Stages of Emotion: Shakespeare, Performance, and Affect in Modern Anglo-American Film and Theatre
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Stages of Emotion: Shakespeare, Performance, and Affect in Modern Anglo-American Film and Theatre Emily Lang Madison Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2019 Emily Lang Madison All Rights Reserved Abstract Stages of Emotion: Shakespeare, Performance, and Affect in Modern Anglo-American Film and Theatre Emily Lang Madison This dissertation makes a case for the Shakespearean stage in the modern Anglo- American tradition as a distinctive laboratory for producing and navigating theories of emotion. The dissertation brings together Shakespeare performance studies and the newer fields of the history of emotions and cultural emotion studies, arguing that Shakespeare’s enduring status as the playwright of human emotion makes the plays in performance critical sites of discourse about human emotion. More specifically, the dissertation charts how, since the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare performance has been implicated in an effort to understand emotion as it defines and relates to the “human” subject. The advent of scientific materialism and Darwinism involved a dethroning of emotion and its expression as a specially endowed human faculty, best evidenced by Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Shakespeare’s poetic, formal expression of the passions was seen as proof of this faculty, and nowhere better exemplified than in the tragedies and in the passionate displays of the great tragic heroes. The controversy surrounding the tragic roles of the famous Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving illustrates how the embodied, human medium of the Shakespearean stage served as valuable leverage in contemporary debates about emotion. The dissertation then considers major Shakespearean figures of the twentieth century, including Harley Granville Barker, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Brook, whose “stages” similarly galvanize and reflect contestation and change in what William Reddy has called “emotional regimes” or Barbara Rosenwein “emotional communities.” For each of these figures, a specific emotional paradigm is at stake in staging Shakespeare and particularly Shakespearean tragedy. I engage with a range of sources, from performance reviews to popular psychology, to locate these canonical moments in Shakespearean performance history as flashpoints in a cultural history of emotion. Table of Contents List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv Introduction: Shakespearean Performances/Emotional Practices…………………………………1 Chapter 1: Henry Irving’s Tragic Body and the “Emotional Language of the Future” ................ 14 1.1 Bell, Darwin, and the “Art” of Expression………………………………………………..16 1.2 "Reading Shakespeare by the Light of The Bells"………………………………………...22 1.3 George Henry Lewes and the Poetry of Human Psychology……………………………..37 Chapter 2: Body Music: Harley Granville Barker, Greek Tragedy, and Ritualistic Shakespeare 49 2.1 Barker's Exemplary Theatre and the "Human Medium"………………………………….52 2.2 Iphigenia in Tauris………………………………………………………………………..57 2.3 The Winter's Tale…………………………………………………………………………63 2.4 Shakespearean Word Music………………………………………………………………76 Chapter 3: The Ego and its Discontents: Performing the Subconscious in Shakespearean Tragedy on Stage and Film ......................................................................................................................... 84 3.1 Hamlet vs. Hamlet: Performing Hamlet in the Theatre…………………………………...87 3.2 "This is I!": Hamlet on Film………………………………………………………………92 3.3 "The tropics have got him": Orson Welles and Voodoo Macbeth……………………….104 3.4 Birthing Macbeth on Film………………………………………………………………..111 Chapter 4: Reclaiming Social Emotion through King Lear…………………………………….120 4.1 Peter Brook's King Lear in "Zombieland"………………………………………………..123 4.2 Children Will Listen: Edward Bond and Lear's Emotional (Re)-Education……………..129 i 4.3 King Lear's Emotional Capital: Ronald Harwood's The Dresser………………………...139 4.4 Coda………………………………………………………………………………………149 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………151 ii List of Figures Figure 1: Irving as Mathias in The Bells…………………………………………………………25 Figure 2: Caricature of Irving as Macbeth from The Fashionable Tragedian…………………..36 Figure 3: Lillah McCarthy as Iphigenia………………………………………………………….63 Figure 4: King Thoas from Iphigenia in Tauris………………………………………………….63 Figure 5: Bradfield production of Iphigenia in Tauris…………………………………………..63 Figure 6: Henry Ainley as Leontes………………………………………………………………69 Figure 7: Sketch of Time………………………………………………………………………...72 Figure 8: Sketch of Perdita………………………………………………………………………72 Figure 9: A fairy and Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream………………………………80 Figure 10: Olivier as Hamlet……………………………………………………………………..99 Figure 11: Sketch of the priest in Voodoo Macbeth……………………………………………107 Figure 12: Macbeth being formed from the witches’ muck……………………………………113 iii Acknowledgments First and foremost, I acknowledge my brilliant, patient dissertation committee: Jean Howard, Julie Peters, and W.B. Worthen. For me, as for so many others, Bill Worthen laid the groundwork for approaching Shakespeare performance as performance. Jean Howard admitted me into her graduate seminar in Renaissance Tragedy as a Dramaturgy MFA student, the first of countless ways she has shaped and encouraged my academic career. Julie Peters is an inspiration for anyone wishing to do work across periods and media. Arnold Aronson has been a huge support since the very beginning of my time at Columba. Helene Foley graciously provided me with her research materials on Harley Granville Barker’s touring productions of Greek tragedy. The PhD Theatre Colloquium consistently provided an encouraging space to test out ideas and to be inspired by the works of my peers. I was also honored to receive feedback from Martin Meisel and Katherine Biers. I have relied on the friendship of fellow graduate students, including Emily Ciavarella Kuntz, Taarini Mookherjee, Rosa Schneider, and Benjamin VanWagoner. Sue Mendelsohn and Jason Ueda run an incredible writing center at Columbia and the opportunity to work there as a consultant was valuable for many reasons. I also want to acknowledge my family: Sarah Lang, Lawrence Madison, and Eliza Madison McLaughlin, with a special thanks to my mother. Finally, I acknowledge my husband Joseph Sumberg, our children Henry Madison and Alex William, and our children’s caregiver Margarita Amores. Henry and Alex might be the reason this project took as long as it did, but they have certainly filled the time with many wondrous emotions of my own. iv Introduction Shakespearean Performances, “Emotional Practices” I must have passions that must move the soule, Make the heart heave, and throb within the bosome, Extorting tears out of the strickest eyes, To racke a thought and straine it to his forme, Until I rap the sences from their course, This is my office. — Induction, A Warning for Faire Women In the induction to the anonymously authored 1599 English play A Warning for Faire Women, the character of Tragedy distinguishes herself from History and Comedy through her claim on the spectator’s passions. Her very “office” is to “have,” or perform, “passions” so that she can “move” them in audiences (49, 44). Studies of the early modern passions and their importance to the period’s drama of all genres mark some of the earliest contributions to the now burgeoning fields of affect studies, the history of emotions, and cultural emotion studies.1 From Gail Kern Paster’s Humoring the Body (2004) to Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan’s The Renaissance of Emotion (2015), scholars have explored the ways in which the early modern theatre was shaped by and helped to produce early modern understandings of emotion. They effectively adopt what the historical and cultural anthropologist Monique Scheer terms a “practice theory approach” to the history of emotions, which “emphasize[s] the use of rituals (in 1 R.S. White offers a useful overview of this literature, as of 2015, in the opening chapter of Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies. Gail Kern Paster and Michael C. Schoenfeldt’s studies are the forebears here, revealing the embodied, material nature of the early modern passions represented in the period’s drama. Building on this work, subsequent studies have addressed how early modern drama, performance, and literature were understood to move and affect readers and audiences, including Katherine Craik and Tanya Pollard’s Reading Sensations in Early Modern England and Alison P. Hopgood’s Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England. Reacting to the focus on embodiment and physiology in these accounts, there has been a concerted effort to understand how affects were conceived more broadly, as in Paster, Rowe, and Wilson’s Reading the Early Modern Passions, Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan’s The Renaissance of Emotions, White’s Shakespeare and Emotions, and Bridget Escolme’s Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage. The latter two are unique for addressing contemporary performances of early modern emotion. 1 the broadest sense) as a means of achieving, training, articulating, and modulating emotions for personal as well as social purposes”