time traveling robot attempts to destroy William Shakespeare but underestimates the fighting prowess of Action Bill."21 In this much more elaborate video, Shakespeare is led to interact with LEGO, Action Man, and the world of Star Trek, a television and film series that is already known for its appropriation of Shakespearean motifs and quotes (Lanier 2002, 14-16). The LEGO Movie video game integrates Shakespeare, whose weapon is a skull (Yorick's) borrowed from the formerly-released minifigure of the Actor (minifigures series 8), so that he looks like an Elizabethan thespian performing Hamlet.

The LEGO Shakespeare craze finds its expression in the two "Brick Shakespeare" books: one, published in 2013 by Skyhorse, focusing on the tragedies and the other, published in 2014, focusing on the comedies (see figures 14 and 15).

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Figures 14 and 15

If these books are not entitled "LEGO Shakespeare," it is because "LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this book" (McCann et al. 2013, copyright page). Brick Shakespeare has recently been commercialized as a complete set of hardback books (2014), which seems to testify to its success. It was not the first book of its kind. The Brick Bible was also published in several editions and has been sold as a complete set since 2013; Brick Fairy Tales and Brick Greek Myths are now sold in one set (2015), while Brick Dracula and Frankenstein is the latest in the series (2014).

The introduction to the latest Shakespeare volume states that: Brick Shakespeare: The Comedies presents four of the Bard's most famous and clever comic works in LEGO form, each of which has been carefully abridged. The fun brick scenes depict Shakespeare's plays just as they were originally written (perhaps with more plastic than he had imagined), with helpful narrative in between to explain what we did not include. Whether you are just being introduced to Shakespeare or are a seasoned devotee, we hope you enjoy this creative and constructive new take on Shakespeare's comedies! (McCann et al., 2014)22 "Creative," "constructive," "new": here lies the heart of the LEGO marketing strategy, which is based on the promotion of originality, although it paradoxically encourages the re-enactment of world-famous, four-century-old plays.

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WHEN THE LEGO IDEOLOGY AND MARKETING STRATEGY MEET SHAKESPEARE The LEGO Movie translates the ideology that is conveyed by the LEGO industry, which is very simple. There are basic, ordinary, common construction guys, such as Emmet; there are "master builders," such as Shakespeare. Any basic construction guy may become a master builder; any Emmet may become a Shakespeare, an Abraham Lincoln, or a Wonder Woman. "You are the Special, and so am I and so is everyone": such is the message of the film, uttered by Emmet, addressing President Business. The key is to "believe" in oneself, as the ending of the film makes clear. The LEGO world values both regular, generic construction workers who are keen on following the instructions precisely and the master builders who are inspired, inspiring, and cultivate freedom.

The whole plot of The LEGO Movie rests on a conflict between and finally the reconciliation of generations, as we learn in the final sequence when we discover that President Business is the father and Emmet the son. The father wants his son, who has been playing with his LEGO "stuff," to "put everything back the way [he] found it." With his glue (termed the "Kragle" in the LEGO world imagined by the son), the father wants to "make things the way they are supposed to be, permanently." What the son sees as a battleship, the father perceives as a "hodgepodge." While Emmet/the child wants to appropriate what his father made, "making something new out of it," Business/the adult wishes to freeze things, considering the LEGO world as a "highly sophisticated interlocking brick system, an adult thing." Here the LEGO theory of adaptation can be used as a metaphor for a theory of Shakespearean adaptation: originality is when things are not "glued"; freedom is the key. At odds with the LEGOLAND theme parks in which all the large models are glued,23 the film favors instead the idea that the minifigures should not be placed in a scale model in one single position forever. Instead, they must be used to play and make up stories imaginatively, in a direct reflection of Shakespeare's words and characters needing to be performed and moved out of the fixity of the page.24 The film puts to the fore the impermanence of any LEGO playing field in its constant reconfiguration: any LEGO show put on by a child is, indeed, a performance.25 However, at the same time, the film asserts the power of cinema to fix and preserve (therefore, "glue" together) this show permanently.

What can be found at the core of The LEGO Movie and the marketing strategy it implies is that the plastic toys feed and facilitate a dialogue between generations. The idea is that both adults and children enjoy LEGO, in the same way as both adults and children love — or are supposed to love — Shakespeare. The community of LEGO fans is made of children but also of adults who buy very costly LEGO special edition sets, collect very costly LEGO items, and even create "LEGO Brick Art." The LEGO Book notes that:

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Some artists paint on canvas. Others carve stone or weld metal. But a special few create art using the unique medium of LEGO bricks and imagery. The work of these talented "brick artists" and others like them is a remarkable visual testament to the creative nature of LEGO building and the unlimited ways that it allows people to express themselves. (Lipowitz 2009, 190-91) Like Shakespeare, LEGO seems to provide endless opportunities for adaptation, invention, and creation. However, the LEGO creation may be limited to some users only since The LEGO Movie expresses an all-male vision of who should constitute the LEGO players: LEGO matters seem to concern fathers and sons in a very biased, gendered stance. The end of the film heavily paves the way for a sequel by announcing the arrival of the very young daughter as a threat to the game, which precisely points to the gender stereotypes. This ending actually reflects LEGO's choice of designing "LEGO Friends" sets specifically aimed at young girls, a choice that was undoubtedly dictated by economic and marketing requirements.26 This targeting reveals that LEGO, contrary to the vision it defends in the film, certainly defines and "glues" the boy world and the girl world into stereotypical representations.

One layer of irony appears in The LEGO Movie's villain being called "President Business" or "Lord Business." The film thus seems to denounce the alienation of the working-class consumers and an economic system based on conformity, military-like management and wild profit-making, while being undoubtedly part of a marketing strategy to sell even more LEGO boxes. The film — in itself a two- hour-long advertisement, albeit a very smart and witty one — encourages people to invent and create new story worlds . . . but only with LEGO material. This invitation to be creative under strict constraints reproduces the attempts by corporations to control the circulation of transformative fan fictions that use characters or stories protected by copyright law. Even when they are not produced for profit (Rose 2012, 101-102), fan fictions have generally been seen as a threat by companies owning the copyrights, since fan works may be seen as modifying or tarnishing the image of the diegetic world carefully constructed by the corporations. Lucasfilm has sought to contain fan fictions based on Star Wars by offering fan-authors to host their productions on an official site free of charge, so long as the fictions became the company's property; Warner Pictures violently targeted all the websites hosting fan rewritings of Harry Potter, and Fox attacked unauthorized sites devoted to shows such as The Simpsons or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Burke 2000). However, the more producers attempt to control the fans' freedom of expression, the more they may alienate a great part of their audience, all the more so since the authors of fan fictions remain enthusiastic readers/spectators of the "original" works.

The fact that Shakespeare appears in the LEGO film for the first time shows that

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the figure may have become marketable and bankable — probably not, or not yet, as bankable as Harry Potter™, Indiana Jones™, or Star Wars™, cleverly licensed by LEGO to attract young buyers, but bankable anyway. The Star Wars minifigures were the first ever licensed LEGO characters in 1999. Since then many more have followed: Spider-man™ minifigures are "some of the most popular characters to feature in fans' stop animation videos, which are known as brickfilms" (Martell 2009, 72); the LEGO Harry Potter™ theme was released in 2001, the LEGO NBA™ in 2003, the LEGO Spongebob Squarepants™ in 2006, LEGO Batman™ in 2006, and LEGO Indiana Jones™ in 2008-2009. And then, in 2013-2014, LEGO Shakespeare™. Shakespeare is used as a brand name, with no specific content but reduced to two accessories: the quill and the parchment displaying the mock-quote "To build or not to build."

In the LEGO world, there are other minifigures known as "Fan-figures," among which one finds Abraham Lincoln (dated 2008), but also Benjamin Franklin (dated 2008, as well). The Shakespeare minifigure, similarly, was created in the first place by fans. They were the ones who customized existing LEGO parts to build Shakespeare, before it was commercially released by LEGO. Such a customized figure appears in a 2011 ABC LEGO history on the LEGO MOCs ("My Own Creations"), which shows Shakespeare under the letter S (see figure 16).27 Different versions of "Shakespeare," fan-made and officially released, thus compete with and complement one another. By officially releasing the Shakespeare minifigure in 2013 as a mainstream trademark, LEGO at once acknowledges the works of fans and manages to channel these creative endeavors. "Shakespeare" becomes a paradoxical character who is revised and who "trembles" through transfictionality (which postulates that characters may leave their preliminary fictive work to live their own lives in other stories and other media, suggesting that they do not belong to a single author or to one particular source). As "Shakespeare" moves freely from one customized version to another, and from customization to officialization, his identity is reshuffled and, if one is to follow Richard Saint- Gelais's general claim on transfictional characters, "contaminated by some part of alterity," although it is not possible to "talk of distinct characters" (2011, 59).

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Figure 16

"From famous historical figures to futuristic steampunk warriors, many talented customizers have truly allowed their imagination to run wild," Nevin Martell writes in Standing Small (2009, 92). The customized — i.e., the creative "original" — becomes a commonplace figure once it is commercially released or "glued," so to speak, in the LEGO world. In a similar way, the fanvids reproducing Shakespearean plays with existing LEGO bricks and figures have been reappropriated in an official way by the LEGO company: to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in April 2016, scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night's Dream were recreated in very professional, stop-motion-style CGI animation. The videos were then posted on YouTube and advertised in the press (Moran 2016).28 If LEGO celebrated Shakespeare, Shakespeare certainly served to promote LEGO.

If, as analyzed by Maurizio Calbi (2013), "Shakespeare" has been more and more fragmented, spectrally mediated and experimentally disseminated in multi-layered, multi-mediatized afterlives on film, TV, and the Web (Calbi 2013), LEGO has first re-materialized "Shakespeare" — by creating, in 2013, a very tangible figure that can be manipulated, played with, used as a character and filmed by young (and less young) fans of his plays and of LEGO bricks — before turning the playwright back into a flimsy presence/absence throughout The LEGO Movie a year later and recreating the plays in stop-motion to promote both Shakespeare and the bricks. http://borrowers.uga.edu/783948/show Page 20 of 27 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'39 PM

The LEGO Movie builds up yet another ironical effect by reducing such a master builder as Shakespeare to the status of a reactionary, old-fashioned figure who shouts "Rubbish!" when he is confronted with the novelty and originality that Emmet, the not-yet-master builder, represents. All the master builders, compared with Emmet the common construction worker are, in fact, presented as old- fashioned and ordinary. Paradoxically, when the ordinary is erected into an emblem of originality, then the original and the exceptional become ordinary. The LEGO Movie, which praises creativity and originality, ironically leads to a vision of the world in which everyone is a creator, ergo no one is a creator, not even Shakespeare; and yet, the fact that Shakespeare should call Emmet's speech "Rrrrubbish" suggests that among all the master builders, the one who is presented as beyond any other future builder is Shakespeare. Shakespeare's exclamation could mean "You will not build beyond me."29 The Shakespeare figure itself thus states and feeds its own mythical stature as a builder "for all time," never to be equalled.

Shakespearean congresses and conferences around the world frequently include seminars and panels on adaptation and re-creation, while also addressing topics rooted in Elizabethan England, displaying the tensions between the two diverging meanings of the word "original" — on the one hand, "That is the origin or source of something; from which something springs, proceeds, or is derived; primary," and on the other, "Created, composed, or done by a person directly; produced first- hand; not imitated or copied from another; novel or fresh in character or style" (OED). A case in point was the call for submissions issued by the World Shakespeare Congress devoted to "Creating and Re-creating Shakespeare," in 2016 in Stratford and London:

The year 2016 marks four hundred years of popular, artistic, and scholarly enthusiasm for Shakespeare's life and works. We justly celebrate Shakespeare as a creator of plays and poems, characters and ideas, words and worlds. But so too, in the centuries since the playwright's death in 1616, have scholars and thinkers, writers, artists, and performers — of all kinds and from around the globe — re-created him. In such perpetual reinventions of Shakespeare we seem to have confirmation of Ben Jonson's words: Shakespeare was "not of an age, but for all time." The tenth World Shakespeare Congress of the International Shakespeare Association will honor Shakespeare's 400-year legacy and celebrate the continuing global resonance of his work. The Congress's rich programme of plenary lectures, seminars, panels, workshops, events, and performances will take place across two successive locations: first in Stratford- upon-Avon, among the key sites of Shakespeare's personal life; and subsequently in London, close to the site of his most famous workplace, the Globe Theatre.

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WSC 2016 will offer unparalleled opportunities to engage with current Shakespeare performance, criticism, and pedagogy, and to connect with fellow Shakespeareans from around the world. (World Shakespeare Congress 2016)

This call for submissions sounds oddly "LEGOesque." The invitation sent to the "globe" to create and recreate, to freely build and rebuild Shakespeare is definitely there, but the fact that the Congress, for this special anniversary, takes place in Stratford and London suggests that there is no way of escaping the brand name "Shakespeare" and its first location in England. Just as one is free to build and rebuild imaginary worlds as long as it is with LEGO bricks, one is free to build and rebuild Shakespeare — as long as one remembers and acknowledges the authority of its primary roots. One may be free to be "original," so long as one pays tribute to the "origin." This is fair enough, but what is surprising is that LEGO — an enterprise that one would have thought very far from the Shakespeare heritage and industry — seems to encapsulate the very tension at the core of Shakespeare studies. The presence of the Shakespeare minifigure in The LEGO Movie may be less fleeting than profoundly eloquent and revelatory.

NOTES 1. Special thanks to François Guerrin for sharing his LEGO scholarship with us. 2. See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1490017/?ref_=nv_sr_2 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1490017/?ref_=nv_sr_2) [accessed 28 April 2018]. 3. A presentation of the Shakespeare minifigure by a LEGO fan is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCP7VHC1Yc0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCP7VHC1Yc0). 4. A presentation of the game by a LEGO fan is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ErkpBuz50w (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ErkpBuz50w). 5. The Guardian, 19 February 2014. Available online at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2014/feb/19/classic-literature-lego-in- pictures-dracula-romeo-and-juliet (http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2014/feb/19/classic-literature-lego-in- pictures-dracula-romeo-and-juliet) [accessed 6 September 2015]. 6. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBCBluq5Js (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBCBluq5Js) [accessed 16 May 2016], 442 views. 7. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Zz4dXY6_U (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Zz4dXY6_U) [accessed 16 May 2016], 8,316 views. 8. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfdcL8CBRbY

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(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfdcL8CBRbY) [accessed 16 May 2016], 154 views. 9. Available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2OTPwT22k (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2OTPwT22k) [accessed 16 May 2016], 9 films (Cor, TC, Tit, JC, Oth, KL, Ham, Rom, and Mac), between 1061 views (Romeo and Juliet) and 100 views (Coriolanus) 10. Several layers of reduction-adaptation appear in a LEGO video of the Reduced Shakespeare Company Rap of Othello at the following address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2OTPwT22k (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2OTPwT22k) [accessed 1 April 2018]. 11. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18F8MNsx3Uc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18F8MNsx3Uc) [accessed 16 May 2015], 786 views. 12. In May 2013, Mariangela Tempera organized an international conference in Ferrara entitled "Shakespeare in Tatters." 13. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uksiib-HLrk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uksiib-HLrk) [accessed 16 May 2016], 1,248 views. 14. Amy Scott-Douglass shared her work on Shakespeare (especially Othello) and Star Wars at the International Shakespeare Conference, during a seminar convened by Brian Walsh (Stratford-upon-Avon, August 2014). 15. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aksAMwDeJEc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aksAMwDeJEc) [accessed 16 May 2016], 372 views. 16. Available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUDyd8KQcbk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUDyd8KQcbk) [accessed 16 May 2016], 129,838 views. 17. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAUK0Fgb6_s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAUK0Fgb6_s) [accessed 16 May 2016], 145 views. 18. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2OTPwT22k (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2OTPwT22k), accessed 16 May 2016], 267 views. 19. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC-f0drvdmM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC-f0drvdmM), accessed 16 May 2016], 614,342 views. 20. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1U0STyAnDI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1U0STyAnDI) [accessed 6 September 2015], 202 views. 21. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQjzWbGKp5w (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQjzWbGKp5w) [accessed 16 May 2016], 24,678 views.

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22. For a thorough analysis of these Brick Shakespeare books, see Sarah Guizal's M. Phil thesis (IRCL, Montpellier, 2015). 23. LEGOLAND Model Maker Nev Smith has admitted: "We have to glue all of our LEGO models. We use a solvent-based plastic weld. It heats the bricks up so the edges bind together. Obviously it has to be very strong to withstand weather conditions." See https://www.facebook.com/notes/official-legoland-windsor/your- questions-answered-by-legoland-model-maker-nev-smith-part-2/497439006912 (https://www.facebook.com/notes/official-legoland-windsor/your-questions- answered-by-legoland-model-maker-nev-smith-part-2/497439006912) [accessed 3 April 2018]. 24. "LEGO" comes from the Danish Leg godt, which means "play well." 25. Many thanks to Amy Scott-Douglass for this idea. This article stems from the seminar convened by Brian Walsh on "Adaptation and originality in Shakespeare films" (International Shakespeare Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon, August 2014). Many thanks to the seminar's contributors for their useful feedback on the first version of this article. 26. Many defenders of "gender neutral" toys have denounced the release of these "LEGO Friends," sets designed for girls. 27. Available online at: http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/258002 (http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/258002) [accessed 16 May 2016]. 28. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k7g8IBHiYE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k7g8IBHiYE) [accessed 25 April 2016]. 29. Many thanks to Douglas Lanier for this reflection.

REFERENCES Booth, Paul. 2010. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Burke, Lynn. 2000. "Fox Wants Buffy Fan Sites Slain." Wired, March. Available online at: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/34563 (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/34563) [accessed 6 July 2013]. Calbi, Maurizio. 2013. Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and London: Macmillan. Carson, Christie. 2014. "Creating a Critical Model for the Twenty-first Century." In Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice. Edited by Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 226- 37. de Certeau, Michel. 1980. L'Invention du quotidien, I. Arts de faire. Paris: Union Générale d'Éditions.

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Desmet, Christy. 2009. "Teaching Shakespeare with YouTube." English Journal 99.1 (September): 65-70. Dobson, Michael. 2011. Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doescher, Ian. 2013. William Shakespeare's Star Wars. Philadelphia: Quirk Books. Fiske, John. 1992. "The Cultural Economy of Fandom." In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Edited by Lisa A. Lewis. London: Routledge. 30- 49. Hatchuel, Sarah. 2015. "The Shakespearean Films of the '90s: Afterlives in Transmedia in the 21st Century." Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 33. Available online at: http://shakespeare.revues.org/2945 (http://shakespeare.revues.org/2945) [accessed 4 September 2015]. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge. Holland, Peter. 2009. "Performing Shakespeare for the Web Community." In Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace. Edited by Alexa Alice Joubin and Charles S. Ross. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. 252-62. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Kustritz, Anne. 2014. "Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids." TV/Series 6 (December): 225-61. Available online at: https://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/331 (https://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/331) [accessed 4 September 2015]. Lanier, Douglas. 2002. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipkowitz, Daniel. 2009. The LEGO Book. London, New York, Melbourne, Munich, and Delhi: Dorling Kindersley Publishing. Martell, Nevin. 2009. Standing Small: A Celebration of 30 Years of the LEGO Minifigure. New York: DK Publishing. Mayer, Jean-Christophe, William H. Sherman, Stuart Sillars, and Margaret Vasileiou, eds. 2013. Shakespearean Configurations. Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 21. Available online at: http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-21/00-Contents.htm (http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-21/00-Contents.htm) [accessed 28 April 2018]. McCann, John, Monica Sweeney, and Becky Thomas. 2014. Brick Shakespeare: The Comedies — A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew. New York: Skyhorse Publishing.

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McCann, John, Monica Sweeney, and Becky Thomas. 2013. Brick Shakespeare: The Tragedies — Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. Moran, Lee. 2016. "Lego Marks Anniversary of Shakespeare's Death in a Typically Awesome Way." Huffington Post 22 April. Available online at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lego-william- shakespeare_us_5719de71e4b0d0042da8cfaf?utm_hp_ref=arts (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lego-william- shakespeare_us_5719de71e4b0d0042da8cfaf?utm_hp_ref=arts) [accessed 16 May 2016]. O'Neill, Stephen. 2014. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Rose, Frank. 2012. Buzz [The Art of Immersion]. Translated by Antoine Monvoisin. Paris: Sonatine. Saint-Gelais, Richard. 2011. Fictions transfuges: La transfictionnalité et ses enjeux. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Sinfield, Alan. 1992. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, Ayanna. 2015. " Othello/YouTube." CUP Online Resources. In Shakespeare on Screen: Othello. Edited by Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne- Guerrin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available online at: http://www.cambridge.org/files/4714/3047/5577/Youtube_Othello_- _Ayanna_Thompson.pdf (http://www.cambridge.org/files/4714/3047/5577/Youtube_Othello_- _Ayanna_Thompson.pdf) [accessed 28 March 2018]. World Shakespeare Congress. 2016. Call for Papers.

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The New Hamlet and the New Woman: A Shakespearean Mashup in (/current) 1902

JONATHAN BURTON, WHITTIER COLLEGE (/previous)

ABSTRACT In exploring one extraordinary "Shakespearean" production that took place on the Smith family farm in Peoria in 1902, this essay suggests that our histories of Shakespeare might be enriched by scholarship that looks beyond academic criticism and professional theater history. The New Hamlet, credited to William Hawley Smith and The Smith Family Farmers, suggests that rather than being the site of strutting, bellowing hams, out-Heroding Herod, amateur and peripheral performance could be a testing ground and proleptic herald of interpretations too novel or drastic for the professional sector. For The New Hamlet — whose title signals the play's interest in the turn-of-the-century idea of the New Woman — offers a feminist critique not only of Shakespeare's most celebrated play, but also of the critical, theatrical, and social conventions that upheld its reputation. What is more, The New Hamlet offers that critique more than half a century before professional critics and theater practitioners would take up similar arguments.

Even before Groucho Marx asked, in A Night at the Opera (1935), "Will it play in Peoria?" the central Illinois city was notorious in American theatrical culture as the quintessential site of mainstream, pedestrian taste. If it will play in Peoria, it was suggested, it will play anywhere, since residents of Peoria are alleged to lack the cosmopolitanism and worldliness of the denizens of larger cities. This essay may not restore the reputation of maligned Peorians, but in exploring one extraordinary "Shakespearean" production that took place on the Smith family farm in Peoria in 1902, it suggests that our histories of Shakespeare might be enriched by scholarship that looks beyond academic criticism and professional theater history.

The New Hamlet, credited to William Hawley Smith and The Smith Family Farmers, suggests that rather than being the site of strutting, bellowing hams, out-Heroding Herod, amateur and peripheral performance could

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be a testing ground and proleptic herald of interpretations too novel or drastic for the professional sector. For The New Hamlet — whose title signals the play's interest in the turn-of-the-century idea of the New Woman — offers a feminist critique not only of Shakespeare's most celebrated play, but also of the critical, theatrical and social conventions that upheld its reputation. What is more, The New Hamlet offers that critique more than half a century before professional critics and theater practitioners would take up similar arguments.

THE ADVANTAGE OF AMATEURISM The case for taking seriously amateur Shakespearean performance has been made most emphatically by Michael Dobson, whose 2011 study argues that "at several important points in theatrical history the geographical scope and social inclusiveness of the amateur theatre have dwarfed those of the commercial and subsidized playhouses" (Dobson 2011, 1). In accounting for the surprising richness that Dobson begins to chronicle, we might turn to Edward Said's Reith Lectures, which celebrate amateurism in contrast to an expertise that must "be certified by the proper authorities; they instruct you in speaking the right language, citing the right authorities, holding down the right territory" (Said 1993, 7). Similarly, I want to consider how amateurism might confer a sense of liberty from the codes, conventions or protocols of theater or academic scholarship — freeing the amateur to tramp interpretive pathways across areas considered by professional standards as inappropriate or unproductive terra prohibita.

In offering a play that proposed to update Hamlet in 1902, the Smiths faced several significant obstructions. To begin, audiences of the time tended to assess Shakespearean performances based on how closely they hewed to traditions established by eminent stage actors such as Edwin Booth (1833-93) and Henry Irving (1838-1905). Consequently, variation in the professional theater was uncommon, and innovative interpretation was effectively discouraged outside of the burlesque tradition. Likewise, the scholarly procedures of professional literary criticism have always slowed innovation by obliging critics to review and engage past scholarship of their field. While this does not mean that scholarship cannot advance and generate new inquiries, the etiquette and protocols of literary criticism have often meant that when a question finds purchase, its grip can be extremely difficult to loosen. Thus, by the time the Smiths set out to work on Hamlet, critics were already obliged to take up the perennial questions of Hamlet's delay and Gertrude's adultery and/or incest.

But the Smiths did not present themselves as professional actors, critics, or playwrights. Instead, they circumvented convention and protocol by presenting themselves as farmers, an identity immediately signaled by the The New Hamlet's extraordinary binding. Produced initially for distribution to the 500 guests of a "garden party" performance set "under the haw tree" (Smith Family 1902, cover boards) at the Smith farm in Peoria, Illinois, the book is bound between wooden boards cut from no. 2 fencing. The title is printed on the board in the style of a livestock brand, along with a note specifying that the play was "composed by Shakespeare and the Smith Family" and then "done into a book . . . by hand, at the barn, on the farm, by farmers" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, cover boards). In eschewing a more conventional cover of cloth on pasteboard (as well as an ornamental stamp or gilding), and insisting on the rustic identity of its creators, The New Hamlet immediately announces its distance from the professional theater and the commercial publishing industry.

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The New Hamlet, Cover Boards

Of course, there is more than a little implausibility in the notion of a family of Illinois farmers hosting five- hundred guests and presenting each with a hand-made book. After all, who was harvesting the corn? Certainly not William Hawley Smith, who had garnered national attention on a country-wide lecture tour after giving up positions as a school teacher and principal. Smith would go on to serve as a county school superintendent and author of numerous books on education, including All the Children of All the People: A Study of the Attempt to Educate Everybody, where he would argue that Shakespeare's plays . . . are no longer popular upon the boards, not because we have no actors great enough to present them, but because the spirit of democracy has taken such a hold upon the minds of the people of to-day that they have lost interest in what happened to kings and queens, as such, in the days gone by . . . What he wrote was once great literature. Both as to form and in spirit he made a most perfect record of the experiences and ideals of the royalty he dealt with. The only trouble is that many of the experiences and ideals he depicted are no longer worthy of being perpetuated. (Smith 1912, 299) William's wife, Ellen Galusha Smith, was also no mere farmer. Descended from a prominent New England family that moved to Illinois where her father was appointed one of the first trustees of the University of Illinois, Ellen authored a book on embroidery and was a charter member of the Peoria Woman's Club, which pushed for suffrage in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Smiths counted among their friends Walt Whitman, Grover Cleveland, Adlai Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In other words, the Smiths were farmers like George W. and Laura Bush are ranchers.

Why then would the accomplished Smith family present themselves as simple farmers? In answering this question, I want to indicate how the guise of amateurism might enable a learned, oppositional stance to scholarly and theatrical traditions. For, as Said suggests, while the unbounded amateur never circumvents authority and power altogether, he or she can elect to address authority not "as a professional supplicant" but instead as "its unrewarded, amateurish conscience" (Said 1994, 83). Accordingly, The New Hamlet offers an instance where "amateur" performance grapples with Shakespeare in ways that are arguably more ambitious and forward thinking than what was found among professional theater companies and even foretells the work of later literary critics. The New Hamlet insists on an alternative reading of Shakespeare's mothers, and

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particularly Queen Gertrude, that would buck both critical and performance traditions, anticipating by more than half a century the work of pioneering feminist scholars.

In nineteenth-century terms, the Smiths' play might be characterized as a melodramatic burlesque or travesty. Yet the contemporary term "mashup" might be a more helpful descriptor given the play's title page, which presents The New Hamlet, intermixed and interwoven with a revised version of Romeo and Juliet.

The New Hamlet, Title Page A mashup combines and modifies existing works to create a derivative text, highlighting the shared contours, motifs and sometimes the shortcomings of its sources. The New Hamlet borrows characters and lines from two of Shakespeare's best known tragedies, while subjecting them to the square-dancing call of "cross over and change partners."1 That is, after the prologue complains that Shakespeare's "doubly grewsome plays / Of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet" are not suited "to times like ours to-day" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 11), Hamlet is partnered with Juliet, and Romeo is united with Ophelia such that all might live — as an epigraph attributed to "Wandering Willie" suggests — "happily ever afterwards" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 7).2 This is not particularly heady stuff on the face of it, but it is interesting for its suggestion that Shakespeare's plays might be in some ways outmoded and that to "bring these lovers strictly up to date" requires the working of "[t]wo wise old mothers" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 12).

BRINGING SHAKESPEARE "UP TO DATE" Of course, Shakespeare's plays are hardly known for the stratagems of "wise old mothers." Indeed, in puzzling over, "Where are the mothers in Shakespeare's plays?" Mary Beth Rose famously noted that the few mothers who appear in Shakespeare's plays are either "resolutely limited to the private realm, inscribed entirely in terms of early love and nurture" or alternatively demonized as "dangerous" interlopers in public life (M. Rose 1991, 313).3 Lady Montague fits obviously among those mothers who live and die solely for their children; she literally dies of grief upon Romeo's banishment from Verona. The case of Queen Gertrude is more complicated in as much as textual, performance, and critical traditions from the nineteenth century up to the 1980s all tended to shuttle Denmark's queen between the poles of nurturing mother and self-indulgent sensualist.

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In neither Gertrude nor Lady Montague do we find a strong candidate for the roles imagined by the Smiths. Yet in rendering these two characters "wise old mothers," the Smiths were neither ignoring critical and performance traditions, nor accepting their terms. Instead, The New Hamlet's insistence on bringing the plays "up to date" meant putting gender on the critical agenda by imagining alternative roles for women and insisting upon the need to change the questions one might ask of Shakespeare's plays. By focusing on mothers specifically, The New Hamlet followed the rhetorical strategies of the New Woman, leveraging motherhood's revered place in the cultural matrix into questions about literary types, social change, and women's public voices.4

The customary use of the definite article before the term "New Woman" can be misleading because, as Marianne Berger Woods points out, "[t]here is no single vision or image of the New Woman" (2009, 5). If scholars agree that the term gained currency in the mid-1890s, they have also shown that it "could signal multiple and contradictory positions" (Patterson 2008, 2), denoting for some the champions of progressive politics and harnessed by others to denunciations of female depravity. In her most stereotypical form, the American New Woman was college educated and believed in women's right to work in professions traditionally reserved for men; she often sought a public role in occupations that would putatively improve society. Assertive and outspoken, the New Woman championed women's right to political selfhood through the vote, to economic autonomy, and to prioritize intellectual or artistic aspirations over domestic concerns. (Rich 2009, 1) But beyond this primary understanding, the term conjured an incongruous range of identities, including "prohibitionist, clubwoman, college girl, American girl, socialist, capitalist, anarchist, pickpocket, bicyclist, barren spinster, mannish woman, outdoor girl, birth-control advocate, modern girl, eugenicist, flapper, blues woman, lesbian, and vamp" (Patterson 2008, 1). So when the Smiths gesture toward the term in their play's title, they engage discussions about Shakespeare's women and also about the contested idea of the New Woman.

These two topics had intersected previously in one Philadelphia "woman question" playwright's 1898 description of Shakespeare as the "prophet and herald of the 'new woman'" (Groff 1898, 242). Yet the Smiths' play suggests instead that Shakespeare's work contributed to a centuries-long tradition that the New Woman sought to dismantle. Their reimagined iterations of Queen Gertrude and Lady Montague exemplify the figure Molly Ladd-Taylor calls the "progressive maternalist" (1994, 7), reconciling sentimental maternalists' emphasis on women's duty to care for their families and feminists' insistence on women's self-fulfillment. Each enters the public realm of the play on the grounds that "women had a special capacity for nurture by virtue of being women" and consequently a "political obligation" to shape the nation's citizenry (Ladd-Taylor 1994, 75).

"LIKE A SHEEP IN THE SUN": GERTRUDE AMONG THE CRITICS For the half-century preceding The New Hamlet, critical response to Queen Gertrude was oriented around three domestic questions: (1) Did Gertrude commit adultery? (2) Was she in any way culpable for her husband's death? and (3) Did she remarry too soon?5 Answers to these questions were concerned above all with determining if, how, and to what extent Gertrude betrayed her husband and son, and the critical consensus was that she was too shallow to be held fully responsible. Of course, it does not help that Gertrude speaks just 157 of the play's (Q2) 4,042 lines, a situation that has lead Richard Levin to conclude that "Gertrude is the victim of a bad press, not only on the stage and screen and in the critical arena, but also within Shakespeare's text" (Levin 2008, 322). http://borrowers.uga.edu/783863/show Page 5 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

In his 1848 Lectures on Shakespeare, the influential American editor and critic Henry Norman Hudson found Gertrude "a mixture of good and bad . . . dragged along in the terrible train of consequences which her own guilt had a hand in starting" (Hudson 1848, 131). In the same year that Hudson published his lectures, Edward Strachey, in the first monograph devoted entirely to Hamlet, described Gertrude as similarly passive. For Strachey, Gertrude was an exemplum of "those women but too common now and always, whose proper humanity has been but little awakened and developed." She is likened to a "polished, but vacant mirror" (Strachey 1848, 32), as virtuous only as the husband she reflects (Strachey 1848, 32).

By the last quarter of the century, Gertrude's alleged passivity was likely to be seen as a mark of her moral indolence. Thus, for Edward Dowden Gertrude was "a lover of ease . . . incapable of genuine passion . . . self indulgent, sensuous, [and] as remote from true woman's virtue as Claudius is from the virtues of royal manhood" (Dowden 1876, 137). This is the tradition that would culminate in A. C. Bradley's famous condemnation of Gertrude as "very dull and very shallow": She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and, to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage 'o'er-hasty' (ii. ii. 57), she was untroubled by any shame at the feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making everything comfortable. (Bradley 1904, 167) Performance and textual practices up to the point of the Smiths' production would reflect and uphold the period's critical assessments of Queen Gertrude. Actresses playing Gertrude were most interested in "the scandalous liaison between Gertrude and Claudius" and emphasized her voluptuousness and sexuality (Hapgood 1999, 53). To make matters worse, from the middle of the eighteenth through the first quarter of the twentieth century, Gertrude's already slight part was significantly cut in both promptbooks and printed editions of the play.6 As Ellen O'Brien has demonstrated, "the most devastating cut occurred in the closet scene itself, eliminating both Hamlet's appeal to the Queen not to reveal that his madness is feigned and her vow to do so" (O'Brien 1992, 31). Alterations such as this meant that Gertrude was never seen to move closer to Hamlet and away from Claudius, and consequently appeared to be "an unresponsive, mindless figure, momentarily distraught by Hamlet's closet scene harangue, but ultimately unaffected by it" (O'Brien 1992, 34). Thus, even as Hamlet — particularly as incarnated by stage luminaries such as Booth and Irving — became a figure of increasing depth and delicacy, Gertrude grew increasingly "weak, sensuous, and affectionate."7 Even in those rare productions where Ophelia might be imagined "a woman of strong passions and fine intelligence who succumbs to a terrible catastrophe,"8 actresses playing Gertrude tended to underscore only the Queen's mindless sensuality.

The notion of a vacuous Gertrude maintained its hold on academic scholarship long after the Smiths' performance of The New Hamlet. When Carolyn Heilbrun wrote in 1957 on "The Character of Hamlet's Mother," she set the agenda for later feminist work on representations of women in Shakespearean drama, but even as she did so she concerned herself primarily with defending Gertrude against the charge that she was a dim sensualist. While addressing the same three questions about Gertrude's adultery and "o'er hasty marriage," Heilbrun offered a point-by-point response to several of the most celebrated Shakespeareans of the century, including Bradley, Harley Granville-Barker, and J. Dover Wilson. More particularly, Heilbrun objected to the received view of the Queen as "well-meaning but shallow . . . incapable of any sustained rational process, superficial and flighty" (Heilbrun 1957, 201). Her Gertrude was instead a "strong-minded, intelligent, succinct [and] sensible woman," flawed only in as much as she is "passion's slave" (202, 206). Heilbrun was particularly adamant that the play offers no convincing evidence of Gertrude's adultery.

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Likewise, when Rebecca Smith's essay, "A Heart Cleft in Twain: The Dilemma of Shakespeare's Gertrude," appeared in the landmark collection The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1980), it focused on Gertrude's few lines to argue against traditional depictions of Gertrude as either "a soft, obedient, dependent, unimaginative woman" or a "temptress and destroyer — self-indulgent and soulless" (R. Smith 1980, 194, 207). If presented according to her own words and deeds, Smith argued, Gertrude instead appears as "another stereotypical character: nurturing, loving, careful mother and wife" (R. Smith 1980, 207). If this reading could not transform Gertrude into a figure for feminist emulation, it was offered as evidence that Gertrude also could not be held responsible for her son's suffering.

Ten years later, O'Brien's work on the textual and performance traditions would follow similar lines, indicating how nineteenth-century excisions obliterated a more thoughtful, sensitive and maternal Gertrude, whose allegiance to Hamlet trumps her affection for Claudius. In sum, when feminist critics in the second half of the twentieth century responded to what they saw as two centuries of mishandling Gertrude, scholarly protocols often lead them back to the same old questions about adultery, culpability, and maternal obligation. Consequently, their defenses of Gertrude essentially succeeded to dislodge her from the role of self-indulgent sensualist only to reinstate her as a self-sacrificing mother, or precursor to the Victorian-era angel in the house.9

Two important exceptions to this practice may be found in the work of Jacqueline Rose and Lisa Jardine, each of whom takes as her starting point T. S. Eliot's famous pronouncement of Hamlet's artistic failure as a result of the play's lack of an adequate objective correlative for its title character's melancholy. Rose argues that "[w]hat requires explanation . . . is not that Gertrude is an inadequate object for the emotions generated in the play, but the fact that she is expected to support them" (J. Rose 1985, 103). If Hamlet evades satisfying interpretation, Rose suggests, it is because subjectivity itself is incoherent and cannot be distilled down to a simple narrative. The problem then is not aesthetic failure (on the contrary, it may be Hamlet's instantiation of the incoherence of subjectivity that draws our continued interest) but rather that femininity is blamed for the incoherence of modern subjectivity. Put another way, where earlier critics accepted certain parameters for analysis in their attempts to defend Gertrude, Rose drew attention to the patriarchal bias in the questions being asked about Gertrude. The problem is not Gertrude's inadequacy, she demonstrated, so much as the inadequacy of patriarchal notions of femininity.

Like Rose, Jardine is interested in shifting the focus from Gertrude specifically to the cultures in which she is textually embedded, read, and interpreted. Thus, for Jardine, the issue is not merely whether Gertrude has "behaved monstrously and unnaturally towards her first husband and her son" but the fact that "her guilt — in direct contrast to Claudius's — is culturally constructed so as to represent her as responsible without allowing her agency" (Jardine 1995, 268). In other words, to whatever extent we find Gertrude guilty of the charges laid against her, we must recognize as well the conditions of her oppression in a community that requires her fidelity to a deceased husband and "deprives her of any but the proxy influence her remarriage gives her, over her son's future" (Jardine 1995, 269).

"KEEP YOUR UNDERCLOTHING ON A WHILE": THE NEW GERTRUDE Both Rose's and Jardine's work have since been regularly anthologized and cited as milestones in Hamlet criticism. But the questions raised by Rose and Jardine about the limited approaches to Gertrude might not seem quite so revolutionary if our critical histories took account of amateur, or voluntary sector, productions. Written for a non-academic audience in 1902, The New Hamlet of course features none of the sophisticated theoretical apparatus of Rose's or Jardine's work. However, read in relation to the criticism of its day, the play similarly insists upon a failure in the critical status quo by drawing attention to the ways in which an

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unfathomable Hamlet was unnecessarily contingent upon an insubstantial Gertrude. In other words, The New Hamlet shares T. S. Eliot's sense that Shakespeare's Gertrude is inadequate, not because she makes the play an aesthetic failure but rather because she fails to represent the capacity of women to enact change. Thus, The New Hamlet insists that the problem is not simply how Gertrude had been conceived, but more broadly the ways in which femininity had been conceived. Consequently, at the core of The New Hamlet is a new Gertrude.

From the outset, The New Hamlet announces its refusal to get hung up on the same old questions about Gertrude's fidelity or to answer them with close readings stressing textual fidelity. After all, it was fidelity to the text that limited so many critics to discussions of spousal or maternal fidelity in the first place. Instead, The New Hamlet signals its plan to ask new questions from its opening lines, where Hamlet muses, "To do, or not to do, that is the question" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 13).

In substituting the pragmatic for the ontological, the Smiths prepare the way for a Gertrude who refuses to let melodrama pass for melancholia, and a play that is largely unconcerned with faithfulness to the Shakespearean text. This is not to say that the questions of incest and infidelity are ignored. But when Hamlet raises the issue of incest in the very first scene of the play, with his pointed reminder, "You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 16), an unflappable Gertrude brushes aside the implicit accusation with the reply, "Just keep your underclothing on a while, / . . . I am your mother, and you are my son, / The king, your father's dead" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 16). In moving the closet scene confrontation to the opening moments of their play, the Smiths at once acknowledge and snuff out the questions dogging discussions of Gertrude.

In refusing to furnish a deferential Gertrude, The New Hamlet demonstrates the extent to which the profound interiority of Shakespeare's prince is fostered within the confines of patriarchal ideology. Hamlet is not simply the prototype of modern subjectivity; he is a function of an overarching gender system that encourages men to explore their own complex subjectivities and women to nurture masculine self-discovery. When denied a pliable Gertrude, Hamlet's introspection looks more like adolescent self-indulgence that should be put in check. Consequently, when the prince warns, "Mother, sit down, and I will wring your heart," Gertrude is not overcome, but instead retorts, "Hamlet, keep still, or I will box your ears" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 17).

This queen's response to her "callow" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 17) son reflects a shift in American households, documented by social historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, from paternal to maternal authority (Mintz and Kellogg 1988, 117). But more importantly, Gertrude's uncowed response amounts to a refusal of the culturally constructed choice between indulgent sensualism and unobtrusive martyrdom. Choosing a third path, this Gertrude insists, upon hearing Hamlet's command to compare the pictures of his father and uncle, that they "proceed to business" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 17).

In proceeding to business, The New Hamlet's Gertrude also proceeds to take her role beyond the strictures that confined her in academic discourse, in the professional theater, and more broadly in turn-of-the-century American culture. At a time when only six percent of married women worked outside of the home, "business," remained a predominantly masculine bailiwick whose negative effects were to be offset by women (mothers in particular) tasked with providing moral uplift at home (Mintz and Kellogg 1988, 129). Nevertheless in the decade prior to the The New Hamlet, women's participation in the paid labor force had doubled (Mintz and Kellogg 1988, 111). So, if The New Hamlet summarily asserts Gertrude's innocence, it does so in order that it can proceed to emphasize that the measure of a woman is not her fidelity but her activity in the world. http://borrowers.uga.edu/783863/show Page 8 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

The New Hamlet, Last Page Thus where Shakespeare's Gertrude will passively "wish" that Ophelia's beauty is the cause of Hamlet's behavior and "hope [her] virtues / Will bring him to his wonted way again" (Shakespeare 1997, Hamlet 3.1.42-43), the new Gertrude takes initiative.

Disentwined from isolated domesticity, the new Gertrude has "traveled far," read deeply, and extracted lessons from American politics. Recognizing that Hamlet and Ophelia are "like walking drug stores," she instructs her son to find instead a wife "whose vim / Shall counteract your muggy natured gall" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 25). Even as she debates her son, Gertrude repeatedly draws authority and credibility from precepts, expectations, and conventions about protective maternity ("I married with you, uncle . . . to save you" [Smith and Smith Family 1902, 21]), a rhetorical strategy that encourages her son to rethink the gendered status quo. Consequently, whereas Shakespeare's Hamlet responds to his mother's plea to remain in Denmark with a qualified, "I shall in my best obey you, Madam," The New Hamlet responds to his mother's insistence that he depart by conceding, "'Tis your right to command; my duty to obey" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 26).

Gertrude's authority derives not only from rewritten lines, but also from reassigned lines. For example, after warning Hamlet, "'Tis a tough job to be a king!" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 18), Gertrude proceeds to speak thirteen lines cut from Richard II's best known speech on kingship, warning that "within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king/Death keeps his court" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 19- 20). Even lines belonging to Hamlet are reallocated to or rewritten for Gertrude so that, for example, it is Gertrude who speaks of a "sea of troubles" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 22); and it is Gertrude who recognizes that "[t]he times are out of joint," that "'Twere cursed spite / Should any green hand try to set them right" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 21), and that "there's a divinity / That shapes our ends" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 61). All told, Gertrude speaks 164 lines (86%) to Hamlet's seventeen in this revised closet scene; in comparison, she speaks forty-two lines (23%) to Hamlet's 144 in the 1623 Folio. The effect is not only to blur the lines between men and women, kings and queens, but also to suggest that women may be self-determining and philosophically practiced, or "wise old mothers."

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Even as a politically savvy Gertrude protects Hamlet from a future for which he is unprepared, she refuses to coddle her son or indulge his moodiness. More forceful than her despondent son, this self-assured Gertrude embraces the turn-of-the-century rejection of Victorian child-rearing practices as she lays bare the naiveté in Hamlet's dejection.10 Deprived of female deference, Hamlet's melancholy is not a sign of depth, but rather of defeatism and inexperience. Convinced that he and Ophelia are "dupes of fate" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 14), Hamlet fails to see that the ghost is nothing more than a ruse concocted by Horatio and Marcellus to elevate the man who might appoint them to more prominent positions. In contrast, the Queen who elsewhere was condemned for her vacuous sensuality is here circumspect, perceptive, and pragmatic, instructing her son in the political gamesmanship that allowed turn-of-the-century Republicans to consistently triumph over their Democratic political rivals. The rich topicality in Gertrude's speech — her references to assassinated presidents, American foreign policy, supreme court rulings, literary magazines, and financial scandals — is not simply a means of fusing Shakespeare to contemporary American life; it points to Gertrude's learned engagement with a public sphere for which Hamlet's "green hand" is unprepared.

The problem with Hamlet, as the Smiths present him, is not that he thinks too much, but rather that he does not think enough of women. When he confronts Gertrude in Shakespeare's language and she responds in a lithe and robust, American vernacular, Hamlet sounds mechanical, like a boy reciting scripted lines. And this is precisely the Smiths' point: Like the play that shares his name, Hamlet is too apt to thoughtlessly follow a patriarchal script that indulges male introspection while imagining women solely as domestic helpmeets. Thus, when Gertrude points out the way in which her marriage to Claudius steers Hamlet away from political wreckage, Hamlet is astonished while Gertrude is exasperated: Hamlet. Oh, mother, you are wise; I never thought — Queen. Of course you never thought! (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 21) The Queen's frustration points to a long history of forgiving Hamlet's misogyny and the resilience of a culture that limits and undervalues women's wisdom and place in the world.

It should be perfectly clear at this point that The New Hamlet offered neither a scholarly commentary on Shakespeare's play in the form of Bradleian character criticism, nor an interpretation of the Gertrude part as it might be played by an actress. At a time when progressive groups were advocating for women's increased presence in civic life, the Smiths recognized that countering a vision of Gertrude whose scope had grown increasingly narrow in criticism and performance would require breaking substantially with mainstream, professional approaches to Hamlet. Consequently, they dispensed with any attempt to offer a reading or production of Shakespeare's play and recalibrated the methods of the burlesque theater to a studious critique of antifeminism.

Burlesque performances incorporating characters or speeches from more than one Shakespearean text can be traced back to the Restoration. However short, comic burlesques became particularly popular in the nineteenth century.11 Interludes bringing together Hamlet, Macbeth, Shylock, Othello, Romeo, Juliet, and Richard III appealed in particular to audiences whose cultural capital was confirmed by their laughter at in- jokes, as well as those seeking to distinguish themselves from ethnic groups with whom they shared a certain economic status.

Much of the humor in these performances comes from the supposed incompatibility of certain social types with particular acts or idioms. What this means is that the burlesque often policed social boundaries, suggesting for example, the incompatibility of Irish- or African-Americans with Shakespeare and hence highbrow culture (MacDonald 1994, passim). Interestingly, The New Hamlet's "intermixture" of Hamlet with Romeo and Juliet retains the humor of earlier burlesques but uses it instead as a mechanism to unsettle social http://borrowers.uga.edu/783863/show Page 10 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

boundaries. In this respect, The New Hamlet looks forward to early twenty-first century music mashups more than it looks back to nineteenth-century burlesques.

MASHUP, CIRCA 1902 In its most common form, the mashup interlaces digitally two texts drawn from different genres, as in music producer Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse)'s notorious Grey Album (2004), which knits together the experimental pop of The Beatles' White Album and Jay Z's hip-hop classic, The Black Album. The title of Danger Mouse's mashup is misleading in as much as it suggests a middle ground somewhere between its two sources. It is more accurate to say that by obscuring the seams between its source texts, a mashup confounds generic boundaries, reminding us of the quarantining effects of generic classification. Thus, in his review of The Grey Album, Phillip Gunderson draws on the work of Giles Deleuze to suggest that the mashup "forms transversal relations between genres that have been arborescently structured by the recording industry" (Gunderson 2004, np). Crucial, then, is the mashup's typical locus of production. Working most frequently outside of a corporate production studio, on a personal computer with relatively inexpensive, commercially- available software, the mashup artist is not bound to conventional ideas about marketing and profits. Consequently, he/she is free to liberate a work "from an excessively restrictive horizon" of associations, contexts and expectations (Gunderson 2004, np).

In emphasizing its non-cosmopolitan, amateur origins, The New Hamlet resembles the mashup that circumvents conventions and expectations. And like a conventional mashup that draws each of its pieces beyond the confines of its generic origins, The New Hamlet draws Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet beyond the strictures of patriarchal tragedy, liberating both plays' mothers in particular from restrictive roles and allowing them "to make comedies out of tragedies" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 6).

To consider properly the effects of a mashup in 1902, we have to imagine a theatrical culture prior to the experimentation of Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard. Even those theatergoers who were familiar with pre- twentieth century metadrama (e.g., Hamlet) would have lacked our ease with and fluency in the juxtapositions, sampling and shifts of cut-and-paste culture. So, where the impact of mashups today is actually muted by a decade's (arguably a half century's) experience and familiarity, the effects of interwoven texts — particularly when those texts are revered — on an audience in 1902 would probably be considerably more intense. But whereas the generic contradiction (hiphop vs. pop; folk music vs. house music; or nineteenth-century fiction vs. the zombie narrative) in typical mashups confounds established ideas about categorical difference, the Smiths' play is, ironically, an incestuous union, mashing together works drawn from the same genre (tragedy) and author (Shakespeare). So, the result is not a blurring of generic lines, but precisely the opposite.

By intermixing two tragedies, The New Hamlet clarifies the ways in which the ossified conventions of genre limit the scope of our thinking, and particularly our thinking about women. In other words, the play is less concerned with entwining the genealogical lines of two plays than it is committed to demonstrating how, in its imperative to deepen male subjectivity, Shakespearean tragedy collaterally subordinates women. So, in its comic interweaving of Hamlet with Romeo and Juliet — like negative integers multiplied to yield a positive sum — The New Hamlet also asks us to consider what would happen if the women of Shakespeare's tragedies were consistently empowered in the manner of his tragic heroes? What if, instead of being reticent props for the development of articulate and searching men, they were themselves perceptive, vocal, and respected?

"COME OFF THAT PERCH AT ONCE": THE NEW LADY MONTAGUE

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Unlike the play's Shakespearean inspirations, in which hundreds of lines can pass without an utterance from a female character, there is not a single scene in The New Hamlet lacking women. Indeed, women are the engines of all the play's action, and only one scene of the play (the last) includes more than a single male speaker. As a list of scenes with their speakers indicates, the intertwining structure of The New Hamlet foregrounds its women. 1.1 Ophelia, Gertrude and Hamlet 1.2 Juliet, Lady Montague, and Romeo 2.1 Lady Montague and Hamlet 2.2 Gertrude and Romeo 3.1 Juliet and Hamlet 3.2 Ophelia and Romeo 4.1 Juliet and Hamlet 4.2 Ophelia and Romeo 5.1 Romeo, Ophelia, and Gertrude 5.2 Ophelia, Gertrude, Lady Montague, Juliet, Romeo, and Hamlet The explicit mashup of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet begins when Gertrude sends Hamlet away to Verona, shuttling him across play-worlds and into dialogue with her old "schoolmate" (24), Lady Montague: Lady M. Welcome, Lord Hamlet, to our humble house I trust your lordship finds himself in health. Hamlet. I am, dear lady, but indifferent well; And yet I greet your ladyship with love. Lady M. I feel your grief, and know whence comes your woe, Being so near your father's funeral. Hamlet. Pray do not mock me, Madam Montague! You should speak of my mother's wedding. Lady M. Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Ham. Thrift, thrift, dear madam. The funeral bak'd meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven — Lady M. These are but wild and whirling words, my lord. Be not cast down whene'er afflictions come; Remember that the death of sires is common. Your father had a father, and he died; His father, and his father's father so. Be not rebellious at the ways of Fate. We'll cheer you up in this bright land of ours. We have a noble band of young men here, Mercutio, Benvolio and the rest; And fair young maids as well! (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 38-39) Like the play's Gertrude, its Lady Montague is astute and quick-witted. She immediately measures the depth (or shallowness) of Hamlet's melancholic assertion that he is "but indifferent well" and distracts him with the prospect of Verona's "fair young maids" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 38). But what is most noteworthy in this initial moment of intermixture is that while most of Hamlet's lines come directly from Hamlet, Lady Montague does not speak lines assigned to her by Shakespeare, or even lines from Romeo and Juliet. Instead, she appropriates and reshapes lines assigned in Hamlet to Horatio, Gertrude, and Claudius. And where http://borrowers.uga.edu/783863/show Page 12 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

Shakespeare's threesome is unable to redirect an unrelenting Hamlet from destructive remembrance, the Smith's Lady Montague steers this transposed version of Hamlet's act 1, scene 2 toward fellowship and romantic love, or the stuff of festive comedy.

Clearly, this is not Shakespeare's Lady Montague, who speaks only twice in Romeo and Juliet. Nor, for that matter, is this the play that critics have frequently seen as depicting like-minded, young lovers countering a rhetoric of society (Hunter 1986, 120). Indeed, the Smiths' play seeks to unsettle the legacy of Romeo and Juliet no less than it does Hamlet, recognizing that the ideas attached to Shakespeare's "star-cross'd lovers" are no less damaging to women than Hamlet's limited interest in Gertrude.

Much more recently, the notion that Romeo and Juliet together oppose conventional ideas within their culture has been challenged by William McKim, who protests that "writers have paid insufficient attention to the differences between the ways the two protagonists imagine themselves as being in love and the tragic significance of those differences." More particularly, McKim indicates that Romeo's celebrated lyricism in fact aestheticizes a "'death-marked' imagination" that Juliet does not share (McKim 2009, 80). The play's tragedy consists then in Juliet's inability to turn Romeo (and the rest of Verona) from a competitive rhetoric that vindicates self-enhancement even at violent costs.

Scholarly protocols prevent McKim from doing any more than registering a critical lapse. But in approaching Shakespeare's work, nearly a century earlier, as amateurs unbound by the conventions of scholarship or the theater, the Smiths do more than expose and lament a failure to perceive Romeo's faults; they enlist Lady Montague in correcting them. Like her Danish counterpart, this Lady Montague makes apparent the shortcomings of her own son, treating with skepticism the very qualities for which Romeo is often praised while protesting strongly any limits on her own role. She perceives that the Petrarchan lyricism that sweeps up Romeo and Juliet also sweeps them toward tragedy. Hence she instructs her son to "come off that perch at once, / And let me see your feet on solid ground" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 32). For her part, if Juliet does initially share in Romeo's poetic idiom, she learns to approach the ideas embedded in literary tradition with skepticism while negotiating her relationship with Hamlet.

In her first appearance, Lady Montague is returning from a meeting of her "Woman's Club" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 30). This piece of information passes quickly but establishes an important set of associations around Lady Montague. American women's clubs — including Ellen Smith's in Peoria — arose in in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Their members, frequently referred to as "the new women," numbered upwards of two million at the time of The New Hamlet.12 Often through their clubs, the "new women" pursued reform projects and/or lobbied for civic and national legislation in the areas of education, environmental protection, labor conditions, public health, and women's suffrage. Although these projects were not always designed to change social conditions that oppressed women specifically, their successes pointed toward the inadequacy of patriarchal notions of femininity that circumscribed women within domestic space.

Lady Montague is, in fact, returning home from her Woman's Club on the same night that Romeo is coming back from his furtive leap over the Capulet garden walls. Their ensuing exchange asks viewers to consider precisely how the gendering of social roles licenses Romeo's capricious passion while constraining his more industrious mother. On one hand, Romeo's breaching of boundaries is induced by and celebrated within a courtly love tradition. He walks alone in the night, claiming to be piloted by love, and swearing in hyperbolic terms of his passion for Juliet. On the other hand, Lady Montague's solitary nocturnal venture is inconceivable to her son. Indeed, Romeo is so unprepared for the sight of his mother that he mistakes her for a phantom and utters Hamlet's lines upon first seeing the ghost of his father: "I'll speak to it, though hell itself http://borrowers.uga.edu/783863/show Page 13 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

should gape" / And bid me hold my peace!" Romeo's appropriation of Hamlet's apocalyptic imagery suggests the degree to which Lady Montague's evening ramble might disturb convention. Moreover, when Lady Montague responds, "I am thy mother, boy, so don't be scared" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 30), she assumes the place and authority of the paternal voice.

Yet, unlike the ghostly father that demands violence, Lady Montague seeks to redirect her son's misguided affections, drawing him away from the fate reserved for him by Shakespeare's play and unchecked masculine privilege. Thus, when Romeo demands to know why "at this dread hour of the night you should / Be here. Why not at home, and safe in bed?" Lady Montague retorts, "And why not you at home, and safe in bed? / The quip is pertinent, and works both ways" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 30). Lady Montague rejects the dualism that would restrict her to the domestic space while her son leaps walls in pursuit of his desires.

Like their Gertrude, the Smiths' Lady Montague takes an active role in the affairs of her son, recognizing that he and Juliet bring out the mooning romantic in each other and would be better off separated. She dismisses at once the "ancient grudge" of Shakespeare's play, insisting, "I care not she's a Capulet" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 32) only that she's "a spoony, foolish little thing" and that Romeo, who has "never earned a penny in [his] life" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 33), is unprepared to be a husband. And just as Gertrude borrows lines from Shakespearean men, Lady Montague adopts Mercutio's skepticism toward courtly love, mocking her son's gushing and Juliet's "girlish" idea to "cut / Him up in little stars" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 32).

Both Lady Montague and Gertrude are canny tacticians whose actions far exceed those of their Shakespearean originals. But in addition to rejecting Shakespearean circumscription, both move beyond the conventions attached to popular melodramatic heroines of the day. Heroines of melodrama might, as Rosemarie Bank argues, "play an active role in solving the problems that beset them" but who were invariably bound to behave according to strict moral principles and define for others what is right and wrong (Bank 1987, 241). By contrast, Gertrude and Lady Montague embrace strategic deception even when it is ethically dubious. Gertrude counsels her son to allow Claudius to fail in a turbulent era so that he can more easily appear the redeemer upon later ascending the throne. Likewise, Lady Montague, offers shady advice to guide her own son's "errant steps" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 33).

Although her husband is "bankrupt" from his failed speculation in railroad stocks, Lady Montague is crafty enough to instruct Romeo to play the other side: "Be a promoter, Romeo, son of mine! / Exploit some scheme that's based on watered stock" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 35). And just as Hamlet follows his mother's advice, Romeo dutifully abandons Juliet and Verona to go to Denmark at his mother's behest. For her part, Gertrude is able to see right through Romeo's stock scheme and redirect his energies toward a marriage with Ophelia: "He takes me for a dunce . . . Wait till he sees, / What I'll sell him without his agonies! / I'll wed him to Ophelia!" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 44).

"PERCHANCE YOU'VE NOT SEEN MUCH OF WOMEN, SIR": THE NEW JULIET That the two mothers' concern for their sons leads them to maneuver Juliet and Ophelia into relationships does not mean that the Smiths sacrifice young women to the needs of male protagonists and their mothers. Their Ophelia and Juliet also resist the conventions that subordinate them in Shakespeare's plays. When Juliet speaks the first lines of act 1, scene 2, her alteration of an iconic speech is no less significant than Hamlet's "To do, or not to do" of the previous scene. Even before the mothers take action, Juliet is already considering what other men might suit her as she begins, "O, Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo? / Or why not Edward Bok, or Elbert Hubbard . . .?" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 26).

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Juliet's alternatives here are telling. Edward Bok was the editor of Ladies' Home Journal, where he published the works of progressive authors such as the suffragette and settlement house pioneer, Jane Addams. Bok's own book Successward, published in 1895, advised young men that "women are morally better and spiritually nobler than men" and "without [a woman's] counsel [man] has become a cipher in the world" (Bok 1895, 139, 156).13

Juliet's second option, Elbert Hubbard, was the founder of the Roycroft Community in East Aurora, New York. Roycroft was a magnet for freethinkers, reformers and suffragists, as well as a center for the American Arts and Crafts movement typified in The New Hamlet's fence-board binding. The "return to handicraft" aesthetic of the fence-board binding might thus be recognized as a nod to the progressive politics associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, and particularly the movement's interest in improving working conditions for women. Hubbard's wife, Alice Moore, a noted suffragette who penned Woman's Work (1908), Life Lessons (1909), and The Basis of Marriage (1910), praised her husband as one who "sees, too, that just as long as there is one woman denied any right that man claims for himself, there is no free man" (Roycroft Campus Corporation 2016). In Woman's Work, she offered an argument even more pertinent to The New Hamlet: "I should like to see woman break conventionalities, rebel against unnatural bondage, prompted by her reason and intellect and never again through her excess of feeling. We have been irrational so long from too much emotion that is considered a quality feminine. Sentimentalism has become the Bastile of woman's mind" (Hubbard 1908, 39).

Though in Romeo's company Juliet may be "a spoony, foolish little thing" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 33), she is intellectually and socially emancipated when Lady Montague releases her from her Shakespearean bond(age). In her first words to Hamlet, Juliet refuses to be cossetted, insisting "I fear no harm; I'm strong, you know" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 45). The two are merely walking along a stone path, so when Hamlet suggests that Juliet's bravery is extraordinary, she indicates the deficiency of his ideas about femininity: "Perchance you've not seen much of women, sir" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 45).

As the scene progresses, Hamlet repeatedly underestimates women, and Juliet repeatedly lampoons his ignorance. Thus, when Hamlet worries that "These senseless stones, / Would trip a foot, a dainty foot, like thine," Juliet responds pointedly, "Perhaps they were / Not reared 'mongst women, and know not their ways!" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 46). The problem, Juliet suggests, is not women's weakness so much as it is the weak opinion that men hold of them.

"AND WOMEN TOO": THE NEW OPHELIA The play is not content, however, to condemn men alone. In the case of Ophelia, The New Hamlet suggests that women's deference may be no less problematic than and even contributory to men's misappraisals. Consequently, its maternal plot to redirect events from the tragic outcomes toward which men steer them is no less transformative for Ophelia. In the play's opening scene, Ophelia is resigned to "dance as they ordain" and to "go sew some more, though my back aches" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 15). She cannot see that she can shape a fate for herself beyond a traditional realm of domestic femininity. At this point, Ophelia resembles her Shakespearean original, whom feminist critics find disquieting not only because she is trapped in a supporting role but also because, as Elaine Showalter argues, to "liberate Ophelia from the text, or to make her its tragic center, is to re-appropriate her for our own ends" (Showalter 1985, 79). Of course, liberatory appropriation is precisely the point and the privilege of the mashup. So where Shakespeare's Gertrude will say of Ophelia, "her speech is nothing," mere "unshaped use," (Hamlet 4.5.7-8), the Smiths' Gertrude instead points out to Hamlet that "she's too like to you" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 25) — and sets out to change the cultural assumptions that doom both.

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Initially, the play seeks to establish Ophelia as Hamlet's equal. So, after Hamlet proclaims in his opening speech, "I give it up! The game's too tough for me" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 13), Ophelia insists, "I'm sure, as well as you. / I hate it all; 'tis a shame and show, / And all goes wrong, whichever way we go" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 14). This is an immediate and important contrast to Shakespeare's Ophelia, whose tragedy, Showalter argues, "is subordinated in the play" and who "unlike Hamlet . . . does not struggle with moral choices or alternatives" (Showalter 1985, 78). But The New Hamlet is not satisfied with equating Ophelia to a Hamlet that it seeks to demystify. When Gertrude moves Ophelia out of Hamlet's shadow, the younger woman's passivity gives way to pragmatism, self-confidence and a desire to fashion her own happiness.

The New Hamlet acknowledges that its treatment of Ophelia marks a radical departure from stage tradition by drawing attention to the inadequacies of stage tradition. As Romeo professes his love to Ophelia's back, he explains, I've seen and heard them say it, on the stage, And there it's always said to the back hair. That is the proper thing, and of all men That ever lived, I'd do the proper thing. (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 49-50) The Smiths here mock conventions of staging, but also — and more importantly — the impulse to follow stage conventions. Since its project requires emancipation from the expectations of academic criticism and Bardolatrous theater, the play turns to metatheater to distance itself from convention. For her part, Ophelia points out the absurdity of Romeo's request that she "love in turn:" "How can I turn and still keep to thee my back hair?" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 50).

Though the play will subsequently move Ophelia, like Juliet, into a marriage that accommodates comedic conventions, she will in the process grow progressively confident, vocal, and instrumental. When Romeo pledges to "throw every dollar to the whistling winds" to prove his love, a more sensible Ophelia asks, "What need have winds of dollars or of dimes? / But men can use them, aye, and women too" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 52). Later, it is Ophelia who confirms Claudius' guilt, overhearing the confession ("Oh, my offence is rank . . .") that Hamlet somehow misses. Likewise it is Ophelia who points out to her husband, Romeo, that [I]f we can the rightful king restore, What minister but you shall to the fore? You shall, of right, be placed at his right hand, And I'll be second lady in the land. (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 58) By the play's fourth act, Shakespeare's "document in madness," the figure that Showalter describes as the "female subtext of [Shakespeare's] tragedy" has taken over from Gertrude and Lady Montague the role of author and catalyst in the Smiths' comedy (Showalter 1985, 79). Her key role in restoring Hamlet to the throne even gives her the confidence to challenge (as Gertrude did in the play's first scene) the new king's self-righteousness, contrasting him to Romeo, "A man who knows not fear, nor has the blues, / And ne'er speaks to me of a nunnery!" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 67). Above and beyond the challenge to Hamlet's individual misogyny, Ophelia's assertion highlights the inadequacy of a tradition that contracts the possibilities between celibacy and suicide.

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scholarship and Shakespeare on stage. Stepping outside of the jurisdiction of academic criticism or professional theater, the play eluded the codes, protocols, and network of interests that repeatedly drew interpretations of Hamlet in particular back to a narrow band of questions related to women's fidelity. In thus broadening the spectrum of interpretation to illuminate the patriarchal bias in approaches to Shakespeare's works, the play anticipated professional critics by more than half a century. In particular, the play insists on changing the questions asked of Shakespeare's plays, imagining alternative roles for women, and stressing the social conditions that contribute to women's oppression. The play ultimately suggests that, given the opportunity to intervene, women might redirect events from the tragic outcomes toward which men steer them.

At the same time, the Smiths' proleptic rejection of scholarly and theatrical convention is limited in ways that reflect its own cultural moment. We witness Hamlet in the Smiths' play crediting his own rise to "two blest women who have made my life / No schoolmates now, but mothers, strong and wise" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 65), and he kneels before Gertrude proclaiming that "more sacred than a crown [is] / The diadem a noble mother wears" (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 64). Yet, even as he speaks these words, Hamlet is himself assured of the royal crown.

The play never allows the elevation of women to menace the primacy of men. It urges only that women be admitted into the public sphere in order to more effectively refine and support the ambitions of their husbands and sons. Indeed, in its repeated turn to motherhood and mothering the play invokes a discourse authorizing a particularly narrow and traditional sliver of feminine experience. As Amber Kinser explains, "when people think, and rhetors speak, of motherhood, they call forth widely shared cultural codes that operate in tension with each other, expanding women's political voice and igniting social change but also reifying gendered norms that contract and attenuate women's agency and possibility" (Buchanan 2013, xiii).

The tension between the resistant and the regressive is most apparent in the play's final scene. Gertrude and Lady Montague speak the play's final lines, but it is also the play's women who are made to reinforce gender stereotypes and diminish their own accomplishments and complexity: First, Juliet pronounces that The proudest summit woman e'er can gain Is where she stands, in that glad hour when she Can to the world proclaim her husband, father — Aye, father of a son, who'll bear his name. Then later in the scene the previously authoritative Gertrude recedes to self-effacing maternity, shifting credit for Hamlet's rise to "the man who won thy case, Sir Romeo" (64). The same tension between the regressive and the resistant is apparent in Hamlet's final lines, urging the audience to always let this in your memory lurk: — The ways of two wise mothers and their work. See what they've done, what wrongs they have made right. (Smith and Smith Family 1902, 54) Women's intellect and labors are credited here with brightening despair and rendering tragedy into comedy, but those women are identified solely as mothers. Put another way, the play flirts with ideas of women's agency, complexity and opportunities, but abridges those possibilities in the end.

CONCLUSION Does the backsliding quality of Hamlet's speech expunge all of the play's progressive challenge? I don't believe so. What lurks in our memory is not the contraction of Gertrude's moxie or the dwindling of Juliet

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into a mother. It is the mash-up that we remember, where the surprising collision of two titanic tragedies — a century before the emergence of the mash-up genre — unleashes comic possibilities dormant or suppressed within Shakespeare's plays. And where tragedy generically draws attention to our failures to see liberatory possibilities, the comedy erupting from the Smiths' play trains our vision to see past the obstacles distancing us from happiness. The New Hamlet makes apparent the patriarchal bias in our hermeneutic praxis, encouraging us to laugh at the shortcomings of characters we have been taught to revere and to witness possibility in characters whose scope of opportunity has been restricted by protocol and tradition.

NOTES 1. This description is attributed to Dr. Everett Hale in an advertisement for the book appearing in School and Home Education, vol. 22 (1903): 325. 2. A Wandering Willie appears in Sir Walter Scott's 1824 novel, Redgauntlet, but he has nothing to say about either Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. The epigraph appears to be fabricated by the Smiths whose "Wandering Willie" may be cited to supplant fixed ideas about William Shakespeare. 3. Janet Adelman argues, likewise, that when Shakespeare turns from comedy to tragedy, it is the figure of the sexualized mother such as Gertrude that "disabl[es] holiday" (1992, 14). 4. On rhetorics of motherhood, see Buchanan 2013. 5. The continuing hold of these questions and narrow scope of interest in Gertrude is evident in the titles of three more recent essays on Hamlet: Jardine's "'No Offence I' th' World:' Unlawful marriage in Hamlet" (1995), Blincoe's "Is Gertrude an adulteress?" (1997), and Levin's "Gertrude's Elusive Libido and Shakespeare's Unreliable Narrators" (2008). 6. Spevack (1973) indicates that Gertrude speaks only 157 of the plays 4,042 lines, or 3.8%. 7. From an account of Georgina Pauncefort's 1874 performance of the part alongside Henry Irving, quoted in Hapgood, 1999, 54. 8. In a 1904 New York Herald Review, cited in Hapgood 1999, 50. 9. Maxwell responds to Heilbrun by insisting that Gertrude's only glimmer of agency comes in her final line and suicide. Prior to that, he claims, she is "[t]oo weak to determine any procedure for herself, she must rely upon others for guidance in every action" (1964, 241). In an argument related to mine, Ouditt (1996) indicates how early feminist work like Rebecca Smith's sought to restore what it saw as Shakespeare's Gertrude. 10. On the more detached, "scientific mothering" that discouraged turn-of-the-century mothers from spoiling their children or catering to their whims, see Mintz and Kellogg 1988, 121-22. 11. On nineteenth century burlesques, see Wells 1991; Levine 1988; Vaughan and Vaughan 2012. 12. Within and beyond the women's clubs, Scheil demonstrates that in the same period "more than five hundred Shakespeare clubs, composed mainly of women, formed across America to read Shakespeare" (2013, 1). 13. Bok's book offers particular praise for mothers.

REFERENCES Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to the The Tempest. New York: Routledge. Advertisement. 1903. School and Home Education, vol. 22.

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Bank, Rosemarie K. 1987. "The Second Face of the Idol: Women in Melodrama." In Women in American Theatre, Revised & Expanded Edition. Edited by Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Blincoe, Noel. 1997. "Is Gertrude an Adulteress?" ANQ 10.4: 18-24. Bok, Edward William. 1895. Successward: A Young Man's Book for Young Men. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co. Bradley, A. C. 1904. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. London: Macmillan & Co. Buchanan, Lindal. 2013. Rhetorics of Motherhood. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dobson, Michael. 2011. Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dowden, Edward. 1876. Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. London: Henry S. King & Co. Groff, Alice. 1898. "The Evolution of Woman in English Literature." Poet Lore: A Magazine of Letters 10: 242- 50. Gunderson, Philip. 2004. "Danger Mouse's Grey Album, Mash-Ups, and the Age of Composition." Postmodern Culture 15.1: np. Hapgood, Robert. 1999. Hamlet: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heilbrun, Carolyn. 1957. "The Character of Shakespeare's Mother." Shakespeare Quarterly 8.2: 201-206. Hubbard, Alice. 1908. Woman's Work: Being an Inquiry and an Assumption. East Aurora, NY: The Roycrofters. Hudson, Henry Norman. 1848. Lectures on Shakespeare, vol. 2. New York: Baker and Scribner. Hunter G. K. 1986. "Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy." In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by Stanley Wells. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 123-41. Jardine, Lisa. 1995. "'No offence i' th' world': Hamlet and Unlawful Marriage." In Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Edited by David Scott Kastan. New York: G.K. Hall: 258-73. Ladd-Taylor, Molly. 1994. Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare and the State, 1890-1930. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Levin, Richard. 2008. "Gertrude's Elusive Libido and Shakespeare's Unreliable Narrators." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 48.2: 305-26. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacDonald, Joyce Green. 1994. "Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness." Theatre Journal 46: 133-46. Maxwell, Baldwin. 1964. "Hamlet's Mother." Shakespeare Quarterly 15.2: 235-46. McKim, William. 2009. "Romeo's 'Death-mark't' Imagination and Its Tragic Consequences." In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing. 79-90.

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Mintz, Steven and Susan Kellogg. 1988. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: The Free Press. O'Brien, Ellen J. 1992. "Revision by Excision: Rewriting Gertrude" Shakespeare Survey 45: 27-35. Ouditt, Sharon. 1996. "Explaining Woman's Frailty: Feminist Readings of Gertrude" In Hamlet. Edited by Peter J. Smith and Nigel Wood. Theory in Practice Series. Buckingham: Open University Press. 83-107. Patterson, Martha H., ed. 2008. The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894-1930. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rich, Charlotte J. 2009. Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Rose, Jacqueline. 1986. "Hamlet: The Mona Lisa of Literature." Critical Quarterly 28.1-2: 35-49. Rose, Jacqueline. 1985. "Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure." In Alternative Shakespeares. Edited by John Drakakis. New York: Routledge: 97-120. Rose, Mary Beth. 1991. "Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the Renaissance." Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3: 291-314. Roycroft Campus Corporation. 2016."Alice Moore Hubbard, Wife of Elbert Hubbard, Founder of the Roycrofters Likens Her Husband to Abraham Lincoln Who Seeks Freedom for All." Roycroft Campus Organization. 19 December. The Roycroft Campus Corporation. Available online at: http://roycroftcampuscorporation.typepad.com/roycroftcampuscorporation/2006/12/alice_moore_hub_1.html (http://roycroftcampuscorporation.typepad.com/roycroftcampuscorporation/2006/12/alice_moore_hub_1.html) [accessed 3 December 2017]. Said, Edward W. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books. Scheil, Katherine West. 2013. She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. First edition. New York: W. W Norton. Showalter, Elaine. 1985. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism." In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen. 77-94. Smith, Rebecca. 1980. "A Heart Cleft in Twain: The Dilemma of Shakespeare's Gertrude." In The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Edited by Carolyn Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 194-210. Smith, William Hawley. 1912. All the Children of All the People: A Study of the Attempt to Educate Everybody. New York: The Macmillan Company. Smith, William Hawley, and The Smith Family, Farmers. 1902. The New Hamlet, intermixed and interwoven with a revised version of Romeo and Juliet. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. Spevack, Marvin. 1973. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Strachey, Edward. 1848. Shakspeare's Hamlet: An Attempt to Find the Key to a Great Moral Problem, by Methodical Analysis of the Play. London: J. W. Parker. Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan. 2012. Shakespeare in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wells, Stanley. 1977. Nineteenth Century Shakespeare Burlesques. 5 vols. New York: Taylor and Francis Group. Woods, Marianne Berger. 2009. The New Woman in Print and Pictures: An Annotated Bibliography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

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Translation and Influence: Dorothea Tieck's (/current) Translations of Shakespeare

CHRISTIAN SMITH, INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR, BERLIN (/previous)

(/archive)

ABSTRACT When Timon the misanthrope finds gold in the woods, he rails against it, excoriating it for its ruinous effects on civilization. At the end of his speech he says: "Come, damned earth, / Thou common whore of mankind." Critics are divided over whether Timon is referring to the earth or to the gold. Karl Marx, who quotes these lines repeatedly in all of his economic writings to depict the effects of money, interprets the word "earth" to mean gold — money. Marx first read Timon of Athens in the Schlegel-Tieck translation where Dorothea Tieck renders the line in this manner: "Verdammt Metall, / Gemeine Hure du der Menschen." By choosing to translate "earth"as "Metall"(metal) instead of Erde (soil, earth), she interprets the meaning of "damned earth" as gold. This interpretation may have influenced Marx's decision to use the line as a core element of his theory: his depiction of the ruinous effects of money. In this manner, Dorothea Tieck influenced not only German Shakespeare studies, but also German theory in general. Yet, Dorothea Tieck was not even named in the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare; her father referred to the translator of Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, Coriolanus, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Sonnets (published separately) only as mein junger Freund (my young [male] friend). Dorothea Tieck's life and translations were situated in a significant period of German literature's and philosophy's coming of age, the

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Romantic period. Her contributions to it can be discovered through a close reading of her translations of Shakespeare's plays and poems. In this paper, significant places in Dorothea Tieck's translations of three of Shakespeare's plays will be close-read, and explored for their contribution to selected writings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Bertolt Brecht.

In his essay, "The Hermeneutic Motion," George Steiner writes that, to begin "the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning . . . we venture a leap: we grant ab initio that there is 'something there' to be understood, that the transfer will not be void. All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust" (2012, 156). There is something missing in this account. Steiner's formulation could be true for someone who approaches interpretation and translation with nothing at stake. It is the stance of one who is not an agent in the interpretation, but one who stands by and wonders if there is meaning in the text, one who must summon faith to accomplish the interpretive act.

For radical critics, hermeneutics is not built upon trust or faith, but upon need — the need to stage, in the interpretive act, a critique of oppressive social conditions. This need to construct meaning arises from an awareness of the contradictions and crises of the critic's historical time. In one who has genuine class consciousness, or is at least empathic to the experience of the oppressed class, the need arises immanently from the social contradictions. This is what Marx means when he writes that theory becomes radical when it grasps things by the root, and that, for the people, the root is the people themselves (1975, 251). The radical critic does not worry about whether she trusts in the existence of meaning in a text. Instead she initiates the construction of meaning from her own ethical stance. The meaning is in her; she temporarily appropriates the text for use in her project.

The hermeneutic motion of a translator can also be understood as an act of criticism. A close reading of the translator's verbal and syntactical choices can reveal her ethics. Lawrence Venuti writes that "[a] translation cannot be produced without theoretical concepts that guide the selection of a source text and the verbal choices made to render it" (2012, 485). He holds that the hermeneutic model "promotes an ethics of translation that avoids any mystifications designed to maintain a cultural or social status quo and instead lays out the possibilities for innovation and change, for the creation of values" (485). In this paper, selections from the German translations of three of Shakespeare's plays that were used by German theorists — Karl

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Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Bertolt Brecht, each radical in different ways — will be close-read to reveal the translator's critical hermeneutic, to consider how the translated texts may have been used in the construction of German theory, and to test whether the interpretive choices made during the translation may have had an effect on theory.1

Marx, Freud and Brecht all display a formative engagement with Shakespeare in their texts. This engagement is regularly mentioned by their biographers. David McLellan's biography of Marx relates the importance of Shakespeare in Marx's life and in the development of his work (1973, 15, 113, 267).2 Freud's biographer, Peter Gay, writes about the significance of Shakespeare in the development of Freud's thinking and the construction of psychoanalytic theory (1988, 100, 166, 313, 323). Similarly, Brecht's biographer, Stephen Parker, lists Shakespeare as one of Brecht's heroes who formed a part of Brecht's lyrical awakening and served as a precedent for Epic Theatre (2014, 77, 226). There are two papers that catalogue the use of Shakespeare's plays by Marx: M. Nechkina's "Shakespeare in Karl Marx's Capital" (1935) and Robert White's "Marx and Shakespeare" (2007) for Shakespeare Survey. Both point to places where Marx used Shakespeare in the development of his theory. A large and quite significant contribution to the field of Shakespearean influence studies can be found in S. S. Prawer's books, Karl Marx and World Literature (1978) and A Cultural Citizen of the World: Sigmund Freud's Knowledge and Use of British and American Writings (2009). Prawer catalogues many of the Shakespearean quotations that appear in Marx's and Freud's writings. He discusses ways in which the plays fit into the respective theories, and he begins the discussion of how they might have influenced Marx and Freud. In 2012 Peter Holland and Adrian Poole published the tenth volume of the Great Shakespeareans series — Marx and Freud — a study of the influence of Shakespeare on Marxism and psychoanalysis, in which Crystal Bartolovich details Marx's engagement and David Hillman details Freud's engagement with Shakespeare's plays. By grouping Marx and Freud, who for Holland and Poole are "thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound" (2012, vi), in one volume of a study of Shakespearean influence, the editors are making a statement about that influence on theory itself, given that Marxism and psychoanalysis are two of the most significant roots of critical and literary theory. In the fourteenth volume of the Great Shakespeareans series — Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire — David Barnett (2013, 113) details the "lifelong connection" between Brecht and Shakespeare's plays. Ruth Morse writes in the introduction to the volume that "above all, the most important thing uniting all five subjects [Victor-Marie Hugo, François-Victor Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire] . . . is their unyielding opposition to oppression, http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 3 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

and their demonstration that poetry can make things happen," and that "for all five men, Shakespeare was a source of cultural freedom and support for political liberty" (2013, 6). In my own doctoral research — "Shakespeare's Influence on Marx, Freud, and the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists" (Smith 2013) — I show that the influence exerted by Shakespeare on Marx and Freud is formative. Shakespeare's texts influenced Marx's and Freud's writing style: Shakespearean lines appear in the fabric of Marxist and psychoanalytic sentences; Shakespeare's rhetoric and logic shows up in the flow of logic of many Marxist and psychoanalytic texts; his imagery is ubiquitous throughout Marxism and psychoanalysis. Both Marx and Freud admit to this influence.

However, a methodological problem arose during my research. Marx and Freud did not read Shakespeare first in the original English; they read him in the Schlegel-Tieck translation. So did Bertolt Brecht. Marx's copy of Shakespeare's plays is not extant. However, a comparison between the quotations in Marx's texts and the Schlegel-Tieck edition confirms that he read and quoted from that translation. Freud's copy of the Schlegel-Tieck edition of Shakespeare is on the shelf in his museum in London. Brecht read many different translations of Shakespeare, but he used the Schlegel-Tieck translation, which he preferred to others that he critiqued for their "oily smoothness." The methodological question of the role of the translation in the influence of Shakespeare on these German writers opens up the possibility that the translator may have had an influence in the engagement between these radicals and their literary precedent. A close reading of the translation can provide evidence to suggest this role.

THE SCHLEGEL-TIECK SHAKESPEARE August W. Schlegel began his famous project to translate Shakespeare's plays in the 1790s, but he abandoned it unfinished after translating only eighteen of the plays. His friend, Ludwig Tieck, took over the project, but he managed only to translate one play, Pericles. By 1825, the first volumes of the edition began to appear before the public, but, soon after, the translation project halted. Publisher Georg Reimer was understandably upset, since subscriptions had been sold and subscribers began to demand their money back (Larson 1987, 27). Schlegel refused to continue his work, and Tieck was incapable of completing it on his own. Yet, in 1830, the project began again and was completed and published by 1833. Tieck announced that two friends had helped him translate the plays, but at first he did not name them. In later editions, he finally named one of those friends, Wolf Graf von Baudissin, as the translator of twelve of the plays. The identity of the translator of the other six plays remained obscured. Tieck refers to this

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person as mein junger Freund (my young [male] friend (Piper 2006, 123).3

The junge Freund turned out to be Tieck's eldest daughter, Dorothea Tieck, who had been translating for her father since 1823, doing most of the work on Tieck's Shakespeares Vorschule (Larson 1987, 29; Jansohn 2000, 1)4 and translated all of Shakespeare's sonnets (Piper 2006, 123; Jansohn 2000, 1). Wolf Graf von Baudissin, Dorothea, and Ludwig Tieck worked alongside each other in the Tieck house, translating from the Johnson-Steevens edition of Shakespeare. Dorothea used Malone's edition for the Sonnets, and Ludwig also owned a copy of the Fourth Folio (Paulin 2016, 3028).5 Ludwig Tieck led a literary workshop in his home. For the Shakespeare translation that Tieck had been contracted to produce, the team consisted of Tieck, Wolf Graf von Baudissin, and Dorothea Tieck. They worked daily on the translations and met in the afternoon for correction (Korrektur) sessions. They would read aloud and critique each other's translations. Dorothea Tieck reports in a letter to her friend Friedrich von Üchtritz that "at first [she] worked together with Baudissin, in Much Ado About Nothing, [she] wrote the verse and he wrote the prose scenes. The difficult (Widerspänstige — stubborn) parts [they] both translated together, afterwards [they] kept the best ones" (Baillot 2008, 192).6 Archival items, including letters, lists, daily time schedules and manuscripts, found in the Tieck archives at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin provide evidence that Dorothea Tieck was a key member of the Schlegel-Tieck Shakespeare translation project. However, a search I performed of the extant editions of the Schlegel-Tieck Shakespeare in Berlin's Staatsbibliothek discovered that Dorothea Tieck's name did not appear on a published edition of the plays until 1906. It was not until the twentieth century that she was credited in print for her translations of Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Coriolanus, and The Winter's Tale in the Schlegel-Tieck edition. The evidence above also suggests that Dorothea Tieck's hand as translator may be present in more than the six credited plays.

Dorothea Tieck (1799-1841) grew up during the German Romantic period in the company of its central figures: her father Ludwig Tieck and her father's friends Goethe, Novalis, A. W. Schlegel, F. Schlegel, and F. Schiller (Paulin 1986, 103). She learned English, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Latin, and Ancient Greek (Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie). If Dorothea Tieck's translations of Shakespeare, in which her hermeneutic stance is visible, did have an influence on German theory, then it can be suggested that Dorothea Tieck's translations serve a critical role in the history of Shakespeare influence. Translation scholarship now can take up the task to close-read Dorothea Tieck's work and to lift its ethics and productive influence out of the historical unconscious, where it has been http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 5 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

repressed for so long.

MARX — VERDAMMT METALL Karl Marx quoted from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in all of his economic writings up to and including Capital, Vol. 1. He used Timon's rant against gold to depict the tragic effects that the money-based capitalist system causes to humanity. According to Marx, money as exchange-value is a radical leveller, a common whore, an object of greed, a fetish, an inverter of good and bad, and a part of the capitalist mechanism that causes alienation of humans. He found this list of qualities of gold/money in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Marx quotes Timon's lines: Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votarist — Roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make Black white, foul fair, wrong right, Base noble, old young, coward valiant. Ha, you gods, why this? What this, you gods? Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads. This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed, Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench: This is it That makes the wappered widow wed again, She whom the spittle house and ulcerous sores Would cast gorge at, this embalms and spices To th'April day again. Come, damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind that puts odds Among the rout of nations, I will make thee Do thy right nature. (Timon of Athens, 4.3.26-46)7 The quotation is from Timon's soliloquy, which he speaks when he digs for edible roots but instead finds gold. Timon's description of gold prefigures the description that Marx writes of money 260 years later. In the section on money in Capital, Vol. 1, Marx writes: "Just as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions" (1977, 229-230). A footnote inserted here leads the reader to an extended quotation from Timon of Athens. In Marx's Capital, the unnaturally powerful characteristics of money, which Marx uses Shakespeare's lines to describe, is the end result of a process that began in history with the leveling of distinctions between

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products, facilitating their exchange. In his 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes: Money, as purely abstract wealth — in which every specific use value is extinguished, and hence also every individual relation between possessor and commodity — comes under the power of the individual likewise as an abstract person, relating to his individuality as totally alien and extraneous. At the same time, it gives him universal power as his private power, a contradiction depicted, for instance, by Shakespeare. (1987, 451-52) Then he inserts the same quotation of Timon's speech at 4.3.26-46 that he had used in Capital. After the quotation, he writes: "That which yields itself to all, and for which all is yielded, appears as the universal means of corruption and prostitution" (1987, 452). Here Marx utilizes another of Shakespeare's images for his critique of money — the metaphor of the whore.

The editors of both the Arden (Eric Dawson and Gretchen Minton; Shakespeare 2008) and RSC (Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen; Shakespeare 2007) editions of the play hold that, in Timon's soliloquy about gold, the earth is the whore. Bate and Rasmussen write that Timon is referring to the earth "because [it is] trodden upon or plowed (both euphemisms for sex)" (Shakespeare 2007, 1781). Holding a different position, John Jowett, who edited the current Oxford edition of the play, writes that damned earth refers to "the gold, so described for its sinfulness Timon attributes to it, and also because it dwells buried under the ground, suggesting the traditional location of hell," and that: Common whore alters the traditional figure of the earth as a common (general, universal) mother, debasing the connotations of common. Whore is appropriate as a reference to earth as mother earth, and so land, in that land can be bought and sold, reflecting a real or imagined debasement of land as a result of its increasing treatment as a commodity in the period. But this whore is more specifically the gold Timon has unearthed. Whether as land or gold, she is seen as a woman who provokes warfare and is sexually available to the victor. (Shakespeare 2004, 269) Karl Klein, editor of the Cambridge edition of the play, writes that the reference is "probably [to] the gold contained in the earth" (Shakespeare 2001, 138).

Dorothea Tieck makes the boldest interpretive statement about the meaning of the line; she translates "damned earth, / Thou common whore of http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 7 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

mankind" as "verdammt Metall, / Gemeine Hure du der Menschen (damned metal / Thou common whore of mankind 4.3.42-43). This is a change from Christoph Wieland's 1763 German translation of the play. He writes this line as, "verdammt Erde, du gemeine Meze des menschlichen Geschlects" (damned Earth, thou common whore of mankind 4.3). Here is Tieck's translation of the lines that Marx quotes: Gold? kostbar, flimmernd, rotes Gold? Nein, Götter! Nicht eitel fleht' ich. Wurzeln, reiner Himmel! So viel hievon macht schwarz weiß, häßlich schön, Schlecht gut, alt jung, feig tapfer, niedrig edel. Ihr Götter! warum dies? warum dies, Götter? Ha! dies lockt euch den Priester vom Altar, Reißt Halbgenes'nen weg das Schlummerkissen. Ja, dieser rote Sklave löst und bindet Geweihte Bande; segnet den Verfluchten. Er macht den Aussatz lieblich, ehrt den Dieb Und gibt ihm Rang, gebeugtes Knie und Einfluß Im Rat der Senatoren; dieser führt Der überjähr'gen Witwe Freier zu; Sie, von Spital und Wunden giftig eiternd, Mit Ekel fortgeschickt, verjüngt balsamisch Zu Maienjugend dies. Verdammt Metall, Gemeine Hure du der Menschen, die Die Völker tört! Komm, sei das, was du bist! (Timon of Athens, 4.3.27-44)8 Many lines in Shakespeare's plays are flexible enough to handle multiple readings of their meaning. However, some meanings act as layers of imagery that give depth to the play while other meanings have a primary role in the plot. The imagery that the earth is a common whore serves the former function, while the assignation of the description whore to the gold serves the latter function. This is supported by a close reading of the lines before and after the image of a common whore. When Timon digs for edible roots, he finds gold. He asks, "What is here?" Then he names it: "Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?" This noun, gold, will serve as the antecedent of the pronoun this that occurs seven times over the next sixteen lines leading up to the common whore image. Shakespeare uses the pronoun, this, as an anaphora bracketing and emphasizing the unnatural capacities of the antecedent — gold. Line 31, "Ha, you gods, why this? What this, you gods? Why, this . . . ," renders the anaphora a prayer of complaint to the gods. Immediately after the last item in the list of gold's capacities, Timon says, "Come, damned earth" (4.3.41-42). He is speaking to the antecedent of

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the last sixteen lines — gold. Timon says to it: "I will make thee / Do thy right nature" (Timon of Athens, 4.3.43-44). The stage directions immediately after that line say, "March afar off." This is the sound of Alcibiades' army that comes across Timon in the woods. When stage directions follow an ambiguous line such as "I will make thee do thy right nature," it can be assumed that the line points to an action that will occur after the stage directions. This is exactly what happens. When Timon learns that Alcibiades is marching on Athens, he gives him some of the gold that he has been speaking to before the soldier arrived. Timon says: "Go on, here's gold, go on. / Be as a planetary plague when Jove / Will o'er some high-viced city hang his poison/ In the sick air" (4.3.107-109). The gold will serve to strengthen the rebel army, pay the soldiers, some of whom are already defecting, and serve Timon's wishes of destroying Athens. This is the right nature to which Timon refers.

Marx, following Dorothea Tieck, accurately reads the role of the gold in the plot of the play and uses this reading to develop his analysis of the abstract, universal nature of money as exchange-value. Like a whore who will yield to anyone, money, as exchange-value, will enter in relationship with any and all use-values regardless of their specific nature.9 As exchange-value, money extinguishes use-value and alienates it. Metaphorically, the potentially deadly venereal diseases arising from whores that Timon repeatedly wishes on the Athenians stand as the vehicle for the tenor of extinguishing shared by both the diseases and exchange-value. Marx uses this imagery as his second critique of money. As leveller, in the first critique, money stands between commodities (C-M-C), facilitating the equivalence of things that are not equivalent. Now, Marx adds a value judgment to this function. It appears as the "universal means of corruption and prostitution" (1987, 452). This, as interpreted first by Dorothea Tieck, is the primary role of the image of gold as a common whore in Timon of Athens.

In the Outline to the Critique of Political Economy, a set of notebooks Marx wrote from late 1857 to May 1858 (Grundrisse), he writes: The exchangeability of all products, activities, relationships for a third, objective entity, which in turn can be exchanged for everything without distinction — in other words, the development of exchange values (and of monetary relationships) is identical with general venality, with corruption. General prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal inclinations, capacities, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relationship of utility and usefulness. Equating the incommensurate, as Shakespeare

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appropriately conceived of money. The craving for enrichment as such is impossible without money; all other accumulation and craving for accumulation appears merely natural, restricted, conditioned on the one hand by needs and on the other hand by the restricted nature of the products (sacra auri famas). [Marx's footnote here: "Thou visible god, that solder'st close impossibilities."] (1986, 99-100) This passage contains Marx's theory of money as the objective entity that is used as the general equivalent and his metaphor in which the prostitute stands for the general venality and corruption that springs from the money economy. The passage then presents a third image, "the accursed passion for gold," (sacra auri famas) from Book 3 of Virgil's Aeneid.

The object of greed becomes, through false consciousness, a fetish. Marx holds that money appears (erscheinen) to have god-like powers. He cites Shakespeare on this point: Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money: 1. It is the visible divinity — the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it. 2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations. The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization of impossibilities — the divine power of money — lies in its character as men's estranged, alienating, and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind. (1975, 324-25)

Timon calls gold "Thou visible God!" and exclaims, when he finds the gold, that he is "no idle votarist" (4.3.27). When read, the line can be paraphrased that he is not a frivolous devotee of gold. However, when heard in the theater, the line acquires the double meaning "idol" — a fetish or false god.10 This gives the line resonance with Marx's theory of the fetishization of the commodity money. In Dorothea Tieck's German translation the line is, "Nein Götter! / Nicht eitel fleht' ich" (No Gods, I didn't beg vainly) (4.3.27- 28).11 The pun eitel and (das) Idol works in German as well. This also serves Marx's purpose to use this quotation to allude to commodity fetishism, because if one believes that the money itself is what creates value, then one begs vainly.

There is a mystery as to why Dorothea Tieck changes the color of the gold from yellow to red in her translation. Shakespeare writes, "What is here? / Gold? Yellow, glittering precious gold?" (4.3.25-26). Wieland translates the http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 10 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

color of the gold as gelbes (yellow 4.3). Dorothea Tieck translates this as, "Was find' ich hier? / Gold? kostbar, flimmernd, rotes Gold?" (4.3.26-27) (What find I here? / Gold? precious, shimmering, red Gold?). Later in the rant, Timon calls the gold a "yellow slave" (4.3.34); Wieland translates this as "gelbe Sclave" (yellow slave 4.3), but Dorothea Tieck translates this as "rote Sklave" (red slave 4.3.34). The search for red gold takes one to metallurgy and chemistry, where there exists the category of red-gold. This is gold that has been smelted with copper to make jewellery and coins (OED, red-gold B.1). The Greeks learned this smelting process from the Egyptians, and there existed a category of gold in Athens called red-gold. By describing the gold as red, Dorothea Tieck may be both alluding to the setting of the play — Athens — and once more signalling that the gold to which Timon is referring is that in the form of coins — gold as money.12

Dorothea Tieck also makes changes to Shakespeare's lines that intensify the imagery. The line "this / Will lug your priests and servants from your sides" is rendered as "dies lockt euch den Priester vom Altar." She has dropped servants and changed sides to altar, intensifying the distance travelled in the imagery. The priests are not only taken from one's side, but from up on the altar. The line "this / Will pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads" (4.3.33) is rendered as "Reißt Halbgenes'nen weg das Schlummerkissen" (tear the sleeping pillow from the half-convalesced) (4.3.33). Shakespeare's line is an allusion to Jonson's 1605 Volpone, where Mosca says "In his next fit, we may let him go. / 'Tis but to pull the pillow from his head,/ And he is throttled" (2.6.86-88; Jonson 1981). By claiming that gold can hurt even stout men, Shakespeare depicts the power of gold.13 Germans would not have likely seen Volpone, so the allusion would not have worked. Dorothea changes it to intensify the victimhood of those affected by gold — those vulnerable because they are not yet fully convalesced. In many cases, Dorothea Tieck's translation foregrounds victimhood. In some cases, she signals class differences. At the beginning of Timon's rant from which Marx quotes, Dorothea changes Shakespeare's sequence of the inverted opposites. Where Shakespeare writes that gold makes "[b]ase noble, old young, coward valiant" (4.3.30), Wieland keeps the order in his translation, but Dorothea writes "Schlecht gut, alt jung, feig taper, niedrig edel" (bad good, old young, coward valiant, base noble) (4.3.30). The inversion that receives emphasis by being sounded at the end of the scansion is the one denoting class — base noble.

Dorothea Tieck's practice of intensifying the differences in the imagery can also be seen in the first translation she produced, the Shakespeare apocryphal play, Arden of Faversham. After Arden's servant Michael betrays his master's location to his murderers, he speaks a soliloquy in http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 11 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

which he reveals his guilt and sympathy for Arden, in contradiction to his loyalty to his mistress and his fear of the murderers. In the German translation, the imagery is altered to intensify the contrast between the evil murderers and the good and noble Arden. In the conceit of the soliloquy, a "hunger-bitten wolf" watches his prey, a lamb. Dorothea Tieck chooses "gier'ge Wolf" (greedy, craving) to describe the attacker. Michael says that wolf will "eat up" the lamb, but Tieck chooses "zerreißen" (tear to pieces, rip to shreds). Michel describes his master as a "gentle life" who is "unsuspecting", but in the German, the master is an "edlen Herzen" (noble heart) who "vertrau'st" (trusts). The murderers in the English version have "lawless rage," but in Tieck's version they have "Mordlust" (blood/murder lust) (Arden of Feversham, 3.183-201; Dorothea Tieck translation, Arden von Faversham, pp. 165-66 in Jansohn 2000). Tieck's translation choices intensify the tragic feel of the imagery, thereby strengthening the feeling of injustice that readers/audiences potentially feel in this play.

When Marx read Timon of Athens in Dorothea Tieck's translation, he was not simply reading Shakespeare, but Shakespeare as refracted through the lens of a German Romantic female translator. Since Dorothea Tieck changed Shakespeare in key sections that Marx quoted, then it must be granted that she had a role in the transmission of the influence from the early modern dramatist to the modern theorist. This influence on a mid-nineteenth century writer by a Romantic translator of an early modern text parallels the influence that German Romanticism, both literary and philosophical, had on the mid-nineteenth century Marxist criticism of eighteenth-century political economy and enlightenment philosophy.

FREUD — ER HAT KEINE KINDER! Sigmund Freud interpreted Shakespeare's Macbeth as a means to develop and describe the way in which neurotic people can be wrecked by success. In his 1916 essay, "Some Character Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work," Freud writes that "so much more surprising, and indeed bewildering, must it appear when as a doctor one makes the discovery that people occasionally fall ill precisely when a deeply-rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfillment. It seems then as though they were not able to tolerate their happiness; for there can be no question that there is a causal connection between their success and their falling ill" (1957, 316). He then explains the mechanism by which this occurs. He makes a distinction between external and internal frustration. External frustration occurs when "the object in which the libido can find its satisfaction is withheld in reality" (316). This in itself does not create neurosis until "an internal frustration is joined to it" (316). The internal frustration occurs when the ego blocks the

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libido's access to its object. A conflict, and subsequent neurosis, can arise if the repressed libido finds a substitute satisfaction by way of a circuitous route. According to Freud, internal frustration by the ego is potentially always present, but "it does not come into operation until external, real frustration has prepared the ground for it" (316). The case of those made ill by success arises when "the internal frustration has operated by itself; indeed it has only made its appearance after an external frustration has been replaced by fulfillment of a wish" (316). If the external frustration is removed and replaced by the wish fulfillment, then the internal frustration, a function of the ego, can operate by itself even more strongly. Freud uses his reading of Macbeth to illustrate this theory.

For Freud, Macbeth is not simply a tragedy of ambition. Freud reads Elizabethan and Jacobean England's anxiety about a failure of primogeniture in the Macbeths' childlessness. He writes that the 'virginal' Elizabeth, of whom it was rumored that she had never been capable of childbearing and who had once described herself as a barren stock, in an anguished outcry at the news of James' birth, was obliged by this very childlessness of hers to make the Scottish king her successor . . . the ascension of James I was like a demonstration of the curse of unfruitfulness and the blessings of continuous generation. And the action of Shakespeare's Macbeth is based on this same contrast. (1957b, 320) According to Freud, Macbeth was most incensed by the witches' decree that he will not found a dynasty, but that, instead, Banquo's children will succeed to the crown (320). Freud points out the many disturbances of lineage that occur in the play: the murder of Duncan is parricide; Fleance escapes being killed, but his father, Banquo, is killed; Macduff lives, but his children and wife are killed; and the Macbeths both die without surviving children (321).

Freud diagnoses the Macbeths, whom he reads as a single character with two sides (1957b, 323), as suffering from an illness that is a reaction to their childlessness, which is poetic justice for their crimes against the sanctity of generation. Freud writes that this poetic justice occurs "if Macbeth could not become a father because he robbed children of their father and a father of his children, and if Lady Macbeth suffered the unsexing she had demanded of the spirits of murder" (321). Once they succeed in killing Duncan and getting what they want, their internal frustration arises and grips their mental functioning. Macbeth's sleeping problem becomes Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking; his fear of not being able to clean the blood off his hands even with all of Neptune's ocean becomes her obsession with the spot that will not be erased (324). http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 13 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

Freud began reading Macbeth in Dorothea Tieck's translation in his childhood, long before he wrote this essay. He later read it in a French translation, most likely while he was in France in 1885, and also in English.14 Freud quotes from and alludes to Macbeth at least sixteen times during his writing career. He began interpreting Lady Macbeth's problems in 1895, during the early years of the development of psychoanalysis (Freud 1962, 79). It is in one of the inaugural texts of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), that he first writes that Lady Macbeth suffers from childlessness (1953, 266). Freud's interpretation of Macbeth evolved alongside the development of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the 1916 essay about the character types wrecked by success is an attempt to handle an exception in the theory of neurosis. Therefore, Freud's reading of the play — mutable, maturing and alive as it is — plays a role in the development of psychoanalysis.

Dorothea Tieck's interpretation of Macbeth, which becomes visible in a close reading of her translation, has similarities to Freud's reading. Similar to the effect her Timon of Athens translation may have had on Marx, her Macbeth translation may have contributed her interpretive stance to the influence of the play on Freud's work. She emphasizes both Macbeth's childlessness and his characterization as a victor who is inhibited by his own success.

The witches open the play in Shakespeare's original saying: FIRST WITCH. When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? SECOND WITCH. When the hurlyburly's done, When the battle's lost and won. (1.1.1-4)15 Dorothea Tieck renders these lines as: ERSTE HEXE. Wann kommen wir drei uns wieder entgegen, Im Blitz und Donner, oder im Regen? ZWEITER HEXE. Wenn der Wirrwarr stille schweigt, Wer der Sieger ist, sich zeigt. (1.1.1-4)16 Dorothea Tieck changes the line "When the battle's lost and won" to "Wer der Sieger ist, sich zeigt," which means "Who the victor is, shows itself (will become apparent)." This shifts Shakespeare's reference to the battle into a reference to the character. It foregrounds a feature of this character, that he is the victor (GDW),17 prominently at the beginning of the play. This immediately signals the success that Macbeth will have and that, according to Freud, will cause his downfall. By mentioning Macbeth's success in a dialogue that ends with the central inversion of the play, "fair is foul and http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 14 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

foul is fair" (1.1.11), the translator also submits that success to an inversion.18

At 1.2.69, Duncan says, "What he [the former Thane of Cawdor] hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won." Dorothea Tieck writes the line differently: "Held Macbeth soll, was der verliert, gewinnen" (1.2.68). She calls Macbeth hero (Held — GDW) instead of noble, and, following German grammatical rules, places the words "lost" (verliert) and "win" (gewinnen) on either side of a comma. When Freud reads Shakespeare's play through Dorothea Tieck's translation, he encounters Macbeth as a hero, his status having been made more salient in the German.

At 1.3.84-85, after the encounter with the witches on the heath, Banquo wonders if he and Macbeth have eaten of the insane root. The editors of the Arden Shakespeare conjecture that Shakespeare may be referring to hemlock, henbane, or deadly nightshade, three plants that produce insanity (Shakespeare 1962, ed. Muir, 1962, 17; Shakespeare 2015, ed. Clark and Mason, 143). Dorothea Tieck writes Banquo's line like this: "Oder aßen wir von jener gift'gen Wurzel, / Die die Vernuft bewältigt" (1.3.84-85). The adjective gift'gen means poisonous (GDW).19 The word poisonous seems to carry a meaning that connotes a consequence more than the word insane does. It hints that the protagonist will be poisoned from his encounter with the witches.

The immobility that will befall the victor wrecked by own his success is hinted at by Dorothea Tieck in her translation of Lady Macbeth's complaint about her husband's fit at the banquet table when he sees the ghost of Banquo: "O! these flaws and starts / Imposters to true fear, would well become / A woman's story at a winter's fire" (3.4.60-62). The German translation reads: "Ha! dieses Zucken, / Dies Starr'n, Nachäffung wahren Schrecks, sie paßten / Zu einem Weibermärchen am Kamin" (3.4.67-69). The word Starr'n (das Starren) means stare. It can also allude to the German adjective for rigidity, starr. Tieck's lines carry that sense of immobility and inhibition that Freud is reading in the victor/hero who is wrecked by his success.

Dorothea Tieck closely captures the meaning from the form of Shakespeare's lines in her translation of 3.4.22-23. After Macbeth learns from the murderer that Fleance has escaped, he says: "But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears." To be cabin'd is to be confined in action and to be stuck in a cabin (OED). To be cribb'd is to be shut in a hovel (OED). Shakespeare's alliterating words create imagery that closes in on Macbeth's body in the same manner that his enemies will close

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in on him as a result of his actions. He is first stuck in a cabin and then a hovel. The OED calls a hovel a wretched cabin. The next word in the line is confin'd, which brings the imagery closer to Macbeth's body, and this imagery tightens around Macbeth's body with the next word, bound. The German translation is,"Doch jetzt bin ich umschränkt, gepfercht, umpfählt / Geklemmt von niederträcht'ger Furcht und Zweifeln" (3.4.23-24). To be umschränkt is to be hemmed in by a wall or to be placed in a cabinet (Schrank) (GDW). To be gepfercht is to be crammed (GDW).20 The imagery moves closer to his body. In the third word of the line, Dorothea Tieck stakes down Macbeth's body with the word umpfählt, which means to be surrounded by stakes. 21 She plucks this word from the last act where Macbeth is besieged by his enemies and he exclaims, "They have tied me to a stake: I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course" (5.7.1-2).

The theme Freud reads into the play about Macbeth's anxiety regarding his failure of progeniture is more salient in Dorothea Tieck's translation of Macbeth's question to Banquo at 1.3.119-22: "Do not you hope your children shall be kings, / When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me / Promis'd no less to them?" She writes: "Hofft Ihr nicht Euren Stamm gekrönt zu sehen, / Da jene, die mich Than von Cawdor nannten, / Nichts Mindes prophezeit?" (1.3.118-20). The words Euren Stamm can mean family tree, pedigree, or lineage. This carries the meaning of dynasty, which Freud reads in the play, more than the word children

In his essay "Some Character-Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work," Freud writes: We watch Macbeth pass through his development, and at the height of the tragedy we hear Macduff's shattering cry, which has so often been recognized to be ambiguous and which may perhaps contain the key to the change in Macbeth: He has no children! There is no doubt that this means: "Only because he is himself childless could he murder my children." But more may be implied in it, and above all it might lay bare the deepest motive which not only forces Macbeth to go far beyond his own nature, but also touches the hard character of his wife at its only weak point. If one surveys the whole play from the summit marked by these words of Macduff's, one sees that it is sown with references to the father-child relation. (1957b, 321) Freud is referring to Macduff's lines at 4.3.219-20, spoken after he has learned from Ross that Macbeth had his family killed. The exchange is like this in the original: http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 16 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

MALCOLM. Be comforted: Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge, To cure this deadly grief. MACDUFF. He has no children. — All my pretty ones? Did you say all? — O Hell-kite! — All? Dorothea Tieck writes it this way: MALCOM. Faßt euch: Laßt uns Arznei aus mächt'ger Rache mischen, Um dieses Todesweh zu heilen! MACDUFF. Er Hat keine Kinder! All die süßen Kleinen? Alle, sagst du? — O Höllengeier! — Alle! In Shakespeare's original, Macduff is devastated and terribly sad. The long caesuras called for by the hyphens indicate fragility and weakness. He has received a great blow. He does not cry his words out strongly until he says "O Hell-kite!" In Dorothea Tieck's translation, Macduff is angrier. It is her punctuation that makes the "shattering cry" that Freud cites. She also has Macduff interrupt Malcolm by placing the word Er at the final beat of Malcolm's line. The accusation of childlessness is emphasized in the German translation.22

A close reading of Dorothea Tieck's translation of Macbeth also offers informed intervention into a longstanding mystery in psychoanalytic studies. In Freud's 1910 essay, "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood," Freud mistranslates a word in Leonardo's notebook. In the margin of one of his notebooks on the flight of birds, Leonardo scribbles a memory from childhood in which a kite ("nibio" sic) flies down to Leonardo in his cradle, opens his mouth with his tail, and strikes him many times on his lips. Freud translates the word nibbio in German as Geier, which means vulture, instead of choosing the word for kite, which is Milan. Freud interprets the memory sexually, and through a linguistic turn in which he traces the similarity between the word for mother in German, Mutter, and the word for vulture in Egyptian, Mut, he allows himself an Oedipal reading of Leonardo's memory. This discursive has proven unsatisfying to many psychoanalytic critics, not the least of which because Freud could read Italian and should not have made that error. Psychoanalytic editors and critics have attributed this to Freud being led astray by other German translations of Leonardo's memory (Freud 1957a, ed. Strachey, Strachey, 61) and to a parapraxis committed by Freud (Fletcher 2013, 171-76).

Upon reading Dorothea Tieck's translation, it becomes apparent that there is

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a kite-to-vulture switch in her rendering of MacDuff's exclamation "O Hell- Kite!" (4.3.220). Tieck chooses the word Höllengeier (Hell vulture). Earlier in the play, where Shakespeare has Macbeth say to the Ghost of Banquo at 3.4.69-70, "If charnel-houses and our, graves must send / Those that we bury back, our monuments / Shall be the maws of kites," Dorothea Tieck translates maws of kites as "der Schlund der Geier" (maws of vultures; 3.4.76). Tieck may have picked up Shakespeare's devouring vulture conceit at 4.3.74, where Macduff is talking to Malcolm about the voraciousness of monarchs — "That vulture in you to devour so many" — and applied it as her conceit across the play. Had Freud only read the play in the German translation, this may not be significant, but Freud, an anglophile, learned English as a youth and read it in the original language, as well. His biographer Peter Gay reports that Freud could recite scenes from Shakespeare in near perfect English (1988, 166). It could be safely assumed that Freud payed special attention to the scene in which Ross informs Macduff of his family's murder, which forms a significant core of Freud's reading of Macbeth in his theory. The slide from kite to vulture would have been set in Freud's mind already by Dorothea Tieck.

Psychoanalysis works partly through close-reading narratives (the analysand's story or a literary text) for clues about source drives that lie latent under the manifest content. The psychoanalyst traces a chain of associations from the manifest imagery of the narrative down into the unconscious of the story, following the links that were constructed during the ego's work of repression. Dorothea Tieck's translation of Macbeth, written in the 1830s, may have provided Freud with some of the necessary associative links from Shakespeare's original to Freud's construction of an interpretation of the play.

BRECHT — ÜBERFLUß In 1953, Bertolt Brecht and some collaborators studied and discussed the first scene of Coriolanus in preparation for Brecht's adaptation of the play. Brecht was interested in the class conflict that the scene depicted. He wanted his adaptation to emphasize the role that the war with the Volscians played in diffusing the class war. In the study, he says that "the conflict between the patricians and plebeians is (at least provisionally) set aside, and that between the Romans and the Volscians becomes all predominant. The Romans, seeing their city in danger, legalize their differences by appointing plebeian commissars (People's Tribunes)" (1964, 256). In the introduction to his play about Brecht's adaptation of Coriolanus, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, Günter Grass writes that "Brecht's self-appointed task, from the very start, was to endow the plebeians with class consciousness and the

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tribunes with persuasive power" (1966, xvi) and that "Brecht's aim is to extract a lesson, both for himself and for his audience, from early Roman history. He points to the established position of the tribunes and of the aediles assigned to them. Accordingly, the illegality of Coriolanus' acts is far more blatant in the adaptation than in the original" (1966, xxiv). A close reading of Dorothea Tieck's translation of Coriolanus shows that a class- based reading of the play which derives some of its meaning from Roman history, similar to Brecht's project, is already present in her translation.

Dorothea Tieck chooses words in German that emphasize the class divide and sets the class war in the context of Roman history more than Shakespeare does. She translates the First Citizen's line, "[w]hat authority surfeits on would relieve us" (1.1.14),23 as "Das, wovon der Adel schwelgt, würde uns nähren" (1.1.16).24 Tieck's word Adel means aristocracy or nobility and stakes out a clearer class distance from the plebeians than Shakespeare's word authority. She uses the word Adel again in Menenius' speech at 1.1.68 where Shakespeare writes patrician (1.1.61).25 Tieck's translation choices for the other side of the class divide brings a historical and jurisprudential issue to her interpretation. The Second Citizen's line, "They say poor suitors have strong breaths, they shall know we have strong arms too" (1.1.54-56), is rendered as "[s]ie sagen, arme Klienten haben schlimmen Atem: sie sollen erfahren, daß wir auch schlimme Arme haben" (1.1.61-62). (They say that poor clients have terrible breath: they shall know that we also have terrible/serious arms.) Tieck's substitution of client for suitor alludes to Roman jurisprudential history, in which a client is "a plebeian under the patronage of a patrician, in this relation called a patron, who was bound, in return for certain services, to protect his client's life and interests" (OED). Tieck chooses a word appropriate to the play's setting, and that word signals the patron's responsibility to the client. A suitor is a petitioner. He may not yet have the relationship legally established with the patron. A client does. Tieck has made the patrician's responsibility to the plebeians more salient. She again chooses a word from a jurisprudential conceit in Menenius' parable of the belly when she translates accuse (1.1.92) as verklagten (1.1.99), which carries the shading of an accusation through legal proceedings in its denotation (OGD). The patricians in Tieck's Coriolanus have a legal and social responsibility to take care of their clients, the plebeians. In this depiction, Brecht found a conceit that fit his Marxist analysis of the class struggle which he makes explicit in his didactic adaptation.

Dorothea Tieck added another conceit in her translation from which Brecht could read the working class in the depiction of the plebeians. Where Shakespeare's Second Citizen says, "The former agents, if they did http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 19 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

complain, / What could the belly answer? (1.1.117-18), Tieck has the First Citizen say, "Die andern Kräfte, wenn sie nun so klagten, Der Bauch, was könnt' er sagen" (1.1.124).26 Shakespeare's word agent carries the meaning of one who does work, but Tieck's Kräfte better fits the Marxist conceit of the working class as a force and a power that Brecht will use in his adaptation (GDW).27 Tieck uses Kräfte again in Menenius' pleonasm "[d]u Schwächling ohne Kraft" (1.1.161; You weakling without strength.)

Dorothea Tieck also emphasizes the plebeian's poverty more than Shakespeare does. This poverty conceit is found in the line already mentioned above, "[s]ie sagen, arme Klienten haben schlimmen Atem: sie sollen erfahren, daß wir auch schlimme Arme haben" (1.1.61-62), where schlimme Arme (terrible arms, as in for fighting) can also allude to terrible poverty and poor people. The adjective arm denotes poor, and the noun Armer denotes poor person, pauper. The declined adjective at the start of the sentence, arme Klienten, is spun around to serve as the noun, schlimme Arme. The multiple layers of meaning pointing towards the class struggle and its cause, poverty, would be especially effective when heard on the stage, where the spelling of the word does not figure as significantly in the denotation. Tieck also renders the First Citizen's line, "[b]ut they think we are too dear" (1.1.17), as "aber sie denken, so viel sind wir nicht wert" (1.1.19); but they think we are not worth that much), which changes the valence of the line from describing the plebeians as too costly for the patricians to describing them as being of less value. In the next line, Tieck translates leanness (1.1.18) as ausmergelt (1.1.20), emaciation or gauntness (OGD), thereby deepening the poverty conceit.

Dorothea Tieck constructs a conceit of flowing and draining that will become critical to Brecht's reading of the effects of the Volscian war on the class war. Tieck translates the Second Citizen's description of the belly, which in Shakespeare is "the sink o' th' body" (1.1.117), as [d]er nur des Leibes Abfluß (1.1.123). In early modern England, a sink is a cesspool. Tieck's word Abfluß means drain (GDW),28 its parts being Ab (off) and fluß (flow).29 The conceit of flow emphasizes the waste and draining of resources from the plebeians. In the turning point of the first scene, where the messenger tells Caius Martius that the Volscians are in arms, Martius replies that he is happy because now he has a means to "vent / [the] musty superfluity" (1.1.221). He means that he can kill off the excess plebeian population in the coming war. Tieck's translation for superfluity, Überfluß (1.1.233), rhymes with and echoes her earlier word "Abfluß". The strength of the plebeians in the class war will now be drained off in the Volscian war. Brecht picks up the conceit of flow and uses it to read the libidinal economics of this scene, whereby the class allegiance of the plebeians will http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 20 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

switch objects, love the patricians, and be drained into the war against the Volscians.

DOROTHEA TIECK — ETWAS EIGENES HERVOR ZUBRINGEN A question arises about why Dorothea Tieck's identity remained in the dark for so long. Was she kept hidden by a sexist culture that could not tolerate women having creative agency? Well-known women writers in the German states in the first half of the nineteenth century can be counted on one hand: Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859), Luise Hensel (1798-1876), and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848). Even after Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 call for women's rights, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, many nineteenth-century female authors still published under male or androgynous pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë; George Sand for Amantine-Lucile-Aurora Dupin; George Eliot for Mary Ann Evans. Elizabeth Gaskell published her first novel Mary Barton anonymously in 1848. Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Shelley, first published her novel Frankenstein anonymously in 1818. When Jenny Marx (neé von Westphalen), Karl Marx's collaborator and wife, wrote some Shakespeare theater criticism for the Frankfurter Zeitung, she asked that the articles be published anonymously (Gabriel 2011, 465). Even as late as 1893, when Laura Marx, Karl's daughter, translated into French Friedrich Engel's The Origin of the Family, she deleted her name from the title page (Gabriel 2011, 590). There is also another woman hidden from public view in the Schlegel-Tieck Shakespeare translation under consideration in this article — Caroline Schlegel, A. W. Schlegel's wife, who co-translated most of the plays with him (Paulin 2016, 296). There was little support for acknowledgment of the identity or creative agency of women writers and translators at any point in the nineteenth century.

Many intellectuals who produced large quantities of textual work relied on the collaboration of family members and others to support their output. Similar to Ludwig Tieck's literary workshop, Karl Marx, writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, was supported by the textual labor of four women: his wife Jenny and his three daughters, Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor. His family copied his dictation, rendered his nearly-impossible-to- read handwriting into fair copy, edited his texts, performed a lot of his research, and then translated his texts into English and French. In spite of being extraordinary scholars, translators, and social activists in their own right, none of the Marx women received credit for their work on Karl Marx's texts. Bertolt Brecht, writing in the first half of the twentieth century, was nearly always surrounded by women as collaborators; they collaborated in writing his plays, acting as amanuenses and discussants. In fact, it is

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incorrect to think of Brecht as a solo writer. Many of his plays were written in collaboration with other writers. Elisabeth Hauptmann collaborated with Brecht during his development of Epic Theatre. She wrote Man ist Man, Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, Die Mutter, and Die Dreigroschenoper with Brecht. Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder was co-written by Brecht, Margaret Steffin, and Helene Weigel (Parker 2014, 209, 224, 297).

In spite of the collaboration, the names that would figure prominently on the covers of the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare's plays would be only August W. Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck; these names sell books. Similar to the Marx women, Dorothea was working uncredited to ensure the livelihood of her family. This is how things were done back then. However, after the first edition of the translation, von Baudissin's name was added to the title page; Dorothea Tieck's and Caroline Schlegel's were not. All the men who worked on it were accounted for; the women were not. Even the placeholder for Dorothea on the title page was rendered male. Furthermore, Dorothea Tieck's 1837 translation of Miguel de Cervantes's Los Tabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (Die Leiden des Persiles und der Sigismunda) was published under her father's name. These decisions were clearly gendered.

There is evidence that Dorothea Tieck internalized this unequal gendered order. She actively supressed acknowledgment of her creative influence on the texts. In spite of being supremely talented and hardworking, she held the opinion that the place of a female writer was ancillary. She wrote in a letter to Üchtritz, "Ich glaube, das Übersetzen ist eigentlich mehr ein Geschäft für Frauen als für Männer, gerade weil es uns nicht gestattet ist, etwas eigenes hervor zubringen": "I think translation is actually more of an activity for women than for men, precisely because it isn't permitted for us to produce something of our own." In an 8 March 1833 letter to Üchtritz, Dorothea writes that it is very unpleasant for her (das ist mir unangenehm) that the publisher, Reimer, was telling people that she was helping with the translations (Baillot 2008). Considering her father's notorious reputation for not completing work, this may have been Reimer's effort to assuage the fears of subscribers. In her gendered societal environs, public exposure would not have been pleasant or easy for Dorothea Tieck. At one level, it was less oppressive for her to stay in her father's shadow and to internalize the sexism of her time than to make manifest her productive and creative agency in a world that was hostile to women writers.30

Other factors that may have influenced the manner in which Dorothea Tieck saw her productive and creative agency may include her Catholic piety, her relationship to her mother, and the depression that overcame her after her mother died. Dorothea only survived her mother by four years. In 1841, she

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contracted measles, then typhus, and died. Dorothea Tieck died unmarried, and there is no evidence that she had any romantic or sexual relations, except for a possible infatuation with Luise von Bülow, who was fourteen years her junior (Baillot and Zeil, 2016; Jahnson 2000). Much more work needs to be done to follow up on these clues about Dorothea Tieck's biography.

Dorothea Tieck stood loyally in the shadow of her father, Ludwig Tieck, and of the author she was translating, William Shakespeare. As shadow, she endeavored to render faithfully the original into German. In her translation practice, she worked with a devout loyalty to the original. Dorothea wrote, "gerade wenn man das Original so genau kennt, kann man nie glauben, daß die Übersetzung eine gelungene Arbeit seyn kann, und man fühl nur, wieviel verloren geht" (letter to Üchtritz 8 March 1833; Especially because one knows the original so precisely, does one not believe that the translation can be a successful job and one feels only how much has been lost). Paradoxically, it may have been her attempt to write as closely as possible to the original meaning that led to her translations becoming useful resources for the German theorists of modernity. In her devotion to the famous writer, she translated so closely that she interpreted the meaning behind Shakespeare's words and images. Christa Jansohn writes about Dorothea Tieck's translation (in this case her sonnet translations) in this way: "Dennoch tragen auch ihre Übertragungen als extreme Form der poetischen Hermeneutik zur stets sich erneuernden Wirkung des Originals bei und sollten als Versuch, der unwiederholbaren historischen Wirkung des Originals näherzukommen, gewürdigt werden" (1992, 12). (Nevertheless, her translation, as an extreme form of poetic hermeneutic, contributes to the effect of the original which is constantly renewing itself, and should be acknowledged as an attempt to get closer to the unrepeatable historical effect of the original.) Dorothea Tieck's hermeneutic commitment was to the original, both its manifest and latent content. She interpreted that Shakespeare was writing about the inverted world of the money economy in Timon of Athens, about the tragic dialectic of success and failure of the hero's repressed desire in Macbeth, and about the class struggle in Coriolanus. These notions are anachronistic for the early modern period. They were developed by the theories of modernity, especially Marxism and psychoanalysis. Dorothea Tieck, writing in the German Romantic period, used the historical setting in which she lived to begin to interpret these notions in her translations of Shakespeare's texts. When considered within the intertextual nexus of historical literature and theory, Dorothea Tieck's translations of Shakespeare's plays can be seen as exerting an influence on German theory, offering conceptual resonance with their theories. Her interpretive choices display her ethics and her politics, however unconscious http://borrowers.uga.edu/783932/show Page 23 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'40 PM

they might have been to her. Whether she was aware of it or not, Dorothea Tieck was an active agent in a radical German Romantic appropriation of literature for the transformation of society.

NOTES 1. By radical, I mean that they worked to discover the roots of their field of study and that they made irrevocable and revolutionary changes in history. Marx made radical changes to philosophy, economics, social theory, and aesthetics. Freud made radical changes to psychology and social theory. Brecht made radical changes to theater studies and practice. 2. Discussions of the presence of Shakespeare in Marx's life can also be found in other biographies of Marx and his family, including Gabriel 2011; Peters 1986; and Holmes 2014. 3. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German to English in this essay are by the author. 4. This edition included Tieck's translations of Arden of Faversham, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and The Late Lancanshire Witches (Jansohn 2000, 1 n.). 5. It is not known if or to what extent the Tiecks borrowed from other German translations before theirs. Further research on this topic could compare Dorothea Tieck's translations to preceding translations. 6. Translation of "Im Anfang arbeitete ich mit Baudissin zusammen, in Viel Lärmen um nichts sind die Verse von mir und die prosaischen Szenen von ihm. Die Widerspänstige haben wir beide ganz übersetzt, hernach ist von jedem das Beste behalten." 7. All references to the play are from the Arden third edition of the play (Shakespeare 2008). 8. All references to this play are from the Aufbau-Verlag edition 2003 (Shakespeare 2003c). The lines have also been checked against extant nineteenth-century Schlegel-Tieck editions of the play at the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. 9. This is not to say that real-life sex workers do not discern between clients. It is a feature of Marx's imagery of whoring. 10. Jowett and Dawson and Minton all accept "idol" as a possible second meaning (Shakespeare 2004, 268; Shakespeare 2008, 274). 11. The word fleht' could be flehte, which could denote either the past tense, "I did not beg vainly," or the conditional, "I would not beg vainly." Wieland's translation is different: "Nein, ihr Götter, das verlangt' ich nicht von euch" (No, you gods, I didn't ask this from you 4.3). 12. It is not too far of a stretch to suggest that Dorothea Tieck would have

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known about this. Goethe, a family friend and sometime visitor, wrote on geology and minerology and had a large mineral collection (Williams 2001, 268-71). 13. Shakespeare's 1604-1606 Timon of Athens shares theme, content, and imagery with Jonson's 1605 Volpone. Timon's inversions about gold are similar to Mosca's lines, "Why your gold/ Is such another medicine, it dries up / All those offensive savours! It transforms / The most deformed, and restores 'em lovely, / As twere the strange poetical girdle . . . It is the thing / Makes all the world her grace, her youth, her beauty" (5.2.98-104). 14. I have viewed Freud's French edition of Macbeth, edited by James Darmester, at the Freud Museum Archives in London. Freud underlined many passages about Lady Macbeth in the text. 15. All references to the play are from the Arden third edition of the play (Shakespeare 2015). 16. All references to the play are from the Aufbau-Verlag edition (Shakespeare 2003b). The lines have also been checked against extant nineteenth-century Schlegel-Tieck editions of the play at the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. 17. The word "Sieger" is cited in the GDW as a name used in German to describe Napoleon, another hero who, like Macbeth, rose and fell and made many enemies. This occurred during Dorothea Tieck's youth. 18. Friedrich Schiller also translated Macbeth, and he changed Shakespeare's opening. His translation of the witch's line is "Wann das Kriegsgetümmel schweigt / Wann die Schlacht den Sieger zeigt" (When the war commotion falls silent, / When the battle of the victor shows; (http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/macbeth-2191/2 (http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/macbeth-2191/2)). While Schiller has introduced the word Sieger — victor, the victor is not the subject of the clause; the battle is. 19. According to the GDW, the word giftigen comes from the common German root gif, which denoted a payment for a wife, and which became poison in German and gift in English. Its use in Dorothea Tieck's translation of Macbeth captures the double meaning of the witches' prophecies — they are a gift to Macbeth, but also his poison. 20. The GDW lists this word being used in 1802 to mean fenced in / in a Pferch (pen). 21. The OGD does not list the word umpfählen. The word does not appear in the GDW, either. It does appear in J. C. Adelung's Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochsdeutschen Mundart, 1801. 22. Some Shakespearean critics hold that Macduff might be speaking about Malcolm's childlessness as a reason for why he can speak about revenge so soon after the news. This challenges the interpretation that Macduff is speaking about Macbeth's childlessness as a reason for why he could kill

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children (Macbeth, Shakespeare 1962, 135; Macbeth, Shakespeare 2009, 86). By using angry punctuation and scansion, Dorothea Tieck interprets the line to mean that Macbeth is a child killer because he has no children. Her translation has Macduff deliver a shattering cry. 23. All references to the play are from the Arden third edition of the play (Shakespeare 2013). 24. All references to this play are from the Aufbau-Verlag edition (Shakespeare 2003a). The lines have also been checked against extant nineteenth-century Schlegel-Tieck editions of the play at the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. 25. This may have been a metrical choice: two syllables in Adel versus three in Patriziers. 26. It is also significant to note that, in the exchange with Menenius, Tieck switches Shakespeare's Second Citizen for the First Citizen, a move that Brecht also makes (or follows). 27. The GDW lists Kräfte as a word used by Goethe to mean vigor, potestas, and facultas. 28. The GDW lists Kant and Schiller as writers who used the word Abluß to mean draining water. 29. Tieck could have chosen Senk (cesspit) or Senkgrub', to keep the line metrical. 30. Thanks to Anne Baillot for helping me think this through and suggesting some of this analysis. See also "'Ein Freund hier würde diese Arbeit unter meiner Beihülfe übernehmen': Die Arbeit Dorothea Tiecks (1799-1841) an den Übersetzung ihres Vaters" (Baillot 2008, 187-206). See also Anne Baillot and Sophie Zeil, "Tieck und Solger; Zwei Namen und ihre Intellektuellen Genealogien. Achim Hölter, and Walter Schmitz" (2016).

REFERENCES Arden of Faversham. 2007. Edited by Martin White. Revised edition. London: Methuen. Baillot, Anne. 2008. "'Ein Freund hier würde diese Arbeit unter meiner Beihülfe Übernehmen': Die Arbeit Dorothea Tiecks (1799-1841) an den Übersetzung ihres Vaters." In Übersetzungskultur im 18. Jahrhundert. Übersetzerinnen in Deutschland, Frankreich und der Schweiz. Edited by Brunhilde Wehinger. Hannover-Laatzen: Wehrhahn. 187-206. Baillot, Anne, and Sophie Zeil. 2016. "Tieck und Solger; Zwei Namen und ihre Intellektuellen Genealogien." In Achim Hölter and Walter Schmitz. Konferenzband der ersten und zweiten agungen der TieckGesellschaft.

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Available online at: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs- 01277669v2/document (https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs- 01277669v2/document) [accessed 22 November 2017]. Barnett, David. 2013. "Brecht as Great Shakespearean: A Lifelong Connection." In Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire. Great Shakespeareans, Volume 14. London: Bloomsbury. 113-54. Bartolovich, Crystal, Jean E. Howard, and David Hillman. 2012. Marx and Freud. Great Shakespeareans. Volume 10. London: Continuum. Bate, Jonathan, and Eric Rasmussen, Eric. 2007. William Shakespeare, Complete Works. New York: Modern Library. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. "The Task of the Translator." In Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. 69-82. Bernhardi, Wilhelm, "Tieck, Dorothea." In Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Available online at: https://www.deutsche- biographie.de/sfz82667.html#adbcontent (https://www.deutsche- biographie.de/sfz82667.html#adbcontent) [accessed 21 November 2017]. Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of the Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang. Brecht, Bertolt. 1972. Coriolanus. In Collected Plays. Edited by Ralph Manheim and John Willett. Volume 9. New York: Vintage. Fletcher, John. 2013. Freud and the Scene of Trauma. New York: Fordham University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1962. "Obsessions and their Phobias." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. Translated by M. Myer. Volume 3. London: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 1957a. "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. Translated by Alan Tyson. Volume 11. London: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 1957b. "Some Character-Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. Translated by E. C. Mayne. Volume 14. London: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 1953. The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. Translated by James Strachey. Volume 4. London: Vintage.

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Gabriel, Mary. 2011. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. New York: Little, Brown. Gay, Peter. 1988. Freud: A Life for our Time. New York: Doubleday. Grass. Günter. 1966. The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising. Translated by Ralph Manheim. London: Seker and Warburg. Holmes, Rachel. 2014. Eleanor Marx: A Life. London: Bloomsbury. Jansohn, Christa. 2000. Zweifelhafter Shakespeare: Zu den Shakespeare- Apokryphen und ihrer Rezeption von der Renaissance bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Münster: Lit Verlag. Jansohn, Christa. 1992. Shakespeares Sonette in der Übersetzung Dorothea Tiecks. Tübingen: Francke. Jonson, Ben. 1981. Volpone. In Five Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Larson, Kenneth, E. 1987. "The Origins of the 'Schlegel-Tieck' Shakespeare in the 1820s". The German Quarterly 60: 19-37. Marx, Karl. 2007. Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Marx, Karl. 1987. "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Translated by Yuri Sdobnikov. Volume 29. New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1986. "Outlines to the Critique of Political Economy," Rough draft of 1857-58. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Volume 15. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Volume 1. New York: Vintage. Marx, Karl. 1976. The German Ideology. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Volume 5. New York: International. Marx, Karl. 1975a. "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844." In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Volume 3. New York: International. Marx. Karl. 1975b. "Introduction" to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. In Karl Marx: Early Writings. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. New York: Vintage. McLellan, David. 1973. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. New York: Harper and Row.

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Morse, Ruth. 2013. "Introduction: Writing Against Tyranny." In In Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire. Great Shakespeareans, Volume 14. London: Bloomsbury. Nechkina, M. "Shakespeare in Karl Marx's Capital." International Literature 3: 75-81. Parker, Stephen. 2014. Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life. London: Bloomsbury. Paulin, Roger. 2016. The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Kindle. Paulin, Roger. 1986. Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Peters, H. E. 1986. Red Jenny: A Life with Marx. London: Allen and Unwin. Piper, Andrew. 2006. "The Making of Transnational Textual Communities: German Women Translators, 1800-1850." Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 22 (2006): 119-44. Prawer. S. S. 2009. A Cultural Citizen of the World. Sigmund Freud's Knowledge and Use of British and American Writings. London: Legenda. Prawer, S. S. 1978. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2015. Macbeth. Edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason. London: Arden. Shakespeare, William. 2013. Coriolanus. Edited by Peter Holland. London: Arden. Shakespeare, William. 2009. Macbeth. Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Shakespeare, William. 2008. Timon of Athens. Edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton. London: Arden. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Collected Works. Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. New York: Palgrave. Shakespeare, William. 2004. Timon of Athens. Edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2003a. Coriolanus. Translated by Dorothea Tieck. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. Shakespeare, William. 2003b. Macbeth. Translated by Dorothea Tieck. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag.

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Shakespeare, William. 2003c. Timon von Athens. Translated by Dorothea Tieck. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. Shakespeare, William. 2001. Timon of Athens. Edited by Karl Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1993. Timon von Athens. Translated by Christoph Wieland. Zürich: Haffmans Verlag. Shakespeare, William. 1962. Macbeth. Edited by Kenneth Muir. London: Arden. Smith, Christian A. 2013. "Shakespeare's Influence on Marx, Freud, and the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists." Ph.D. Thesis. University of Warwick. Steiner, George. 2012. "The Hermeneutic Motion." In The Translation Studies Reader. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. Third edition. London: Routledge. Tieck, Dorothea. 2017. "Brief von Dorothea Tieck an Friedrich von Uechtritz (Dresden, 8. März 1833)." Edited by Anne Baillot. Available online at: http://www.berliner-intellektuelle.eu/manuscript? Brief07DorotheaTieckanUechtritz+de#1 (http://www.berliner- intellektuelle.eu/manuscript?Brief07DorotheaTieckanUechtritz+de#1) [accessed 21 November 2017]. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 2012. The Translation Studies Reader. Third Edition. London: Routledge. Virgil. 1952. Aeneid. Translated by C. Day Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, R. S. 2007. "Marx and Shakespeare." Shakespeare Survey, 45 (1992): 89-100. Shakespeare Survey Online [accessed 15 October 2009]. Williams, John R. 2001. The Life of Goethe. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Hamlet's Road from Damascus: Potent Fathers, Slain (/current) Ghosts, and Rejuvenated Sons

YOUSEF AWAD AND BARKUZAR DUBBATI, THE UNIVERSITY OF JORDAN (/previous)

(/archive)

ABSTRACT This paper examines the intertextual relationship between Hamlet and Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus (2008). It argues that the appropriation of Hamlet's intellectual and psychological inner conflicts in the novel highlights the complexities of ideological decisions Muslims in Britain face in post-9/11 times. Sami, the novel's protagonist, goes on a quest for salvation and truth that echoes in many ways Hamlet's anguished and prolonged search for evidence of his father's murder story, as narrated by the father's ghost. Just as Hamlet's revenge mission turns into a series of meditations on the human existence, death, and the futility of vengeance, Sami's negotiation with his late father's unwavering demands for secularism and repudiation of Islam complicates the shaping of the Muslim diasporic identity. A number of quotations from Hamlet that come at crucial moments in the novel, as well as Sami's Hamlet-like hallucinatory state, help steer him toward crucial self- realizations.

This paper examines Robin Yassin-Kassab's appropriation of Shakespeare's Hamlet into his post-9/11 novel, The Road from Damascus (2008). It presents a comparative reading of the two texts, identifying parallel techniques and crucial plot development that help Yassin- Kassab in problematizing the ideological representation of the Arab Muslim in diaspora. We argue that the hero of Yassin-Kassab's novel shares some of Hamlet's dilemmas,

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disillusionments, and experiences of attempting to find answers for urgent and persistent ontological questions. As the specter of the father dominates Hamlet and his pursuit of and resistance to revenge, Sami, the protagonist in The Road from Damascus, is haunted by his father's ghost while he explores his ideological affiliations.

Sami finds himself torn between his father's anti-Islamist pan-Arabism and his own allegiances and political convictions. Like Shakespeare's protagonist, who sets out on a psychological journey through which he asks a series of critical questions that eventually help him clear his mind and reach a sense of equilibrium, Sami's early confusion and procrastination turn into a profound and thoughtful quest that eventually cleanses his mind and restores his sense of self-respect and dignity.

Our reading of Yassin-Kassab's appropriation of Hamlet examines his use of the specter of the father, the father-mother-uncle triangle, in addition to his use of direct references to Shakespeare and his works. We argue that the appropriation of Hamlet into Sami's story is meant to complicate the binary opposition between secularism and Islamism and trouble some of the stereotypes associated with each. Through this complication, Yassin-Kassab proposes the viability of different paths beyond this binary opposition for the protagonist, who is meant to stand for Arabs and Muslims in post-9/11 Britain.

The references to Hamlet also intellectualize the debate over the relevance or resistance to the influence of Islam on the perception and reproduction of Arab Muslims' identities in Britain. They also humanize Arabs and Muslims as Hamlet-like figures whose relationships with the past (haunting fathers/home of origin) and present (location in British society) are far from stable and structured, but rather troubled and troubling. We argue that there is abundance of textual evidence to suggest that Yassin-Kassab appropriates Hamlet into his story, following a long literary tradition of adaptation and intertextualization of the play into Arabic literature and Arabic literature in diaspora. The paper explores the implications of such an appropriation on the story of Sami and the representation of Arabs and Muslims in post-9/11 Britain.

The Road from Damascus, which is written in English, is the story of Sami, the son of Mustafa Traifi, a deceased Syrian immigrant to England. He lives under the shadow of his father's academic distinction and his dogmatic atheism and secularism. Sami's father is a well-known intellectual and pan-Arab nationalist who passed away fifteen years ago. As the novel opens, Sami makes his way back to Britain after a sojourn in Syria, in which he tries to seek an inspiration for his Ph.D. dissertation on Arabic poetry. Attempting to fulfill his father's wishes and emulate his academic success, Sami is determined to write a dissertation that diminishes the influence of Islam on Arab cultural productions.

After Sami returns to his home in London, he is shocked to find out that his wife, Muntaha, has decided to wear a hijab/headscarf, reminding Sami of his mother, who made a similar choice years ago, despite the relentless objections of Sami's father. Ever since, Sami has

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categorized his mother's deed as an act of betrayal of his father's anti-Islamic stances and sentiments. Sami finds himself further pushed to the edge when his academic supervisor informs him that his research topic is not viable, reminding him of his obligation, as the son of a renowned thinker, to produce a first class dissertation. Deeply disappointed and disillusioned, Sami indulges in a world of sex, drugs, and alcohol. At this point of intense ideological self-doubt, Sami's father's ghost, taking the shape of a centaur, visits him in hallucinatory episodes to remind him of the necessity to avoid Islam and Muslims, a demand that Sami heartily acknowledges. Sami is imprisoned for drug abuse, and his marriage begins falling apart after his wife discovers his infidelity during a two-day bender.

Out of house and without money, Sami turns to his wife's younger brother, Ammar, who has recently become a devout Muslim. Gradually, Sami's unwavering and unquestioned belief in his father's secularism and pan-Arabism crumbles and is replaced by self-fashioned spiritual inclinations that are akin to Islamic values and beliefs. Sami concludes his inner struggles by slaying his father's ghost and liberating himself from the confinement of his father's demands and commands. He realizes that he has been enslaved by his father's hatred and hostility to Islam and begins to look at life with fresh eyes. As Sami comes to terms with other possibilities beyond his father's doctrine, the 9/11 attacks take place, turning Sami and his ilk into targets of the British government. Sami is arrested and interrogated for standing outside a mosque in a London neighborhood. His beard, the police insist, has given them an incisive clue to indict him of complicity in terrorism. When the police recognize their mistake, they offer him the chance to work as an informer on members of Arab and Muslim communities, which he rejects. The novel concludes with Sami's reconciliation with both his wife and his mother, as he realizes that there are valid paths other than the one his father had chosen for him.

ARABIC ADAPTATION OF HAMLET Yassin-Kassab creates an Arab Muslim Hamlet-like figure whose life is shaped, on the one hand, by a secularist heritage left to him by his father and, on the other, by an anti-Muslim intolerance and hostility created in the aftermath of 9/11. Yassin-Kassab's novel maps a post- 9/11 diasporic Arab and Muslim tragedy "onto the template of Shakespeare's Hamlet," to quote Graham Holderness's words on other adaptations of Hamlet by Arab writers in diaspora (Holderness 2006, 12). This is unsurprising, considering Shakespeare's global popularity and immense influence on world literature, which has led to the appropriation of his plays into international literature (Bosman 2010, Kennedy 2001, Sanders 2007). Julie Sanders demonstrates how processes of adapting and appropriating Shakespeare's plays are "complex means" that involve "multiple acts of mediation and filtration" (Sanders 2007, 62). Thus, "appropriations are often as much in dialogue with other adaptations as with the Shakespearean sourcetext" (62).

In this sense, the Arab world is no exception. Hamlet has always had a strong presence in contemporary Arab literary and cultural productions. As Holderness succinctly puts it,

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"Shakespeare's absorption into Middle East culture was not, by any means, a simple process of imperialist transmission and passive colonial reception" (Holderness 2006, 10). Shakespeare's plays have been adapted and appropriated in the Arab world since "the late- nineteenth century to meet the needs of stage companies that were burgeoning in Egypt and other Arab countries" (Al-Shetawi 1999, 44). Al-Shetawi maintains that in the Arab world, Shakespeare's plays "were translated repeatedly and more often adjusted to satisfy the conditions of local theaters of the time." Hamlet, Al-Shetawi asserts, "has been assimilated in the fabric of Arabic creative processes" (60).

Al-Shetawi's remarks anticipate Margaret Litvin's recognition of "an Arab Hamlet tradition that has produced countless citations, allusions, adaptations and other intertextual appropriations in the past half-century" (Litvin 2007, 74).1 This tradition, Litvin argues, is strongly linked to the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's "anticolonial revolution and the hopes it first inspired and then disappointed" (Litvin 2011, 34). She invokes Hamlet's most memorable and iconic phrases to describe equally uncertain times in the post-Nasser era: The time has been most painfully "out of joint" in the ideological vacuum left by Nasser's 1970 death; the crisis of whether "to be or not to be" has arisen most sharply after the failure of Arab nationalism. This is true not only for Egyptians but for the generation of Arabs all over the Near East who spent their youth listening to Nasser's radio broadcasts and sharing his dreams (Litvin 2011, 34).

The invocation of Nasser is quite pertinent to our discussion of The Road from Damascus, since Sami's father appears as a domineering Nasserist figure whose anti-Islamist pan- Arabist legacy looms over not only Sami but also generations of ardent believers in pan- Arab nationalism. Arabs in diaspora are no exception in dealing with another shadow as they negotiate their hybrid identities. In fact, Nasser's death in 1970 generated mixed responses in the Arab world, as he was represented on stage in any adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet as "Hamlet's father's ghost: awe-inspiring, betrayed, succeeded by men of lesser talent, and continuing to haunt the Arab political imagination" (Litvin 2011, 52).2 What Litvin says about Nasser's representation in adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Arab world applies, to a great extent, to the role Sami's father plays in The Road from Damascus. A fervent believer in pan-Arab nationalism, Sami's father's ghost haunts the novel and continually commands his son to continue to believe in Arab nationalism and to be as far as possible from Islam. In doing so, the ghost personifies Nasser's aspirations of a pan-Arab nationalism and hostility towards Islamism.

INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE ROAD FROM DAMASCUS Yassin-Kassab's life and writings embody the complexities of an Arab identity hybridized in diaspora. He is an Arab-British author who writes in English and whose works examine the complexities of identity constructions for Arabs in diaspora as they mitigate their way around thorny issues of migration, faith, and generational conflicts (Chambers 2011, Rashid http://borrowers.uga.edu/783922/show Page 4 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'41 PM

2012b). His writings belong to a burgeoning tradition of Arab writers in diaspora whose works simultaneously draw on their Arab cultural heritage and their status as citizens of non- Arab and non-Muslim countries. As Layla Al-Maleh argues, Arab writers in diaspora are "compelled, more out of necessity than choice, to negotiate identities from a vantage-point with firm links to Arab history, even when they [are] second- or third-generation writers" (Al-Maleh 2009, 13). The works of Arab writers in diaspora negotiate the space between the different cultures to which they belong. As Salhi puts it, Arab authors in diaspora live in a space "where both home and host cultures converge, intersect, and even clash" (Salhi 2006, 3-4). It is a space in which Arab and Western traditions, philosophies, and cultural artifacts blend and shape each other.

Most critics and analysts who have reviewed The Road from Damascus have pointed out that the novel raises the reader's awareness of the role Islam plays in shaping the identities of a large number of the characters. For instance, Catherine Rashid argues that "Yassin-Kassab challenges the critique of Islamic dogma by constructing a plot which follows an individual's partial conversion to Islam, through a bildungsroman structure" (Rashid 2012b, 94). Rashid maintains that since the novel focuses on the moral development of an individual "within a shifting diasporic community,"The Road from Damascus can be viewed as "not only a novel of 'formation' but also as a novel of 'transformation'" (94). In other words, Rashid highlights how Islam plays a crucial role in the way in which Sami eventually begins to accept his identity as an Arab Muslim who lives in Britain. This realization is instigated by a humiliating racial profiling experience he undergoes towards the end of the novel, after the 9/11 attacks.

Reflecting the hybridity of identity of author and protagonist, Yassin-Kassab's novel draws on both Arabic and Western traditions. It employs intertextuality "as a creative strategy of resistance" (Awad 2012, 172) to produce a clear picture of spiritual and intellectual struggles that the protagonist undergoes. Intertextuality affirms the impossibility of the independence of texts. Since Ferdinand De Saussure's (1974) contribution to literary theory, which established a relational construction of language and meaning, other critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva insist on the indispensability of the social contextualization of reading. Kristeva (1986) posits the instability and disunity of texts. As Graham Allen argues, "The text is not an individual, isolated object but, rather, a compilation of cultural textuality. Individual text and the cultural text are made from the same textual material and cannot be separated from each other" (Allen 2011, 36).3 Readers read into texts the influence of other texts, acknowledging the textual fluidity of meanings. These moments of intertextual affinity do not only fold the linearity of time but also create "linkage between literary creativity and political interpretations" and "renewed interest in the relationship between history and narrative" (Allen 2006, 5). Intertexuality thus provides the space in which history, narrativity, past, present, literariness, and politics come together.

The intertextuality in The Road from Damascus operates no differently. As a culturally hybridized author, Yassin-Kassab tells a story of an Arab and Muslim man's exploration of

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his ideological inclinations, a quest made perilous by a post 9/11 world that has metonymized 'terrorism' in beards and headscarves. He builds this story on intertextually punctured holes that allow Shakespeare's most famous play into the narrative of dealing with the specter of the father of pan Arab nationalism that haunts individual spiritual pursuits in a hostile British environment. It provides a cross-cultural context to what otherwise is supposed to be an individual religious choice. The oppressive secularist pan-Arab nationalism is only mirrored by the hegemony of the state at the end of the novel that essentializes Sami's identity into the binary opposition between a terrorist and a traitor to Britain or a spy and betrayer of his own kind.

In the midst of this polarity of routes, Yassin-Kassab appropriates Hamlet and invokes its protagonist's intellectual dilemma and restraint from action within limited and limiting spaces created by the specter of the father, the incestuous betrayal of the mother, and the colluding of the uncle. In this sense, Yassin-Kassab's novel can be seen as one of the contemporary texts that incorporate a Shakespearean plot within its pages. Drawing on Hamlet enables Yassin-Kassab to paint a realistic picture of the consequences of 9/11 on Arabs and Muslims in Britain. A Hamlet-like Sami is reduced by British police to an "Islamist terrorist" whose beard and skin color are evident marks for instantaneous indictment.

The frequent appearances of Sami's father's ghost, then, link Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus to Shakespeare's Hamlet. As the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet unsettles and perturbs the Danish Prince's mind, eventually rendering him as an iconic contemplative figure who has captured the imagination of generations of readers and viewers worldwide, the appearance of Sami's father's ghost serves to initiate Sami's self-conscious journey of contemplation that leads him to question, challenge, and ultimately abandon his father's commandments. The appearance of the restless ghosts of the two father figures instills in their sons a desire to question and scrutinize what they are ordered to do, prompting them to go on self-probing voyages. While Hamlet contemplates death, the afterlife, and the futility of revenge, Sami's quest leads him to re-evaluate his father's antagonistic thoughts about Islam and reflect on his own beliefs and exigencies, eventually becoming a practicing devout Muslim.

Yassin-Kassab's novel contains numerous references to Hamlet. This is specifically seen when the omniscient narrator describes how Vronsky, a Russian immigrant to Britain during WWI, "learnt English from the newspapers and from a leather-bound volume of Shakespeare" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 133). Few lines down, Vronsky muses that "The Daily Mail said one thing, but Shakespeare said another" (134). Vronsky cites Hamlet's words on man when he is talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about his depression and loss of interest in life: "What a piece of work is a man — how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties, in form and moving; how express and admirable in action; how like an angel in apprehension" (2.2.295-98).4 Echoing Hamlet's words, Vronsky describes his future wife: "In form, in moving, thought Vronsky, how express and admirable! In action how like an

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angel!" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 134). In addition, Marwan, Sami's father-in-law's commentaries on Shakespeare are commended by Jim, a British Council official who knew Marwan long time before his death (141). And Antony, head of a marketing company that Sami briefly works for, urges his employees to work hard and climb the business ladder, quoting Hamlet's words, "There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio" (273).

THE SPECTER OF THE FATHER(S) The novel's first lengthy reference to Shakespeare comes at the beginning of chapter 18. The chapter starts as follows: "In seventeenth-century England the verb 'to leap' was slang for to fuck. Hence the tendency of Shakespeare's livelier characters to visit 'leaping houses'" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 175). Right after this allusion to Shakespeare's witty employment of puns, the omniscient narrator informs us that "Sami had been leaping about in time. He had evaded news of one death and, as usual, frozen out the reality of another" (175). The first death that the above quotation refers to is the death of Marwan, and the second death is that of his father. Sami believes, however, that his father is still alive, a conviction reinforced by the frequent visits his father's ghost makes. To be sure, the omniscient narrator informs us that Sami "embarked on Hobbes' voyage, but had been brusquely hauled back to land by a hallucinated leaping horse. By his father" (175). This is only one of a number of visitations that take place at crucial moments in the narrative. Here, the visit coincides with the start of Sami's self-probing journey following his realization that his Ph.D. project has hit an impasse. When the ghost of the father visits Sami, he takes the form of a horse. The sound of the hooves often precedes these visits.

Sami's challenge to his dead father's desires is similar to Hamlet's procrastination in fulfilling the wishes of his father's ghost by avenging his murder. Sami and Hamlet question the desires of their respective fathers' ghosts, taking in a journey of self-exploration that complicates their lives, but ultimately helps each of them take a critical decision. As Janette Dillon puts it, "What drives Hamlet to unpack his heart is doubt" (Dillon 2007, 74). Sami's response to the ghost's demand that he maintain the path chosen for him as a secularist and anti-Islamism intellectual is replete with doubt. He counters his father's formidable belief in pan-Arabism with growing doubts and persistent wavering between the fulfillment and the rejection of the father's desires. Hamlet doubts his father's ghost, instead seeking evidence before the fulfillment of the father's vengeful wish.

One, however, can read the ghost's demands beyond revenge since Hamlet's killing of Claudius will restore the throne to its rightful heir, which had been usurped by the murder of the father and the marriage to the mother. In this context, Sami's and Hamlet's doubts are similar as they hesitate and procrastinate in the fulfillment of the oppressive demands of their fathers to emulate their achievements (being a king or being an anti-Islam intellectual). Neither son is allowed different paths from the ones selected by the father. The specter of the father, thus, epitomizes the generational conflict between fathers and sons and past and

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present, as a bloody future awaits both sons' resolve to choose their paths (the final bloodshed scene in Hamlet and 9/11 in The Road from Damascus).

Dillon attributes Hamlet's doubt to the fact that "England in 1600 was reeling from a century of religious upheaval, as yet unresolved" (Dillon 2007, 75). She notes that it is no accident that Hamlet and Horatio are established at the start of the play as students at the University of Wittenberg, since this is the place where Martin Luther had nailed his beliefs to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517. Dillon states that Hamlet recalls to an Elizabethan audience "the world of an older faith" as the ghost tells Hamlet how "the souls of the dead had to suffer in purgatory before they could be saved" (75). At the same time, Dillon maintains that the play "consciously puts opposing ideas into play, particularly in the last act, as Hamlet seems to reach a new calm based on a growing trust in providence" (75). In other words, Shakespeare's play presents Elizabethan audiences with complex, and even contradictory, religious doctrines that the skeptic Hamlet has to grapple with.

This augments Hamlet's dilemma, as he has to decide whether or not to accept the words of his father's ghost. As Dillion's words show, Hamlet encounters diverse religious narratives that should be scrutinized and questioned during the course of the play. In a way, this idea re-surfaces in Yassin-Kassab's novel, when Muslim characters "enunciate diverse and often clashing views of Islam," depicting a more nuanced picture of Muslim communities today and deflating the idea "that Islam is a consistent single entity" (Chambers 2012, 121, 125).

The ghost of Sami's father has never left his son. Early in the novel and during his visit to Syria, someone has hinted to Sami that his father, a staunch Ba'athist and a believer in Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism, has informed on Sami's uncle because of his Islamic inclinations. Subsequently, Sami's uncle, Faris, was jailed and tortured for nearly twenty years. On the last night of his visit, Sami dreams of his father, an uncomfortable dream. In a recurring invocation of the image of the horse but this time in the form of a dream, Sami sees a dead sweating horse that "wore the face of Sami's dead father. Mustafa Traifi's face, elongated to fit the equine muzzle" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 10). When Sami wakes up, he remembers that he "had never been visited by his father in a nightmare form. All his dreams of him had been burnished memories, night nostalgia of the kind that occasionally provoked wholesome tears" (10). Sami muses:

There was nothing wrong in the father-son relationship, nothing except the fact that the father was dead, had been dead for sixteen years, was dead, embalmed and mummified. Mustafa Traifi, porcelain sepulchre. Mustafa Traifi, enshrined in Sami's head. The only member of Sami's family who Sami had no problems with. None at all. (10)

This changes, however, when Sami discovers his father's role in the incarceration of his uncle Faris, which leaves him paralyzed.

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(Yassin-Kassab 2008, 23). He confirms his position as a loyal disciple of his father who refuses his mother's act of betrayal when she has decided to wear a hijab, an issue Sami has to deal with personally with his own wife. He sees her desire to wear a hijab as a "threat [. . .]" that "represent[s] the end of everything Sami had hope for too" (3). The perception of the hijab for Sami begins as a visible renunciation of the father's secularist doctrine. The mother's and wife's decision to wear it represents a rejection of what Sami's father stands for and what Sami is compelled to emulate. As Sami's perception of Islam changes once he frees himself from the specter of the father, the hijab like the beard he decides to grow, transforms in ideological significance into a visible declaration of identity in Britain. They both transcend their religious meaning and become an emblem of difference and in post-9/11 times, a target for racial profiling. Sami's initial view of the mother's and wife's decision to wear the hijab as an act of betrayal changes into an opportunity for affinity against the father's dominance.

THE FREUDIAN TRIANGLE At the center of Sami's quest for self-knowledge is a triangle that is not different from the one present in Hamlet. In The Road from Damascus, the father-mother-uncle triangle creates a second and more powerful specter that haunts Hamlet/Sami and their pursuits. In unpacking this parallel of triangles, we rely on Freud's reading of a subtext in the play that psychoanalyzes Hamlet's reluctance and procrastination, which Freud (1945 [1899]) reads as a manifestation of the Return of the Repressed: the oedipal desire. We find this reading enriching to our discussion of the intertextuality in Yassin-Kassab's novel. Freud argues that the infant son develops forbidden sexual desires towards the mother, and since he views the father as a rival for the mother's love, he harbors the desire to kill him. These forbidden wishes are repressed by the fear of castration, a psychological mechanism through which the authority of the father is asserted on an unconscious level. These desires remain latent in the child's unconscious and surface only in neurotic symptoms such as madness, displacement, and impulsive and irrational reactions.

According to Freud's reading of Hamlet, Claudius usurps Hamlet's place as king and as the mother's lover. Hamlet's initial struggle before the visit from his father's ghost is with the incestuous and hasty marriage between his uncle and mother. Once the ghost reveals the truth about his murder, Hamlet's anger towards the mother is compounded, as the betrayal is doubled. Freud notes, however, that Hamlet's own oedipal desires motivate his hesitance to exact revenge against his uncle. He unconsciously recognizes in Claudius' incestuous marriage to Gertrude a fulfilment of his own repressed oedipal desire, and this affinity becomes an obstacle in his quest for revenge. Unable to reclaim his throne without dealing with the second forbidden usurpation, incest, Hamlet postpones his act of revenge, as neurotic symptoms of madness and displacement conceal the Return of the Repressed, which is the desire to marry the mother and kill the father.

The marriage between Gertrude and Claudius represents a moment of incestuous sexual

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affinity acknowledged by Claudius himself, who declares Gertrude "our sometime sister, now our Queen" (1.2.8). This acknowledgement of incest motivates Hamlet's anger and frustration with the reenactment of his forbidden desires. Freud reads Hamlet's instinctive act of killing Polonius, Ophelia's father, mistaking him for Claudius, as an impulsive enactment of oedipal desire to kill the father/father figure. It is no coincidence, according to Freud, that this scene occurs in the mother's bedroom when mother and son are engaged in intense moments of confessions. Polonius, hiding behind a tapestry, momentarily appears like a ghost, which makes Hamlet's act of stabbing him a double act of oedipal killing involving both the specter of the father and the uncle. Once Gertrude is accidentally killed when she drinks from the poisoned cup that Claudius intends for Hamlet, Hamlet is freed from the shadow of the repressed, and he eventually kills his uncle by forcing him to drink from the same cup, yet again uniting the incestuous couple. The rotten state in Denmark of mixed forbidden blood and sex ends with the bloodshed of all sinful parties.

The triangle in The Road from Damascus also consists of father-mother-uncle and is rife with betrayal. While the incest in Hamlet is sexual and marital, it is ideological between actual brother and sister in The Road from Damascus. The ideological affinity between Nur, Sami's mother, and brother against her late husband's atheist convictions is interpreted by Sami at one point as an act of betrayal. The uncle who spends years in the oblivion of Syrian jails due to the betrayal of Sami's father wins the mother's conviction when she decides to cover her hair and make her ideological difference visible. This act of affinity is further complicated when Sami's own wife follows suit and wears the headscarf. This ideological mimicking creates a window of release that allows Sami to slay the ghost of the father as wife and mother become doubles through the head cover.

The fulfillment of the oedipal desire, while interrupted in Hamlet by Ophelia's suicide, is allowed in The Road from Damascus. The triangle in The Road from Damascus operates similarly to Hamlet's in endearing the uncles to the protagonists in both texts. In Hamlet, the uncle represents a fulfillment of Hamlet's latent oedipal desires, hence incapable of being killed. In The Road from Damascus, the uncle represents the ideological fulfillment of incest while simultaneously fulfilling the role of the victim of the father that Sami eventually embodies. The death of the father is supposed to instigate Hamlet's revenge quest; however, it hinders that revenge, since the story is a reversal of the development of the Oedipus Complex. According to Freud, the killing of the father is the ultimate unfulfilled pursuit of the infant boy as he goes into maturity, but in Hamlet, the story begins with the death of the father and the resurrection of his specter. Sami's struggle concludes with the killing of the (ghost of the) father. Marrying the mother is allowed on an ideological level, as both turn into practicing Muslims and renounce the ideology of the father, and also on a sexual level, when Sami's wife mirrors his mother's ideological decision and wears the hijab.

MADNESS AND SUICIDE Other points of parallel between the novel and the play concern the two protagonists' erratic

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behavior, which is spurred by the intervention of the specters of the father into their lives. Sami's initial response to the ideological threat is indulgence in the world of drugs. Disconnecting his mobile, Sami goes on a journey into the city's underworld. In a night club, he has sex with a girl whose name he does not know. Once he wakes up, Sami is visited by his father's ghost:

Not when at his back, above him, there is the heavy thud of hooves, an equine slobber, a flurry of dust (thick, red Syrian dust), and the beast rearing on its hind legs, flanks shivering and scattering blood. He doesn't want to see the rider [. . .] The apocalypse horse is its own rider. It has a human face: the leering, fish-eyed face of Mustafa Traifi. (Yasin-Kasebb, 2008, 166)

Ashamed of what he has done, Sami does not listen to his father. He runs away. Wandering aimlessly around the city, Sami looks like a mad person, which creates a parallel to the appearance of mad Hamlet following the visit of his father's specter. In fact, Ophelia is stunned to see Hamlet with "his doublet all unbraced" and his stockings "fouled," looking "pale as his shirt" (2.1.74-81). The shopkeeper of the store in which Sami enters is astonished to see him in his horrendous shape, "bloodshot, semi-dressed, canal-stained" (177).

Sami has surely been derailed from the path his father has carefully drawn for him. It is not surprising then that Sami apologizes for his procrastination and assures his father's ghost of his full obedience: "'Despite whatever you've done,' he muttered, 'I don't hold anything against you. Despite it all. Just leave me alone, then. I'm doing this for you. Steering clear of Muslims. No need to worry. So leave me alone'" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 178). As Sami continues his voyage into the streets, he gets arrested for using drugs. A prison inmate advises Sami to "'[d]istinguish false from true visions. Stand in Satan's way'" (82). Sami "felt he was on the verge of something. The lifting of a veil. The Greek word for it is apocalypse" (181). At this moment of crisis, Sami is visited again by his father's ghost: Sami heard the briefest clack of hooves. Mustafa Traifi's face began to form. "Oh fuck off," said Sami. Mustafa disappeared. There were tears in his eyes, but he didn't brush them away. What he did this time was face facts. Heard the echo of his own "fuck off" in his ears. Words with no audience, for his father was really gone. (184) Sami muses: "Nothing was left of Mustafa Traifi, it was time to admit that. Time to stop behaving as if his father was still here. And time, therefore, to examine all the superstitions he'd built around his father's ghost" (184). Spurred by the prison inmate's warning of false visions and urging to confront Satan, Sami begins to investigate the ideas his father has implanted in him.

This is similar to Hamlet's decision to act logically and investigate the narrative of his

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father's ghost, which Hamlet begins to suspect and interrogate. He wonders whether what he has seen is a manifestation of the devil, who "hath power to assume a pleasing shape" — that is, the shape of his father — and exploiting his "weakness and my melancholy" (2.2.531-40). Similarly, Sami begins to question his father's ideas and thoughts: "The God fiction, for instance. He'd believed as passionately as he could that it was fiction because he'd thought it was manly and worthy of his father's pride to believe so" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 184).

As Sami begins to find alternatives for the thoughts his father has instilled in him, he becomes a Hamlet-like meditative figure. Dillon makes a link between Hamlet's meditation on death and contemporary anxieties over the location of religion in politics and society, which is similar to Sami's conflicted pursuit of identity among combating ideologies. Dillon argues that in the scene in which Hamlet discusses death with the gravedigger, albeit in a comic way, he "recalls an older tradition of Christian drama, combining the fear of death with the hope of resurrection, at the same time as it moves towards a new secularism" (Dillon 2007, 70). This uncertainty is further centralized in Hamlet's internal torment and manifested in his "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Hamlet's meditations on death and the afterlife are part of an internal conflict that he undergoes once his father's ghost informs him about his murder at the hands of his uncle. Hamlet's soliloquy reflects Elizabethan debates about these thorny and crucial issues. According to Claire McEachern:

This afterlife was by no means an uncontested site. Different stripes of Christianity defined the nature of connection between now and later in different ways. Skepticism about the afterlife's very existence was also present in this period, as was indifference or insouciance. (McEachern 2010, 196)

To a large extent, Sami's meditations on death and the afterlife echo those of Hamlet and reinforce the Hamlet-like meditative figure that Sami takes on as he questions his father's hostility and resentment toward Islam. Similar to previous adaptations by Arab writers, Yassin-Kassab's "Hamletization of the Arab Muslim hero" grants Sami "psychological depth" and "recognition as a moral subject" (Litvin 2011, 92). Sami contemplates: What if he were to believe, positively, in a God, in the unseen? To believe that death was not death but another kind of life? Would that be wrong? Would it be wrong to at least aspire to such a belief, to hope? Was hoping wrong? Faced with injustice, the absurdity, the unthinkability, of death. For it is unthinkable, once you've noticed yourself living, to stop. No, not wrong. Perhaps not right either. But not wrong. You could even say that the weight of blindness falls on those who don't stir to hope, so blind they are to the absurdity of death. The careless atheists, like him. The materialists who sneer at religious emotion. You could even say that it is they who are in denial. For Sami this was a great leap, across, out, into the abyss. Towards what? Would something be there to meet him? To stop him falling through the void? (Yassin-Kassab

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2008, 184)

In fact, the novel contains significant passages meditating on death and, in different ways, giving explanations to Hamlet's inquiries. Significantly, Muntaha is the character who offers these clarifications, especially in her conversations with Gabor. In one place, she explains death from a Muslim perspective, which parallels Hamlet's famous soliloquy. Quoting Muslim scholar Ghazali, she describes death as "mysterious" and a transient dream-like state of being in which the souls of the dead "sleep and dream of the state they'll be in after the Last Day" (145). Yassin-Kassab's novel seems to explore what Hamlet refers to as the "undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns" (3.1.78-79).

Eventually, Sami's meditations lead him to reject his father's adverse thoughts toward Islam. Sami here can be seen as Hamlet, who towards the end of the play develops trust in providence: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will' (5.2.10-11); "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow" (5.2.197-98).5 Hamlet's quest leads him to question the usefulness and worth of revenge. Hamlet, to use David Bevington's words, "feels sure that divine wisdom is somehow in charge of all that happens; now he sees that pattern with more confidence and faith in an unseen goodness" (Bevington 2006, 96). In other words, Hamlet "put[s] himself at the service of an overseeing providence to which he now trusts his whole life and mission" (98). Thus, when his father's ghost appears to him, towards the end of the novel, Sami does not hesitate to slay him, avenging all the people, including his uncle Faris, who was victimized by Sami's father and his repressive ideologies that allow no dissent: He [Sami] turns around, finding a sword's handle in his grasp, and the centaur snorting and galloping at him. He stabs it upwards through the throat, through flank and gristle, pushing hard. [. . .] More stabbing, more gore. The son sacrifices the father, whose horse body quickly dissolves. Mustafa raises a palm in farewell. (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 281)

Once Sami slays the ghost of the father, he regains his freedom and begins to look upon his life with serenity. The omniscient narrator informs us that "mosques didn't frighten him [Sami] since he'd stopped believing in Mustafa's ghost" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 204). Sami now realizes that "[t]here were paths other than the one his father had trodden. Other, but not necessarily mistaken. Paths taken, for instance, by his wife, or by his mother. Other, valid paths" (10-11). As the novel closes, the reconciliation between the son and mother is complete. Sami and his mother discuss, for the first time, their past. Asking his mother for clarification about the role his father played in informing on his uncle Faris twenty years ago, Nur offers a more benevolent and tolerant reading of the past: "He [Sami's father] thought there'd be one nation. One Arab nation from the Ocean to the Gulf. What we have now is everything but. We have everything smaller and

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everything bigger. Little sects and ethnicities, little nationalisms, and big Islamism. But no Arab nation. If they hadn't tried so hard to force us into it, maybe it would have happened." (340-41)

Nur's words are quite interesting because she clearly reveals that Mustafa Traifi's unwavering and dogmatic faith in pan-Arab nationalism prevented him from being more lenient towards other ideological approaches, particularly Islam. Mustafa Traifi's belief in pan-Arab nationalism surely reminds us of Gamal Abdel Nasser's dreams and aspiration for a pan-Arab nation that has little, or even no, space for Islamism. As Litvin notes, Nasser underlies and enables "Arab Hero Hamlet: Shakespeare's Hamlet understood as a visionary activist, a fighter for justice brutally martyred by an oppressive regime" (Litvin 2011, 36).

Hence, it is quite fitting that the novel complicates Sami's inner conflicts of choosing between Islam and nationalism by bringing into the picture Hamlet, who in the Arab world is understood as "largely a product of Nasser's revolution and the way that revolution was lived out" (Litvin 2011, 36-37). In this way, Hamlet is more than a charismatic Shakespearean hero, but he is strongly affiliated with and deeply engrossed in pan-Arab nationalism — lived, adored, and idolized by a generation of Arab intellectuals represented in the novel by Mustafa Traifi.

Once Sami frees himself from his father's ghost, he realizes that "faith is not synonymous with backwardness, nor secularism with humanism" (Jaggi 2008, par. 5). In one place, he states that "'Islam is something you find inside yourself rather than in any specific country'" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 221). He even starts to perform prayers because "He had no opinions to prevent him from doing so" (222). Through his brother-in-law, Ammar, he begins to integrate into the Muslim community, which is more accepting of his choices and newly found identity (224). Now Sami looks at his past with a kind of regret: He considered how different to his illusions the world actually was. He'd thought he was holding the fort of secular humanism, but the fort had already fallen. In its rubble a marketplace of religion had set up, where people thrashed and struggled to attain uniqueness of belief. (244) Sami realizes that "secular humanism was a late nineteenth-century hiccup, an antiquated European gentleman's daydream. And Mustafa's daydream too, of course" (245)).

POST 9/11 HAMLET HERO Yassin-Kassab's representation of Sami as a Hamlet-like figure is meant to humanize Arabs and Muslims, who after 9/11 have been demonized, criminalized, and dehumanized. Sami's journey away from the shadow of the father and his secularist doctrine enables him to make some insightful and even-handed comments. The novel, which is written in English, addresses mainly Anglophone culture and readers for whom Hamlet represents, inter alia, nobility and honor. Sami is meant to be an Arab Muslim Hamlet who lives in diaspora. Like

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Hamlet, The Road from Damascus ends in mass deaths that have enduring repercussions for contemporary life. As the attacks of 9/11 take place in the United States, Arabs and Muslims in the West experience a backlash as "[r]epeated references to 'Islamic terrorists,' even 'Islamo-fascists,' have justified many acts of discrimination, both large and small" (Scanlan 2013, 22).

In this sense, the novel attempts to portray some of the hardships that Arabs and Muslims in Britain have undergone following the attacks. The parallel between Sami and Hamlet draws a more realistic image of Arabs and Muslims that counters and undermines images circulated through media "in which the propensity for extremism and violence of a small segment of politicized Islam is magnified and projected onto Muslim communities around the world" (Morey and Yaqin 2011, 18).

With this in mind, Yassin-Kassab depicts the repercussions of 9/11 events on Sami's life. The suicide attacks take place at the moment when Sami awakens and begins to see reality clearly. He is bewildered as "he had no scale to measure the event. Nothing inherited from Mustafa. No nationalist way of judging. No Qabbani verse to help him" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 315). Sami reverts to his mentor, Tom Field, for explanations, who offers a pessimistic version of what will happen: "I said something big was planned. And there you have it, a couple of days ago. The catalyst. The trigger. Well then, watch it unfold. Enjoy the . . ." — his flow broke and resumed as he stripped and stacked — — ". . . the oil wars, Or not. As the case may be." [. . . ] "It's how they'll exploit it that's the point. And that isn't difficult to predict."' (324-25)6

It does not take long for Tom's apocalyptic words to turn true for the "war on terror" has already started. Sami, who has just grown a beard, gets arrested outside a Brick Lane mosque. As the police carry out their investigations, Sami realizes that he was in this situation because of "The burden of the beard [. . .] The burden of belonging. Just when he was sorting himself out the external world took a lurch for the worse" (333). Once the police discover Sami's true identity, they release him. In a reminder of one of the most frequently employed motifs in Hamlet, which is spying and betrayal, the police offer Sami to work as a spy and an informant on his Arab and Muslim community, which he categorically refuses.

In order for Yassin-Kassab to present the dilemma of Arabs and Muslims in Britain post 9/11, he draws on Shakespeare's Hamlet. By presenting Sami as a Hamlet-like figure, Yassin-Kassab presents to his Anglophone audience an Arab Muslim man whose life has been shaped by ontological complications, psychological conflicts, and spiritual quests. Yassin-Kassab creates an Arab Muslim figure whose life is shaped, on the one hand, by a secularist heritage left to him by his father and, on the other hand, by Islamophobia and post 9/11 hostility. Sami's choice for Islam over secularism occurs about the same time as the 9/11 attacks which instigates another war, the victims of which were innocent bearded Arab http://borrowers.uga.edu/783922/show Page 15 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'41 PM

and Muslim men like Sami and headscarves-wearing women like Nur and Muntaha.

CONCLUSION Just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, Sami's father's ghost haunts the novel, and hence, enables Yassin-Kassab to explore "a mind in crisis" (Sanders 2007, 54). By employing intertextuality, The Road from Damascus vocally denounces the war on terror and the environment of witch hunting and spying that has prevailed in post 9/11 Britain. In this sense, the novel, to quote Scanlan's words on the postcolonial novel after 9/11, "haunt[s] and indict[s] the war on terror" (Scanlan 2013, 33). Through deconstructing the monolithic representation of the Arab Muslim in diaspora, Yassin-Kassab complicates the binary opposition of the secular/religious Arab Muslim. By drawing on the psychological depth that is the hallmark of Hamlet, the novel imbues Sami with sophistication as intense as that of Hamlet. After all, what we learn from Hamlet is that life choices are more than "to be or not to be" because, as Sami finds out, there are other "valid paths" (Yassin-Kassab 2008, 11).

NOTES 1. In her seminal book, Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost, Litvin (2011) argues that there are three main phases of postcolonial Hamlet appropriation in the Arab world. In the first period, which Litvin calls Nasserist revolutionary optimism (1952-1967), Hamlet is "an emblem of interiorised subjectivity and psychological depth" (2011, 83). In the second phase, which Litvin associates with the complete Arab military defeat in 1967 and the death of Nasser in 1970, "Hamlet has become an Arab revolutionary hero, a martyr for justice meant to mobilize audiences against" tyrants (83). In the last phase, which Litvin links to the past thirty years (since about 1977), Arab dramatists have "deployed Hamlet for dramatic irony," whereby the hero-Hamlet of the previous two phases "has become a foil for pointedly inarticulate and ineffectual protagonists" (83). 2. It is noteworthy that Arab British playwright Sulayman Al-Bassam's adaptation of Hamlet, The Al-Hamlet Summit (2006), is written in English. For a comprehensive discussion of the play, see: Holderness 2007. 3. See also Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (2008). 4. All references to Hamlet are to the Arden 3 edition, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Shakespeare 2006). 5. Janette Dillon uses these two quotations to argue that "faith in providence was central to Calvinist doctrine, and Calvin himself used the same example of the sparrow from the New Testament (Matthew 10.29) to insist upon it" (2007, 75). As explained earlier, Dillon argues that Hamlet's doubts about the ghost's demands of revenge stem largely from the religious upheaval England was witnessing around the time Shakespeare was writing his plays. 6. Asked by Claire Chambers (2011) on his opinions on 9/11, Yassin-Kassab replied: "The whole thing is very suspicious. I don't go along with the blatant conspiracy theorists, but I

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feel certain Osama bin Laden — wittingly or unwittingly, perhaps just out of stupidity — is working for America, because al-Qa'ida has saved the Empire's skin on three occasions that I can think of" (Chambers 2011, 199). Yassin-Kassab explains these three occasions in the same interview. To some extent, Tom Field voices some of Yassin-Kassab's perspectives on 9/11.

REFERENCES Allen, Graham. 2011. Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom. Second edition. London: Routledge. Allen, Roger. 2006. "Intertextuality and Retrospect: Arabic Fiction's Relationship with its Past." In Intertextuality in Modern Arabic Literature since 1967. Edited by Luc-Willy Deheuvels, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, and Paul Starkey. Durham: Manchester University Press. 1-12. Al-Maleh, Layla. 2009. "Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature." In Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature. Edited by Layla Maleh. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1-63. Al-Shetawi, Mahmoud F. 1999. " Hamlet in Arabic." Journal of Intercultural Studies 20.1: 43- 63. Awad, Yousef. 2012. The Arab Atlantic: Resistance, Diaspora, and Trans-cultural Dialogue in the Works of Arab British and Arab American Women Writers. Saarbrücken, LAP: LAMBERT Academic Publishing. Bevington, David M. 2006. How to Read a Shakespeare Play. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bosman, Anston. 2010. "Shakespeare and Globalization." In The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 285-301. Chambers, Claire. 2012. "'Sexy Identity-Assertion': Choosing between Sacred and Secular Identities in Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus." In Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing. Edited by Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin. London: Routledge. 117-31. Chambers, Claire. 2011. British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dillon, Janette. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Tragedies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1945. The Interpretations of Dreams. Translated by A. A. Brill. 1899; London: Allen & Unwin.

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Holderness, Graham. 2006. "Introduction." In The Al-Hamlet Summit, by Sulayman Al-Bassam. Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. 9-19. Jaggi, Maya. 2008. "Beyond Belief." Guardian, 14 June. Available online at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/14/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview9 (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/14/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview9) [accessed 28 April 2018]. Kennedy, Dennis. 2001. "Shakespeare Worldwide." In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 251-64. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press. Litvin, Margaret. 2011. Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Litvin, Margaret. 2007. "Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition." Critical Survey 19.3: 74-94. McEachern, Claire. 2010. "Shakespeare, Religion, and Politics." In The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 185-200. Morey, Peter, and Amina Yaqin. 2011. Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Orr, Mary. 2008. Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Rashid, Catherine. 2012a. "British Islam and the Novel of Transformation: Robin Yassin- Kassab's The Road from Damascus." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48.1: 92-103. Rashid, Catherine. 2012b. "Cultural Translation and the Musafir: A Conversation with Robin Yassin-Kassab." Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 3.1: 151-62. Salhi, Zahia Smail. 2006. "Introduction: Defining the Arab Diaspora." In The Arab Diaspora: Voices of an Anguished Scream. Edited by Zahia Smail Salhi and Ian Richard Netton. London: Routledge. 1-10. Sanders, Julie. 2007. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Saussure, de Ferdinand. 1974. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia University Press. Scanlan, Margaret. 2013. "Migrating from Terror: The Postcolonial Novel after September 11." In Literature, Migration, and the "War on Terror." Edited by Fiona Tolan et al. London: Routledge. 266-78.

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Shakespeare, William. 2006. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden 3. London: Arden. Yassin-Kassab, Robin. 2008. The Road from Damascus. London: Penguin.

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Vortigern in and out of the Closet

(/current) JEFFREY KAHAN, UNIVERSITY OF LA VERNE

(/about) ABSTRACT

(/archive) The W. H. Ireland forgery Vortigern has been explored repeatedly as an infamous and in some ways scandalous theatrical failure. At the same time, studies of Ireland himself have focused on the toxic nature of his childhood. Yet, no one has entwined these performative and biographical threads. This paper reframes Vortigern as a closet play designed to expose and humiliate the forger's father, Samuel Ireland. It gathers evidence from the hitherto unexplored first draft of the play, which was read aloud by Samuel Ireland at a family gathering. The earliest draft of Vortigern was not a play designed for professional performance; it was, rather, a closet play, a mousetrap in which Samuel Ireland was ensnared, his credulity exposed, and moral hypocrisy uncovered before his counterfeit family.

This essay is dedicated to Diane Long Hoeveler, 1949-2016.

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Meeting of Vortigern and Rowena painted by William Hamilton

In 1815, an anonymous rhymester, "Anser Pen-Drag-on, Esq," mocked the fashionable playwrights of his era, including an infamous Shakespeare forger and his play, Vortigern: In garb of deception boy Ireland now view, With Vortigern dauntlessly brave critic crew, Thus proving mere childhood can acumen blind, And veil youthful faults with bright flashes of mind. (W. H. Ireland 1815) The poet supplemented the passage with a critical gloss explaining: "the fate of Vortigern [sic] is well known to the public; it was the effusion of a youth of eighteen, and, if not possessed of some beauties when read in the closet, the wisest and most able critics must have been most egregiously deceived" (W. H. Ireland 1815, 121n.). Today, we know that "Anser Pen-Drag-on, Esq," was in fact William-Henry Ireland; as such, Anser Pen-Drag-on's verse is intended as a revisionary puff, an attempt to save Vortigern from the scrap heap of history. Ireland's play was staged for all to see at Drury Lane on April 2, 1796. The house was packed; newspaper and journal coverage was extensive, but the result, in part due to machinations among the cast, was disastrous. The play was booed off stage. That said, the forger is not merely suggesting that Vortigern's public premiere was sabotaged; he is also referencing a still earlier private performance — when Vortigern was "read in the closet."

VORTIGERN IN PUBLIC

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Thinking of Vortigern as a closet play is a significant relocation, if only because in 1794 through 1796, it was very much a public event. In late 1794, the teenage William-Henry Ireland claimed he had met a mysterious man named "Mr. H.," who (allegedly) owned a trunk brimming with Shakespeare's legal papers, love letters, unpublished poems, portraits, business correspondences, and a series of lost plays, among them, Vortigern. The forgeries were open to public viewing; anyone willing to shell out the entry fee (two guineas, or in today's money roughly £220) could look at them.1 The high ticket price was by design.2 The forger's father, Samuel Ireland used the forgeries as a money- making scheme and as a social passport into high society (Bate 1989, 58). Ticketed sirs, earls, and dukes lined up to see (and to be seen seeing) the papers (Schoenbaum 1993, 156; Kahan 1998, 168; Lynch 2004, 94; see also Worrall 2007, 133).

While a variety of experts were invited to inspect the manuscripts and offer their public opinion, almost all of the authorities who entered Samuel Ireland's house on 8 Norfolk Street seemed happy enough to participate in a grand spectacle tinged with religiosity. James Boswell, loyal sidekick and biographer of Samuel Johnson, studied the putative "Shakspeare Papers," then requested a tumbler of warm brandy and water (W. H. Ireland 1874, 96). Having nearly finished his drink, Boswell could no longer contain himself. He fell to his knees and cried out, "how happy I am to have liv'd to the present day of discovery of this glorious treasure — I shall now die in peace"; and then he kissed the papers (Kahan 1998, 83).

Despite the public veneration and general hoopla surrounding the discoveries, the top Shakespeareans of the 1790s (Edmond Malone and George Steevens) refused invitations to visit 8 Norfolk Street. Joseph Ritson, another important Shakespearean of the era, inspected the papers, asked a few quiet, purposeful questions and left without saying good-bye. The forger interpreted Ritson's actions: "In fine, I do as firmly believe that Mr. Ritson went away fully assured that the papers were spurious, as that I have existence at this moment." William Henry Ireland had shrewdly deduced Ritson's opinions. In a letter to a friend in Edinburgh, Ritson stated that the papers were "a parcel of forgeries, studiously & ably calculated to deceive the public" (Kahan 1998, 150).

Given the public referendum over the play and the way it was carefully framed by the other accompanying forgeries, the thought of Vortigern having been written as a (presumably stand-alone) closet piece is startling. It is also counter-intuitive. Commonsensically, the documents that Boswell and other critics inspected were a collective framing device for Vortigern: the forgeries carefully lay the groundwork for the play's debut. Vortigern was only "discovered" after a variety of legal and personal letters established the existence of the "old" and unknown play. However, we do not know and cannot know the order in which the forged documents were created. It may well be that Vortigern was written first, and only then did the forger turn his brain to how he might release the papers, first to his family and then to the public. As James Agate reminds us, "The drama is an aesthetic phenomenon, the theater is an economic

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proposition" (1926, 9). In short, it is my contention that Vortigern was first written for the forger's family and then recalibrated as part of a money-making scheme.

CLOSETED MEANINGS A closet drama is broadly defined as any play that is meant to be read or that has been published; it can also include a play performed for intimate friends or relations (the most famous instance is Elizabeth Inchbald's play, Lover's Vows, performed among friends in Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park); it can be a professionally-published souvenir copy (i.e., the title-page might state that the version offered was "performed at" such-and- such a theater by such-and-such a company), or a pseudo-novel meant for armchair readers. While there is some overlap here, Marta Straznicky suggests that closeted performances differed from commercial theatricals insofar as the former belonged exclusively to the "private" sphere and afforded women access to theatrical discourse otherwise unavailable to them (2004, 112; see also Raber 2001, 19, 23-24). In such instances, the playwright might craft a work that spoke specifically to an immediate audience (e.g., family and friends). Straznicky's study centers on female playwrights, and, in terms of eras, ends about a hundred years before Ireland penned Vortigern, but the argument nonetheless holds. Plays created for closeted readings often carried within them private discourse. In terms of a private reading for family and friends, I want to expand that definition to include secret or coded messages.

Saying that some works have secret messages does not do us much good if we have no way to decode them. In most cases, the autobiographical inner life of any author is often read as if it were a scrambled alphabet, the life turned into literary riddles and runes, or what Anne Williams has called personalized or "coded" expressions (2009, 29). Reading for the inner-life of the author across multiple drafts of a work only adds to that interpretive challenge, and this is especially true when dealing with mid- to late eighteenth-century authors, who commonly marketed their highly polished works as extemporaneous, hastily conceived, or received in a trance or dream.3 Edward Young, for example, considered writing to be something that "rises spontaneously" (1918, 7). That aesthetic, what Zachary Leader calls "textual primitivism," is all the more important in cases of forgery, since forgeries must appear to be artless, their authorship and, thus, intent, deliberately concealed (1996, 25).4

In the case of Vortigern, any critical interpretation or biographical reading must also take into account Ireland's intended misdirection. Since Vortigern is supposed to be by Shakespeare, the clues in the public text should point to the inner life of Shakespeare, not to that of the forger. Readers looking for straightforward biographical significance in the Ireland forgeries (or even his printed Confessions) would do well to adopt Jack Lynch's jaundiced view: "William-Henry Ireland lied; he lied often; he lied about important matters; he lied about trivia; he lied recklessly. The result is that almost everything we think we know about Ireland may be wrong. Those who presume to write

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about him must be on their guard" (2004, 87). Nonetheless, looking at the forgeries in context, there is more than enough reason to suppose that at least one member of the Ireland household recognized a coded message in Vortigern. We can delay for a paragraph or two what that message was. The point to keep in mind here is that the message was not only recognized, it was also purposefully suppressed before it could be shared with the public.

The proof is in the extant manuscripts. There are seven distinct manuscript versions of Vortigern (MSS 1-4, 6-7 are in the Folger Library; MS 5 is at the Huntington Library). The stage-approved version (as found in MS 4 and beyond) tells the story of Vortigern, a usurper who discards his wife in favor of Rowena, his mistress. When Vortigern crowns her as his new queen, the family fractures. Vortigern's first wife, Edmunda, goes mad; his daughter Flavia flees to the local forest; his sons join the armies of Aurelius, son of the murdered King Constantius.

In the three earliest versions of the play (MSS 1-3), there is another reason for Flavia's flight — her father's incestuous desire. This is from the modern-spelling version, MS 3: VORTIGERN: Yes, thy mellow'd Voice shall here command me, And in my breast fast root the Plant o Love Thy radiant beauty shall serve as Sun, To nourish and bring forth its tender blossoms. Why start thus, wherefore art thus amaz'd? FLAVIA: Can it be other Sir, when such words as these From Fathers lips find utterance? The Angels sure did hide themselves with shame, And Man's great Enemy did turn aside, Else must this firm Globe ha' been feverous, And heavens high canopy in horror, Have blaz'd this vast immensity of Earth! O Sir, are you my Father — shame, Shame, Shame! VORTIGERN: Ay, one woud needs love, and admire you, An you took the right way to preferment. But mark me, and set not the burning coal To fire revenge within, for if thou dost, I'll measure this my quantity o love, And thrice treble it, with direst hate. My Passions, thou know'st, are hot, and fiery, More is than troubl'd Sea; or hungry Tyger Therefore beware, and give a speedy answer? Thou dos't understand me, for on that, depends Thine happiness or misery. — (Kahan 2004, 3:157-58)5

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Before she can be raped, Flavia flees her father's court. Shame here takes on another resonance, the need to maintain silence. Flavia's impulse to leave the court is explained only by Vortigern himself, who accuses his daughter of perverse loyalties, deserting his side in favor of the enemy. Though Vortigern is captured and arrested for his murderous usurpation and Flavia restored as a titled princess of the realm, she adheres to her father's duplicitous narrative. She never discloses her personal and familial shame.

The scene was apparently so shameful that no one was allowed to read the original manuscript of the play. While the other documents were on display and were actually printed and available for inspection (S. Ireland 1796), Vortigern remained unpublished and unseen. There is, for example, no reference to Boswell having read the play; the first person outside the family to read Vortigern was Drury Lane manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan. And even then, he read only a redacted transcript in a modern hand — MS 4. The forger recalls that Sheridan "inspect[ed] the fair copy of the play [i.e., the modern, theatrically, or in this case, publicly-ready version], which had been made from the manuscript as produced in the disguised hand" (W. H. Ireland 1874, 138).6

True, the Irelands may have kept the play back to maximize public curiosity (and its related market value) in negotiations with Sheridan, but the point remains that the public knew nothing of the incest scene. That was not the case within the Ireland family. When the forger turned over his "discovered" Shakespeare play to his father, he had every reason to suppose it would be read aloud to the family. In his Confessions, William- Henry Ireland writes: "I had daily opportunities of hearing Mr. Samuel Ireland extol the genius of Shakspeare, as he would very frequently in the evening read one of his plays aloud, dwelling with enthusiasm on such passages as most peculiarly struck his fancy [. . .] I [. . .] paid the greatest attention to every statement made by Mr. Ireland" (1874, 6; emphasis added). Taking the forger at his word (not always a good idea), William-Henry Ireland wrote Vortigern with his father in mind. The subject and the speaker here were designed to be heard as one. In Samuel Ireland's closet performance of the incest scene, the family would have seen a truly repulsive parental figure and predator.

Of course, there might be nothing to this. Samuel Ireland might have read the play to his family and made no connection between himself and Vortigern. Maybe he never connected the dots; maybe there were no dots to connect. But then why was the scene cut before anyone outside the family could read it? If you are asking who did the cutting, well, as the head of the household, Samuel Ireland himself undertook the crossing out of lines that he presumably felt were inappropriate.7

The logic for cutting the incest scene had nothing to do with Shakespeare's supposed respectability. Both Hamlet and Pericles have incest scenes, and both were staged in the era. Hamlet was, far and away, the most popular staged play of the eighteenth century; Pericles, while comparatively unpopular — it was only professionally staged twice in London in the entire eighteenth century — was commonly included in complete works

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of Shakespeare (Index 1979, 772; Kahan 2004, 3:7-8). Vortigern's incest, however, was never performed on stage and was not included in the later manuscript copies (MS 4-7) and later published quartos. If the theatrical record cannot justify the cut, then obviously, we'll have to explore alternatives. We can begin by looking at the public façade of the Irelands and the forgeries that they presented to the world.

A FORGED FAMILY From the outside looking in, "the Ireland family could have been called respectably Bohemian"; Samuel's household was seemingly irreproachable (Mair 1938, 1). They lived in a fashionable area of London, a few blocks away from the British Library. The middle-aged Ireland seems to have been a widower who devoted himself to the care and comfort of his children. His son, William-Henry, had recently completed his education in France and was clerking for a law firm; his daughters, Anna Maria and Jane, were both accomplished artists. Money did not seem to have been an issue. The elder Ireland lived the life of the haute bourgeoisie, rubbing shoulders with London's literati, traveling throughout Europe or indulging his passion for collecting Shakespeare memorabilia (Mair 1938, 5-6).

What was less-widely known was that Ireland was no gentleman. Until recently, he had been a common Spittalfields weaver. The economic capital necessary for Samuel Ireland's grand lifestyle came from the Earl of Sandwich, who seems to have paid Ireland for taking his mistress — Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger, sometimes known as Coppengen, later known as Mrs. Freeman and as Mrs. Irwyn — off his hands.8 The disposing of mistresses was not uncommon nor always scandalous, so it might be useful here to compare Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger to women in similar circumstances. On the droves of single, unwed or widowed women, often with children in tow, begging, or prostituting themselves in the streets of London during this era, Tim Fulford writes: "London's streets overflowed with poor women pressing their ware — and themselves — on any passing man they thought might give them money" (2006, 313). These women were commonly the widows of soldiers or pregnant serving girls abandoned by their lovers and/or fired by their employers. In an era in which "poverty afflicted more Britons than ever before, due to population growth, bad harvests, capitalist employment practices, and continual war," hooking for £2 or £3 (roughly £200 to £300) a week was not an option but a necessity (Fulford 2006, 321; see also Burford 1986, 210).

So much for women at the low end of the social spectrum. At the higher end of the sex trade, women, Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger among them, led still more precarious existences, insofar as they had still further to fall. The inevitable fading of physical charms or a simple lover's quarrel might lead to a permanent expulsion from high society. On the other hand, for those who could negotiate their roles successfully, respectability (if not for themselves, then for their children), was a real possibility. For example, the former prostitute Dorothy Clement was initially the mistress of Edmund

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Walpole. According to Samuel Johnson's friend, the London gossip Mrs. Piozzi, Mrs. Clement was a "lovely Creature" who was found in "rags" sitting on a "Dust Cart." In 1759, she was "in the hands of a Covent Garden Milliner, who transferr'd her to Neddy Walpole" (1996, 4:278, n.3). Assuming here that Milliner may be read as prostitute, a woman living by the prick of her needles, the transfer seems clear enough: Walpole bought her. She later married James Waldegrave, the second Earl Waldegrave, great grandson of James II. The Earl died in 1763; in 1772, Maria married the Duke of Gloucester.

There were, too, lesser degrees of success and some downright tragedies. The acclaimed actress, Dorothea Bland (Mrs. Jordan), was mistress to the Duke of Clarence, the future William IV, and mother to ten of his children. In 1811, the couple separated, and the Duke provided her with a pension, on the condition that she never again perform on stage. Debts forced the resumption of her career, whereupon the Duke cut off her allowance. Jordan then fled creditors and died a year later, penurious, at St. Cloud, a suburb of Paris.9 Anxious about money and unable to secure a new lover, she had but one way to maintain her financial position: theatrical performance. For women without Jordan's theatrical talent, options would have been still more limited. For such women, the dread of a still further fall into outright prostitution must have made them frantic.

Comparatively speaking, it would seem that Sandwich had acted as respectably as his station allowed. He paid Samuel Ireland to take his old mistress (and possibly her bastards — on this, more anon) off his hands. His payment was no mean sum: £12,000 or roughly a million pounds in today's funds.10 Doug Stewart argues that Samuel Ireland's gobbling up of Sandwich's crumbs was pure "acquisitive lust" (D. Stewart 1991), but this might not have been Ireland's only deadly sin; the highlight of Samuel Ireland's travelogue, Picturesque Tour through Holland, Brabant and Part of France, is a visit to a Dutch brothel (S. Stewart 2010, 32; S. Ireland 1790, 1:130).

Whether out of love, lust, or greed, Samuel Ireland pretended that all of Anna Maria de Burgh de Coppinger/ de Coppengen/Freeman/Irwyn's children — William-Henry, Jane, and Anna Maria — were unquestionably his own. But some or all of them were likely fathered by Sandwich.11 Adding to the confusion over paternity, Mrs. Freeman was early on treated as a housekeeper, then as an aunt. It was only as the children reached puberty that Samuel instructed them to address their "aunt" as their "mother." Likewise, Mrs. Freeman/Mrs. Irwyn now gave way to yet another cognomen, "Mrs. Ireland" — though this too was a falsification, since she remained either married to another man or unmarried altogether (Grebanier 1965, 51-54). As for the forger, Samuel Ireland often referred to William-Henry as "Samuel," "Sam," or "Sammy" (ie., a copy of himself — or, more accurately, since there was likely no blood relation, a false copy).12

FAMILY PLAYS

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Although Samuel Ireland took Sandwich's mistress for a large sum of money, it does not follow that he treated her well. In his Confessions, the forger recalled that every evening the members of the Ireland household would gather to hear Samuel Ireland read aloud passages from Shakespeare. On occasion, however, he diverged from the bard to indulge in a more scandalous narrative: Herbert Croft's Love and Madness. Principally, the book is a nonfiction concerning the murder of Martha Ray, a former mistress of Lord Sandwich, and mother to nine of his children (Burford 1986, 112). So, when the family sat around listening to Samuel read from Croft's thinly-disguised novel, Love and Madness, Mrs. Ireland (or whatever she called herself) was forced to listen to Mr. Ireland read, in front of her illegitimate children, a story closely connected to her former lover. These constant reminders of her past in front of her bastard children must have made for perverse and cruel treatment. Reading aloud Love and Madness in this context showed "either gross insensitivity to his partner's feelings or a sadistic streak" (D. Stewart 2010, 50).

Croft's book likely played a key role in William-Henry Ireland's decision to retaliate in kind. According to the forger's own confession (again, not always to be trusted), it was only a few months after the live reading of Croft's Love and Madness that Ireland himself was "held forth to public view as the supposed discoverer of the Shaksperian manuscripts" (W. H. Ireland 1874, 11). The timing may be entirely coincidental, but, as Nick Groom notes, the Ancient Greek for the word fakes comes from the Greek nothoi, meaning, bastards (2002, 246). Groom goes on to argue that Ireland became a forger because he saw himself as a bastard, a counterfeit, someone of a falsely coined pedigree. In support of this thesis, we may note how the forger himself connected Love and Madness to both bastardy and to his own Shakespeare forgeries. Martha Ray's lover, James Hackman, is referred to within Croft's book as "Mr. H."; "Mr. H." is also the name of William-Henry Ireland's mysterious benefactor, the non-existent man who supplies him with a seemingly endless supply of unknown Shakespeare documents.

MOCK HISTORY I mean mock here not just in terms of falsity but also in terms of comedy. Indeed, as the forgeries grew (William-Henry Ireland seems to have "discovered" more documents in Mr. H's trunk on a daily basis), some found them hard to take seriously. Edmond Malone, for example, ridiculed their seemingly antique logography: any disquisition on "KYNG VORRTYGERNE, and all the KKINGES and all the QQUEENES which have been announced from the same quarter . . . is, I conceive, wholly unnecessary" (Malone 1796, 314). Even Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the very man who bought Vortigern, suggested that the forgeries were a sophomoric prank: "It is very odd, one would be led to think that Shakspeare must have been very young when he wrote [Vortigern]" — a none-too-veiled reference to the play's teenage discoverer (W. H. Ireland 1874, 139).

Certainly, Ireland seems to have gone out of his way to point to himself as the author of

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the papers. The "Deed of Gift," for example, recounted how "Masterr William henrye Irelande" saved Shakespeare from drowning in the Thames. William-Henry Ireland discovering a document that mentions a "Masterr William henrye Irelande" may have suggested that providence was at work in the provenance, that Ireland was, like Hamlet, born to set things right. As the descendant of the man who saved Shakespeare, he and he alone was tasked with giving new life to Shakespeare's lost works. But less romantically, it really does strain credulity that William-Henry Ireland found centuries- old documents that contained his very name. It seems far more likely that Ireland added this detail because he wanted to get caught.

Public attention (and humiliation) is often cited as a motive for literary forgery, but, as Louise J. Kaplan reminds us, criminal writing, specifically forgery, always has an aspect of "triumphant revenge" (1987, 157).13 But what was that revenge? Samuel Ireland, always willing to sacrifice truth for cash, kept saying that all the papers were legitimate. As such, he had to admit the legitimacy of a document that named "William henrye Irelande," and that William-Henry Ireland was legitimately an Ireland.14 Of course, Samuel Ireland knew that William-Henry Ireland was not his blood relation and thus, could not be a direct descendant of the "William henrye Ireland" who saved Shakespeare from drowning. However, if he revealed that secret, then the discovered papers did not belong to his "son." The irony could not have been lost upon the elder Ireland, who, having accepted Sandwich's mistress (and her children) as his own in exchange for money, now had to re-acknowledge (or at least not deny) William-Henry's paternity in order to collect his "son's" earnings.15

The incest in Vortigern, however, must have presented a more private form of conscience-pricking. In scripting Samuel Ireland's one-man recital, William-Henry Ireland was playing a version of Prince Hamlet, who sets down eight or a dozen lines in the Murder of Gonzago in order to catch the conscience of the man who plays at being his "loving father" (4.3.50).16 In sum, Vortigern's hypocrisies extend to his first player, Samuel Ireland, who publically pretended to have an ordinary and healthy relationship with William-Henry and his siblings. And while within the play itself Flavia never reveals her father's crime, she and her brothers clearly side against their father, just as William-Henry and his sisters unquestionably sided against the man who was shaming their mother.

If I am correct, then William-Henry was enacting a "triumphal revenge." Going one better than Hamlet, who merely had Claudius listen to actors recite offensive lines, our forger had Samuel give voice to his "son's" special message: But mark me, and set not the burning coal To fire revenge within, for if thou dost, I'll measure this my quantity o love, And thrice treble it, with direst hate. (Kahan 2004)

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To be sure, this reading relies upon free association. I am here transposing Vortigern's lines as if they spoke on behalf of their author. That approach may strike some as hopelessly naïve, but as Kaplan points out, forgers commonly create fragments and supposedly lost poems in order to reflect a "fragmented sense of self" (1987, 157). Ireland follows this archetype by fragmenting himself into a variety of roles. True, the Ireland children were not victims of incest (at least not in the formal sense of bloodlines), but they were still victims — chattel, sold haplessly to Samuel Ireland. And if the later had nothing but "direst hate" for his mistress and her offspring, the feelings were, according to this reading, entirely mutual. Pretending to be only the play's discoverer or surrogate, William-Henry was free to attack Samuel Ireland. If the latter wanted to expose his "son" as the play's true author, then, obviously, such an exposure would lead to further questions and, possibly, still other family revelations. Samuel Ireland was also aware that exposing the true nature of his relationship with his wife and children would invalidate his claim over any money generated from the forgeries. Faced with this choice and mindful of how much this incest scene mirrored the emotional subtext of his Love and Madness closet readings, in which he expressed his contempt (or "direst hate") for Mrs. Ireland and her children, Samuel suppressed the ugly truth. The scene had to be cut.

But we need not examine the extant manuscripts of Vortigern to come to the conclusion that the play carried within it a message apparent only to the Ireland "family." Every member of the household knew the "family" secret, just as they (almost certainly) knew the secret of Vortigern's authorship. All they had to do was look at the print hanging above the mantelpiece. The subject was John Mortimer's painting, Vortigern and Rowena (W. H. Ireland 1874, 132-33).17 The engraving was made by Samuel Ireland. When Samuel Ireland read Vortigern "in the closet," he was, in fact, reading a transcript of a forged play (based on a copy of a painting) to a fake family; he then edited and oversaw the revision of the play eventually staged at Drury Lane. The earliest draft of Vortigern was not a play designed for professional performance; it was, rather, a closet play, a mousetrap in which Samuel Ireland was ensnared, his rapacious nature exposed before his counterfeit family.18

NOTES 1. This assumes that a guinea is worth £1.05 circa. 1795; the present-day value comes by way of http://www.measuringworth.com (http://www.measuringworth.com) (2016). 2. For more on ticketing and hours of operation, see W. H. Ireland 1874, 183. 3. On this point, see Tilottama Rajan, "Mary Shelley's Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism" (1994), especially 47-48. 4. James Boaden, for example, noted that a common defense of Ireland's forgeries was that they must be Shakespeare's because they demonstrated the "spontaneous flow of the

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soul of the sweet Swan of Avon" (1796, 11). 5. All citations from Vortigern are from the same volume (Kahan 2004). 6. For full collations, see Kahan 2004, 3:94-175. 7. There were, however, various hands involved in the additions. See Kahan's collations (2004). 8. Another bit of gossip came by way of Edmond Malone, who reported that Mrs. Irwyn had been married but had separated from her husband. See Dictionary of National Biography, 29:32. Robert Miles overlooks Malone but comes to the same basic conclusion: "Although of good family, Mrs Freeman had become déclassé in her liaison with Sandwich . . . in his sexual mores Samuel Ireland was old-fashioned and drew the line at marrying the cast-off mistress of an aristocrat" (2005, 602). 9. Before Mrs. Jordan died, she turned to William-Henry Ireland, now a Grub Street hack, to write her memoirs (Pierce 2014, 225). Jordan had played Flavia in Vortigern. 10. Doug Stewart calls the £12,000 from Sandwich a "parting gift" and states that it was, in our money, about £700,000 pounds (2010, 13). On modern calculation of sums, see note 1, above. There is also a connection between Mrs. Ireland and Mrs. Walpole: they were friends. See Kahan 2009, 64. 11. Patricia Pierce raises the possibility that one or more of the children were sired by Sandwich (2014, 20); Doug Stewart writes that Mrs. Freeman was Samuel Ireland's "mistress and the likely mother of all three children" (2010, 12). In any case, whether Samuel fathered one or all three children, legally, they were all illegitimate. 12. As Robert Miles phrases it, the forger "felt himself doubly a bastard: in blood terms, a counterfeit of a counterfeit" (2005, 602). William-Henry Ireland ascribes the nickname to yet another displacement. Apparently, Samuel Ireland's first-born was a son he named "Samuel." The child died, and Samuel then took to calling William-Henry "Samuel" or "Sammy" (W. H. Ireland 1874, 251). Whether this other son was William- Henry's full or half-brother is impossible to determine. For all we know, the other child is a fiction. 13. See also Susan Stewart, who links imposture and forgery to daydreams of masturbation and humiliation (Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991), 144-54). 14. As Paul Baines notes, in a legal sense, the document was the forger's self-created birth certificate of authenticity. Baines calls the Ireland forgeries a familial tragedy in which Ireland "curiously disinherited himself" (1999, 181). It is this author's contention that the original version of Vortigern similarly served as a form of self-emancipation. 15. Paternity is also at the forefront in Ireland's forged "Deed of Trust," in which Shakespeare discusses the siring of a bastard ("thatt Chylde of whom wee have spokenn butt who muste note be named here"), and his rationale for writing the play, "Kynge Vorrtygerne" — i.e., to support his love child (S. Ireland 1796, n.p.). 16. Citation from The Riverside Shakespeare (1997). 17. We have only the forger's word on this; no copy of the engraving has thus far been located. For detailed discussion of Mortimer's, as well as other paintings, of Vortigern

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and Rowena, see Kahan 1998, 74-81. 18. The author acknowledges the many kindnesses of the Borrowers and Lenders editorial team.

REFERENCES Agate, James. 1926. A Short View of the English Stage, 1900-1926. London: H. Jenkins. Baines, Paul. 1999. The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate. Boaden, James. 1796. A Letter to George Steevens, Esq. London: Martin and Bain. Bate, Jonathan. 1989. Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730- 1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press. Burford, E. J. 1986. Wits, Wenchers, and Wantons — London's Low Life: Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century. London: Robert Hale. Burroughs, Catherine B. 1997. Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dictionary of National Biography. 1892. Edited by Sidney Lee. New York: Macmillan. Fulford, Tim. 2006. "Fallen Ladies and Cruel Mothers: Ballad Singers and Ballad Heroines in the Eighteenth Century." The Eighteenth Century 47.2/3: 309-29. Grebanier, Bernard. 1965. The Great Shakespeare Forgery. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. Index to The London Stage. 1979. Edited by Ben Ross Schneider, Jr. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Groom, Nick. 2002. The Forger's Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature. London: Picador. Ireland, William-Henry. 1874. Confessions of William-Henry Ireland. 1805; reprint, New York: Franklin Burt. Ireland, William-Henry [Anser Pen-Drag-on, Esq.]. 1815. Scribbleomania: or, The Printer's Devil's Polichronicon. London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones. Ireland, S., ed. 1796. Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare. London: Cooper and Graham. Ireland, S. 1790. A Picturesque Tour Through Holland, Brabant, and Part of France; Made in the Autumn of 1789. London: T. & I. Egerton, 1790.

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Kahan, Jeffrey. 2009. "The Curse of Shakespeare." In Shakespearean Gothic. Edited by Christy Desmet and Anne Williams. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 60-83. Kahan, Jeffrey. 2004. Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies, and Forgeries, 1710-1820. 3 vols. London: Routledge. Kahan, Jeffrey. 1998. Reforging Shakespeare: The Story of a Theatrical Scandal. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Kaplan, Louise J. 1987. The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Leader, Zachary. 1996. Revision and Romantic Authorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynch, Jack. 2004. "William Henry Ireland's Authentic Forgeries." Princeton University Library Chronicle 66.1: 79-96. Mair, John. 1938. The Fourth Forger: William Ireland and the Shakspeare Papers. London: Cobden-Sanderson. Malone, Edmond. 1796. Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments. London: H. Baldwin, for T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies. Measuring Worth. 2016. Available online at: http://www.measuringworth.com (http://www.measuringworth.com) [accessed 18 May 2016]. Miles, Robert. 2005. "Forging a Romantic Identity: Herbert Croft's Love and Madness and W. H. Ireland's Shakespeare MS." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17.4: 599-627. Pierce, Patricia. 2014. The Great Shakespeare Fraud: The Strange, True Story of William- Henry Ireland. Stroud: Sutton. Piozzi, Hester Lynch. 1996. The Piozzi Letters. Edited by Edward A Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom. Newark: University of Delaware. Raber, Karen. 2001. Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. Rajan, Tilottama. 1994. "Mary Shelley's Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism." Studies in the Novel 26.2: 43-68. Schoenbaum, Samuel. 1993. Shakespeare's Lives. New Edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blackmore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Second edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Stewart, Doug. 2010. The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA.: Da Capo Press. Stewart, Susan. 1991. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Straznicky, Marta. 2004. Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550-1700. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Tilottama Rajan. 1994 "Mary Shelley's Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism." Studies in the Novel 26.2: 43-68. Williams, Anne. 2009. "Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare." In Shakespearean Gothic. Edited by Christy Desmet and Anne Williams. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 13-36. Worrall, David. 2007. The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787-1832: The Road to the Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Young, Edward. 1918. Conjectures on Original Composition. Edited by Edith J. Morley. 1759; Manchester: Manchester University Press.

PERMISSIONS Meeting of Vortigern and Rowena painted by William Hamilton. Wikicommons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meeting_of_Vortigern_and_Rowena.jpg (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meeting_of_Vortigern_and_Rowena.jpg)

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"Now 'mongst this flock of drunkards": Drunk (/current) Shakespeare's Polytemporal Theater

JENNIFER HOLL, RHODE ISLAND COLLEGE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | INTRODUCTION | "GIVE ME SOME WINE, AND LET ME SPEAK" (ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, (/about) 4.15.49): DRINK AND THE THEATER | "MY TEEMING DATE DRUNK UP WITH TIME" (RICHARD II, 5.2.100): TIME AND DRINK IN SHAKESPEARE | "WINE AND WASSAIL SO CONVINCE THAT MEMORY" (MACBETH, 1.7.74-75): MACBETH'S DRUNKEN EQUIVOCATIONS | "HATH OUR INTELLIGENCE BEEN DRUNK?" (KING (/archive) JOHN, 4.2.116): DRUNK SHAKESPEARE AS POLYTEMPORAL IMMERSION | NOTES | REFERENCES

ABSTRACT Drunk Shakespeare is a current off-Broadway production that combines a performance of Macbeth with outrageous improvisation, frequent audience participation, and, as the show's title unapologetically promises, drunken revelry. Despite the production's playful irreverence, this essay argues that The Drunk Shakespeare Society's Macbeth adapts a consistent Shakespearean trope — specifically, the capacity of alcoholic consumption to alter temporal landscapes and loosen time restraints — into a shared theatrical experience. Building off recent work in both Shakespearean polytemporalities and immersive performance, this essay explores the means by which Drunk Shakespeare wields communal carousal as an immersive strategy that invites audiences not only to witness, but to inhabit the surreal, polychronic worlds of Macbeth. As I argue here, the convergence of time, drink, and theatrics that informs Drunk Shakespeare theatricalizes a consistent Shakespearean probe into the temporal release that drink affords. Thus, convivial consumption becomes not only a gimmick, but one of a number of immersive strategies that this production employs in order to create an experiential Macbeth, one in which audiences, in the manner of Lady Macbeth, may "feel now / The future in the instant" (1.5.65-66).

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In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world, and you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. Mankind, that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interest. Perhaps it's fate that today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom. Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. We're fighting for our right to live, to exist, and should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, "We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on, we're going to survive." Today we celebrate our independence day! (Independence Day 1996)

INTRODUCTION Fans of popular cinema hardly need to be prompted as to the origin of this rousing speech, the rallying cry to arms delivered by President Thomas J. Whitmore on the eve of the aerial assault that unites humankind in a shared victory over intergalactic tyrants in Roland Emmerich's 1996 Independence Day. Set amidst a swelling score, the dim light of dawn, and rolling waves of mist, this speech has taken on a life of its own over the past two decades: the speech, whether Bill Pullman's original performance or various others' recitations, features prominently on YouTube, often accompanied by comments like "best speech ever!" In 2012, Forbes, citing this speech in particular, ranked Pullman's Whitmore as America's best fictional president (Pomerantz 2012).1

As YouTube demonstrates, this speech surfaces in numerous, unexpected places — in wedding toasts, flash mobs, and Internet parodies, for instance — and in the summer of 2014 at New York City's Quinn's Bar, it provided the conclusion to The Drunk Shakespeare Society's adaptation of Macbeth. As Malcolm stood over the lifeless bodies of the Macbeths, the heir to the Scottish throne announced the end of the Macbeths' tyrannical rule and the dawn of a new era, courtesy of President Whitmore. The concluding speech from Independence Day elicited enthusiastic applause and squeals from the small audience in attendance and provided a fitting conclusion to Drunk Shakespeare's particular brand of performance: that is, an exuberant mash-up of Shakespeare, pop culture references, and booze that playfully effaces the boundaries between past and present, performer and playgoer, adaptation and appropriation, and scripted performance and improvisation.

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Figure 1. Drunk Shakespeare Promotional Logo

The Drunk Shakespeare Society, which bills itself as "a company of professional drinkers with a serious Shakespeare problem," began its limited run of Drunk Shakespeare in March of 2014; in 2015, the production moved to a larger venue, The Lounge, and has gradually increased its run to at least, by the time of this writing, September of 2018.2 The five-actor ensemble initiates the performance each evening by calling their meeting to order and explaining the format: one of the revolving cast of professional actors will down five shots of liquor before the company proceeds to perform Macbeth, surrounded on all sides by tables of audience members who are likewise drinking and free to continue ordering drinks from the cast/staff along the way. Cast members may interrupt the performance to call a "point of order," which generally involves a careful explanation of a key moment or commentary on the performance, while the drunk actor of the evening may call a "drunk point of order," and alter or re-interpret moments of the play. They justify their approach with a handful of Shakespeare quotations — "Good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used" (Othello, 2.3.328-39), for example — and explain their contention that alcohol likely played a part in the original stagings, if not the crafting, of Shakespeare's work.

While drinking was certainly a commonplace of the early modern theater, the implication that Shakespeare was a drinker remains debatable. Anecdotally, the Reverend John Ward of Stratford recorded in his diary that Shakespeare died of a fever he caught after a night of heavy drinking with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton (Ward 1839, 61); seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey, on the other hand, wrote that Shakespeare "wouldnt be debauched" (cited in Chambers 1930, 252).3 Despite the unapologetic frivolity of the performance's premise, the Macbeth that follows, while condensed, is often thoughtful, at times surprisingly

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earnest, if riotous and wildly irreverent. As Tom Teodorczuk observed in his review for The Daily Beast, "the show has been wildly entertaining both devotees of Shakespeare and those whose idea of a horrible night out is a four-hour Hamlet. It's as though Mark Rylance has stumbled onto the set of TV show TMZ" (Teodorczuk 2014).

It is perhaps fitting that the production chooses the iconic Independence Day speech as its finale, as the insertion of one iconic conclusion into another seems to highlight the thematic principles that inform the entire production. If drunkenness functions as a gimmick in this production, it also operates as an immersive strategy and a distortive lens through which a drama that is already obsessed with issues of disjointed time ruptures into a kind of meta- Macbeth, self-consciously aware of its own distortions of time, its history, the conditions of its present staging, and its dialogic relationship to contemporary pop culture. Drunk Shakespeare operates through what Hamlet might call "time . . . out of joint" (1.5.210), and offers, through the drunken antics shared by actor and audience alike, the opportunity to inhabit multiple temporalities at once, much as Lady Macbeth muses that she "feel[s] now / The future in the instant" (1.5.65-66). Occupying a space somewhere between traditional performance and the experiential Shakespeare offered in Sleep No More, the audience is encouraged to drink along with the cast and participate in the performance, creating a shared theatrical experience that dispatches with time and eases boundaries in a spirit of revelry. That the concluding monologue is one so definitively marked by a specific calendar date that corresponds neither to present staging nor to Shakespeare's play provides an audaciously misaligned moment of intertextuality that asserts the radical temporalities at play.

Such nonlinear strategies of adaptation, though playfully wielded, remain in line with recent trends in temporal explorations of Shakespeare generally and Macbeth specifically. What Donald W. Foster deems "Macbeth's War on Time" has spurred a vast body of criticism from numerous angles into the complex treatment of time in Macbeth (Foster 1986, 319-42); as Luisa Guj notes, "In Macbeth . . . time is under scrutiny in its tripartite sequence of past, present, and future" (Guj 1986, 176).4 Recently, the study of time in Shakespeare has turned toward what Jonathan Gil Harris, in Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, calls "palimpsested time," in which "time" refers not to measurable, sequential, or discreet units but to "an understanding of the temporal relations among past, present, and future" (Harris 2009, 3). According to Harris, "Time in Shakespeare's plays is sometimes a progressive line that follows the arc of the sun, but it is also counterintuitively a plane in which the future is behind and the past ahead, and a preposterous folded cloth in which before and after are coeval" (4).

Interest in nonlinear time in Shakespeare has propelled a number of recent inquiries into various polytemporalities, including anachronism, presentism, and queer temporalities, and as, perhaps, Shakespeare's most overt meditation on time, Macbeth factors prominently in many such studies.5 In her queer analysis, Heather Love explores "the collapse of past, present, and future into a single moment" (Love 2011, 201), particularly in Lady Macbeth's "longing for an outcome located in the future — but as a constant enjoyment of the future in

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and as the present" (204); similarly, Howard Marchitello re-examines the frequently discussed notion of speed in Macbeth, in terms of both the brisk pace of the drama and Macbeth's own obsession with acceleration, as Macbeth's "desire to be and act before . . . to have defeated time by anticipating its passage and flow and to have obliterated both by conflating present and future into an atemporal space of a new 'now'" (Marchitello 2013, 448).

It is precisely this new, atemporal now to which The Drunk Shakespeare Society grants access, as its unorthodox Macbeth transforms the pervasive thematic exploration of Shakespearean polytemporality into a shared theatrical experience. In an innovative convergence of theatrics and analysis, Drunk Shakespeare immerses its participants in the idiosyncratic terrain of Macbeth's polytemporal world, inviting both actor and audience to inhabit a space where past, present, and future collapse in the instant, where various histories collide and dissipate and every day is Independence Day. As theater historian David Carlyon argues, theatrical performance is a form of "applied criticism" (Carlyon 2011, 131); Drunk Shakespeare offers what we might instead label an act of immersive criticism in which, as Josephine Machon explains of immersive traditions, "the audience-participant is actually there, physically inhabiting the fantasy world [and] responding within an imaginative, sensual environment" (Machon 2013, 61). Through its porous theatrical boundaries, participatory ethos, unanticipable spontaneity, and, indeed, communal spirit of drunkenness, this unique Macbeth facilitates an empathic excursion into the twisted temporalities that recent scholarship has critically engaged. In Drunk Shakespeare, as Machon argues of immersive theater as a whole, "temporality itself becomes experiential" (96).

As the show's primary calling card, the drunkenness at the heart of Drunk Shakespeare offers more than a quirky theatrical transgression; communal carousal here becomes an immersive strategy that both highlights and exploits the capacity of consumption to alter the temporal landscape of its inhabitants, while simultaneously engendering a shared spirit of spontaneous communitas that playfully dismantles traditional theatrical structures. As I will explore in this essay, drunkenness offers a particularly apt means of immersion in this theatrical experience of Macbeth's polytemporalities, as the intersection of time and drink that informs Drunk Shakespeare engagingly adapts a recurrent Shakespearean probe into the temporal release that drink affords. Before turning to the production's specific performance strategies, this essay will first contextualize this company of drunk Shakespeareans amongst similarly time- bending Shakespearean drunks, revealing the means by which the production's primary strategy of immersion is itself an appropriation of a consistent Shakespearean trope. As I will further explore, boozy excess likewise propels the temporal distortions of Macbeth; Drunk Shakespeare thereby wields drunkenness as an immersive theatrical strategy that opens Macbeth's wine-soaked polytemporal fantasy to participatory engagement.

"GIVE ME SOME WINE, AND LET ME SPEAK" (ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, 4.15.49): DRINK AND THE THEATER

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Upon ascending the staircase at Quinn's Bar to the private, second-floor barroom that housed Drunk Shakespeare, patrons, on the evening I attended, were greeted by the sound of Postmodern Jukebox's ragtime rendition of Robin Thicke's 2013 hit "Blurred Lines." The song, a ubiquitous piece of contemporary dance-pop rendered almost unrecognizable in this early-twentieth-century-styled incarnation, provided an effective welcome to the blurring of genre and chronology that the evening delivered; so too did the acting ensemble, mingling with attendees while dressed in quasi-1920s garb and sipping beer and wine. Of course, tavern theater, while something of a rarity today, is not without precedent in the staging of early modern drama. In Better a Shrew than a Sheep, Pamela Allen Brown discusses how "the early modern alehouse became a prime place for the cross-fertilization of everyday jesting and theater. Many forms of popular performance, such as sports, games, morris dancing, jigging and ballad singing, took place in the alehouse" (Brown 2003, 71). Shakespeare certainly evokes the relationship between the playhouse and the alehouse in his dramas as well, with taverns often serving as decidedly theatrical spaces: Eastcheap's Boar's Head Tavern, for example, hosts Falstaff and Prince Hal's improvised role-playing in 1 Henry IV; in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Master Ford performs the part of abject pursuer Brooke at the Garter Inn.

The worlds of the tavern and the theater intersected in very material ways as well, as ale and other beverages seem to have been fixtures of the early modern playhouse: "Peddlars of food . . . and ale there certainly were," notes Andrew Gurr (Gurr 2004, 98-99). Gabriel Egan has convincingly argued that King's Man John Heminges operated a tap-house adjoining the Globe (Egan 2001), and the availability of ale at the theater plays a vital role in Sir Henry Wotton's 1613 letter detailing the burning of the Globe: "only one man had his Breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle Ale" (Wotton 1672, 426). Though the sale of ale in the theater was likely a necessity due to a polluted urban water supply (McBride 2004, 182), playhouse indulgence certainly fueled derision: the comically condemnatory ballad "A Sonnett upon the Pittifull Burneing of the Globe playhowse in London" details the manner by which "reprobates, thoughe druncke on Munday" stream out of the theater along with panicked players (printed in Halliwell-Phillipps 1887, 311), and antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson rails against excessive playhouse "quaffing" in The School of Abuse (Gosson 1579, 17).

Contemporary episodes of playhouse drunkenness by both actors and audiences have likewise provoked unsavory public displays and justifiable criticism. In 2014, The Oregonian theater critic David Greenwald pleaded to his readership, "you have to stop being drunk schmucks at theater shows" (Greenwald 2014), and a handful of national news stories have illustrated the disruptive potential of drunk playgoing: police escorted actor Shia LaBeouf out of a Broadway theater in 2014 for drunkenly yelling slurs at performers; in 2015, an admittedly drunk theatergoer at the Broadway production of Hand to God marched on stage to charge his cell phone at an on-set (and non-functioning) electrical outlet.6

And while Drunk Shakespeare has enjoyed nearly unanimous praise from critics in The Daily

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Beast, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, Yelp contains a handful of disgruntled reviews from disappointed attendees, some of whom, like user Julie G., lay blame on the audience: "there were two really loud and progressively drunk people who interrupted the show literally every 4 minutes" (Julie G. 2014).7 Others simply find the show's premise unamusing and sophomoric: "Awesome . . . if you just want to re-enact your drunk dorm days," writes another user (Enchanted W. 2015).

Figure 2. Drunk Shakespeare Actors Poppy Liu, Lucas Calhoun, and Lindsey Hope Pearlman

In his review of the Boston production of the similarly styled Scottish import, Shit-faced Shakespeare, Boston Globe critic Don Aucoin registers a more startling concern: You don't have to be a teetotaler or a killjoy to feel queasy sitting amid a throng of spectators who are roaring with laughter while someone reels about the stage for an hour or so, virtually out of control. Onstage as in life, drunks are more depressing than funny. Further curdling the laughs for anyone who lives in this university-packed region is an awareness of the epidemic of binge drinking on college campuses. (Aucoin 2015) Aucoin's pointed criticism rings especially troublesome considering producer Lewis Ironside's apparent disregard for the dangerous climate of college binge-drinking on American campuses; in fact, he claims to have chosen Boston for the company's U.S. debut precisely because of "the mixture of heavy-drinking antics and well-educated refinement" that the area's universities provide (Hoover 2015). For its part, Drunk Shakespeare seems

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much more attentive to the valid concerns that inebriated performance may elicit; the company maintains a strict 21-and-over attendance policy and monitors the drunk actor via breathalyzer, and both the evening's emcee and the company's website offer the following disclaimer: "We do not condone excessive drinking. Our drunk actors are on a regular rotation and are carefully monitored at all times. Drinking in moderation can be fun. Drinking to excess can ruin your life. We promote healthy drinking" (Drunk Shakespeare Society 2015).

The company's disclaimer further highlights, as do Shakespeare's plays, the wildly disparate effects of intoxication. In Shakespeare and Alcohol, Buckner B. Trawick found that each of Shakespeare's plays contains at least one allusion to alcohol, and he tallied 360 references to "a drink, a drinker, or drunkenness" in the complete works (Trawick 1978, 7, n.1). Such references serve myriad different ends; in Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt observes that while the plays at times "registered disgust" with drunkenness, they also indulged in "the delicious foolishness, the exuberant cracking of jests, the amiable nonsense, the indifference to decorum, the flashes of insight, the magical erasure of the cares of the world" that intoxication can provoke (Greenblatt 2004, 67). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the very elements that Greenblatt cites as characteristic of Shakespearean drunkenness are the same phenomena that attract many to the theater.

Drunkenness in Shakespeare, whether depicted as light-hearted revelry or the pernicious breeding ground of malice, remains, above all, highly theatrical; like the theater, the state of drunkenness is an inherently unstable and unpredictable space that induces illusions and alters perception, whether to amusing or distressing ends. As Puck reminds us in the Epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the "shadows" and "visions" of the stage are no more yielding than the dream state that ensnared the play's characters in the forest (5.1.1, 4); it is as if we have all ingested that intoxicating "liquor" of "a little western flower" that fuels the dream-like escapades of the theater (2.1.185, 172).

"MY TEEMING DATE DRUNK UP WITH TIME" (RICHARD II, 5.2.100): TIME AND DRINK IN SHAKESPEARE One of the parallels between drunkenness and the theater that Shakespeare's dramas repeatedly exploit is the capacity of each to manipulate and distort the human perception of time. As Matthew Wagner notes in Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time, in the theater, "fictive time meets 'real' time; past meets present meets future; the time of the play is carved out of, and radically different from, the time of the remainder of the day" (Wagner 2012, 2). Similarly, in Shakespeare, the drunkard, too, gains license to bend or stand outside of time altogether. In Shakespeare, as in Drunk Shakespeare, the state of intoxication alters temporal environments to the extent that fixed, timely referents and standard units of temporal measurement dissolve in extended scenes of drunken polytemporality. In fact, the convergence of time, drink, and theatrics that informs The Drunk Shakespeare Society's performance reifies a fairly consistent Shakespearean trope across genres, as some of

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Shakespeare's most notable drunks, including Hal and Falstaff in 1 Henry IV, and Measure for Measure's Barnardine, profitably indulge in drunkenness's reprieve from orderly time. Each of these notoriously bibulous characters inhabits a polytemporal world to which their sober counterparts are not privy, and it is precisely this world to which Drunk Shakespeare grants entry, as the company's immersive strategies theatricalize the boozy temporalities that these plays thematize.

In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber notes that of the many parallels drawn between the playhouse and the alehouse in 1 Henry IV, Hal directs attention specifically to timelessness. As Garber argues, when Hal delivers his celebrated monologue in act one, his declaration that, "I know you all, and will awhile uphold / The unyoked humor of your idleness" (1.2.202-203), he speaks not only to his Eastcheap gang of miscreants, but to the theatrical audience at large, as he mirrors "the 'idleness' of playgoers [to] the idleness of tavern- dwellers" (Garber 2004, 330). This idleness, he explains, is not mere inactivity, but an eternal state of "playing holidays" (1.2.211), and as Garber argues, Hal's eventual transformation into the English hero celebrated by history necessitates his disavowal of "playing" and drinking in the Boar's Head and his surrender to the sobering state "of time and timeliness" on the battlefield (Garber 2004, 330). But the Boar's Head, not unlike Drunk Shakespeare's Quinn's Bar, provides a perpetual play space that shelters its inhabitants from the linear chronologies unfolding outside its doors, and here Hal intends to "drive away the time" (2.4.29) — not only to pass the time in idle consumption, but to forcibly expel temporal concerns and forestall his inevitable future.

With his inescapable "reformation" always looming (1.2.220), Hal understands his linear lease of obligation to a history yet to unfold, but until his date with that predetermined future arrives, he bristles at any attempt to disrupt his extended, timeless holiday. Early in 1 Henry IV, for example, a presumably drunken Falstaff innocuously asks, "Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?" (1.2.1). The seemingly benign question incites a disproportionately lengthy and contemptuous response from the prince: Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which though wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta. I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day. (1.2.2-13) By asking for the time, Falstaff, arguably Shakespeare's most celebrated tippler, unearths a well of disdain as he taps into the prince's anxieties regarding his inevitable succession. According to Hal, the drunkard's privilege is to measure life not in minutes or hours, but in wine, chickens, and whores. Lawrence Danson labels this alternate temporality "Falstaffian time": "Falstaff eats time and screws the instruments of its measurement. Unlike the King's linear time, Falstaff's time is a flexible medium" (Danson 2000, 99). Libation, here, is http://borrowers.uga.edu/783933/show Page 9 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

liberation from the unrelenting demands of time.

For Hal, the simple inquiry is, quite literally, sobering, as it threatens to impose the kind of rigid adherence to time that drink promises to absolve — an adherence that the prince has thus far successfully eschewed, but which his father aptly demonstrates in the previous scene. In contrast, King Henry's opening monologue ripples with precise timely considerations: in a rush to take advantage of this hard-won "time for frighted peace" (1.1.2), the king plans to finally embark upon his "twelve month old" plan to reclaim the holy land for his savior (1.1.28), who was there crucified "fourteen hundred year ago" (1.1.26). With other timely and pressing matters to contend with, however, the king must once again postpone his crusading dream, as he reconvenes his counsellors for "Wednesday next" (1.1.102). But fixed schedules and timely operations are part of "the debt [Hal] never promised" (1.2.216): the weighty, structured, and inflexible antithesis to the drunken escape of Eastcheap. Only when he is summoned by the King and shamed into submission does Hal finally accede to his father's sense of time and order, declaring, . . . for the time will come That I shall make this northern youth exchange His glorious deeds for my indignities. (3.2.149-51) His vow to unseat the valiant Hotspur is rooted in a sense of linear time, as Hal must acknowledge that "the time" that he has thus far successfully averted "will come." Hal, removed from the Boar's Head's temporal liberation, now operates on his father's schedule.

Of course, Hal's eventual submission to his father's rigid chronology is a predetermined fate that both the audience and Hal have presciently understood all along as unavoidable. As a character in a history, Hal's attempts to "drive away the time" at the Boar's Head can only amount to a temporary reprieve, and moments of drunkenness and idle tavern-dwelling punctuate an otherwise linear arc with moments of polytemporal escape. As Steven Earnshaw notes, in 1 Henry IV, "the tavern, thus being without time, might be said to transcend time" (Earnshaw 2000, 48), and Adam Smyth likewise observes that in early modern treatments of tavern life, "time is threatened" as drunkenness itself is figured as "an inversion of time" (Smyth 2004, 201).

Demonstrating the transcendence of tavern time, Hal informs the clueless drawer Francis, "I am now of all humors that have showed themselves humors since the old days of Goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight" (2.4.95-98). Hal's "now" is the split-second convergence of all that has ever transpired — the past in the instant — with none of the future that drunkenness allows him to defer. When Hal follows his time-bending declaration with the timely question, "What o'clock, Francis?" (2.4.99), Francis's reply of "Anon, anon, sir" only further defers that future (2.4.100); as Garber notes, Francis's reply "underscores the central theme of time itself" (Garber 2004, 335). The tavern thus provides a sheltering cocoon for its intoxicated inhabitants from the inevitable linear timeline that ceaselessly marches on, like troops to the battlefield, outside its walls.

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Released from the predetermined chronology of history, the comedies are free to explore the transcendent nature of drunken temporality to more enduring ends. In 1 Henry IV, Hal's extended holiday must eventually give way to the sobering responsibilities of both the kingship and historical chronicle, but in Measure for Measure, the drunkard Barnardine, a convicted murderer who has been awaiting execution for nine years, effectively bypasses time's hold altogether. Unlike Hal and Falstaff, whose drunken antics are depicted as good- natured revelry, Barnardine embodies a more sinister strain of drunken temperament; he is a surly and unrepentant murderer. Like Hal, Barnardine scowls at time; the Provost explains that this prisoner is not only "drunk many times a day, if not many days entirely" (4.2.161- 62), but also "careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come" (4.2.155- 56). In an era when death sentences were exacted almost immediately, Barnardine has avoided execution, first, through his friends' intercessions and some doubt as to guilt, but now, purely through his near-constant inebriation.

Though physically imprisoned and awaiting his sentence, as opposed to Hal's more figurative form of imprisonment by history, Barnardine is said to have "had the liberty of the prison" (4.2.159-60), enjoying a freedom within his cell that Hal could never quite realize. In fact, the Provost notes that Barnardine craves no more freedom than that which he already enjoys: "Give him leave to escape hence, he would not" (4.2.160-61), the Provost informs the Duke. It is as if, through perpetual intoxication, Barnardine has discovered a form of unconditional liberation, in which neither looming threats nor iron bars may detain a free and drunken spirit. With neither remorse, nor present care, nor anxiety for what's to come, Barnardine maintains a contented, drunken existence free from the burdens of past, present, or future.

When Pompey and Abhorson attempt to carry out his sentence, a drunk and sullen Barnardine replies, "I have been drinking all night. I am not fitted for't" (4.3.45-46). When the Duke, disguised as a friar, attempts to prepare the prisoner for his eventual end, Barnardine continues his adamant refusal: DUKE. Sir, induced by my charity, and hearing how hastily you are to depart, I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you. BARNARDINE. Friar, not I. I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets. I will not consent to die this day, that's certain. DUKE. O sir, you must; and therefore, I beseech you look forward on the journey you shall go. BARNARDINE. I swear I will not die today, for any man's persuasion. DUKE. But hear you— BARNARDINE. Not a word. If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward, for thence will not I today. (4.3.52-67) Shielded only by his drunken defiance, Barnardine's mantra-like disavowal of his death sentence effectively upends the Duke's linear timeline.

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Though the Duke intends to move "hastily" toward a seemingly predetermined future, Barnardine's reiterative "not . . . this day" and "not . . . today" defy both time and authority, and time's authority specifically, as he assuredly negates an unfolding chronology in an act of perpetual deferment. By play's end, Barnardine has unpredictably and illogically received a full pardon, despite bearing no signs of remorse, repentance, or even the desire to be released; the compassionate Duke cannot bear to execute a drunk man, "a creature unprepared, unmeet for death" (4.3.71), and as Musa Gurnis notes, this final-act pardon amounts to "an extended deferral to the ultimate Judge" (Gurnis 2014, 161). While Hal's drunken, polytemporal escapes are always mitigated by the adjacency of a predetermined chronology, Barnardine's incessant drinking affords him a permanent release, on this plane, at least, as he inhabits a world where the actions of the past need not determine the future in linear subsequence.

Though Barnardine speaks only seven times in the entire play, his audacious defiance of both authoritative and timely structures has spawned a great deal of critical interest and popular appeal, beginning, perhaps, with the Romantic William Hazlitt, who found Barnardine "one of the finest [characters] in all of Shakespear" (Hazlitt 1818, 283); Greenblatt, too, finds Barnardine "theatrically compelling" (Greenblatt 2010, 13), and while Gurnis deems Barnardine "a disturbing character," she also acknowledges that he is "extremely funny": "Barnardine, the man too drunk to die, is a likely favorite with pleasure-seeking theatergoers" (Gurnis 2014, 161). That a remorseless murderer emerges as a purveyor of pleasure speaks to the theatrical potency of staged drunkenness; unlike Hal or even Falstaff, Barnardine is a man of no redeeming virtue, yet he offers a seductive glimpse into a timeless, transgressive fantasy world free of obligation, concern, or consequence.

With no care as to what is past, present, or future, Barnardine's drunken antics transcend even that ultimate human fear, as he remains "insensible of mortality" (4.2.156-57). Shakespeare's similarly transgressive drunks have long been crowd favorites, evidenced as early as 1598 when the quarto edition of The History of Henrie the Fourth included "With the humorous conceites of Sir John Falstalffe" on its advertorial title page. At least part of the pleasure that these bibulous figures provide, I would argue, stems from the momentary access they provide to a carnivalesque temporal economy in which time holds no authority. It is this same kind of pleasure that Drunk Shakespeare offers, as the production presents not only a flash encounter with a fantasy of timelessness, but an opportunity to inhabit the polytemporal worlds enjoyed by the drunkenly untroubled. Through its self-consciously drunken theatrics and thoroughly interactive strategies, The Drunk Shakespeare Society's Macbeth invites participants to inhabit the worlds enjoyed by Shakespeare's most notorious drunks, where past, present, and future converge in the instant.

"WINE AND WASSAIL SO CONVINCE THAT MEMORY" (MACBETH, 1.7.74-75): MACBETH'S DRUNKEN EQUIVOCATIONS The first word uttered in Macbeth, quite fittingly, is "When." Especially as used here, as the

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precursor to a question, "when" is a word that probes time, and the play that follows consistently interrogates the nature, order, and perceptual variances of time. Generally dated to 1606, Macbeth is a play that peers into the world of a ruthless eleventh-century Scottish monarch who can, through the witches' presentation of Banquo's successors, return the spectator's gaze and look back upon a future generation that is watching him. Macbeth provides a particularly apt vehicle for Drunk Shakespeare's time-bending, immersive theatrics, as the play does not so much open a portal into the past as it offers a surreal expression of the multidimensional, multidirectional relationship among past, present, and future. As Ross declares upon the assassination of Duncan, "By th' clock 'tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp" (2.4.8-9); time has become unraveled, as day and night no longer precede or follow each other but co-exist simultaneously.

As Harris argues, "Macbeth is a play that repeatedly smudges the boundaries dividing the present 'moment' from other times" (Harris 2009, 123), but in Macbeth, even the notion of a present time remains a decidedly shaky foundation upon which to build ideas about the past or future. From the onset of the play, the present, through the witches' prophecies, is one predicated on a future that the audience understands as history. The porter's scene of 2.3, which most likely alludes to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and the eighth king's mirror in the witches' parade of apparitions in 4.1, through which Macbeth beholds the image of James I, pierce an already unstable sense of the eleventh-century present with glimpses into another present. These present spaces, like day and night in Ross's observation, inhabit one polytemporal arena simultaneously. As Lady Macbeth explains, Macbeth's letter relaying the witches' prophecies transport her "beyond / This ignorant present" (1.5.64-65). Not only does she claim to experience the "future in the instant," but she deems her present reality "ignorant," which, according to the OED, renders her present as either unconscious or, in a now obsolete definition, uninformative in its concealment of the truth (OED s.v. "ignorant," 3b); the present, for Lady Macbeth as in the play at large, mystifies and equivocates.

It is perhaps, then, unsurprising that a play that so overtly shuffles temporalities would likewise feature drink so prominently, given Shakespeare's frequent explorations of alcohol's time-altering capacities. According to Joan Fitzpatrick in Food in Shakespeare, one of the play's most iconic moments, that of the witches' song and dance around their cauldron before they deliver the prophecies that portend Macbeth's downfall, aligns the weird sisters with early modern brewing practices: "'Double double toil and trouble' [is] an apparent allusion to double-double beer and the demonized female brewer" (Fitzpatrick 2007, 128), she writes. Double-double beer, Fitzpatrick explains, was a more potent version of double beer, which was boiled twice (49); double-double beer carried a "reputation for causing social disorder" (51), and thus, with their instigating prophecies and onstage brewing, the witches may likely have conjured images of women brewers and their corruptive capacities.

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Figure 3. Poppy Liu, Kristin Friedlander, and Kate Gunther as Macbeth's Witches

Furthermore, Fitzpatrick notes that the witches wield their greatest power at the moment they gather at their cauldron (7). Just as significantly, the cauldron remains onstage during their ensuing prophecies, providing a stark material reminder of their repetitious references to the intoxicating "double double" brew that seems the source of their grand, visual illusions, one of which — the king that bears the "twofold balls and treble scepters" (4.1.136) — opens a window to the present of the play's original staging. If the witches can indeed, as Banquo says, "look into the seeds of time" (1.3.61), then their time-travelling capacities are strongly linked to the intoxicating brew that seems to fuel their most potent prophecies.

If the witches' cauldron figuratively points to the power of intoxicating drink to bend time and alter reality, the drunken carousal of Inverness provides a much more literal representation. As the central defining moment of the Macbeths' narrative arc, Duncan's murder is saturated in boozy excess, as is revealed by the Porter's drunkenly delayed response to a knocking at the door, before he offers a lengthy treatise on the effects of over-imbibing as he greets the guest. "We were carousing till the second cock," he explains, "and drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things" (2.3.24-26): Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes. It provokes the desire but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be

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said to be an equivocator with lechery. It makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him; makes him stand to and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep and, giving him the lie, leaves him. (2.3.29- 38) Drunkenness, according to the Porter, equivocates; it clouds the potency of desire for future outcomes with the impotence of present inaction, and as Christoph Clausen notes in Macbeth Multiplied, the Porter's remarks echo Lady Macbeth's sexual taunting of Macbeth in the moments leading up to Duncan's murder: "Lady Macbeth quickly moves from figuring her husband's ambitions as inebriation to figuring them as a test of his virility" (Clausen 2005, 100).8 As Lady Macbeth asks, "Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.39-40), she parallels the Porter's sentiments that while Macbeth's spirit was once willing, his flesh is now weak, his ambition dulled as if drunk.

As a great equivocator, drunkenness lays a mystifying shroud over the brutal actions within Macbeth's castle. Alcohol plays a central role in the Macbeths' murder plot; as Lady Macbeth explains, . . . his two chamberlains Will I with wine and wassail so convince That memory, the warder of the brain, Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason A limbeck only. When in swinish sleep Their drenchèd natures lies as in a death, What cannot you and I perform upon Th'unguarded Duncan? (1.7.73-80) As the key to both carrying out the murder and avoiding detection, Lady Macbeth drugs Duncan's guards' wine, which she understands will so confuse the guards' powers of perception as to render them unconscious and, in keeping with the Porter's assessment, impotent. As she draws the parallel between the chamberlains' position in Duncan's quarters and the memory's function as the watchman of the mind, she asserts wine's capacity to perplex and immobilize both. Likening the body to a distillery, the brain, that "receipt of reason," absorbs the intoxicating vapors of a drunken belly to the point of disorientation.

Lady Macbeth, for her part, is not so much disoriented as re-oriented after having imbibed, as she declares, "That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold, / What quenched them hath given me fire" (2.2.1-3). "Spirits," as she had earlier commanded, may indeed have unsexed her and filled her full "Of direst cruelty" (1.5.47, 50), as wine emboldens her to collaborate in the murderous plot, even if she cannot bring herself to kill a king who "resembled / [Her] father as he slept" (2.2.16-17). Macbeth, however, asks to be notified "when my drink is ready" (2.1.42), then immediately launches into a polytemporal hallucination in which his future unfolds before his eyes: "the bloody business" he has yet to undertake "informs / Thus to [his] eyes" (2.1.60-61), and with a "stealthy pace" shuffles him

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forward "towards his design" (2.1.66, 67); the initially spotless dagger he sees before him drips with blood "Which was not so before" (2.1.59), as he inhabits his future in the instant. If Macbeth aimed to defy the order of time through regicide, he realizes his goal almost immediately, as upon committing the murder, he finds that he has likewise "murder[ed] sleep," which he notes is "The death of each day's life" (2.2.48, 50); his future is now one long, undying day, unpunctuated by sleep's reprieve.

To stress Macbeth's new and endless day, the following scene provides a comically exaggerated interval of slow time, as the Porter drunkenly and unhurriedly shuffles to answer an elongated series of eight knocks at the door. In his dilatory response, the Porter seems to open the door not only to the seventeenth-century theatrical audience's present, but to the early modern theater's dramatic forebears as well. In a moment that Harris labels "a polychronic palimpsest," the Porter adopts the role of the medieval mystery plays' stock "porter of Hell-gate" and asks (Harris 2009, 128), "Who's there, in th'other devil's name? Faith, here's an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven" (2.3.7-11). Aside from further attesting to the mystifying effects of too much drink, his conjecture of a treasonous equivocator at his gate is a likely reference to the Gunpowder Plot's co- conspirator Henry Garnet, whose A Treatise of Equivocation helped to convict him. The Porter scene, then, like the witches' apparitions of future kings, forges a time-bending bridge between the murder and attempted murder of two Scottish monarchs a half-millennium apart, all while infusing the present theatrical moment with decidedly dated dramatic practice. The Porter taps into a future that is his initial audience's present, reinvigorates outmoded stagecraft on the present stage, and presents a past uncannily connected to a seventeenth- century audience's current moment, as drink, again, equivocates in matters of time.

"HATH OUR INTELLIGENCE BEEN DRUNK?" (KING JOHN, 4.2.116): DRUNK SHAKESPEARE AS POLYTEMPORAL IMMERSION On the night that I attended Drunk Shakespeare, cast member Poppy Liu, who played the parts of a witch and Macduff, was singled out as the evening's drunk Shakespearean. Presented with five murky brown shots of liquor, she asked for an audience member to come forward and imbibe one of the shots with her. The move was part audience participation, part magician's gimmick; she aimed to demonstrate that the liquor and, hence, her ensuing drunkenness were indeed real and that Drunk Shakespeare delivers its promise authentically and collaboratively. As she selected one of the several enthusiastic volunteers to join her, this initiating moment signaled the drunken revelry to follow and invited the audience to participate; it also telegraphed a certain degree of anxious anticipation. Liu was visibly drunk, and though she told the audience not to worry as she has a high tolerance, her drunken grin and wildly oscillating volume provided an air of instability and spontaneity, even danger, to the evening's entertainment. As I soon discovered, actual on-stage drunkenness, and not the comically exaggerated performance of drunkenness fans of Shakespeare are accustomed to in their Falstaffs or Toby Belches, can provide an unsettling theatrical experience.

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As performance theorist Herbert Blau argues in The Dubious Spectacle, the primary architectural space of the theater is and always has been the body of the actor, subject as it is to the dematerializing power of the gaze that dissolves all space into itself. It is, of course, a transient architecture with a breathing skin, subject at any instant to the corrosions of time, the future in the instant. (Blau 2002, 50). Riffing on Lady Macbeth, Blau argues that human mortality and the ceaseless flow of time are always on display in the theater through the live, corporeal bodies of its actors "literally dying in front of your eyes" (51). Actor and spectator "breathe each other" (50), he says, bonded in their mutual mortality, both aware of their shared time and space in their present environment and the relentless progression of time toward an uncertain future. On-stage drunkenness, I would argue, only heightens this theatrical effect as it alerts the audience to the shared vulnerabilities of everybody, with the passage of time revealing, and revealed by, the inevitably intoxicating consequences of consumption. Immediately after downing her liquor, Liu assured the audience, "Don't worry, my body just absorbs alcohol," to which her cast-mate Lucas Calhoun corrected, "Um, all our bodies absorb alcohol." It was a funny exchange, but it also reminded the audience that Liu remained subject to the same debilitating effects of excess indulgence to which we all are, and that her position on the stage did not shelter her vulnerable, human body from inebriation.

If Drunk Shakespeare promises a drunken performance, it cannot do so without actually and chemically compromising the body and mind of its intoxicated actor, and this slow process of gradual and easily perceptible inebriation acutely signals both her mortality and what Blau calls the "corrosion of time." The evening's entertainment then persistently threatened, or perhaps promised, the potential for startling reminders of human frailty as Liu further devolved into drunkenness: Would she stumble, slur, forget her lines, or, in a more ghastly turn, vomit? But it is precisely this kind of unsettling apprehension that grounds this particular theatrical event in a highly conscious sense of the present, with a foreboding sense of an unanticipatable future always looming. On-stage drunkenness commands vigilant attention to the immediacy of the theatrical event through its sheer unpredictability.

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Figure 4. Ensemble members (L-R) Lindsey Hope Pearlman, Josh Hyman, Poppy Liu, Kristin Friedlander, Lou Sallan, Damiyr Shuford, and Kate Gunther

The Drunk Shakespeare Society is hardly the first ensemble to perform Shakespeare while intoxicated, nor is Drunk Shakespeare the first Shakespearean production to place at its forefront what other performers may have concealed through character and, in a quasi- Brechtian turn, assert the presence of the (drunken) actor behind the role. Producer Scott Griffin acknowledges that a performance of the Scottish Shit-faced Shakespeare in Edinburgh inspired Drunk Shakespeare (Teodorczuk 2014), and the Scottish company has recently brought their production stateside for the limited 2015 run in Boston that provoked the Boston Globe reviewer's concerns. Despite the similarities of inebriated and partially improvised performance, however, Drunk Shakespeare remains a vastly different experience from its inspirational predecessor; performed on a stage in a traditional theatrical auditorium, Shit-faced Shakespeare invites its audience to witness the idiosyncrasies of drunken Shakespeare, without the complicity or spatial fluidity of this participatory tavern environment. Free of divisive barriers, Drunk Shakespeare can then wield drunkenness as something beyond spectacle, as convivial consumption becomes an immersive strategy that facilitates a sense of shared lability and collaborative enterprise.

As Machon argues, the hyper-present awareness engendered by Drunk Shakespeare is characteristic of immersive performance, which she notes, "accentuates the 'presentness' of human sensory experience" (Machon 2013, 44), produces a "felt sense of time-play" (96), and invites participants into an unspoken "contract into which you are entering [an] exclusive

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and ludic society" (96). Fittingly, the performance references itself not as a show, but a "meeting" of The Drunk Shakespeare Society. As emcee Phil Gillen called the meeting to order, it became clear that we were all drunk Shakespeareans for the evening, with Liu only serving as a particularly legible demonstration of the communal, theatricalized revels in which we all participated.

Inclusive imbibing provides not only a means of immersing attendees in the alcohol-fueled polytemporalities of Macbeth, but a device to facilitate a sense of spontaneous communitas amongst all participants. Communitas, the unstructured state of mutual, egalitarian affiliation that emerges through shared experience, involves a liminal experience that Victor Turner deems "a moment in and out of time" (Turner 1969, 96): "Communitas is of the now" (113), he writes, and arises free of the structural burdens of linear timelines. What he specifically refers to as "spontaneous communitas" is an extemporal, unrepeatable moment through which divisional hierarchies dissolve in a communal, though fleeting, spirit of chaos (140). Theater and performance studies frequently engage Turner's model of communitas, especially in regard to experimental and immersive forms that suspend traditional barriers between spectacle and spectator; as Richard Schechner states in Performance Theory, "The goal of [participatory] performances is to entertain, to have fun, and to create what Victor Turner calls 'spontaneous communitas,' the dissolution of boundaries shutting people off from each other. The resulting experience is of collective celebration" (Schechner 1988, 128). Indeed, despite the somber tone of Shakespeare's Macbeth, this meeting of The Drunk Shakespeare Society maintained a celebratory atmosphere more indebted to the humorously transgressive antics of Falstaff or Barnardine than to the weighty machinations of the Macbeths, as participants shared not only drinks and laughter, but the same theatrical space, text, and alternating roles of performer and spectator.

In a compelling subversion of the traditional boundaries between locus and platea, a bride-to- be named Lisa, there celebrating her bachelorette party, fulfilled the role of Duncan, or rather, Queen Lisa, from her seat on a red velvet throne in the center of the play-space. As Robert Weimann theorized in his highly influential Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, early modern and subsequent stages traditionally operate through a divide between two distinct theatrical spaces: the scaffolded, upstage locus, reserved for thrones and stationary set structures; and the "neutral" platea, a liminal play space that facilitates performer-playgoer interaction (Weimann 1978, 74-76). As Queen Lisa's position on the only fixed set-piece demonstrates, Drunk Shakespeare operates entirely in platea, as the neutral space of performer-playgoer interactivity encompasses the entire barroom, from the central royal throne to the outermost patrons' tables. With neither social nor physical boundaries to divide the performance from its audience, there is no safe space in Drunk Shakespeare; attendees can find no shelter from the pervasive — and certainly to some, invasive — scope of the performance, as one Yelp reviewer lamented after "a random actor [came] up to us and without saying a word [drank] some of my beer" (Ricardo A. 2015). In turn, no part of the play-space or even the play-text is specifically off-limits to playgoers, as an audience member occupies the throne, and all references to Duncan in the text were substituted with http://borrowers.uga.edu/783933/show Page 19 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

"Lisa."

As attendees corporeally and rhetorically entered both the play-space and the play, the actors, too, at times assumed the role of spectator, as during unscripted moments, members of the five-actor ensemble retreated amidst the patrons' tables and often partook of a drink while watching their fellow participants' performances. It soon became evident that the atmosphere of unpredictable spontaneity that gripped the audience extended to the principal players as well; neither audience nor actor could foresee the often drunken improvisations that would unfold from either cast members or attendees. In one apparently unscripted excursion, Gillen asked Liu, mid-production and further progressed in her intoxication, to spontaneously perform a scene from Henry VI. She consented, then paused to ask, "Wait, which one?" Gillen repeated "Henry VI," and Liu dropped to her knees and delivered one of Queen Katherine's courtroom monologues from Henry VIII. Like the audience, the actors responded to this mistaken monologue as they did to many of her drunken improvisations, with visceral displays of startled whispering and hearty laughter.

Before the performance of Macbeth began, Liu, after having downed her shots and with a rather rambling delivery style, proceeded to explain that Macbeth is an old story that has known many incarnations, and that when she was a child, her parents often told her a somewhat sanitized version in the form of a fairy tale. "It went like this," she said, before speaking the story in Mandarin, punctuated occasionally by the familiar names of "Macbeth" and "Macduff." Her storytelling, like most of her drunken antics, elicited a great deal of laughter from all participants, but it also established a sort of precedent: that the story about to unfold belongs to no singular time or place, that it is an ongoing narrative that has been reimagined, transported, and translated for centuries. As the evening's drunk Shakespearean, she provided an apt vehicle for the delivery of this particular message regarding the unfixed fluidity of the story, and she reiterated this narrative instability almost immediately when she interrupted the second scene with her first "drunk point of order" to command that every time Gillen, as Ross, enter the action, he do so as a different powerful woman from history. This apparently improvised emendation provided an early signal of the dramatic license the company assumes and allowed various histories to collide in a spirit of good humor, so with a faux-Columbian accent and gyrating pelvis, Gillen delivered a Shakira-inspired message that Duncan had named Macbeth Thane of Cawdor, before proclaiming, "And my hips don't lie."

Despite frequent improvisations and multiple interruptions, The Drunk Shakespeare Society performs a great deal of the play, though as the performance progressed and the participants became further intoxicated, it sometimes seemed that Shakespeare was, in fact, interrupting an improv session rather than the other way around. In his work on Shakespeare and the performance of histories, Brian Walsh argues that "it is the present that animates the past" (Walsh 2009, Kindle loc. 10%); in their discussion of memory, cognition, and the early modern theater, Evelyn B. Tribble and John Sutton conversely argue that "the past animates the present" as both conscious and unconscious memories spur present practices (Tribble and Sutton 2012, 589).

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Drunk Shakespeare demonstrates a matrix of reciprocating temporal causalities that, I would argue, encompass both perspectives simultaneously. Multiple pasts are on display in Drunk Shakespeare, including the history of the eleventh-century monarch, the cast's 1920s-inspired costuming, and Liu's childhood memories. As Walsh argues, each of these various histories comes alive through the words and bodies of the actors present. But multiple presents exist as well, from the conditions and persons of the present staging to the frequent pop cultural references that direct attention to the present outside the tavern walls. In keeping with Tribble and Sutton's model, it is Shakespeare's distinctly seventeenth-century verse that provides a springboard for the company's stories, jokes, and commentary; throughout the performance, passages from the play launched various cast members to reflect upon topics ranging from contemporary film to the New York City subways. The language of the play animated their present-minded joviality, and the friction between the dated iambic pentameter and the cast's casual, contemporary commentary highlighted the historical gap between the two. If the production is marked, through both drunken spontaneity and pop cultural references, by an overriding sense of the present, as well as a looming, inevitable future, both seem to spring from, and co-exist with, an insuppressible past rendered rhetorically by the present actors. Drunk Shakespeare, then, provides a shared experience thematized in Macbeth: one in which past, present, and future occur in the instant.

As the inescapable progression of drunkenness gradually enveloped all participants, the gap that seemed to express Shakespeare's language as a sort of playfully wielded historical artifact gradually shrunk: radical breaks from the text seemed less audacious, but rather, somewhat expected and therefore more fluid; an emboldened audience grew louder and participated more substantially in the performance, becoming ever more complicit in the experience. Throughout the performance, audience participation was encouraged, at times demanded.

Attendees filled in the parts of the murderers in 3.1 and 3.4. As Great Birnham Wood ascended to Dunsinane Hill, Kate Gunther's Malcolm led a group of playgoers, all dangling pine tree air fresheners before them, toward Macbeth's waiting forces. Furthermore, spontaneous outbursts, if not invited, generally met positive response and, indeed, became a central part of the show. When, for example, Lindsey Hope Pearlman entered as Lady Macbeth, she delighted an audience member by handing him her prophetic letter. The recipient of the letter later, upon Lady Macbeth's declaration that, "I have given suck, and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me" (1.7.62-63), shouted back, "Oh, I've given suck, too, honey!"

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Figure 5. Drunk Shakespeare Playgoer Displays his Souvenir: Macbeth's Letter to Lady Macbeth

The exchange demonstrates a pattern in Drunk Shakespeare, as early on, audience members were initially welcomed into the show by means of gesture, question, and comment, which then signaled license to participate freely. As the play progressed, audience interruptions occurred nearly as frequently as Liu's interruptions; as director David Hudson stated to The New York Times, "The audience is the sixth character in the play" (Sloan 2014).

It has become something of a given in critical discussions of early modern theater to discuss the audience as part of the playhouse spectacle. In Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama, Jeremy Lopez argues that early modern audiences "enjoyed going to the theater for reasons other than seeing the play — to see and be seen by others . . . to show off new clothes" and took a great deal of enjoyment in "responding visibly, audibly, and physically" (Lopez 2002, 34). Andrew Gurr, Ian Munroe, and Nova http://borrowers.uga.edu/783933/show Page 22 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

Myhill, along with such early modern commentators as Thomas Dekker and Thomas Nashe, have all written on the complex relationship between audience and on-stage action, asserting, as does Lopez, that in the early modern theater, the audience, too, is on display and, indeed, part of the show.9 While I have generally accepted such arguments in theory, I have rarely experienced contemporary theater in this way, given today's general inclination toward darkened auditoriums and mostly obeisant audiences. Even in reconstructed theaters, such as London's Globe or the Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia, with their universal lighting and onstage seating, the air of bardolatry permeates so severely and, indeed, seems embedded within the very timbers, that it is hard to imagine a truly irreverent or disruptive audience. But in Drunk Shakespeare, audience irreverence and unpredictability, undoubtedly spurred on by the beverages consumed, played an increasingly significant part in the spectacle and added to an already tension-laden environment, further destabilizing the performance with the potential for boundary-crossing disruption.

Given the high degree of audience interaction, Drunk Shakespeare can feel, at times, less like a performance and more like a Shakespeare-themed funhouse, and the cast acknowledged as much. When, in the aftermath of Lisa's murder, Macbeth (Calhoun) uttered his "sleep no more" lament, Gillen called a point of order to ask if anyone had been to Sleep No More. Many in attendance responded that they had, before Gillen added, "I've seen Sleep No More fifteen times, and my favorite part is when the big hairy guy takes you in the dark closet and teaches you how to be a man." The cast, with impeccable comic timing, paused to stare at their cohort in stunned disbelief as the audience roared; the joke, later enhanced when Gillen emerged in the signature Sleep No More mask, ties the performance to what is perhaps its closest counterpart: another Macbeth-themed theatrical experience that likewise invites its audience to inhabit its world. To be certain, Drunk Shakespeare is much more closely aligned to the play-text than is Sleep No More, and the comedic production is punctuated with moments of surprisingly earnest performance. Calhoun, in one such instance, delivered a powerfully evocative "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech that, for a brief moment, brought the generally unruly crowd to silence.

But the spontaneous improvisations and drunken antics of the participants are the main attractions here. Throughout the performance, Liu, despite playing a role with less stage time than Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, provided an omnipresent reminder of the show's central premise. She interrupted with several drunk points of order; before the massacre at Macduff's castle, for example, she drunkenly reiterated, in the impassioned, repetitious manner to which drunks are prone, how disturbing she found the murder of children in this play, and then commanded that the entire assault be relayed only through interpretive dance. She could be seen at times drinking with playgoers during her unscripted moments, and once emerged to announce her intention to play "Fortyhands," which I had to ask a tablemate to explain. Fortyhands, a riff on Edward Scissorhands, is a drinking game that involves duct-taping a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor to one's hand, which cannot be removed until it is fully consumed. I needn't have asked, as Liu promptly demonstrated, and then could be seen flitting between tables, pouring portions of her bottle into eager attendees' mouths. http://borrowers.uga.edu/783933/show Page 23 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

Figure 6. Poppy Liu

Liu provided an exaggerated mirror of the drunken spiral consuming all of Drunk Shakespeare's participants. As the barroom gradually became enveloped by the encroaching spirit of genuine debauchery, so, too, the play devolved into a barely recognizable pastiche of Shakespeare, inebriation, and pop culture, until its culmination in the Independence Day speech. By the time the matter of Scottish succession was determined by a dance-off between Macduff and Lady Macbeth, which Macduff handily won by performing an impressive split, any sense of intertwined, competing narratives and temporalities had already ruptured into an open-ended free-for-all.

Drunk Shakespeare resists easy categorization; like the "tragical mirth" offered by the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream (5.1.61), The Drunk Shakespeare Society's

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Macbeth is a comical presentation of a tragedy. It presents a tavern theater experience that seems at once rooted in a distant past, but given the cameo appearances of Shakira, Beyonce, and Marlon Brando that peppered the performance, remains strikingly contemporary. It is both a drunken night out at the pub and an off-Broadway play. It combines sometimes clever, sometimes downright silly improvisation with adherence, even, at times, reverence to Shakespeare's script. It blurs distinctions between audience and performer.

Despite its resistance to easy definition, however, Drunk Shakespeare seems persistently aware of exactly what it is. Before the performance of Macbeth began, Gillen asked the crowd about their own Shakespearean theatergoing experiences; several in attendance responded that they had seen Mark Rylance's celebrated productions of Richard III and Twelfth Night or Ethan Hawke's recent turn as Macbeth on Broadway. The Drunk Shakespeare Society understands that its audiences have their own histories with Shakespeare and that Shakespeare is as much a part of popular culture as Shakira and Independence Day. They opt then to force those various histories — Shakespeare's, their own, their audience's — into collision with an unfolding present, to simultaneously perform and disrupt, then stand outside the wreckage as watchful commentators. The audience, in turn, is invited, coaxed even, to collaboratively participate in the gradual dissolution of conventional theatrical and temporal boundaries — "to drive away the time," as Hal says in the Boar's Head — not only to observe, but to empathically inhabit the chaotic, polytemporal worlds of Macbeth.

NOTES 1. The words in my title are Iago's (Othello 2.3.61-62). All Shakespeare quotations come from the Folger Digital Texts (Shakespeare 2017). I would like to thank the editors of Borrowers of Lenders, as well the anonymous readers, for their astute and generous feedback. I am indebted to their thoughtful and productive guidance, which I found to be of great assistance in revising this essay for publication. 2. All descriptions of Drunk Shakespeare reference the original Quinn's Bar performances of 2014. Since 2014, the production has evolved and twice changed venues, and thus, certain performance practices and spatial dynamics discussed here have likewise evolved. 3. For more speculation as to Shakespeare's personal and perhaps complicated relationship with alcohol, see Greenblatt 2004, 66-71. 4. See also Burnham 2002; Kállay 2003; Macdonald 2010; and McLuskie 2009. 5. For an overview of recent explorations into diverse Shakespearean temporalities, see L. Munro 2011. Munro divides such critical discussions into five categories: "studies of the interrelations between the medieval and early modern periods; approaches focusing on the workings of memory and trauma; materialist approaches; approaches that seek to interrogate or 'queer' notions about temporality; and 'presentist' approaches, which seek to understand the past primarily in terms of its impact on the present day" (105). 6. Both events were covered in multiple media outlets. For details of LaBeouf's arrest, see

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Oldham 2014; for details of the cell phone offense at Hand of God, see Cox 2015. 7. See Teodorczuk 2014; Sloan 2014; and Catton 2014. 8. Clausen offers further parallels between the Porter's comments and Lady Macbeth's sexual taunting, along with an analysis of how Verdi's opera adapts these relationships, in Chapter 2 of Macbeth Multiplied (Clausen 2005). 9. In The Shakespearean Stage, Gurr notes the animated responses of early modern playgoers and logs thirty-four dramatist complaints regarding audience behavior (Gurr 1992, 222-29). Ian Munro's The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London provides an in-depth exploration of the relationship between audience, theatrical spectacle, and the city outside the theater walls (I. Munro 2005). Nashe provides contemporary accounts of early modern theater patrons and their visceral reactions to plays and performers, including an instance when a justice beat several audience members for daring to laugh at Queen's Man Richard Tarlton (Nashe 1592, Sigs. E3-E3v). Dekker famously lampoons audiences' obnoxious behavior in Chapter 6 of The Guls Horne-book (Dekker 1609, 27-32).

REFERENCES Aucoin, Don. 2015. "Alcohol and 'Dream' Don't Mix at Davis Square Theater." Boston Globe, 18 April. Available online at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/04/18/boozy- misguided-dream-davis-square-theatre/eF7fFG7IjWG1c1o2NdM4XI/story.html (https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/04/18/boozy-misguided-dream-davis-square- theatre/eF7fFG7IjWG1c1o2NdM4XI/story.html) [accessed 25 June 2015]. Blau, Herbert. 2002. The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brown, Pamela Allen. 2003. Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Burnham, Douglas. 2002. "Language, Time and Politics in Shakespeare's Macbeth." In Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture. Edited by Sharon Ouditt. Burlington: Ashgate. 21-32. Carlyon, David. 2011. "'Find Love's Prick': Touchstone Improvises." ANQ 24.3: 131-37. Catton, Pia. 2014. "All the Bar's a Stage, and All the Players Are Drunk. The Wall Street Journal, 26 August. Available online at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/alcohol-fueled- shakespeare-productions-serve-classics-with-a-twist-1409106604 (http://www.wsj.com/articles/alcohol-fueled-shakespeare-productions-serve-classics-with-a- twist-1409106604) [accessed 25 June 2015]. Chambers, E. K. 1930. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Volume 2. Oxford: Clarendon.

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Clausen, Christopher. 2005. Macbeth Multiplied: Negotiating Historical and Medial Difference Between Shakespeare and Verdi. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Cox, Gordon. 2015. "Broadway's 'Hand to God' Cell Phone Offender: 'I Downed a Few Drinks." Variety, 10 July. Available online at: http://variety.com/2015/legit/news/broadway-cell-phone- hand -to-god-patti-lupone-1201537866/ (http://variety.com/2015/legit/news/broadway-cell- phone-hand%20-to-god-patti-lupone-1201537866/) [accessed 15 July 2015]. Danson, Lawrence. 2000. Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dekker, Thomas. 1609. The Guls Horne-book. London. Devlin, Dean, prod. 1996. Independence Day. Directed by Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox. The Drunk Shakespeare Society. 2015. "Drunk Shakespeare". Available online at: http://www.drunkshakespeare.com/welcome (http://www.drunkshakespeare.com/welcome) [accessed 25 June 2015]. Earnshaw, Steven. 2000. The Pub in Literature: England's Altered States. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Egan, Gabriel. 2001. "John Heminges's Tap-house at the Globe." Theatre Notebook 55: 72-77. Enchanted W. 2014. Drunk Shakespeare review. Yelp, 2 February. Available online at: http://www.yelp.com/biz/drunk-shakespeare-new-york?start=160 (http://www.yelp.com/biz/drunk-shakespeare-new-york?start=160) [accessed 16 August 2015]. Fitzpatrick, Joan. 2007. Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays. Aldershot: Ashgate. Foster, Donald W. 1986. "Macbeth's War on Time." English Literary Renaissance 16: 319-42. Garber, Marjorie. 2004. Shakespeare After All. New York: Pantheon. Gosson, Stephen. 1579. The School of Abuse. London: Thomas Woodcocke. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2010. Shakespeare's Freedom. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton. Greenwald, David. 2014. "Portland, It's Time to Behave at the Schnitz." The Oregonian, 7 October. Available online at: http://www.oregonlive.com/music/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_behave_seated_shows.html (http://www.oregonlive.com/music/index.ssf/2014/10/portland_behave_seated_shows.html) [accessed 25 June 2015]. Griffin, Scott. 2014. Drunk Shakespeare. Directed by David Hudson. Quinn's Bar. New York, 31 May.

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Guj, Luisa. 1986. "Macbeth and the Seeds of Time." Shakespeare Studies 18: 175-88. Gurnis, Musa. 2014. "'Most Ignorant of What He's Most Assured': The Hermeneutics of Predestination in Measure for Measure." Shakespeare Studies 42: 141-69. Gurr, Andrew. 2004. The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew. 1992. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. 1887. Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Harris, Jonathan Gil. 2009. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hazlitt, William. 1818. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. Boston: Wells and Lilly. Hoover, Amanda. 2015. "Shit-faced Shakespeare Comes to Boston." Boston Magazine, 10 April. Available online at: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/blog/2015/04/ 10/shit-faced-shakespeare/ (http://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts- entertainment/blog/2015/04/%20%2010/shit-faced-shakespeare/) [accessed 25 June 2015]. Julie G. 2014. Drunk Shakespeare review. Yelp, 20 September. Available online at: http://www.yelp.com/biz/drunk-shakespeare-new-york?start=160 (http://www.yelp.com/biz/drunk-shakespeare-new-york?start=160) [accessed 16 August 2015]. Kállay, Géza. 2003. "Was Macbeth Lying? The 'Be All,' the 'End All,' and the Ethics of Time." European Journal of English Studies 7.2: 137-49. Lopez, Jeremy. 2002. Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, Heather. 2011. "Milk." In Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by Madhavi Menon. Durham: Duke University Press. 201-208. Machon, Josephine. 2013. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonald, Julia. 2010. "Demonic Time in Macbeth." Ben Jonson Journal 17: 76-96. Marchitello, Howard. 2013. "Shakespeare and the Problem of Real Time in Macbeth." Shakespeare Quarterly 64.4: 425-48. McBride, Charlotte. 2004. "A Natural Drink for an English Man: National Stereotyping in Early Modern Culture." In A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth Century England. Edited by Adam Smyth. Cambridge: Brewer. 181-92.

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McLuskie, Kathleen. 2009. "The Future in the Instant." In Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare. Edited by Evelyn Gajowski. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 239-51. Munro, Ian. 2005. The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Munro, Lucy. 2011. "Shakespeare and the Uses of the Past: Critical Approaches and Current Debates." Shakespeare 7.1: 102-25. Myhill, Nova. 2011. "Taking the Stage: Spectators as Spectacle in the Caroline Private Theaters." In Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Audience, 1558-1642. Edited by Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 37-54. Nashe, Thomas. 1592. Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell. London: Richard Jones. Oldham, Stuart. 2014. "Shia LaBeouf Arrested at Broadway 'Cabaret' Performance." Variety, 26 June. Available online at: http://variety.com/2014/legit/news/shia-labeouf-handcuffed- escorted-out-of-broadway-cabaret-1201251983/ (http://variety.com/2014/legit/news/shia- labeouf-handcuffed-escorted-out-of-broadway-cabaret-1201251983/) [accessed 25 June 2015]. Pomerantz, Dorothy. 2012. "Bill Pullman in Independence Day Tops Our List of the Best Fictional Presidents." Forbes, 6 November. Available online at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2012/11/06/bill-pullman-in-independence- day-tops-our-list-of-the-best-fictional-presidents/ (http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2012/11/06/bill-pullman-in-independence- day-tops-our-list-of-the-best-fictional-presidents/) [accessed 12 July 2014]. Ricardo A. 2015. Drunk Shakespeare review. Yelp, 13 February. Available online at: http://www.yelp.com/biz/drunk-shakespeare-new-york?start=160 (http://www.yelp.com/biz/drunk-shakespeare-new-york?start=160) [accessed 16 August 2015]. Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, William. 2017. Shakespeare's Plays. Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library. Available online at: http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org (http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org) [accessed 5 January 2018]. Sloan, Brian. 2014. "Poking the Fourth Wall." The New York Times, 23 July. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/fashion/inspired-by-sleep-no-more-more-new-york- interactive-theater-experiences.html?_r=2 (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/fashion/inspired-by-sleep-no-more-more-new-york- interactive-theater-experiences.html?_r=2) [accessed 25 June 2015].

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Smyth, Adam. 2004. "'It were far better be a Toad, or a Serpant, then a Drunkard': Writing about Drunkenness." In A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England. Edited by Adam Smyth. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 193-210. Teodorczuk, Tom. 2014. "Is That a Bottle of Wine I See Before Me? The Delights of Drunk Shakespeare." The Daily Beast, 1 June. Available online at: https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/01/is-that-a-bottle-of-wine-i-see-before-e-the- delights-of-drunk-shakespeare.html (https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-that-a-bottle-of-wine-i- see-before-me-the-delights-of-drunk-shakespeare) [accessed 28 June 2014]. Trawick, Buckner B. 1978. Shakespeare and Alcohol. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tribble, Evelyn B., and John Sutton. 2012. "Minds in and out of Time: Memory, Embodied Skill, Anachronism, and Performance." Textual Practice 26.4: 587-607. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Wagner, Matthew. 2012. Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time. New York: Routledge. Walsh, Brian. 2010. Shakespeare, The Queen's Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kindle Electronic Edition. Ward, John. 1839. Diary of the Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon. Edited by Charles Severn. London: Henry Colburn. Weimann, Robert. 1978. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wotton, Sir Henry. 1672. Reliquiae Wottonianae, or, A collection of lives, letters, poems: with Characters of Sundry Personages. Third edition. London: T. Roycroft.

PERMISSIONS Figure 1. Drunk Shakespeare logo. Scott Griffin. Figure 2. Drunk Shakespeare actors. Still from promotional Drunk Shakespeare video. Producer Scott Griffin. Figure 3. The Witches of Drunk Shakespeare. Photograph by Jenny Anderson. Figure 4. Drunk Shakespeare cast 2014. Photography by Jenny Anderson. Figure 5. Drunk Shakespeare attendee holds Macbeth's letter. Photograph by Jennifer Holl. Figure 6. Poppy Liu as a witch. Photograph by Jenny Anderson.

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Taking the Measure of One's Suppositions, One Step at a Time

(/current) REGINA BUCCOLA, ROOSEVELT UNIVERSITY

(/about) ABSTRACT

(/archive) One Step at a Time Like This, a Melbourne-based theater company, developed an astonishing interactive meditation on Measure for Measure for Chicago Shakespeare Theater's World's Stage Series in the fall of 2014. An immersive, ambulatory theater experience, Since I Suppose pushed audience participants to examine the complex sexual politics of Shakespeare's play, the city of Chicago, and their own personal moral identities through a variety of different lenses. Since I Suppose challenged its audience participants' assumptions of imperviousness to the corruption of a political aspirant like Angelo, the weakness of a political figure such as the Duke, or the myriad temptations of a sprawling city. In the manner of the best productions, One Step at a Time Like This produced an adaptation of Measure for Measure that left audience members with not merely a different understanding of the play, but of themselves. Diving deeply into a corrupt world of substitute political leaders, substitute sexual partners, and substitute decapitated criminals, Since I Suppose left its audience to contemplate the profundity of the most basic question of identity: Who are you?

Take a city — Vienna or Ferrara,1 Chicago, or Melbourne.2 Examine it, clinically: its streets, its pristine halls of power, its dark underbelly. Suppose that you are the ruler of it, and understand that you have let the reins on license go slack. Like a coward, you put someone else in charge and disguise yourself to sit back and watch what will happen. But things don't go quite as you planned. Licentiousness is curbed more harshly than you envisioned. And then there is that girl, the nun, the novitiate. You see your substitute see things in her, things that you can see yourself. Before you know it, you are implicated, caught up in the drama you intended to just let unfold around you.3

Such, in its bare outlines, is the narrative of Measure for Measure, and of Since I Suppose, the riff on Measure that the Australian theater company One Step at a Time Like This4 developed for Chicago Shakespeare Theater's World's Stage Series. A meditation on the themes of power, corruption, morality, and sexuality raised by Shakespeare's play, Since I Suppose allowed the audience members who experienced it, one by one, to begin as detached observers of video clips of cityscapes inhabited by characters from the play, but slowly sucked you directly into the drama until, rather than watching a video clip of Marianna climb into bed next to Angelo disguised as Isabella, you did it yourself, wearing a fake moustache rather than a nun's habit. Audience participants were kept separate from one another by staggered start times, which meant that the performers in the live sequences were repeating their scripted and choreographed interactions with new audience participants at roughly fifteen-minute intervals.

Since I Suppose thus combined elements of immersive theater5 and one-to-one theater. As Gareth White explains: the former tends to make use of spatial and architectural interventions, and to ask spectators to involve themselves physically in tracking down or pursuing the performance; the latter seeks a more direct relationship with the individual spectator. Both of these putative new forms often, but not always, ask the spectator to speak or act in dialogue with the http://borrowers.uga.edu/783924/show Page 1 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

Taking the Measure of One's Suppositions, One Step at a Time

(/current) REGINA BUCCOLA, ROOSEVELT UNIVERSITY

(/about) ABSTRACT

performers or the performance environment, or to make choices that structure their experience: they invite the spectator to participate in ways that are differently active to the typical theatre event. Both terms serve to legitimate participatory practice, offering something more edgy and exciting than mere audience participation, perhaps. (White 2013, 2) Punchdrunk's celebrated Sleep No More is a site-specific work inspired partly by Shakespeare's Macbeth in which a collective, masked audience is free to roam throughout the performance space, interacting with it as they choose. While Punchdrunk's audience members may be pulled away individually for a one-to-one experience, that production is primarily immersive in its orientation and permits its audience participants a certain degree of both detachment and anonymity via masks.6Since I Suppose remained both one-to-one and immersive throughout the experience, turning its audience participants semi-loose in a major metropolitan area, unmasked, where they interacted with regular citizens going about their days with no knowledge of the performance in addition to live and filmed performers with One Step at a Time Like This. In the final stage of the experience, audience participants were marked out as unusual via fake moustaches, sometimes attracting the attention of ordinary citizens on the street and in semi-public contexts like the Hotel Palomar which — unlike Punchdrunk's McKittrick Hotel, the warehouse-turned-hotel setting for Sleep No More — remained open for regular business. As Josephine Machon observes, "immersive experiences in theatre combine the act of immersion — being submerged in an alternative medium where all the senses are engaged and manipulated — with a deep involvement in the activity within that medium" (2013, 21-22).

FOLLOW FILMS Audience participants experienced Since I Suppose one by one, but encountered directly at least eight different performers, several of whom also appeared in videos designed to move the audience participant through the play's plot, and the city in which it was (re)set. The audience participant's training in how to adapt to the unique delivery mode of this adaptation of Measure began the day before attending the performance, when an e-mail arrived with an embedded YouTube video introducing some of the characters and the adaptation's governing concept of the card trick.7 The video also provided a street-corner rendezvous point in downtown Chicago from which the performance would begin, with instructions to bring a fully charged cell phone, wear comfortable shoes, and leave baggage at home (with an image of a woman staggering beneath literal baggage, but the subtextual suggestion of metaphorical baggage).

At the street-corner rendezvous point, participants received a phone call instructing them to walk toward the twinkling lights of the Palace Theater. There, an elegantly dressed and coiffed woman (Sara Sawicki) seated them on a velvet bench in the theater's empty lobby to orient them to the rest of the performance experience. While participants were asked to bring their own phones, these were immediately replaced by Motorola Moto G smartphones fitted with headphones, attached to both a lanyard placed around the neck, and a Velcro strap, to wear around the hand.8 Participants walked through a brief example of a "follow film," in which the idea is to follow in real space the advancing image on the phone's video screen in front of you.9 In the case of the orientation film, for example, the video showed the empty lobby; the unseen person making the follow film walked slowly toward a marble pillar. Once you arrived at the pillar in the "company" of the video, you then turned, as the image on the screen turned, toward a staircase with a burnished brass handrail, and back to the bench from which the journey began.

The elegant woman then oriented the participant to another part of the performance experience, the violation of physical boundaries between the performer and the participant. "May I blindfold you?" she asked, after the video had returned the participant to sit on the plush bench.10 Sawicki's query constituted the first of three moments of blindfolding in the performance, each with higher stakes.

Once the participant was blindfolded, Sawicki leaned over them from behind, an open hand resting firmly on their shoulder, to whisper questions associated with the plot content of Measure for Measure, such as "Do you have a brother or a sister? Do you believe in the death penalty? Have you ever wanted someone so desperately that you did something that you knew was wrong? Which would you prefer: immediate death, or a difficult marriage?"

These questions were not rhetorical; the woman waited for the participant's reply before continuing. After her whispered interrogation, she slipped silently away on the dense carpet of the theater lobby, leaving the participant blindfolded. A rough male voice then instructed: "Take off your blindfold."

The participant found that they now were seated across from a man in a baseball cap, fake moustache, and dark sunglasses. http://borrowers.uga.edu/783924/show Page 2 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

Participants had "met" him before, in the e-mailed video offering instructions on how to prepare for the performance experience, and where to go to begin it. "This is the situation," he said, using a deck of erotic playing cards, and deft card tricks with the participant to introduce the main characters and plot points from Measure for Measure. Telegraphing the role he was meant to be playing, at one point he used the first person pronoun in reference to an action of the Duke's, correcting immediately to, "I mean, the Duke."11

Spanning less than fifteen minutes, this entire opening sequence successfully oriented the participant to every aspect of the remaining two hours of the performance: traveling to the correct place in the city to receive a new set of directions about what to do and where to go next; following verbal instructions to get from one point to another; successfully navigating the follow films; orienting to the main characters and plot points in Measure for Measure; linking these characters and plot points to cards used in card tricks; and recognizing that substitutions would play a significant role in the proceedings.

The next thirty minutes or so of the performance invited the participant to look at the city — and issues like sexual blackmail, the commingling of Christian morality and secular law, and the death penalty — from fresh perspectives. I had never really noticed — until I was instructed through my headphones to stand in the center of Daley Plaza and really look at what flanked me on three sides — that City Hall, a courthouse, and a church all have real estate fronting that plaza, the site of the city's Christmas tree, the meeting point for monthly Critical Mass Rides, a common gathering place for political protests. As the audio playing at this point observed, three of the four sides of the square that constitutes Daley Plaza represent secular law, religious law, and the instrument of punishing those who disobey the law. As a participant in a talk- back with Suzanne Kersten and Julian Rickert, co-creators of Since I Suppose, sardonically pointed out, there is also a bank on one corner; thus almighty lucre, the god of capitalism, is present there, too.

Participants were invited into City Hall via a follow film of Isabella (Clair Korobacz) in a creamy white nun habit, complete with full wimple and veil. As she disappeared into an elevator, the participant was instructed to wait for her in the lobby, but invited to "eavesdrop" on her interview with the Duke's deputy, Angelo. Key snippets of Shakespeare's text, primarily from 2.4, in an array of recorded voices highlighted Angelo's proposition to Isabella — "Redeem thy brother / By yielding up thy body to my will" (2.4.164-65) — her horrified rejection of it, and his ultimate sexual blackmail of her.12

One Step at a Time Like This titled their adaptation with a phrase uttered by Angelo in his harsh proposition to Isabella in 2.4 of Measure for Measure. Isabella unwittingly offers Angelo an opening by asserting that women are "ten times frail" and "credulous to false prints" (2.4.129 and 131). He retorts: "Since I suppose we are made to be no stronger / Than faults may shake our frames, let me be bold. / I do arrest your words. Be that you are; / That is, a woman. If you be more, you're none" (2.4.133-36, emphasis added). Since I Suppose works to challenge any belief the audience participant may have that they are impervious to the corruption of an Angelo, the weakness of a political figure such as the Duke, or the myriad temptations of a sprawling city.

In a subtle substitution, participants followed Isabella into City Hall, the seat of political power, but then followed Angelo out of it and across the street into the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple, for his reflections from the end of 2.2: "Is this her fault or mine?" (167). Paradoxically, participants eavesdropped on a violation of the law in City Hall, and on the ruminations of a man contemplating a carnal sin — and a capital crime — in a church. After this front-loading of plot and Shakespearean language, Isabella led participants, via a follow film, down the steps to the pedway connecting the blue and red line subway trains. As they traversed the brightly-lit pedway mall, participants listened to audio of interviews with nuns explaining how they were called to their religious lives, spliced with the Mother Superior from The Sound of Music, admonishing the problem-child Maria about the challenges of the sisterhood.

A second descent took participants down to the platform of the red line train itself, where they were instructed to walk as far down the platform as they felt comfortable going, and then to stare down the darkened tunnel. Here, the audio switched to interviews with men on death row, including a man who described how his sister had not been to visit him in years: "We were real close," he explained, and, thus, she "couldn't handle" seeing him in this context. In Measure for Measure, Claudio, sentenced to death for fornication, has a sister who cannot bear to look at him after he begs her to sacrifice her chastity in exchange for his life. Next on the audio track came the familiar voice of Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three and the author of Life After Death, which recounts his escape from death row after a wrongful conviction for a triple child murder. Like Echols, Claudio is spared in the eleventh hour, though Claudio's escape from death row is not, of course, based in DNA evidence, as was Echols's. http://borrowers.uga.edu/783924/show Page 3 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

After these bleak reflections in the dark underworld of the city's subway system, participants rode the escalator up to street level once more, and were invited by the audio track to linger in liminality on the State Street Bridge over the Chicago River. The crossing marked a significant shift in the experience of the piece. A follower, listener, and watcher no longer, once across the bridge, the audience participants found themselves fully and directly engaged in the experience of the production.

SEEDY BARS AND DIRTY BOOKSTORES The street slopes downward at a relatively steep incline for a Midwestern city once one crosses the bridge northbound. The follow film for this portion of the journey featured Angelo, sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up, his suit jacket thrown over his shoulder, eating a slice of pizza from a triangular cardboard container which, in a wonderful gesture of characterization, he tossed down onto the street: the "precise" Angelo, a litterbug. And then, there were his incongruous surroundings: dive bars and dirty bookstores. Participants were on a downward trajectory, in Angelo's tailwind. At the base of the hill, participants ran into the Duke, in his fake moustache, at the door to a seedy bar. Rather than a follow film, participants now followed a person, into the bar.

"Are you a drinker?" he asked, looking furtively around the bar. An answer in the affirmative produced a shot. More card tricks, reminding us of what we had already seen, and what was yet to come. The central summative premise of the card tricks was that the play features multiple, interconnected head tricks. The nominal head of the city, the Duke, appoints a substitute head, Angelo, for his time "away" from the city, a time in which he does not really leave, but continues to watch how his substitute head performs, substituting himself in for him when necessary, as in the orchestration of the bed trick. Participants were brought up to speed on this portion of the series of head tricks in the bar, and then instructed to close their eyes.

"Do you prefer to suck, or bite?" the Duke asked from behind the participant, noisily removing the cellophane wrapper from an unseen object, which he dabbed provocatively at their lips, until the participant opened their mouth, to discover a sweet lollipop.

"It's usually best with both," he remarked,13 before sending the participant back out into the street, following audio directions around the corner to Courthouse Place, where they learned that the alley behind this building was once the site of a public gallows. In addition to the audio guide, this portion of the journey also used chalk-drawn arrows on the ground, guiding the participant to a circled target on the pavement directly across from Courthouse Place.

After discussing the gallows, the audio guide directed participants to look directly behind them, where a pair of shoe prints were chalk drawn onto the sidewalk in front of a partial wall across an alley. The objective was to stand in them. Once you did so, a sharply-creased dollar bill appeared over your left shoulder, the sinister side.

"Do you know where the nearest dirty bookstore is?" asked yet another man in a fake moustache and dark glasses. It proved to be immediately to the left. Three options were presented: go into the dirty bookstore and complete a task, hear about the dirty bookstore, or change the subject. The task to be completed was to browse the shelves in the dirty bookstore and return with something — a title, a phrase — that you would be willing to wear emblazoned on a T-shirt.

The first time that I experienced the production, it was broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon. At that time, I opted to hear about the dirty bookshop. The second time I experienced Since I Suppose, I hit this portion of the journey at approximately 5:30 p.m. on a Friday. No question — I wanted to go into the dirty bookstore. My interlocutor was delighted with my choice and recommended that I select a fake moustache to wear. "They cost a dollar," he said laconically, taking back the creased bill he had used to get my attention. As I walked toward the bookstore, moustachioed, it occurred to me that I was being sent into a dirty bookstore sucking on a lollipop. I considered tossing it, but then decided not to. Surely it would add to the experience, or they wouldn't have given it to me.

I think I anticipated being ogled, perhaps even verbally harassed, a relatively attractive woman in a fake moustache, sucking on a lollipop, perusing the titles of dirty DVDs on Friday during rush hour. Instead, every man in the establishment (and there were only men in the establishment, although the lesbian porn selection was extensive, and well curated) — including the proprietor — looked at me in sheer terror. Deer in headlights. Cornered rats. It was a fascinating, impromptu study in sexual dynamics I would never have thought to conduct were it not for the specific urban choreography and props of Since I Suppose.14 http://borrowers.uga.edu/783924/show Page 4 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

But my exploration of sexual dynamics was just beginning. When I returned to report the results of my quest for an appropriate T-shirt message ("Neighborhood Slut Watch," which elicited the dry observation, "Charming"), I was given a hand-drawn map of the surrounding area on a page ripped from the same moleskin notebook that housed the selection of adhesive moustaches. Red lines drawn onto the map directed me to the Hotel Palomar, eighteenth floor.15

On the way there, the audio track supplied for the journey recounted the downward trajectory of a female sex worker, from her relatively innocuous, hands-off entry into the business, to full-scale prostitution. She started with ads on Craigslist offering her used panties for sale, delivered through the mail. Then she escalated to physical contact, selling "blow and go's," an arrangement whereby men meet the sex worker for oral sex, and then leave. Eventually, she began having vaginal intercourse for money. She effused in the interview about how fantastic it was to be praised for her looks and sexual prowess by a john who then paid her, before admitting that her mother cried when she revealed to her how she was earning her money.

In the waiting area for the elevators on the eighteenth floor, another, different fake-moustache-wearing man in dark glasses found me, tossing a playing card to the floor at my feet while furtively peering at me around the corner from the adjacent hallway. Again, rather than following a film, the objective became to follow a live actor, into the service stairwell for the hotel. There, he played more card tricks, explaining the bed trick as yet another head trick: Marianna put in place of Isabella, whom Angelo wants "to give him head . . . her maidenhead."

The video "trailer" for Since I Suppose features a title card reading "head" both at its beginning and its ending. All senses of the word "head" are deployed in Since I Suppose, from the figurative use of the term to denote a leader, to the literal reference to the body part, to the lewd slang for the act of performing fellatio. All of these terms are bound up in the person of Angelo, who serves as the substitute for the Duke, or the head of Vienna, and who demands the head of Claudio even after he has been given head, perhaps — among other sexual favors — during his assignation with Isabella/Marianna.

Punctilious about every detail, One Step at a Time actually filmed scenes in the follow films for Since I Suppose at different times of the day, so that the lighting of the street environment would seamlessly blend for the participant from that depicted on the screen to their own environment, as they interacted with the video. Having seen the production twice, at different times of the day, I got the opportunity to experience this contrast. After the stairwell card trick introduction of the bed trick/head trick, participants were directed to one of two locations in the hotel, depending on the time of day and the weather.

The first time that I experienced Since I Suppose it was a warm, sunny afternoon in late August. The second time I experienced the production, it was a prematurely chilly and rainy early evening in the second week of September. On my first outing, I went from the stairwell to a posh balcony dotted with lounge chairs. A woman in a bikini, sunglasses, and a floppy straw hat met me at the door, placing her index finger with a pasted-on moustache along its length over her top lip. The lounge area faced onto the glass-enclosed, tiled indoor pool of the hotel. As in the contemplative period created by the crossing of the Chicago River earlier in the piece, this moment of contemplation by another body of water, albeit a man- made one, also served as a significant point of transition in the piece.

The second time that I experienced Since I Suppose, I passed this period of contemplation in the warm steam of the enclosed poolside, while the rainy evening darkened outside. My video darkened and moved indoors accordingly. I had found the experience of the production so unique the first time that I actually resisted seeing it a second time, despite the fact that experiencing it twice was an almost obscene luxury, when tickets were sold to only 300 patrons, and the run immediately sold out. I had thought, before my second journey, that I wanted to keep the first experience preserved in amber. Well aware of the tricks that memory plays, I didn't want to discover that something I treasured about Since I Suppose wasn't really the way that it happened at all. Sitting in the warm steam of the indoor pool, shifting this way and that, fooling with my fake moustache, which did not respond well to the climate, I saw immediately one of the advantages of a second trip.

On my first Since I Suppose excursion, I enjoyed the warm sun and the posh surroundings, snapped a ridiculous selfie of my face, framed by a floppy straw hat (provided on the lounge chair, along with an ice bucket of complimentary supplies, like sunscreen) and adorned with a fake moustache. Knowing the play, I should have known what was coming, but knowing the play only prepares you for what is coming in the play. It does not prepare you for what is coming for you. At this point in the production, it had been a fascinating adventure: exploring the city, listening to intriguing and moving narratives, watching gorgeous follow films, and, at times, having some frank good fun with card tricks and shot glasses. Isn't this play a comedy,

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after all?

Despite the physical manipulations of the participant via blindfolding, placing of lollipops to your lips, and questions whispered in your ear, you had remained largely an observer, albeit an observer upon whom some physical demands were made, such as walk these four, or six, blocks; ride this escalator; take this elevator to that floor. On my second go-round, however, I knew what came next, and sitting by that pool, I was nervous — nervous, perhaps, in the way that Marianna might be nervous, having navigated the first of the locks that will lead her to her assignation with Angelo, still waiting by the "garden circummured with brick . . . with a vineyard backed" (4.1.25-26), to enter the place where she will execute the bed trick. I knew, the second time, that when I left that poolside, I would have to be Marianna.

In one of the production's more sly substitutions, after leaving the poolside, the participant was directed to a room on the thirty-first floor of the hotel, where they were asked to take the place of Marianna in an actual bed next to the live actor who portrayed Angelo in the follow films, substituting themselves for Marianna, substituting herself for Isabella. Once the participant had obeyed the directive to "make yourself comfortable," the actor playing Angelo, buried under the bed's voluminous white sheet and comforter when one entered, rolled over and turned to face the audience participant. In keeping with the production's insistence that everything in the play can be boiled down to a head trick, Angelo kept the sheets pulled tightly up to his chin, exposing only his head.

In a sharp deviation from the dynamics of the bed trick as it is performed in Measure for Measure, and the dozens of other early modern plays in which it constitutes a plot device, this bed trick was performed in the light of the bedside lamp, rather than in the dark. The audience participant was forced to come face to face — literally — with a person they did not know in bed. Paradoxically, this is exactly what happens in bed tricks played in the dark: "a sexual encounter occurs in which at least one partner is unaware of the other partner's true identity . . . because the couple meet in the dark" (Desens 1994, 11). In the case of Since I Suppose, the bed trick might, perhaps, have affected the audience participant less powerfully if they were not forced to confront the face of the person in bed with them, a face recognizable only from the follow films they had watched of Angelo, and not that of a person that they actually knew.

Audio for this part of the production came from a CD player on the nightstand, a CD that the participant had followed Isabella on film in retrieving from a neatly folded towel under the lounge chair by the pool. The track asked the participant to consider what it would be like to be in bed with someone you had longed for, to imagine the first touch, who made the first move to kiss. Marliss Desens points out that, in the case of bed tricks performed by women in the interests of winning back a wayward spouse (or fiancée, in Marianna's case), the woman in the bed "experiences the pain of having been rejected by her husband [or fiancée] and the humiliation of knowing that in the dark her husband cannot distinguish one female body from another" (1994, 61).16 In both instances as I lay in that bed, all that I could think of was what it must be like to be Marianna, knowing that whatever passion or erotic desire is conveyed to her by Angelo is meant for someone else.17 Finally, Marianna — and we, the audience participants — were in that bed at the behest of a disguised Duke, a trickster, a player of head-tricks. The lack of agency about it all carried its weight into that bed, too.

Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Hedy Weiss balked at this set piece, complaining: "Can't figure out how this works for male 'visitors' without corrupting this crucial bedroom scene element of the plot" (Weiss 2014). Though she did not pursue the implications of her own observation, Weiss inadvertently pointed out an intriguing challenge posed by Since I Suppose to the presumptive male gaze. The audience participant was confronted not with a bedded woman, but with a bedded man. Moreover, the issue that Weiss raises assumes a heteronormative audience; a lesbian woman might have the same difficulty imagining the male actor playing Angelo as someone they have longed for sexually that a straight man might experience. But all of this assumes that audience members lack the imagination that the audio track playing during the experience directed them to exercise, erasing the actual person lying next to them, mentally, and replacing him with someone for whom they had experienced intense, unrequited longing.

The door to the bedroom in the Hotel Palomar was a wonderfully medieval-looking thing in dark wood, with wrought iron trimmings and handle, that slid along circular iron tracks at the top and bottom. The attention to detail in the places that one went, and their fitness for the play, cohered most clearly in this important vignette. Once risen from bed, the participant was told to step out onto the room's balcony. Incredibly, it looked down not only onto the lower balcony outside of the indoor pool, where fair-weather sojourners transitioned into the assignation with Angelo, but also onto a rooftop garden that had not been visible to participants from their earlier vantage point, but which, indeed, "backed" the poolside balcony. http://borrowers.uga.edu/783924/show Page 6 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

Here, looking down on not only their earlier location, but also out at Lake Michigan, and at the forest of skyscrapers surrounding them, the participant was asked in the accompanying audio track to contemplate falling. What it means to fall, to have fallen. While participants entered the room as Marianna, they left as the fallen Angel(o). Back inside the hotel room, the participant found the door to the bedroom open, the bed rumpled and empty, the stray dress shoe that had been on the floor gone. As the participant stood in the doorway, looking at the scene of the crime,18 a follow film began showing a morose Angelo getting up out of the bed, and getting dressed, flopping his flaccid penis into his boxer shorts and dress pants in full frontal nonchalance. The way out of the room was to follow him, on the phone screen.

Suit jacket thrown over his shoulder, in the same careless gesture he had used roaming the city streets when he tossed down his empty pizza box, Angelo took the service stairs, pausing to send a text message on his phone. The camera zoomed in to show the message, to the Provost: "Send me Claudio's head by 5:00." Angelo placed his phone on the step next to him as he tidied his shoe laces; when he picked it back up, the death card in the production, the ace of spades, lay on the ground beneath it. Claudio, too, had become detritus, a throwaway delivery mechanism for one of Angelo's carnal desires.

Participants followed Angelo onscreen into the elevator, to a floor that proved to give access to the parking garage, where a man in glasses and a fake moustache waited next to a sleek black sedan; an a capella cover of Radiohead's "Creep" constituted the audio accompaniment for the downward elevator ride. Extra diegetic for the follow film, the music shifted to Radiohead's version as diegetic music once the participant entered the waiting car. While Angelo and Isabella were clearly cast in the follow films, the identity of the men wearing dark glasses and fake moustaches shifted. They looked similar, but were clearly not all the same man. Was one of them supposed to be the Provost? Escalus? Friar Peter? Fake moustaches and dark sunglasses hid all.

IMMEDIATE DEATH, OR A DIFFICULT MARRIAGE? The mystery driver (Jose Nateras or Alex Tey) traveled a short distance, fiddling repeatedly with the radio dial, which reported story after story of political corruption and sex scandals, punctuated by the odd traffic report. Even here, One Step at a Time Like This curated the audio impeccably, as the voices one heard were recognizably those of local radio personalities. The driver stopped the car in the bowels of the city on Lower Wacker Drive after feigned consultation with someone via an earpiece.

"Put this on," the driver directed gruffly: one last blindfold. He rooted around noisily in the trunk, and then directed participants to hold out their hands, over their thighs. A warm, flesh and blood head was rested in the participant's lap. Then it was removed and, after much rustling of plastic, shoved unceremoniously beneath the participant's feet. Another short drive, and then, still blindfolded, the participant was escorted physically out of the car, shuffling forward under the guidance of a firm hand on each shoulder, into a small, wooden-walled container, of the kind used to move large pieces of furniture, where they were told to grope for a low, metal chair.

Once seated, a sardonic voice invited the participant to remove the blindfold. The walls of the container were emblazoned with character names from the play, skulls and crossbones. A milk crate sat between the participant and their fake moustache and dark-glasses-wearing interlocutor. One last card trick for the participant, recounting the play's final head tricks: the substitution of Ragozine's head for Claudio's, thereby saving his life, and the restoration of the proper head of the city, the Duke, to power.

"He sentences them to . . . did you choose immediate death, or a difficult marriage?" audience participants were asked after the final card trick. The four couples created at the end of Measure for Measure might well say, with Silvius, one of another four couples created at the end of As You Like It, that he will have Phoebe to wife, "Though to have her and death were both one thing" (As You Like It 5.4.17). As Emily Detmer-Goebel points out, the specific nature of the "difficult marriage" with which all of the men in Measure for Measure are left to grapple is to a woman whose chastity has been impugned, whether that be due to draconian laws (Juliet), political theater (Isabella and Marianna) or actual prostitution (Kate Keepdown). Detmer-Goebel wryly observes, "the play jokes about (if not celebrates) men being forced to marry their 'whores,' while at the same time, it questions which is worse, being executed for making the woman a whore or being forced to marry one" (Detmer-Goebel 2009, 126).

Left alone in the container to contemplate the choice between death or a difficult marriage that one had made, the participant

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in Since I Suppose listened to snippets of the final long scene of Measure for Measure from a Crosley turntable until ready to go through the doors, which had been analogized to the gates of the city, the entry way by which the participant would return to their "real" life. The doors opened on what proved to be a long-abandoned stage in the ground floor theater of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, across from Grant Park. Random props lay scattered about, along with lighting rigs in varying stages of disrepair, the air heavy with the smell of drywall dust.

While Measure for Measure does not, explicitly, address fundamentalist religious objections to the theater itself in Shakespearean-era England, Since I Suppose did.19 "There are those, you know," one of the men of the fake moustache observed laconically, "who think that even the theater is disgusting" and that it should be shut down, that its performances should cease. For the theater-going audience participants, this comment had the effect of looping them into the seaminess of the city, rhetorically implicating them in Angelo's furtive, illicit, hypocritical violations of the very laws he was meant to uphold. Guilty by association, audience participants became sullied by contact with the fake moustaches, the dirty bookstores, the unlocked hotel room doors, the tousled sheets, the decapitated heads.20

But the production was not over when the audience participant took the stage in the abandoned theater — the stage lights came harshly up, blinding them to all but their immediate surroundings on the stage. Slowly, the lighting shifted, to illuminate the upper balcony of the theater, facing the stage. The Duke, wearing an open robe and his fake moustache and dark glasses, sat facing Isabella, still in full nun habit, at a card table. As the participant watched, they silently played a game of strip poker, which Isabella lost. Blackout occurred when she had been forced to strip completely, wearing only her wimple and veil, looking out over the head of the participant onlooker on the stage with a detached, numb expression as she struggled to cover her exposed crotch and breasts. Only the Duke could play a winning hand with a dirty deck of cards designed for trickery.21

While the soundscape for the entire production had been expertly crafted by Julian Rickert, featuring Massive Attack prominently, the strip poker game was played in complete silence, the only sound the vicious, victorious slap of the cards onto the table as the Duke won yet another hand against Isabella. Following the blackout, the house lights came dimly up — the participant was alone in an empty theater. A flashlight appeared in the aisle; a security guard came to escort the participant out, skeptically reporting into their earpiece that this random person in the empty theater claimed they had been seeing a show, but that no one else was there.

"Did you leave anything behind?" the participant was asked at the theater's doors. In fact, participants had been instructed to leave all of their things in the black sedan, before entering the wooden-walled container. "Are these things yours?" the flashlight waved across the participant's things, in a small cardboard box.

Hours later, at home, I found a single playing card in my bag, the bag that I had left in the black sedan. A talisman, a reminder of the experience of Since I Suppose, along with the fake moustache and map to the Hotel Palomar that I had stuffed into my jacket pocket. The card tricks representing the head tricks, the masking of identity, the location of the bed trick: these were the things that One Step at a Time Like This singled out for physical souvenirs of their production, and of the play on which it was based.22

"Who are you?" the flashlight-wielding theater guard demanded, when she appeared in the aisle. Unaccountably, the first time I was asked this question, I faltered: "The Duke, maybe? I don't know." Participants were instructed to enter the theater doors as if making a return to their city. What kind of return, they were asked to consider: Triumphant? Defeated? Filled with trepidation? If we walked onto the stage as the Duke, returning to Vienna, that identity was immediately taken from us. There was the Duke, in the balcony, playing strip poker with Isabella. And who is she, at the end of Measure for Measure? A nun? A novitiate of the Order of Saint Clare? The fiancée of the Duke? Who is Angelo? The Duke's trusted substitute? A common criminal? Marianna's husband?

"Who are you?" In the end, that basic question was the one with which participants in Since I Suppose were left to grapple.

NOTES 1. Brian Gibbons acknowledges the Italianate nature of many of the character names in Measure for Measure, but simply http://borrowers.uga.edu/783924/show Page 8 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

observes that the location of Vienna "was presumably added by the scribe Ralph Crane" without questioning Vienna as the setting (Measure for Measure 2006, 87). John Jowett notes that none of the play's recognized sources or analogues is set in Vienna, and Shakespeare elsewhere shows virtually no interest in either Vienna or Austria. Moreover, in contradiction of the linguistically Germanic setting, the personal names in Measure are consistently Italian. Some of the analogues refer to the Duke of Ferrara . . . There are reasons to suppose that Shakespeare set the play in Italian Ferrara, and that Middleton altered the setting specifically in order to establish the Thirty Years War as a backdrop." (2007, 1544) 2. Since I Suppose was performed in Chicago, Illinois from August 28 until September 21, 2014, and in the Melbourne Festival in Australia from October 15 to 26, 2014. 3. Great thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Borrowers and Lenders, whose comments and suggestions helped to give this piece its final shape, and to Frank Ballantine for an early, thorough, and thoughtful critique. 4. The company does not capitalize its name, presenting itself as "one step at a time like this." The name is capitalized in this essay for ease of reading. 5. See Josephine Machon's masterful comparative chart outlining the differences between traditional theater and immersive theater in Immersive Theatres (2013, 54-55). 6. Keren Zaiontz notes the way in which these masks "not only rendered me and all other spectators alike, but it created a protective bubble (a fourth wall) between spectators and the theatrical world even as they inhabited it" (2014, 413). 7. The invitation video is still viewable via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=M7HrBGyAaCkfeature=youtu.be&utm_source=mail2&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=M1415SINC48hrStartInfo (https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=M7HrBGyAaCkfeature=youtu.be&utm_source=mail2&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=M1415SINC48hrStartInfo). 8. Josephine Machon notes that such technologies constitute one of the tools of the immersive theater trade (2013, 283 n. 11). Punchdrunk's immersive production Faust (2006) similarly "operated on a series of choreographed sequences or timed 'loops,' running in parallel across the space and coordinated by audio or music cues" (Eglinton 2010, 50-51). 9. The trailer for Since I Suppose features examples both of the kinds of images audience participants experience in a follow film and footage of audience participants engaged in viewing/following them. See: https://youtu.be/TzT2T8Ta8LA (https://youtu.be/TzT2T8Ta8LA). One Step at a Time Like This employed the follow film strategy in their own earlier work, En Route, also presented in Chicago Shakespeare Theater's World's Stage Series. The strategy also recalls Janet Cardiff's The Missing Voice (Cast Study B) as described by Josephine Machon (2013, 2). 10. I participated in Since I Suppose twice; while I made alternate choices in every other instance when presented with an option each time that I experienced the performance, I agreed to be blindfolded both times. Writing of Punchdrunk, Josephine Machon notes the radical lack of reiterability in immersive theater experiences: "as much as the 'form' of the event is repeated within the duration of any given performance night and across the performance run, the nature of each moment of this performance for each individual audience member is different and diverse and would be unrepeatable were they to attend every performance across the entirety of said run" (2013, 31). Keren Zaiontz builds upon Jen Harvie's critique of the "prosumer" to interrogate the extent to which such performance experiences are truly unique. The prosumer model posits an audience that arrives "with the expectation that they will be put to work in the artistic production (even if it is just as a crowd)" (2014, 411). The work that the audience does whether it is promenading through a neighborhood or purpose-built site or encountering scenes and talking to performers[,] is an expression of predetermined choices that spectators set into motion through their real-time interactions. While these choices might yield diverse experiences among audiences, they do not significantly expand the repertoire of what a production can do because the choices (and subsequent responses) are oriented around how best to consume the production. (Zaiontz 411) While it is true that the choices of audience participants in Since I Suppose are circumscribed, to some extent, by the performance environment and the parameters established for the experience, within those confines audience members can have radically different experiences of and responses to even the same set of choices, given the unique alchemy of their own backgrounds, knowledge, and perceptions. 11. The only cast members who were firmly attached to specific roles were Julian Richert (Angelo) and Clair Korobacz (Isabella). The cardsharps were played by Julian Hester, Alex Knapp, and Paul Fagen. The casting functioned in conjunction with the nature of the show, since the start times, staggered by 30 minutes, meant that multiple audience participants were seeing different portions of the piece at the same time, though no audience members ever overlapped. If a http://borrowers.uga.edu/783924/show Page 9 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

particular audience member lingered too long in one part of the experience, the watching staff would intervene to move them along, as needed. Just as the Duke watches over his citizens unseen in Measure, the producers of Since I Suppose contrived to keep eyes on audience participants, although the means by which they monitored events was never apparent to the audience participants. Moreover, just as the Duke in Measure is a metatheatrical figure, donning disguises and playing roles, the Duke in Since I Suppose was also a metatheatrical figure played — depending on how one perceived the cardsharps vis-à-vis the cast of Measure — by multiple different people. Even more than the Duke in Measure, the shadowy, fake moustached figure of Since I Suppose existed "under erasure. He seems simply an effect of theatricality, constituting himself solely through performance" (McCandless 1997, 82). 12. All references to Measure for Measure are to the updated Cambridge edition edited by Brian Gibbons (Shakespeare 2006). 13. I can aver that this exchange is scripted, having been addressed with the same lines each time I experienced the piece. 14. Josephine Machon's observations about immersive theater experiences are apt with respect to this vignette in Since I Suppose. She writes: "such performances can offer lawbreaking conditions to roam free, take risks, be adventurous. They are specifically designed to immerse the individual in the unusual, the out-of-the-ordinary, to allow her or him, in many ways, to become the event" (2013, 28). Jennifer Flaherty's description of the oscillation between immersion and interaction in Punchdrunk's Sleep No More is applicable to Since I Suppose as well: "Audience members can literally interact with the environment and the actors, sometimes subtly changing the performance itself through their reactions. But the audience members are also voyeurs on their own personal journeys, as opposed to characters who perform their journeys for audiences" (Flaherty 2014, 145). 15. Since I Suppose rendered viscerally literal the observation that David McCandless makes about the odd disconnect between the Duke of Measure's friar disguise, and his status as the orchestrator of a series of illicit sexual situations: "The Duke's neutered persona sanctions a series of covert intimate meetings with young women and a potentially titillating management of their sexual lives" (1997, 85). In Since I Suppose, the Duke bought the audience participants a shot in a seedy bar, provocatively fed them a lollipop, sent them on an errand to a dirty bookstore, and then directed them to a hotel assignation with a man waiting for sex. 16. Raymond B. Waddington asserts that "on stage, however conscious or unconscious the complicity, the bed trick works to exalt its operator's authority and control while conversely denigrating the victim. Male bed tricks put down women" (1996, 122). Who is the operator of the bed trick in Measure for Measure? The Duke proposes it, Isabella talks Marianna into it — offstage — and Marianna is left to execute it, consummating her marriage to the man who jilted her, knowing that he thinks that she is someone else while she is having sex with him. It is horrifying for all concerned, except, perhaps, the Duke, who gets to punish Angelo publicly and propose to Isabella as a result of it. 17. Michael Bristol notes that in discussion with students about this scene, one articulated candidly and movingly the problem with the bed trick: "'I want to be loved for who I really am — or not at all,'" she said. As Bristol goes on to explain, "getting away with it was hardly the problem. The bed-trick was about a deeper question of self-acknowledgement and self-respect. . . To be rejected by someone you love would be bad, but faking your way through a sexual encounter to attain a token of that love would be a whole lot worse" (2012, 25). 18. Angelo's crime, but also the audience participant's, since, as Marliss Desens notes, implicitly, having sex with a person when you know that they believe you to be a different person voids the consensual nature of the sex act, rendering it a rape (1994, 153 n. 21). 19. As Brian Gibbons notes, "moves were intermittently made throughout the period to suppress plays, arrest actors and playwrights, and close theatres. The city authorities associated theatres with public disorder; the court was suspicious of plays for their potential for political comment" ("Introduction" 2006, 5-6). In her foundational exploration of the tension between the bounds of the city and the liberties, law and license, Leah Marcus observes that "there were contemporaries who would have agreed with Angelo that death was not an excessive penalty for fornication, but they were the same zealots who were most vehement against the theater" (Marcus 1988, 181). 20. As Gareth White observes: where classical aesthetics will privilege the beautiful or the sublime, progressive and participatory aesthetics (both styles and theories) are as interested in other pleasures and other effects: the uncanny, the unexpected and the transgressive, perhaps. Most importantly, they include the potential for political and ethical values and outcomes to form part of the definition of aesthetics and the work of art. (2013, 14) Since I Suppose offered the unexpected and the transgressive in an exploration of gender politics and political ethics that was never heavy-handed. 21. Almost two decades ago, David McCandless could observe that "recent productions [of Measure for Measure] have . . . http://borrowers.uga.edu/783924/show Page 10 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

boldly engaged the play's erotic, sadomasochistic dynamics" (McCandless 1997, 182 n. 4); in an update to Gibbons's introduction to the New Cambridge Shakespeare series edition of the play, Angela Stock notes that most recent productions go for technologically-enhanced, grotesque, and graphic depictions of sex and criminal conduct (2006, 78-83), a trend that has continued, as evinced by productions such as Robert Falls's 2013 Measure for the Goodman Theatre in Chicago (Bourus 2013). 22. I have spent a year thinking and writing about Since I Suppose. As Keren Zaiontz notes, "works that challenge spectators to perform do not often grant this kind of reflection during performance, since the act of consuming yourself as theatre demands complete and continuous management of your own body within the theatrical space. You have to wait until you get off the ride to make sense of the experience" (2014, 406-407).

REFERENCES Bourus, Terri. 2013. " Henry VIII and Measure for Measure." Review of Henry VIII and Measure for Measure, by William Shakespeare, as performed by Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Goodman Theatre, Chicago," Shakespeare Bulletin 31.3: 485-94. Bristol, Michael. 2012. "How Dark Was It in That Room? Performing a Scene Shakespeare Never Wrote." In Shakespeare's Sense of Character: On the Page and From the Stage. Edited by Yu Jin Ko and Michael W. Shurgot. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 19-34. Desens, Marliss C. 1994. The Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama: Explorations in Gender, Sexuality, and Power. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Detmer-Goebel, Emily A. 2009. "Shakespeare's Bed-Tricks: Finding Justice in Lies?" In Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama. Edited by Andrew Majeske and Emily Detmer-Goebel. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 118-39. Eglinton, Andrew. 2010. "Reflections on a Punchdrunk." Theatre Forum 37: 46-55. Flaherty, Jennifer. 2014. "Dreamers and Insomniacs: Audiences in Sleep No More and The Night Circus." Comparative Drama 48.1/2: 135-54. Gibbons, Brian. 2006. "Introduction" to Measure for Measure. 2006. Updated edition. Edited by Brian Gibbons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 1-68. Jowett, John. 2007. "Introduction" to Measure for Measure: A Genetic Text." In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. Edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1542-46. Machon, Josephine. 2013. Immersive Theatres. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marcus, Leah S. 1988. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents. Berkeley: University of California Press. McCandless, David. 1997. Gender and Performance in Shakespeare's Problem Comedies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2009. As You Like It. Edited by Michael Hattaway. Updated edition. 2000; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2006. Measure for Measure. Edited by Brian Gibbons. Updated edition. 1991; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Since I Suppose. 2014. Dir. Suzanne Kersten and Julian Rickert. World's Stage Series, Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Stock, Angela. 2006. "Recent Stage, Film, and Critical interpretations." In Measure for Measure. Edited by Brian Gibbons. Updated edition. 1991; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 68-83. Waddington, Raymond B. 1996. "Entertaining the Offered Phallacy: Male Bed Tricks in Shakespeare." In Shakespeare's Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions. Edited by John M. Mucciolo, with Steven J. Doloff and Edward A. Rachaut. Aldershot: Scolar Press. 121-32.

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Weiss, Hedy. 2014. "A Walkabout Measure for Measure as Shakespeare Might Envision It Now." Review of Since I Suppose, as performed by One Step at a Time Like This, Chicago. 7 September 2014. Available online at: http://entertainment.suntimes.com/entertainment-news/walkabout-measure-measure-shakespeare-might-envision-now/ [accessed 23 September 2014]. White, Gareth. 2013. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zaiontz, Keren. 2014. "Narcissistic Spectatorship in Immersive and One-on-One Performance." Theatre Journal 66.3: 405-25.

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after all?

Left alone in the container to contemplate the choice between death or a difficult marriage that one had made, the participant

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"Who are you?" In the end, that basic question was the one with which participants in Since I Suppose were left to grapple.

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ABSTRACT | INTRODUCTION | "GIVE ME SOME WINE, AND LET ME SPEAK" (ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, 4.15.49): DRINK AND THE THEATER | "MY TEEMING DATE DRUNK UP WITH TIME" (RICHARD II, 5.2.100): TIME AND DRINK IN SHAKESPEARE | "WINE AND WASSAIL SO CONVINCE THAT MEMORY" (MACBETH, 1.7.74-75): MACBETH'S DRUNKEN EQUIVOCATIONS | "HATH OUR INTELLIGENCE BEEN DRUNK?" (KING JOHN, 4.2.116): DRUNK SHAKESPEARE AS POLYTEMPORAL IMMERSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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M. G. AUNE, CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

(/current) NOTES | REFERENCES

Stratford Shakespeare Festival Behind the Scenes. Version 1.0. Apple (/previous)iTunes Store. 7 December 2012. $4.99. Now in its sixty-first season, the Stratford Festival (formerly the (/about) Stratford Shakespeare Festival) continues to innovate in its marketing of itself as a premiere destination Shakespeare site. After a series of initiatives for social media, including YouTube (2007), Facebook (/archive) (2008), Twitter (2009), and Pinterest (2012), in late 2012 the Festival released an app for the iPad and Blackberry Playbook to engage users with the Festival's performances using the multimedia functionality of a tablet computer. The description from the iTunes App Store promises: The Stratford Festival at your fingertips! Become a theatre insider with the Stratford Festival Behind the Scenes app. Explore the process of building a season at the Festival, from choosing the playbill to set construction to performance. Filled with interviews, observations, and breathtaking photography, this app will lead readers on a fascinating journey into corners of the Festival seldom seen by members of the public. ("New app" 2012)

The second sentence provides the key to the Festival's conception of its users — theater insiders. Rather than new patrons, these people are regular visitors to the Stratford Festival and are seen as desiring knowledge of "insider" information and access to "seldom seen" aspects of the Festival. Simply attending plays is no longer enough; the audience is now able to observe the entire "process of building a season." Newcomers are not excluded, but the apparent lack of basic information about the Festival might leave unfamiliar audiences confused. The use of present tense in the second and third sentences suggests that the viewer will see the development of the current season, http://borrowers.uga.edu/783860/show Page 1 of 9 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

but the list of details implies that this is not the case:

360-degree views of treasures from the Festival Archives; Interactive set models from productions at our two largest venues; Exclusive images and slideshows from rehearsals and backstage; Exclusive interviews with Antoni Cimolino, Des McAnuff, and Lloyd Robertson, as well as many more members of the cast and crew; Photos, stories, sketches, animations, and insights into the world of theater; Full text version of our 60th season book to complement the digital content. The visual nature of the app is foregrounded in the first three items, as is the interactive potential of the iPad. The last three items seem less interactive and more passive. Omitted is any mention of the plays or of Shakespeare. The app offers insight into the mechanics of the Festival rather than its products.

The press release for the app amplifies the content's exclusivity; it "reveals the secrets of theatrical production, demonstrating the artistry that takes place behind the scenes is every bit as magical as the performance itself" ("New app" 2012). Not only do backstage views provide rarely seen images, but they also reveal secrets and expose viewers to magic. The appeal goes well beyond theatrical audiences to address Festival aficionados who are not satisfied with the conventional audience experience. They already know the performers and the plays; now they want to know what is behind the curtain of theatrical performance.

The press release goes on to describe how the app allows the Festival to "connect to younger audiences" and inspire "follow-up projects, including study guides for students and teachers." These audiences are school-age children and teens who need to be educated to enjoy theater or will most likely only attend theater as part of a school group. They are also those who might rather watch a video on a screen rather than see a live play. Stratford Shakespeare Festival Behind the Scenes is more than a marketing tool or a souvenir. It constructs its audience as consumers of an innovative, hybrid, multimedia form of Shakespeare in which the wonder at learning how the plays are produced, rather than the plays themselves, is the actual product.

The app begins with a black screen, then a stage manager's voiceover: "lights twenty-one, go, sound and opening doors, go." In the http://borrowers.uga.edu/783860/show Page 2 of 9 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

background is the sound of an orchestra tuning. A vertical slash of light splits the screen; two men in eighteenth-century livery appear on each side of the light holding handles to doors that will open onto the Festival stage.1 On the voice's cue, they pull the doors open. Rising dramatic music begins, then a pan-and-zoom montage of backstage images of makeup, costume, scenery, and prop shops passes by, moving away from the viewer; finally, the navigation screen appears.

With this opening, users have the sensation of being thrust into the behind-the-scenes world of the Festival. They have been given a preview of much of what the app will offer — dramatic and detailed sights and sounds that audiences never see. The two doormen create a slightly misleading sense that users will be walking on stage and will become participants in the process. Instead, they will be the audience for a different type of production.

Tapping on each of the chapter headings begins a PowerPoint-style pan-and-zoom montage similar to the opening, with images moving onscreen from all directions and dramatic music playing in the background. Once this has concluded, the user is prompted to swipe from right to left to move through the chapter. In the upper left of the screen is a smaller prompt: "To return to the main menu, pull out the tab in the top left and touch the Stratford logo. To read the full text, turn your tablet 90 degrees." Turning the iPad 90 degrees to the portrait orientation presents the user with an eBook version of Stratford Behind http://borrowers.uga.edu/783860/show Page 3 of 9 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

the Scenes by Don Gillmor, a coffee table book published in 2012 to celebrate the Festival's sixtieth anniversary.

The user swipes through each chapter very much like a book. The chapters range from six to twenty-two screens in length, each page having one or two images and a sentence or two of text. Some of the images are marked with an "X" in the corner, which, if touched, expands the photograph to fill the entire screen. Most chapters have brief embedded video clips of actors, directors, stage managers, and others typically explaining or narrating some aspect of production. The clips that illuminate procedures are some of the most effective, in part because they also provide images of what is being described. Stage manager Cynthia Toushan, for example, gives a tour of her booth in the Festival Theatre, pointing out her controls and quickly running through her process of preparation before a performance.

Several chapters have a "snapshot" feature, a group of photos that the user can swipe through manually while remaining on the same page. Three automated time-lapse sequences allow the viewer to watch an actor apply his makeup, the stage crew switch the Festival stage from one production to another, or actors rehearse an elaborate fight scene. The "Setting the Scene" chapter has two animated "fly through" renderings of the stages for Henry V (2012) and Jesus Christ Superstar (2012), both created by the stage designers as part of the process of building the sets.

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The 360-degree photograph feature is used most extensively in the chapters on props and costumes. Users may rotate (on the vertical axis only) materials from current shows and archives. Included are images of an epergne from Henry V (2001), the crown from King Lear (2007), and the gold casket from The Merchant of Venice (1989). The costume chapter provided the oldest object in the app, a mask from Oedipus Rex (1954/55), as well as one of the most colorful, a wolf mask from Into the Woods (2005). The images below show the masks in rotation. The images also may be enlarged with a finger spread. Some sharpness is lost, but the image can still be rotated.

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The chapter on costumes also contains a unique example of linked audio and visual materials. Rather than a filmed interview, seven audio clips of costume designer Carolyn M. Smith describing her ideas are linked to color images of seven of her idiosyncratic sketches.

The app may also be browsed in outline form. Beginning at the Table of Contents screen, if one touches the chapter titles, one can swipe through a précis of three or four images from the chapter. The app also allows users to jump forward and backward, using a slider at the bottom of the screen that appears when one of the four edges is touched. This action also brings up a link to the home (table of contents) screen, a back arrow that returns the screen to the previously viewed page, and a pop-up version of the table of contents. Touching the border also reveals a star in the upper right that allows users to mark favorites. Next to the star is a set of four vertical bars that, when touched, provides another browse feature. This shrinks the image stream so that the current image and the previous and subsequent images are visible. The user can swipe quickly through the chapters to find a particular page or image.

The app is visually impressive, giving the user access to a rich variety of images, animations, and video and audio recordings. Navigation is initially tricky, but the book-like organization quickly becomes apparent. While this linear structure is a rewarding way to experience the app, the various navigation tools also encourage browsing and http://borrowers.uga.edu/783860/show Page 6 of 9 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

discovering. It is equally enjoyable to jump from section to section as it is to move through the app from beginning to end. The mixture of different types of media keeps the user's attention. The sections on wardrobe and set design are the longest, with the largest number of images and the greatest variety of media. The sections on stage management, acting, and directing are the shortest and rely more on still photos and talking head type interviews.

The content of the app does exactly what the promotional materials suggest: provides users with a behind-the-scenes view of what has happened (and by implication, what will continue to happen) at the Festival. The experience is repeatedly characterized in terms of wonder and its resolution, with words such as "amazing," "explore," "explain," "experiment," and "unlock." The photos and video clips reinforce this feeling of awe. Andrew Mestern, Technical Director of Scenic Construction, describes the trial and error process of building a set feature so that it will support the actors safely, look convincing to the audience, and be simple enough to disassemble every day. Head of Wigs and Makeup Gerry Altenburg explains that wigs are made with real human hair and that European hair is easier to work with than American hair. The app provides numerous images of the creation of both the prop and the wigs to exemplify the wonder of the transformation of materials from ordinary objects to items of dramatic value.

The choice of objects and scenes increases the sense of wonder. The archives have been thoroughly excavated. The props and costumes, such as the wolf's head, are among the most elaborate and curious in the collection. The processes, too, are never ordinary but always involve unusual and painstaking labor. Throughout these moments of revelation, the app is scrupulous to identify nearly every person and his or her title.2 Rather than potentially diminishing the wondrous effects, this practice makes them all the more impressive because the user sees and hears ordinary people hard at work making theatrical magic. The instances of problem solving, or in the case of the actors and stage crew, tales of disasters narrowly averted, activate a "show must go on" ethos that excites audiences and performers alike. As Toushan says, "audiences love when things go wrong because that puts them on the inside track." And the app not only records accounts of these events, but also identifies the numerous Ruby Keelers who have stepped in to save the day over the years. They are, however, theater workers. The problems they relate are always solved because the show always goes on. The day-to-day tasks, such as sorting human hair, are simply part of http://borrowers.uga.edu/783860/show Page 7 of 9 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/14/19, 1'42 PM

a profession that few people know much about.

The extensive multimedia content of the app is well-organized and easily accessible. It provides a rewarding experience to Festival regulars who wish to recall past productions and learn more about the process of mounting a play. For newcomers, the app will likely be less appealing. There is much to learn, but without first-hand knowledge of the Festival, the content will lack important context. For younger audiences, the app will be impressive, but lack the interactivity that accompanies most apps. The navigation options may appear novel to older generations, but the younger audience that the Festival wants to develop will have greater expectations for participation in the app.

NOTES 1. The voice belongs to stage manager Ann Stuart, and the two doormen are Jaz Sealey and Victor Dolhai from 2012's production of The Misanthrope. The app is very careful to identify everyone who appears. 2. This may well have as much to do with contracts and union rules — topics that are never introduced as part of the behind the scenes glimpse at the Festival — as anything else.

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REFERENCES "New app presents rare insider's view of the Festival." 2012. Media Release 46/12. Stratford Shakespeare Festival. 6 December.

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GIORGIA DE SANTIS, UNIVERSITY OF ROME TOR VERGATA

(/current) REFERENCES

Nutshell, by Ian McEwan. London: Jonathan Cape, 2016. 208 pp. ISBN-10: (/previous)1911214330; ISBN-13: 978-1911214335. $16.00 (paperback); $24.95 (hardback).

(/about) According to Ian McEwan, novelists, whether they are aware of it or not, live in Shakespeare's shadow. The reaction to this shadow has recently become a common choice for authors of various backgrounds, a choice meant to react to (/archive) stories, plots, characters, and those ambiguities on which Shakespearean plays are solidly constructed.

In his latest novel, Nutshell, published in September 2016 by Jonathan Cape, the British novelist engages in a postmodern rewriting of Hamlet, transferring the action to contemporary London and the court of Elsinore into a rotting house and the womb of Hamlet's mother, Trudy. Trudy and Claude, her brother-in-law, conduct a clandestine affair behind the back of Hamlet's father, John Craincross, a broke professor and failed poet. The illicit relationship between the two lovers is punctuated by sex and reveries, chit-chat and gossip, all aimed toward the murder of John. What distinguishes McEwan's revenge tale from Shakespeare's is that the protagonist is a nine-month old fetus, who plots to avenge his father's death while witnessing the whole sequence of events from within the maternal womb. The physical and sentimental bond between the fetus and his mother makes the affair a love-hate triangle, where everything that is said, done, and felt by Claude and Trudy is equally experienced by the woman's silent guest.

The novel emerges as a tale of negated revenge, a revenge tragedy sui generis, due to the protagonist's inability to gain agency against his uncle, Claude. The revenge is internalized, truncated, and the question that the protagonist keeps asking himself is not "Must I avenge my father?" but rather, "How can I avenge my father from here?" In an interview with The Guardian, McEwan

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claimed that the only person who he could think of as more trapped than a fetus was Prince Hamlet (Aitkenhead 2016). This is when he decided to turn Hamlet into a clever, sassy, and self-deprecating baby within the womb of a would-be murderer and lover of her own brother-in-law.

When appropriating a text, the author who is re-interpreting or re-writing is often politically, ethically, or morally committed. In the light of that, could we consider Nutshell as a criticism of the extreme and criminal consequences of reckless, perverse extramarital relationships? An extended, witty meditation on abortion and child abuse? And, in that sense, an attempt to give a political voice to those who are dismissed as having none? McEwan seems to reject these claims, as he states that his novel is about "the communication of pleasure" (McEwan, 2016) and is, therefore, what Barthes would have called a texte du plaisir.

While Shakespeare's Hamlet moves on stage freely and manages to overhear, spy, and dissemble, McEwan's soon-to-be Hamlet is literally bounded in a nutshell. But here's the rub: Trudy's placenta is what separates the soon-to-be Hamlet, whose future name is never mentioned by the characters outside, from the world — his mother, his father, and Claude. The novel opens with a short, but extremely powerful, evocative sentence: "So, here I am, upside down in a woman" (McEwan 2016, 1). This woman, Trudy, not only seems to be based on Shakespeare's Gertrude, but also has characteristics of Lear's Goneril (for her strong sexual energy and masculinity) and of Lady Macbeth, due to her shifting relation to the crime she is about to commit.

Trudy cherishes bittersweet memories of the poems her current husband John used to dedicate to her and of his childish fantasies; even the fetus recalls some of his father's lines, which are often borrowed from Shakespeare and other poets; John first resembles John of Gaunt, paraphrasing his celebration of England, and later quotes Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," praising the intimacy of the grave. Claude, on the other hand, is the opposite of his brother and is anything but a poet; rather, uncle Claude is a man built on banality, where nihilism constantly balances the commonplace. The baby's verdict is implacable: "Just how stupid is Claude really?" (McEwan 2016, 56). Claude speaks a factual, repetitive, and insignificant language, and the fetus takes great pleasure in deconstructing and undermining his uncle's speeches and actions and shows an outstanding, and lucid critical sensibility, unconsciously nurtured by Trudy whenever she listens to the news or the radio.

For example, Hamlet's intellectual and cognitive maturity improves on a daily basis through the few means he has. On the one hand, Shakespeare's

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Wittenberg is replaced by news reports, television programs, and radio talks; on the other, the beat of Trudy's heart, her hormones, breath, and epiglottis movements are the baby's litmus test. His fondness for the radio and his readiness in overhearing everything that is going on "outside" recalls Hamlet's and Polonius' spying and peeking in Elsinore, a transposition of information and voices that is never direct and clear, but rather muffled and filtered.

As the novel unfolds and the plot to poison John through some food bought at The Danish Takeaway progresses, no one is spared from the baby's judgment: McEwan's Hamlet plays the part of both the fool and the malcontent. He is the only one who sees his mother, father, and uncle for what they really are. While John is a man-child, Claude is a small-minded, dull, Machiavel, not clever enough to get away with John's murder; however, the fetus-protagonist keeps an eye out for any revelation and overhears the couple's pillow-talks and sexual activities as the public does at the theater, becoming, de facto, an accidental victim-accomplice in the murder, a point emphasized when the fetal Hamlet defines the events as "a doomed production of a terrible play, where improbable lines were rehearsed in the small hours by drunks" (McEwan 2016, 94). Sometimes it feels as though he is sitting next to us, reproaching us, and requesting silence — "But shush, the conspirators are talking!" (54). The fourth wall is, thus, broken down, and the protagonist, being a fool, prevents us from reaching catharsis: lucid and precocious, Hamlet unveils the truth with his linguistic maturity, takes the beauty out of the narrated events with cold reasoning and epigrammatic lines, and makes us sympathize with him, bounded in a nutshell but still king of infinite space. As a consequence, the novel takes the form of a critical and relentless inner monologue, interrupted, now and then, by meaningless and decadent exchanges between Trudy and Claude; McEwan's conversational style and fluid prose also confer a sense of deterministic chaos to the baby's reasoning.

And since the fetus is both a spectator of and actor in this tragedy, there is the typically Elizabethan need to create several clusters of images that might obviate the need of the child for sight, physical settings, and faces. Hamlet, like a blindfolded audience, relies on sounds, words, and the mental images they create in him, and declares that "words, as I'm beginning to appreciate, can make things true" (McEwan 2016, 59).

Playing the part of the malcontent, he says, "Life imitates art" (McEwan 2016, 117), and ultimately, that is what he tries to do: the murderers want the police to believe that John committed suicide, and Hamlet even imitates the fiction they try to keep up by using his umbilical cord to hang himself. Frustratingly, the baby attempts to "suit the action to the word" (Hamlet, 3.1.58), but eventually fails.

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The dilemma to be or not to be? thus acquires a new, drastic meaning: to be born or not to be born? At the beginning of the novel, the fetus struggles to understand whether it is better to come into the world and therefore make his guilt and his connivance real, or, simply, not to be born and live innocently. "Ripeness isn't everything" (McEwan 2016, 34), Hamlet affirms bleakly, since he is well aware that he has no other option than to be alive and despair, because it is he who must set time right again. The question he keeps asking himself is also directed at us: would you come into the world if you knew what is waiting for you? However, McEwan's message is clear. When it comes to life, we are bound by personal destiny.

Nevertheless, the dilemma changes again, and the protagonist declares: "I want to become" (McEwan 2016, 119). To be someone or to be someone else? is now the question. Finally persuaded that his mother is going to deliver him in a prison cell, he wants his life and his own identity, something that he, as opposed to Claude's and Trudy's sin, will shape.

The protagonist is the sole character who does not lie. Living inside his mother, close but at the same time removed from the outside world and those who make the events unfold, he makes us experience them "third-hand," in a game of metafictional frames where the baby's words and eyes are our filter and all we can rely on, as if the audience was, too, a silent womb dweller. Sometimes the baby even mocks the reader, making him believe that John's ghost is haunting the house; however, he is making fun of the one person who is sitting next to him at the theater and knows even less than him. Even so, in the end Hamlet's revenge is truncated: Trudy gives birth, gets arrested and the dreaded prison cell approaches. "The rest is chaos" (McEwan 2016, 199), he claims, not silence, since what is left now is simply life.

REFERENCES Aitkenhead, Decca. 2016. "Ian McEwan: "''I'm going to get such a kicking.'" The Guardian, 27 August. Available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/ian-mcewan-author-nutshell- going-get-kicking (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/ian- mcewan-author-nutshell-going-get-kicking) [accessed 23 November 2016]. McEwan, Ian. 2016. Nutshell. London: Jonathan Cape.

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Shakespeare, William. 2015. Hamlet. In The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Edited by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery. Second edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Wallace, Arminta. 2016. "Ian McEwan: 'Shakespeare should be celebrated or railed against.'" The Irish Times, 31 August. Available online at: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/ian-mcewan-shakespeare-should-be- celebrated-or-railed-against-1.2773235 (http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/ian-mcewan-shakespeare-should-be- celebrated-or-railed-against-1.2773235) [accessed 23 October 2016].

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Contributors

(/current)

Dr. Yousef Awad is an Associate Professor at the University of Jordan. (/previous)He published a monograph on Arab writers in diaspora titled The Arab Atlantic. He also published a number of articles that explore a range of themes like cultural translation, identity and multiculturalism in the (/about) works of Arab writers in diaspora. Currently, Dr. Awad is working on a project that examines the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare by Arab writers in diaspora. (/archive) Regina Buccola is Professor of English and Chair of the Humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where she also serves as Director of Literature and Languages and core faculty in Women's and Gender Studies. She has published several books on early modern British drama and culture, most recently as editor of A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Critical Guide and co-editor, with Peter Kanelos, of Chicago Shakespeare Theater: Suiting the Action to the Word. In addition to several essays in collections, she has also recently published in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. She serves as the scholar in residence at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and is one of the Midwest American reviewers for the online journal Reviewing Shakespeare.

Jonathan Burton is Associate Professor of English at Whittier College. He is the author of Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579- 1624 (2005) and co-author of Race in Early Modern England (2007). He has published numerous articles on topics in Shakespeare and early modern studies, including pieces on racial difference, religious conversion, and Shakespeare in nineteenth-century schoolbooks. His most recent publications are a chapter on western encounters with non- European bodies for the Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1500 to the Present and an article on "Christopher Sly's Arabian Night: Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew as World Literature."

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Giorgia De Santis is a Ph.D. student at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where she completed her M.A. in European Languages and Literatures with a dissertation on dystopian elements in King Lear, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest. While her forthcoming articles include essays on Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo e Giulietta and on the appropriation of Hamlet, she is currently researching the relationship between medieval religious drama and Christopher Marlowe's theater. Among her areas of interest are medieval drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Early Modern theater, dystopian literature, and Shakespeare and appropriation.

Dr. Barkuzar Dubbati received her Ph.D. from George Washington University in Washington DC. Her areas of research are literary theory, popular fiction, cultural studies, and postcolonial literature. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Jordan.

Balz Engler is Professor Emeritus of English Literature. He has published a critical edition of Shakespeare's Othello (1976), which includes a German prose translation of the play. He has written books on Shakespeare translation (Rudolf Alexander Schröders Uebersetzungen von Shakespeares Dramen, 1974), on the relationship between poetic texts and their modes of communicating (Reading and Listening: The Modes of Communicating Poetry and their Influence on the Texts, 1982), and on literature as performance and its cultural implications (Poetry and Community, 1990). He has edited nine collections of essays, among them one on community drama (Das Festspiel, with Georg Kreis, 1988), on European English Studies: Contributions towards the History of a Discipline, two volumes (with Renate Haas, 2000 and 2008), and on Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture (with Ladina Bezzola Lambert, 2004). He served on the boards of the European Society for the Study of English (1991-2003), the Deutsche Shakespeare- Gesellschaft (1993-2011) and the board of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (1998-2007) which made him an honorary member in 2015. His website (offering full bibliographical references) is at http://www.BalzEngler.ch (http://www.BalzEngler.ch).

Sarah Hatchuel is Professor of English Literature and Film at the University of Le Havre (France), President of the Société Française Shakespeare and head of the "Groupe de recherché Identités et Cultures." She has written extensively on adaptations of Shakespeare's plays (Shakespeare and the Cleopatra/Caesar Intertext: Sequel, Conflation, Remake, 2011; Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen, 2004; A Companion to the Shakespearean Films of Kenneth Branagh, 2000) and on TV series (Lost: Fiction vitale, 2013; Rêves et séries américaines: la fabrique

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d'autres mondes, 2015). She is general editor of the Shakespeare on Screen collection (with Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin) and of the online journal TV/Series.

Jennifer Holl received her Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and she is currently Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College. Her research interests include the early modern theater; film and adaptation; and Shakespeare and celebrity, fan, and performance studies. Her work has appeared in several journals and recent volumes, such as Who Hears in Shakespeare? (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2011), Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and The Shakespeare User (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Jeffrey Kahan is the author of several books, among them Reforging Shakespeare (1998), The Cult of Kean (2006), Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (2010), Shakespritualism: Shakespeare and the Gothic, 1850-1950 (2013), The Quest for Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2017), and Shakespeare and Superheroes (ARC, 2018).

Christian Smith completed his doctoral thesis, "Shakespeare's Influence on Marx, Freud, and the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists," at The University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies in 2013. He worked as a Teaching Fellow in the same department. Christian is editing a special "Karl Marx" edition of the journal Shakespeare and has been published in Shakespeare, Textual Practice, Asymptote and Critique. He is currently working as an independent scholar in Berlin, writing his first monograph, "Shakespeare's Influence on Karl Marx: The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism".

Michael Ullyot is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary, specializing in early modern literature and the digital humanities. He has published articles on anecdotes, abridgements, and Edmund Spenser. His current projects include a monograph on the rhetoric of exemplarity and a computer program that detects rhetorical figures of repetition and variation in literary texts.

Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin is Professor in Shakespeare studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Vice President of the Société Française Shakespeare, and Director of the "Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'âge Classique et les Lumières" (IRCL, UMR 5186 CNRS). She is co-editor-in-chief of the international journal Cahiers

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Élisabéthains and co-director (with Patricia Dorval) of the Shakespeare on Screen in Francophonia Database (shakscreen.org). She has published The Unruly Tongue in Early Modern England: Three Treatises (2012) and is the author of Shakespeare's Insults: A Pragmatic Dictionary (2016). She is co-editor, with Sarah Hatchuel, of the Shakespeare on Screen series.

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