Hamlet's Compulsive Revisions in Film, Television, And

HAMLET’S COMPULSIVE REVISIONS IN FILM, TELEVISION, AND SOCIAL MEDIA

KRISTIN N. DENSLOW

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

To Amelia, lover-of-the-gardens, who reminds me of now and now and now

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I thank my committee for supporting my work, even when that required a cross-country move and advising via email. I thank my chair, Richard Burt, whose work in Shakespeare, film, and media inspired me as an undergraduate to pursue my own work in these fields; Terry Harpold, whose feedback and close editing were of great help in the final stages of writing; Al Shoaf, whose rigorous scholarship and teaching inspire me; and Eric Kligerman, for taking a chance on a graduate student whom he had never met.

I would also like to thank the network of friends, colleagues, and mentors who have gotten me to this stage: Monique Pittman for introducing me to Shakespeare and film and encouraging me to pursue graduate education; Vanessa Corredera for always staying a year ahead of me and showing me the ropes of graduate school and the job market; Gwen Tarbox for mentoring me throughout my MA; Tony Ellis for being above all kind, generous, and supportive of graduate students—may you rest in peace; and beloved colleagues from Andrews University, Western Michigan University, and the

University of Florida for their advice, encouragement, and conversation: Adrienne

Redding, Renee Lee Gardner, Mick Teti-Beaudin, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Rex Krueger,

Matthew Snyder, and James Newlin. I am thankful for a newfound support system in the great state of Wisconsin, including my colleagues at UW-Green Bay. Brian Sutton, in particular, has read portions of this dissertation, providing thoughtful feedback and professional advice. In addition, two Shakespeare Association of America seminars— led by Kate Rumbold and Christy Desmet—involved challenging conversations that helped clarify my research. For supporting my studies, I would also like to acknowledge

4 the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the

University of Florida.

I thank the community of family and friends who have upheld my spirits and granted me patience. For these gifts, I am eternally grateful. I thank my parents, Ken and Pat, for encouraging me to see the bigger picture; Jeff, for providing “Granddad

Daycare,” thus allowing me the mental space in which to complete this project; and my friends for not letting me take myself too seriously. And finally, my gratitude extends to the ones who supported this dissertation (our second-born child) on the home front:

Paul, whose relentless cheerleading and steadfast belief sustains me, and Amelia, whose arrival saved my degree.

TABLE OF CONTENTS page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 10

Filiality in Adaptation ...... 13 Revision Compulsion ...... 18 The Beginning is the End is the Beginning ...... 22 The Ghost in Flashback ...... 27 Consuming and Subsuming Texts ...... 33

2 “CLEARLY IT’S NOTHING ALARMING…IT’S ONLY SHAKESPEARE”: CENSORSHIP, REPETITION COMPULSION, AND THE JOKE IN ERNST LUBITSCH’S TO BE OR NOT TO BE ...... 38

Censorship and Repression in Gestapo and Hamlet ...... 44 ...then as comedy: Resolution through Joke-Telling ...... 48 Alas, poor Greenberg ...... 56 Adaptation and/as the Joke ...... 65

3 HAMLET’S GHOST MEME: ACCIDENTAL SHAKESPEARE ON TELEVISION .... 75

Defining Memes: Biology and the Internet ...... 78 The Ghost Meme from Hamlet ...... 84 Rewriting Hamlet in Gossip Girl ...... 89 Hamlet’s Arrested Development ...... 93

4 BETWEEN SURVEILLANCE AND SOCIAL MEDIA: TECHNO-AUTHENTICITY AND PERFORMING THE SELF IN GREGORY DORAN’S HAMLET ...... 106

Surveillance, Power, Techno-authenticity ...... 110 Surveillance in Film Hamlets ...... 112 From CCTV to Super 8: Modes of Surveillance in Doran ...... 118 Social Media Shakespeare ...... 133

5 CONCLUSION ...... 140

From “Why Hamlet?” to “Why Hamlet?” ...... 142 Why Hamlet? Because Shakespeare ...... 148 Concluding Remarks ...... 153

WORKS CITED ...... 156

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 166

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

HAMLET’S COMPULSIVE REVISIONS IN FILM, TELEVISION, AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Kristin N. Denslow

December 2014

Chair: Richard Burt Major: English

This dissertation proposes a theory of adaptation in which the play Hamlet theorizes its own afterlives. Responding to the much-aligned fallback of “fidelity” in adaptation studies, I suggest the term “filiality” to describe the product of inheritance anxiety leading to what I refer to as “revision compulsion,” that is, the compulsion both within and without Hamlet to repeat in order to revise. Literary adaptation, like patrilineal inheritance in Hamlet, means that the identity of the father—or source text—is always in question; in this way, I see adaptation as a form of revision compulsion in which the adapter seeks to not only re-create the play again but also overtake a series of rival adaptations. Furthermore, revision compulsion implies a silent, unconscious process; the adapter may not consciously know what intertexts s/he adapts.

These two theories, tied up as they are in both biological and psychological metaphors for adaptation, inform my readings of Hamlet’s afterlives. Though the issues of heredity and lineage are fairly transparent in the intergenerational rivalry of Kenneth

Branagh’s film Hamlet, revision compulsion can also arrive in sound-bite Shakespeare, such as through the censorship politics of Ernst Lubitsch’s film To Be or Not To Be in

Chapter 2, which invokes also an unnamed Shakespeare play—Merchant of Venice. In

Chapter 3, the study of memes, or units of cultural transmission, enables a discussion of textual repression. I trace Hamlet memes in two popular American television shows—

Gossip Girl and Arrested Development—that build the play into their genetic codes.

Building on the meme’s Internet context, Gregory Doran’s film of Hamlet, studied in

Chapter 4, introduces yet another form of technologically-mediated repetition through surveillance devices in Elsinore. The CCTV cameras offer an unknown viewer access to the world of the court, invading its privacy in the name of knowledge and archive but only ever capturing a partial truth. Ultimately, what each artifact studied in this dissertation demonstrates is that adaptation and appropriation are processes of ongoing revision and rewriting.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane. O, answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher, Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d, Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.4.43–51)1

I begin with Hamlet’s exhortation to the Ghost of his father because it provides an apt metaphor for the work of literary adaptation, particularly when adaptations arrive in

“questionable shapes,” such as those I study in this dissertation. In this passage,

Hamlet’s language indicates not only that the Ghost arrives in a suspicious form but also that it can be questioned.2 And because the Ghost is questionable, because it invites questions, Hamlet feels compelled to speak to it. Hamlet admits that he chooses to call this shape “Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane”; the Ghost may or may not be King

Hamlet but calling it “Hamlet” allows Prince Hamlet to proceed with his line of questioning. Hamlet seeks understanding; he needs to know why the “sepulchre” keeps opening its “ponderous and marble jaws / To cast thee up again.” His father’s corpse refuses to stay buried. Instead of being inurn’d, the King’s body keeps coming back—

1 All quotations, unless noted otherwise, are taken from the Riverside Shakespeare.

2 M.M. Mahood suggests that “Questionable means not only ‘that I may question’ but also ‘doubtful, uncertain’, and shape, besides being the essential form of something, has more commonly in Shakespeare the meaning of a theatrical costume or disguise” (123). In this analysis, then, we have yet another gloss of “questionable shape” as “doubtful” or “uncertain” disguise, which will assist in my analysis of To Be or Not To Be in Chapter 2. The Arden Third Series Hamlet glosses the “questionable shape” as “inviting questions,” pointing out that the understanding of “questionable” as “uncertain” or “baffling” does not emerge until the eighteenth century.

10 vomited up, if you will, by the personified grave.3 These lines underscore Hamlet’s concern with recognizing the Ghost and identifying its traits in reference to the interred body of the King. The dead King and the living Ghost are reference points for one another.

This image of the Ghost cast forth from the grave serves as a metaphor for adaptation insofar as the text of Shakespeare’s play, like the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, refuses to stay buried: to engage with Hamlet and its afterlives is to engage with the play’s questionable shapes. As a scholar, I feel compelled to speak to the “canoniz’d bones” of a play that keep bursting forth from their cerements—and I deliberately play here with both the sense of consecrated objects and literary canonization. Hamlet’s father was wrapped in grave-clothes, the text of Hamlet in bookbinding. And the ghost of the play keeps appearing in new forms. To give the name “Hamlet” to some of the artifacts studied in this dissertation is both fitting and apt in that they resemble the canonized bones of Shakespeare’s play. The name “Hamlet” describes precisely what the work sets out to present—namely a version of Shakespeare’s play—as seen in the

Hamlet films of Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Grigori Kozintsev, Franco Zeffirelli,

Michael Almereyda, and Gregory Doran. Sometimes calling a text “Hamlet” is a choice; the shape being more of a disguise than a resemblance. In these less faithful forms, I choose to call the shapes Hamlet as I sense them gesturing toward me to follow them, to see why they appear in these Hamlet-like forms. To call these forms “adaptation” may result in less terminological precision, yet if one acknowledges the biological, hereditary

3 See Arden Third series gloss, which explains that “The tomb is personified (animalified?) as vomiting the Ghost from its mouth.”

11 applications of the word, then a more inclusive definition is appropriate.4 In these usages, one can trace problems of descent with modification5 as well as what I will later describe as “filiality” in adaptation. This model also incorporates a more writing-centric sense of revision, in the sense that all adaptations—indeed all creative texts—are doing a form of rewriting akin to adaptation. Certainly, some adaptations appear to be positioned in closer, direct relation to their source than others, 6 yet regardless of the intent of the creator, an alleged source text is revised and reworked. In a model of rewriting, one can see elements of repetition, revision, and modification—thus resembling descent with modification from biology. My use of the broad term

“adaptation” in this dissertation, then, observes that adaptations of Hamlet, like the

Ghost of King Hamlet, have appeared an indeterminate number of times, have more or less resembled the form of the play, and have been witnessed by many, like myself, who find themselves chasing the ghosts of Hamlet’s canonized bones across film, media, and literature.

In its analysis of how the play Hamlet and its afterlives offer a particular perspective on adaptation theory, this dissertation is situated between studies surveying filmic Hamlets on the one hand7 and studies arguing particular theories of adaptation on

4 Many rightly argue for more taxonomic rigor in adaptation in order to differentiate between different modes of adapting or appropriating. My open use of “adaptation” may be met with resistance from those advocating these models, but there is a need for a broad term to encapsulate all these forms, connoting an entire range of artistic engagements.

5 See Gary R. Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon, who argue that in literary adaptation, “the ‘source’ could perhaps be…productively viewed as the ‘ancestor’ from whom adaptations derive directly by descent. As in biological evolution, descent with modification is essential” (446)

6 In this regard, compare Olivier’s now canonical Hamlet with my reading of Gossip Girl in Chapter 3.

7 Studies in this category include Samuel Crowl’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Relationship Between Text and Film and Patrick J. Cook’s Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda, both of which address more canonical adaptations of Shakespeare’s play.

12 the other.8 Instead, I theorize the adaptation of Hamlet through Hamlet; using the play as a guide, I will examine ideas and metaphors of adaptation which can be found in the play’s text—namely those relating to doubling, descent with modification, filiality, and revision compulsion—and argue that the play Hamlet offers, a priori, a theory of adaptation later demonstrated by adaptations of Hamlet. I will apply that theory in this introduction to the Hamlet films of Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh.

Filiality in Adaptation

In its structure, language, and themes, the play Hamlet offers the reader/viewer various forms of copying, repetition, and doubling that can help clarify my usage of

“adaptation” as a term encompassing in biology, heredity, and descent with modification.9 The play offers doubled fathers and sons, which I will explore more fully below, as well as structural doubling, such as the repeated visits of the Ghost or the repetition of the dumb show and the play-within-the-play—both of which repeat a story the audience has already heard through the words of the Ghost. The Ghost itself is a doubled double that takes on the form of the dead king, as demonstrated in the chapter’s opening. In other words, as Jacque Derrida “argues in Specters of Marx, not only does the Ghost double the image of the dead king, but it also, in the opening scene, (re)appears for the first time in the play.10

8 There are endless numbers of studies I could cite in this regard, many of which engage not only canonical adaptations but also appropriations, spin-offs, citations, and other forms of “loose” adaptations. Recent often-cited texts in this regard, though these are broader than solely Shakespeare-in-adaptation studies, include Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, Julie Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation, and Thomas Leitch’s Adaptation and Its Discontents.

9 See, in particular, Bortolotti and Hutcheon for a nuanced perspective on biology and adaptation.

10 Perhaps Derrida’s phrasing is helpful here: “everything [in the play] begins in the imminence of a reapparition, but a reapparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play” (2)

Though the play does present us with a surplus of doubles, much of that doubling becomes questionable, like the shape of the Ghost. The double can only more-or-less resemble its “source”—to borrow from the language of literary adaptation—and even the source’s source can be opened to question. For example, the Ghost, as an always- already imperfect copy of a formerly living person, can only more-or-less resemble the deceased King, and, in the play, that identification arrives only vis-à-vis Hamlet’s leading questions posed to Horatio and Marcellus:

HAMLET. Arm’d, say you?

ALL. Arm’d, my lord.

HAMLET. From top to toe?

ALL. My lord, from head to foot

HAMLET. Then saw you not his face.

HORATIO. O yes, my lord, he wore his beaver up.

[…]

HAMLET. His beard was grisl’d, no?

HORATIO. It was, as I have seen it in his life,

A sable silvered. (1.2.226–30; 239–40)

This scene, excerpted here, consists of a series of questions and answers in which

Hamlet seeks to identify how similar this Ghost was in appearance to his late father. Yet his questions lead their answers; after the Marcellus and Barnardo tell him the Ghost was armed, Hamlet asks how they could see his face and thus identify him. The guards are quick to change their answer, clarifying that the Ghost had its beaver, or visor, up.

Hamlet’s query about his father’s beard being grizzled also leads its answers; Hamlet presents Horatio with a new distinguishing characteristic that Horatio, of course, agrees

14 with. This scene is concerned primarily with establishing that the Ghost resembles

Hamlet’s father.

This work of more-or-less resemblance extends to the play’s concern with what one might call “overfamiliality,” or the state of having too much family. The play draws on issues of heredity, particularly as it relates to inheritance. Hamlet is populated with

(dead) fathers and sons: Hamlet/Hamlet, Polonius/Laertes, and Fortinbras/Fortinbras.

Each of these sons attempts to fulfill an obligation to his father: Hamlet, of course, avenges the murder of King Hamlet, Laertes hopes to do the same for Polonius, and

Fortinbras wishes to reclaim the land his father lost. The son, psychoanalytically, is stuck intergenerationally; he must simultaneously inherit an identity that is not his own and form a sense of self that is wholly his own. And in the play, that inherited identity requires avenging the wrongful death of the father—an act that all three of the play’s sons (Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras) must commit. The son, then, must toe the line between being a genetic copy of his father—however imperfect that copy may be—and gaining his own sense of identity.11 As Coppélia Kahn argues in relation to

Shakespeare’s history plays, “the son inherits his identity (the name and role by which he is known in society, and his inner sense of self) from his father” (48). Hamlet inherits his father’s name of Hamlet, but Kahn’s latter two characteristics—Hamlet’s public role at court and private sense of self—are more complicated.12 King Hamlet accuses

Claudius of usurping the throne, an act that takes Young Hamlet’s right to the throne

11 Some speculate that this is the position of Shakespeare at the time of Hamlet’s writing, caught intergenerationally between his son Hamnet’s death and his aging father.

12 I will explore this divide between public and private selves more thoroughly in Chapter 4.

15 away from him.13 Now Claudius, alleged usurper, has offered Hamlet the right of succession—“You are the most immediate to our throne” (1.2.109)—and the privilege of being his “son”—“And with no less nobility of love / Than that which dearest father bears his son / Do I impart toward you” (110–12). So, Hamlet’s present and future public roles are open to debate. Furthermore, Hamlet’s inner sense of self, wrapped up in the business of mourning, must be rapidly re-oriented by the arrival of the Ghost. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet mourns the lost family unit; now he is too much in the sun/son (1.2.67). The breakup of that family (and Gertrude’s subsequent remarriage) results Hamlet being “overfamilial.” The Ghost’s arrival complicates Hamlet’s position further as now he finds out that his uncle-father is also his father-uncle’s murderer.

Hamlet is simultaneously son and nephew and subject to the law of two kings; his deceased father commands him to kill the current King who holds the keys to Hamlet’s fate as possible future King. Yet, the relation of fathers and sons will be fraught with anxiety and “paternal undecidability,” a phrase with which Marjorie Garber

(Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers)—drawing on Lacan (and before him, Freud)—explains that “the father is always a suppositional father, a father by imputation, rather than by unimpeachable biology” (78).

In Shakespeare’s play, the absence of the father figures and the sons’ roles as revengers demonstrates that the father/son doublings of the play work both vertically and horizontally. That is, the sons double their fathers—whether in name, title, or unity of purpose—but the sons also double each other in that parallels can be drawn between

13 Scholars are uncertain if Kingship at Elsinore is a matter of inheritance or election. By contemporary English laws of succession, Hamlet was the rightful king, but according to Denmark’s laws at the time, it was an elected position. See de Grazia (pp. 85–88).

Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras as overfamilial sons. In a way, these men serve as literary foils for one another, a meaning to which Shakespeare draws close when

Hamlet addresses Laertes, saying, “I’ll be your foil, Laertes” (5.2.255).14 Each son sets out to avenge his father, and each more-or-less succeeds in that taskeven in the face of failure in patrilineal descent. 15 Margreta de Grazia argues that these sons are united in their mission to replace their fathers: “Three father-son units are poised at the generational brink, each son scheduled to supersede his father” (97). Yet these are all patrilineal failures: “the Crown lands Fortinbras stood to inherit were wagered away by his father; the realm Hamlet was born to rule passed to his uncle; the estate Laertes would have inherited is forfeited by the tainting circumstances of his father’s death” (97–

8). Fortinbras’s pity towards Hamlet’s corpse at the end of the play may be in recognition of these similarities. He expresses that “with sorrow I embrace my fortune”

(5.2.388) and yields to Horatio’s request to tell the story of Hamlet’s death “Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance / On plots and errors happen” (5.2.394–95).

In its filiality, the issue of lineage in Hamlet provides a metaphor for adaptation in which identity is not just a matter of biological heredity. The “father,” or source text, is always a suppositional father, a father by imputation, not by unimpeachable biology

(direct literary descent). In other words, the adaptation may claim a literary father, a source, but that source can only be termed the parent by imputation. Like Kahn’s statement about the identity of sons, the adaptation inherits its identity from its father—

14 While Hamlet cannot quite mean the literary trope, his contemporary meaning does relate. The Arden edition glosses this line as follows: “Hamlet puns on foil meaning setting (as of a jewel), background or contrast” (450). In this sense, a foil is a piece of metal that sets off a jewel in order to make it appear brighter.

15 Hamlet and Laertes each kill their father’s murderers, but die themselves. Fortinbras is able to avoid bloodshed by stumbling upon the corpses, but thus does not actually play a role in avenging his father.

17 and as we will see, this can happen even if the son cannot recognize his own father.

The adaptation must find its own identity even as it draws on the identity and authority of the source text. This can lead to calls in adaptation studies to set aside fidelity and focus instead on the new text as its own entity. Fidelity should perhaps be replaced with

“filiality” with the accompanying recognition that in filial relationships the parent is always present, even if only through the genetic code. And, like fathers and sons in

Hamlet, adaptations also move both vertically and horizontally, retaining attachment to—and sometimes allegiance to—the parental text while also working through fraternal attachments. Though Hamlet’s models of this are not siblings, they are part of a generational divide—much like Prince Hal and Hotspur in 1 Henry IV—and are thus united generationally. In drawing conclusions about Shakespearean adaptation, it is important, then, to consider not only patrilineal descent but also sibling connections.

Revision Compulsion

The play’s concern with the revisionary logic of storytelling extends from the issue of filiality insofar as each (re-)telling of the story extends out from its original source. Storytelling, which later becomes adaptation itself, is produced through a compulsion to repeat and revise, what I will refer to as “revision compulsion.” This intergenerational copying and doubling in Hamlet is indicative of the copying and retelling of stories both within and without the play, which itself both begins and ends with acts of storytelling. Hamlet opens with Barnardo telling Horatio the story of the Ghost, even though, as the play text makes clear, Barnardo has already told Horatio this story:

Sit down awhile,

And let us once again assail your ears,

That are so fortified against our story,

What we have two nights seen. (1.1.30–33)

Barnardo uses militaristic imagery to describe the storytelling process; he will “assail”

Horatio with the story, even though Horatio has already “fortified” his ears against it.16 In other words, in spite of Horatio’s protestations and disbelief, Barnardo will keep telling this ghost story until Horatio believes it. The story will be heard. Shortly thereafter, however, Barnardo’s telling of the story is interrupted by the appearance of the Ghost, leading Horatio to finish the story himself. Horatio, in Act 1, Scene 2, goes on to tell

Hamlet the ghost story, taking over the storytelling role from Barnardo. The play then famously ends with Hamlet’s request to Horatio to “Absent thee from felicity awhile, /

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story” (5.2.347–49), a request that Horatio seems destined to fulfill when he asks Fortinbras to let him “speak to th’ yet unknowing world / How these things came about” (5.2.379–80).

The Ghost’s story exhibits similar repetition. When the Ghost first addresses

Hamlet, he informs Hamlet that he could tell him the most harrowing story about hell but, since he is “forbid / To tell the secrets of my prison-house” (1.5.13–14), he will instead tell the story of his murder (1.5.13–20). Even that story is embedded in storytelling since the Ghost first alludes to the “official” story given out about his death by serpent. The Ghost goes on to tell the “real” story of his murder, a story then repeated twice more: once in the dumb show and once in the Mousetrap. (The embedding structure of this telling and re-telling of the ghost’s story has been picked up by filmmakers, including Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, in the use of

16 The imagery here reminds of Romeo’s Rosaline, who has militaristically defended herself from his wooing siege (Romeo and Juliet 1.1.208–16).

19 flashbacks, a device that I will consider more fully later in this chapter. In essence, the flashback repeats the repetition that is already occurring within the play.)

What is interesting about each of these forms of storytelling (and the repetitions of the stories that are told) is that each repetition is also different. None tells the same story in the same way. They are the variations on a theme, varying the material, the form of presentation, and the subject matter. The ghost story becomes the story of the ghost, which ultimately transforms into the story of both Prince Hamlet and Hamlet, the play ostensibly about the Prince. The play contains too many stories within it, lending a sense of surplus or overabundance (or, one might add, copia in order to retain the play’s Renaissance roots). Revision compulsion extends to the afterlife of Hamlet in which the play’s popularity threatens to overtake all other Shakespeare plays—and sometimes all other literature. We might consider it alongside the image of rebellious

Laertes overtaking the court. The play describes Laertes as a sea flooding the plain:

The ocean, overpeering of his list,

Eats not the flats with more impiteous haste

Than young Laertes, in a riotous head,

O’erbears your officers. (4.5.100–03)

Laertes’s rebellion is here described as taking over, consuming, going outside of the prescribed boundaries of a citizen. He is described as more destructive and engulfing than even the ocean, which cannot compete with his urgency, his “impetuous” haste— sometimes emended as “impiteous haste,” the play of meaning here suggesting both cruelty and rapid movement. The play itself has this feel of rolling on rapidly and violently unstoppable and untamable. The movement of Hamlet after Hamlet bears this same (sometimes rebellious) force in that adaptations seek to “overpeer” not only the

20 play itself but also the work of rival adaptations. We live in a world glutted with

Hamlets—a Google search of the name yields 12,500,000 results, an IMDB search shows 200 title matches; and neither search can truly take into account all the Hamlet derivatives, references, allusions, and citations in existence. Books on Hamlet overwhelm library shelves; films, spin-offs, revisions, and other forms of adaptation are created constantly and insistently as if creative beings are always destined to (or damned to) re-write, re-vise, and re-stage Hamlet.

The play presents models of complicated parental relationships that provide metaphors for the work of adaptation. Here, I will offer a case study in “overfamiliality” and the surplus of adaptation. In it, I will examine the Hamlet films of Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, arguing that Branagh’s film demonstrates an anxiety of filiality that is exemplified through his revision compulsion. Branagh’s Hamlet, famous for its adaptation of the full playtext of Hamlet as well as its stunning visual design and star- studded cast, demonstrates the ways in which the play Hamlet acts as an unstoppable, elemental force, catching up previous Hamlets within its orbit. Branagh seeks not only to film a “complete” text of Hamlet—itself a misnomer since Branagh’s full text must necessarily conflate the Q1, Q2, and F1 versions of the play in order to accomplish that goal—but also populate the film with “rival” Shakespearean actors, casting himself in the lead role alongside famous Hamlets of past generations, Derek Jacobi and John

Gielgud, as well as one future Hamlet, Simon Russell Beale. In the film, Branagh figures like that impetuous all-consuming figure of Laertes, attempting to overtake and consume his rivals. In my reading, this plays out most strongly in Branagh’s rivalry with

Laurence Olivier, whose film Hamlet the younger actor seeks to subsume and replace.

Though Olivier’s Hamlet famously follows the Oedipal interpretation of the play proposed by Sigmund Freud and his disciple Ernest Jones, I will be looking at it and

Branagh’s film through an alternative psychoanalytic lens: that of Freud’s essay on “The

Uncanny,” which provides a useful intertext for understanding how the two films are related in their concern with uncanny effects, including reanimation of the dead, doubles, blindness, repetition compulsions, and disturbances of memory, or déjà vu.

The films present these uncanny effects through structural repetition and visual devices, showcasing in a way the repetition compulsion and circularity central to Freud’s uncanny. The two films, through the use of flashback and other devices of repetition and doubling, contain several scenes in which a number of narrative possibilities are simultaneously in play, presenting themselves successively as if in a rotating circle. Like

Freud’s description of accidental repetition and detour in the provincial Italian town

(237), the Hamlet films of Olivier and Branagh have left the safety of the piazza; the viewer is forced into moments of intellectual uncertainty and unending repetition.

Branagh, as both director and actor, is caught up in filial anxiety which leads to his revision compulsion, that is, his seeming need to “overpeer” Olivier through retaining and revising two of Olivier’s filmic devices.

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

Both Olivier and Branagh start and end their films in the same way: with an establishing shot of the exterior of the castle. Whereas Olivier begins and ends with funerals, Branagh bookends his film with a statue of King Hamlet; Branagh’s film, then, is the King/Ghost’s story, unlike Olivier who is focused primarily on the character of

Hamlet himself. Olivier begins and ends his Hamlet with shots of a tower—the same tower from which Hamlet later delivers “To be or not to be” and meets the Ghost. The 22 opening credits show the tower, shrouded in mist in the background, while waves crash against the rocks in the foreground, imbuing the scene, momentarily at least, with elemental strength.17 After the credits, the viewer sees a bird’s eye view of the M.C.

Escher-like castle. Following the interpolated “mole of nature” lines (see discussion below), the mist gives way to four unidentifiable men carrying a body aloft while a fifth, presumably Horatio, stands to one side. The body is only recognizable as Hamlet through identification of costume from the film’s closing scene, which, of course, the viewer has not yet seen. From this shot, the film cuts to an extreme high angle shot of what appears to be the same scene, and the figures disappear from the tower like ghosts. This scene confuses the timeline of the film. It is probably a flash-forward to the end of the film, but it could equally be the funeral that comes immediately before the play, that of King Hamlet, reminding the viewer that the action of the play is bookended by two funerals, though only one is staged.18 The lighting, disorienting angle, and distance distort the figures on the tower, making any determination of whose funeral we are witnessing impossible.

Adding to the confusion is an interpolated voiceover of Hamlet’s “mole of nature” lines from Act 1, Scene 4 of the play. The preproduction script describes the scene:

“The camera shoots from on high, down at the castle of Elsinore, and slowly approaches it. After about fifteen seconds a cloud settles in front of the camera, shutting out the castle from view. Over the cloud are superimposed these words:

So oft it chances in particular men That through some vicious mole of nature in them,

17 This type of high angle, castle-over-the-sea opening scene is picked up in the Hamlet films of Kozintsev and Zeffirelli.

18 Zeffirelli’s Hamlet does, in fact, begin with the funeral of King Hamlet.

By the o’ergrowth of some complexion Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, Or by some habit that too much; that these men— Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, Their virtues else—be they as pure as grace, Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault.”

An additional supplement follows the out-of-place “mole of nature” lines; Olivier, in voice-over, continues: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”19

Here, a number of elements are out of place: the lines from later in the play, the addition of extra-textual material in the form of a thesis statement, and Olivier’s voice. Olivier’s addition of non-Shakespearean lines registers strangely, especially considering that this thesis counters the Ernest Jones reading of the play to which Olivier is beholden.20

Furthermore the lines, read by Laurence Olivier in voice-over mark a disjunction between play, character, and voice.

Even if one knows these opening lines are Hamlet’s from Hamlet and even if one recognizes Olivier’s voice, these lines do not belong here, at the beginning; it is unclear who recites them. This disorientation comes about because there is no stable referent for the text and voice-over. Instead, they are free-floating signifiers in the form of a detached quotation that can never be reattached. The ambiguity of the interpolated voiceover stems partly from the fact that one cannot be sure who speaks the lines.

Perhaps Olivier speaks the lines as himself (as director), as unnamed Chorus, or even

19 Scholar Peter Alexander took text editor Alan Dent to task for this line since both Alexander and Dent were former students of Macneile Dixon, whose reading of Hamlet would not endorse this tagline. Alexander’s book corrects Olivier/Dent’s approach in the name of his former teacher and for the sake of the “some 20 million spectators” who have applauded the film (v).

20 Jones argues precisely the opposite, that Hamlet can make up his mind and only falters when confronted with killing Claudius. This dilemma requires Hamlet to wrestle with his unconscious, which is not the same as an inability to make up one’s mind.

24 as the Ghost of King Hamlet, whose voice Olivier also provides later in the film.

Alternately, the scene could be Hamlet recalling the scene of his father’s or his own funeral, though this would mean that Hamlet’s ghost narrates the film in its entirety. Or, finally, the film could take place in the audience’s memory, though of course this memory is temporally “out of joint,” since the audience has not yet seen the ending of this particular adaptation. In this scenario, the scene belongs to a socially-constructed memory of the play. Like Hamlet, who, as we will see, imagines the scene of his father’s death, the audience watches this image as projection, identifying with Hamlet’s ability to visualize the scene. Each of these narrative possibilities is in play simultaneously in this brief sequence.

The film ends where it begins, though in the final scene the identity of the dead

Hamlet is clearly established. The final sequence of the film begins with a profile of

Hamlet’s body slumped on the throne. The camera tracks left into darkness. It stays in darkness for a beat, after which we see a procession weaving through the castle. Four men (perhaps the same four men from the opening of the film) carry Hamlet’s body upward—again reinforcing the film’s verticality in which many key moments take place on High Tor—while Horatio looks on. One shot pauses on a window through which we see a smoking cannon in front of a graveyard, reminding the viewer of the deaths that have punctuated the film. The camera pauses at notable points in the castle—

Polonius’s passage, the circular staircase, the chapel, Gertrude’s closet—and cannon fire lights up these now empty spaces. A low angle long shot—in sharp contrast to the opening extreme high angles—shows silhouettes carrying the body up a steep flight of stairs. This final shot offers a variation on the opening shots, though this time the figures

25 do not fade ghost-like into the mist; the repetition compulsion at work here reveals this is an unending saga. This time, it is Hamlet’s story, but next time it could be Fortinbras’s body ascending the tower.

Branagh’s send-up of a similarly bookended film extends Olivier’s technique of repetition but does so not through extra-textual narratorial confusion but by making his film the Ghost’s story, so that the unending saga of the Hamlet family extends into perpetuity exclusively as the Ghost’s story. The Ghost is a consuming figure for

Branagh; its presence bookends the film and catches up Hamlet in its mission. The film begins and ends in the courtyard of Blenheim Palace, itself a place imbued with historical significance.21 In the opening scene, the title of the film—here etched into the nameplate of a statue of King Hamlet—yields to the snowy exterior of Blenheim Palace.

The camera—alternating between establishing shots of the palace and shots of

Francisco patrolling the grounds—pans back and forth across the statue twice, suggesting that the Hamlet that the title refers to could perhaps be King Hamlet, not

Prince Hamlet. In Branagh’s film, the appearance of the Ghost is the catalyst for the play; even though Barnardo, Francisco, and Marcellus expect military action during their watch—note their frequent glances towards the snowy, distant terrain—the terror at court actually comes from the family’s trauma. The end of Branagh’s film continues this theme of Hamlet being the Ghost’s story. This last scene, shot in bright daylight, echoes

Olivier’s inclusion of the body of Hamlet being carried from the Great Hall to the exterior of the castle, as if in death he can finally leave the prison of Elsinore. Branagh’s Hamlet,

21 Crowl (Screen Adaptations) briefly states its historical significance; Blenheim Palace is “an eighteenth- century country estate outside of Oxford built by Queen Anne for John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, in recognition of his military triumphs over the French. The estate is one of England’s great country houses, resembling a monumental European palace, and has the added resonance for the English of being the birthplace of Winston Churchill. The building projects Empire” (69).

26 however, is carried out—arms outstretched in a Christ-like pose—to his military funeral, which is presided over by hundreds of soldiers. Hamlet’s casket sits in the middle of the courtyard, ensconced by eternal flames and anonymous ranks of Fortinbras’s men.

These men salute Hamlet with gunfire, and then climb the statue of his father in order to destroy it and establish the regime of a new king. The film ends with the King’s name again etched in stone and the head of the statue falling into front of it, covering up the name. By bookending the film not with the body of Prince Hamlet but the statue of King

Hamlet, Branagh reinforces his theme of Hamlet’s struggle with a dead father.

The Ghost in Flashback

That this is the Ghost’s story in Branagh’s film becomes even clearer through the use of flashback and “flashcut” techniques, visual devices of repetition that Olivier also employs. These scenes sometimes duplicate Shakespeare’s language and offstage scenes with imagery and other times interpolate images to clarify Shakespeare’s text (a technique used exclusively by Branagh), thus mixing illustration and text, or the verbal with the visual.22 These moments disturb memory, crossing into hallucination and a projection. That is to say, one cannot be sure whose visions or projections are on screen. Again, as with the opening and closing scenes, Branagh becomes the vision of excess, building not only upon Shakespeare’s play but also on Olivier’s film. Whereas

Olivier makes use of the flashback in four scenes—the Ghost’s story, Hamlet’s visitation of Ophelia, Ophelia’s drowning, and the pirate scene—none of which necessarily requires additional visualization, Branagh’s Hamlet is in a near-constant state of

22 Among contemporary films of Hamlet, Olivier and Branagh are the only two directors to employ this technique, though Almereyda does show past scenes through Hamlet’s edited tapes.

27 flashbacks and flashcuts.23 In both films, the flashbacks—particularly the visual depiction of the Ghost’s story—register as uncanny through the unnecessary and often jarring repetition of the verbal with the visual.

In Olivier’s film, Hamlet’s visualization of the Ghost’s story of Act 1, Scene 5 complicates the represented relation of memory and temporality. In the film, Hamlet follows the Ghost up to the top of the tower, kneels in front of the specter, and, while listening to its story, visualizes the scene at hand. This visualization takes place at the end of a shot-reverse shot sequence in which each subsequent shot of Hamlet brings his face closer in while the shots of the Ghost are increasingly obscured by mist. In the final shot of this sequence—the tightest shot of Hamlet’s face—the Prince closes his eyes to imagine the scene. The next shot shows the back of Hamlet’s head, and the camera moves in quickly to an extreme close-up. An accompanying dissolve shows the

King asleep in the orchard. For a brief moment, the two scenes—the back of Hamlet’s head and the orchard—completely overlap, indicating that this scene stems from

Hamlet’s imagination. Olivier’s Hamlet thus creates a false memory not grounded in the text through this visualization, and this scene privileges Prince Hamlet as creator of that memory.

Olivier’s depiction of this scene unsettles a number of boundaries since now it is difficult to determine who is having the memory (the Ghost or Hamlet) and whether the memory is a hallucination or a projection. Hamlet’s hallucination, that is, may also be

23 Olivier’s decision to include these flashbacks—or in Kliman’s term “living tableaux” (“Olivier’s Hamlet”)—has been met with much criticism about being out-of-date (see Kliman and Duffy) or even damaging the passage (see Brebach) In spite of these objections, Olivier may have been appropriating silent film techniques as this type of inset scene is typical of that genre. See Robert Hamilton Ball’s thorough book, Shakespeare on Silent Film, which documents at least four films that interpolate a visualization of the Ghost’s story.

28 regarded as the Ghost’s flashback projected on what appears to be a movie screen.

The Ghost and Hamlet are equally centered subjects if we follow out this analogy between memory and cinema. On the one hand, the Ghost projects the flashback; on the other, Hamlet watches it. Yet Olivier’s cinematic sorting of subjectivity paradoxically reproduces the very uncanny effects it attempts to manage. Hamlet sees his imagination play out on screen, which results in a projection-within-a-projection, or as a film-within-a-film. If it is subjective, rather than a documentary illustration of fact (in voice-over), the Ghost’s flashback may itself be partly hallucinatory, as may be Hamlet’s reception of it.24 Moreover, the cinematic boundary of what Hamlet sees is uncertain; flashback is also a montage of sorts, which both reinforces and unsettles the authority of the Ghost’s ghostly voice-over.

Like the opening of the film in which the narrator cannot be determined, Hamlet’s hallucination is complicated by the presence of multiple actors and roles. Laurence

Olivier plays Hamlet, of course, but he also provides the Ghost’s voice.25 Though the

Ghost is a puppet-like phantasm, almost animatronic in form, its voice is human, though never actually credited to Olivier. In fact, Samuel Crowl (Screen Adaptations), citing newly acquired documentary evidence, tells the story of Olivier’s Ghost as a product of film editor Helga Cranston’s intervention based on a recent Paris staging that had a

“barely visible” Ghost with “throbbing heartbeat” sound effects: “Olivier seized on this idea and refined it by making the Ghost a shadowy figure with a muffled voice (actually

24 In classic Freudian terms, this frame-within-the-frame might be viewed as fetish work, a kind of neurotic multiplication of frames to contain a primal scene of fratricide.

25 Even this apparent “fact” is disputed since his name is never actually assigned to the Ghost’s voice in the literature about the film. The strongest evidence that I’ve found suggesting this is Olivier’s voice is in Crowl’s recent book (Screen Adaptations), a product of archival research on film Hamlets.

Olivier’s recorded at a slower speed) and powerful heartbeat” (43).26 In the film, then,

Olivier plays the son, the father (or at least his voice), and the narrator—who could be either son or father. He takes on a surplus of roles, as if needing to infiltrate and control all aspects of the film. An additional uncanny effect emerges, albeit retrospectively and perhaps only after several viewings, in that not only is Olivier’s voice never identified as that of the Ghost, but the actor who plays the Ghost in Hamlet’s flashback is never named; the name of the actor is nowhere to be found in the opening credits or in any other epitextual documents related to the film. In the only scene that depicts a living version of the dead king, he is unnamed and unrecognizable.

Branagh, not one to be outdone by Olivier’s modest use of interpolated scenes, amplifies the technique to include a wide variety of “flashcuts” that not only depict offstage material (Olivier’s primary technique) but also illustrate several speeches, such as Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick” speech (5.1.184–95) in which Branagh depicts Hamlet as a child playing with Yorick (portrayed by comedian Ken Dodd). Branagh employs these flashcuts—or “displaced diegetic inserts” in the language of formalist film theory

(Anderegg 131)—in a variety of forms, from flashbacks to imagined scenes.

Symptomatically, the flashcuts are randomly inserted and out of control. The majority of them are original to Branagh’s film, such as a sex scene between Hamlet and Ophelia or scenes of Fortinbras making battle plans.27 These highly specific visualizations abandon some of the ambiguity of Olivier’s film. Branagh prefers to put everything on

26 I find Crowl’s description of what led Cranston to offer this advice to be particularly entertaining: “When Helga Cranston first went to Denham Studios to work on the film she found Olivier smeared with blackface and with a light bulb stuck in his mouth. He was experimenting with a radical way of filming the Ghost so ‘that he would appear like a negative [photographic] image’” (43).

27 While Branagh is liberal with his use of visually interpolated scenes, he excises two scenes with precedent in Olivier’s film: the pirate scene and Ophelia’s drowning.

30 the table. In his visualization of the Ghost’s speech, the flashbacks and flashcuts seem manic, as if moving at hyper-speed thus disorienting the viewer from any stable sense of the narrative. Intercut scenes arrive quickly, with little explanation, and sometimes without precedent in the play text, such as family game of curling in the castle that sets up an affair between Gertrude and Claudius prior to the old King’s death.

The visualization of this scene amplifies, extends, and gluts the film with imagery.

It begins with Hamlet running through the woods chasing after an unseen Ghost before ultimately giving in to a series of frenzied flashcuts. During the Ghost’s speech, the orchard appears in flashes, cross-cutting shots of King Hamlet’s corpse with shots of the dark, faceless statue from the beginning of the film. Each time the Ghost or Hamlet utters the word “murder,” the scene cuts to the King’s pulsing, bleeding ear—perhaps a reference to the pulsing sound that accompanies the Ghost in Olivier’s film. By the time we see the family scenes from the palace or the murder itself, a number of shots have already foreshadowed the King’s murder, including the aforementioned ear and a shot of the King reclining in the snowy orchard. When Hamlet gasps, “O my prophetic soul!

My uncle!” the scene cuts to the royal family gathered in the castle for a game of curling, a scene which foregrounds father/son bonding while mother casts her wandering eye on

Claudius. The shot cuts away to a shot of a corset being hastily untied, though the identities of the individuals are obscured.

Branagh’s use of interpolated scenes here and elsewhere become confusing partly due to their frequency but also because Branagh, unlike Olivier, does not signal the shift between past and present. Conventiona film flashbacks use a framing device to delineate between past and present; devices for signaling this movement can include

31 the use of subtitles or altering the visual space of the screen. By avoiding these techniques, Branagh produces what we might call “antiflashbacks” that dissolve the boundaries between past and present, rather than assisting the viewer in reconstructing the flow and relation of time. These scenes become important moments of disturbed memory. For example, the curling and orchard scenes depicted during the Ghost’s speech suggest a number of narrative possibilities simultaneously at play in terms of point of view: this could be Hamlet’s projection, his own flashback, the memory of the

Ghost, the film’s omniscient narrator, or some other outside observer. Even though

Branagh appears to put everything on screen by including copious flashcuts, there is still an element of the unknown and an uncertainty between recognition and misrecognition.28 On the one hand, Branagh chooses to show rather than simply tell.

But on the other hand, even as he appears to be exposing, Branagh is really covering up.

This tension between revealing and concealing has to do with Branagh’s complicated relationship with Olivier’s oeuvre. Ostensibly, Branagh is in the business of fidelity to Shakespeare’s text but his engagements with other “fathers” provides a model of filiality suggesting multiple forms of duty. In other words, Branagh’s debt is not only to

William Shakespeare but also to Laurence Olivier—and certainly others as well, in a chain of influence. Branagh’s revision compulsion, which manifests in various forms of surplus and doubling, is the result of his paternal undecideability. At each turn, he simultaneously embraces and distances himself from Olivier’s perceived competition.

28 See Lisa Hopkins, L. Monique Pittman, Bernice Kliman (“The Unkindest Cuts”), and Mark Pizzato for more on point of view in the flashbacks. Crowl (Screen Adaptations) usefully notes that “While this image must surely be one imagined by the Ghost, I think the film suggests that it is shared by Hamlet as well: father and son are now on the same illustrated emotional page about their good/bad wife and mother” (75).

Branagh’s Hamlet is very conscious of covering up its close relationship to and reliance on Olivier’s earlier film. Rather than acknowledging that debt and building upon it,

Branagh resists Olivier’s influence while simultaneously coding that prior intertext into his notionally full-text Hamlet. He famously renounces the Oedipal reading of the play, which is itself a renunciation of Olivier who openly embraces that reading. Yet

Branagh’s Hamlet contains notable overlap with Olivier’s, as demonstrated above.

Beyond these scenes, however, are other visual cues linking the two films such as

Branagh’s choice of a blond Hamlet matching Olivier’s earlier decision to dye his hair lighter as well the dominant use of light and shade in both films—a chiaroscuro effect in

Olivier’s black-and-white film against the black-and-white checked hall in Branagh’s.

Branagh’s Hamlet is representative of the cultural force of previous Hamlets which sweeps up their successors into their orbit. Like the flood imagery that describes

Laertes’s return to court, Hamlet threatens to overtake the Shakespearean or English literary canon. Paying attention to that movement—a form of cultural revision compulsion—shows an ever-evolving, ever-revolving series of characters, events, and occurrences that together signify “Hamlet” and “Shakespeare” at the present moment.

This dissertation aims to study but a small sample of these artifacts with the ready acknowledgment that cataloguing and archiving instances of Hamlet remains an impossible task. One may only ever study Hamlet after Hamlets; the singular artifact is swept into the vortex of the collective Hamlets we have known.

Consuming and Subsuming Texts

In concluding this introductory chapter—indeed ending the beginning—I would like to shift metaphors yet again from that of impetuous Laertes overpeering, or surpassing, his rivals to that of Laertes, the flood, overtaking the plain. Following this 33 image gives us a sense of consuming and devouring; the flood literally “eats” the flats.

Yet, a slight shift in language shows that being consumed does not simply mean to destroy but also to be simultaneously subsumed, or incorporated, into the body of another.29 The arguments I have made about the way that filiality results in revision compulsion serve to show how the theme of adaptation within the play can play out in adaptations of Hamlet. In other words, just as the playtext invokes issues of heredity and re-writing, adaptations of Hamlet can be forms of descent with modification and/or revision compulsion. Specifically, this dissertation engages with some of the play’s

“questionable shapes” in order to inquire not whether or not they are Hamlet but how and in what ways Hamlet impinges upon their textual identity. The examples chosen here emphasize repetition and doubling and consume Shakespeare’s text in interesting ways. While some critics choose “commodity” as a way of designating how texts appropriate the cultural and commercial industry that is William Shakespeare, I prefer the metaphor of consuming in that it conveys the dual sense of swallowing up or ingesting the text as well as the idea that, through digestion, parts of the text might become integrated into the body (and, of course, following that metaphor through, other parts of the text are “dispensed” with entirely).30 To amend again the description of

Laertes arriving back at court, the adaptation, overpeering of its list, eats the text with impiteous and impetuous haste. But, like Laertes, the adaptation becomes re-integrated with the text. That is, Laertes, instead of overtaking the court, becomes subsumed by it;

29 I am indebted in this metaphor to Maurizio Calbi’s essay in Spectral Shakespeares on incorporation and ingestion in two Macbeth adaptations, a play in which the analogy of consuming is much stronger than it is in Hamlet.

30 This humorously calls to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s remark, “I have a smack of Hamlet in myself” (Qtd. Bevington 116).

34 he attempts to find vengeance for his father by overtaking the King—and he has the support of the citizens at Elsinore—but ultimately, he becomes part of Claudius’s plot to remove Hamlet. In the succeeding chapters, I will attempt to maintain this same tension of consuming and subsuming, or between allowing the adaptation to overtake the source and maintaining the source as a reference points for the adaptation. This is a theory of filiality, not fidelity, in which each adaptation can be a distinct identity while simultaneously engaging in a hereditary network of texts.

Chapter 2 extends my comments here on ingesting Shakespeare by considering

Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film To Be or Not to Be in which a joke about Hitler becoming a piece of cheese gives way to an argument on censorship—which, in this film, is itself a digestive metaphor in the sense that the film reworks the censored text(s) by chewing on them, allowing them to be re-formulated and re-integrated into the film’s body. To say that To Be or Not To Be is a variation on Shakespeare’s play only works in the filial sense that I’ve described above. The film does not re-present or re-write the narrative of

Hamlet. Instead, using Hamlet’s famous soliloquy as a starting point, the film offers a figure of a hammy-Hamlet (played by Jack Benny)—reminding us perhaps of the joke about Hamlet being a small ham—whose egotistical missteps allow Lubitsch to comment on the situation of Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw.

Censorship—figured as repression in the film—becomes a powerful force that ultimately requires the film’s only clearly-coded Jew, Greenberg, to offer up a plea for justice and mercy, voiced through another Shakespeare character: Shylock. Shylock’s speech, itself repeated three times within the film, is Greenberg’s memorial reconstruction of

Shakespeare, which, due to his marginal status can only be performed in marginal

35 spaces. Yet, the marginalized Greenberg functions like Shakespeare—present here only in sound-bite form—within To Be or Not To Be; Greenberg’s presence and performance is what provides meaning to the film, if only belatedly. By breaking down the binaries of illusion and reality, Greenberg (and by extension, Shakespeare) shows the audience a way out of the censorship and repression contained within the film, but only by offering himself as a sacrificial lamb.

Chapter 3 again considers the issue of repressed texts by focusing on two 21st century American television series—Gossip Girl and Arrested Development—that encode Hamlet-like narratives within their plots. These series never acknowledge their indebtedness to Shakespeare’s play, in spite of the fact that each is heavily intertextual and meta-referential to other cultural and literary predecessors. I theorize this unacknowledged repetition through the metaphor of the meme—a concept that I adopt from its biological roots as well as its contemporary Internet usage. The meme, as an agent of encoded repetition-with-a-difference, provides an apt metaphor for the work of adaptation, suggesting that sometimes adaptation works not as a conscious process but as a realization of a plot, theme, or archetype that is embedded in a cultural

(un)conscious. Shakespeare’s “stickiness”—that is, his ability to retain cultural presence and value over the course of 400+ years—becomes a matter of cultural circulation and memetic uptake. Though these metaphors may appear initially to devalue the Bard’s work, the reality is that due to their “greatness,” the works of Shakespeare show themselves to be worthwhile in the cultural meme-pool.

I continue my technology-based metaphors in Chapter 4. My discussion of

Gregory Doran’s Hamlet (2009) involves a mostly “faithful” adaptation of Shakespeare—

36 in contrast with To Be or Not To Be, Gossip Girl, or Arrested Development. Yet, when one looks closely at its exploration on surveillance culture, its status as the “Doctor Who

Hamlet” is thrown into relief. As in his role in that popular BBC television series, David

Tennant’s Hamlet is surrounded by technologies of spying and watching with which he must engage for the sake of survival. I explore the tension between spying and surveillance technologies and the (only ever partial) truth, or authenticity that these technologies can archive. Like Polonius who determines to “find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre” (2.2.157–59), the surveillance technologies have limited means and access, especially as it concerns the internal, emotional landscape of the subject. That surveillance technology can only ever capture partially the “truth” of the situation is analogous to the work of the adaptation, which can only ever get at a piece of the source text, regardless of how “faithful’ it appears to be.

Text-representation is as complicated as self-representation. The identity of a source text is always diffuse; meaning is dispersed among a network of medially-bound texts.

What I seek to demonstrate in each of these case studies is the tension of filiality in adaptation. Each adaptation has a parent, a source text from which the adaptation derives its literary, visual, and formal codes, its DNA. But, just as genetics cannot account for all forms of parenthood, source texts are not the only form of textual inheritance for adaptations. Quite obviously adaptations draw from a number of sources, invoking both vertical and horizontal networks. That is to say, adaptations are involved in a complex family tree that frequently confuses and doubles its roles. By examining these filial and fraternal networks, one can get a better sense of the revision compulsion at work in the endless instantiations of Hamlet(like) adaptations.

CHAPTER 2 “CLEARLY IT’S NOTHING ALARMING…IT’S ONLY SHAKESPEARE”: CENSORSHIP, REPETITION COMPULSION, AND THE JOKE IN ERNST LUBITSCH’S TO BE OR NOT TO BE

In the period in which Ernst Lubitsch filmed and released To Be or Not To Be

(1942), a network of cultural, political, and social issues worked together to impede the film’s success. Lubitsch filmed the comedy during 1941, prior to the Japanese attack on

Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into World War II. But, before the film’s 1942 release, everything had changed. Peter Barnes neatly summarizes the shift in historical context:

In 1941, an unstoppable Hitler had smashed the Allies in the Middle East and was overrunning Russia and besieging Moscow; HMS Ark Royal was sunk, Sebastopol fell, Pearl Harbor was bombed and America entered the war, which was going very badly. The Japanese advanced across East Asia, taking Malaya and Singapore, while the Russians were fighting street by street in Leningrad, and thousands were dying daily. In January 1942, Himmler’s right hand man, Reihard Heydrich, talked about the extermination of the Jews in the Final Solution and by March Jews were being deported to Auschwitz in Poland. Everything is Poland. (7)

On March 6, 1942, Lubitsch’s comedy about Nazi-occupied Poland reached theaters and promptly flopped.1

That Lubitsch chose to make an anti-Nazi comedy that appears to make light of what he later termed the “miseries of Poland” may seem unsurprising given the director’s biography and history with Germany and the Nazi regime.2 As is well known,

Ernst Lubitsch emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1922, following up his

1 The actual numbers are complicated, however, since in the months following the film’s release, United Artists dissolved the Romaine Film Corporation. Through some accounting magic, the film made a profit but reported a loss. This was not resolved in tax court until 1949. See Eyman.

2 Lubitsch commented that the comedy was “the only way to get people to hear about the miseries of Poland. Audiences would feel sympathy and admiration for people who could still laugh in their tragedy” (Qtd. Eyman 302).

German filmmaking career with Hollywood success. In spite of the fact that he was well- entrenched in American Hollywood culture prior to Hitler’s rise to power, Lubitsch was despised by the Führer. Peter Barnes describes Lubitsch as “one of Hitler’s pet hates”

(7) and explains that railway station posters showed Lubitsch’s well-known face “as an example of a truly degenerate non-Aryan” (8). Scott Eyman’s biography references a

1940 Nazi propaganda “documentary,” The Eternal Jew, which depicts Lubitsch as an example of the stereotypical Jew, a figure who “is interested instinctively in everything abnormal and depraved” (233). Though To Be or Not To Be was conceived of, filmed, and released in the U.S. when Lubitsch and his family were safely out of Hitler’s grasp, he may have had something to gain by repressing the political connections of the comedy. In fact, on his last trip to Germany in 1932, Lubitsch answered a reporter’s question about why he discontinued making films there by saying, “That’s finished ...

Nothing good is going to happen here for a long time” (Qtd. Eyman 205). Yet, even though he was removed from the reach of German government censorship, Lubitsch still had to contend with Hollywood’s repression of filmmaking as elaborated in the

Production Code. Though Lubitsch was generally gifted at evading the more restrictive elements of the Code, the lack of Jewish images in 1940s Hollywood film that might have provided a larger context for his film along with the Hollywood taboos on making films about the “Jewish problem” in Europe, kept Lubitsch from crafting a more overtly satirical film.3

To Be or Not To Be was met with mixed reviews; some of the most notable film critics of the time, such as Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, denouncing the film

3 For more on the film’s evasion of Hollywood taboos, see Rosenberg, especially p. 210 on Lubitsch’s gift for “elusive allusiveness” and 214–15 on Pearl Harbor as important turning point for anti-Nazi filmmaking.

39 entirely.4 In his first of two negative reviews of the film, Crowther critiques the film’s poor timing: it opened “under delicate circumstances at best” and given the death of its female lead (Carole Lombard) as well as the ongoing war, “To say it is callous and macabre is understating the case” (7 March 1942). In the second critique, Crowther’s primary complaint, that the film “use[s] the world’s current misery as a backdrop for artificial shows,” is based on the film’s “shocking confusion of realism and romance” (22

March 1942). He accuses Lubitsch, among others, of “see[ing] the world through theatrical eyes” and of using the trauma and locales of war for recycling the “same old story lines.” Though Crowther’s remarks were the most strident, he was not the only critic of the moment to condemn the film.

More recently, critics have seen the film as a product of its cultural context, in which it is alternately seen as anti-Polish sentiment and anti-Nazi/pro-Shakespeare commentary. In a study of WWII films, M.B.B. Biskupski points out that in spite of

Poland’s centrality to the European conflict and its significance in postwar narratives, only three Hollywood film released between 1939 and 1945 are set in Poland—To Be or

Not To Be, In Our Time, and None Shall Escape—due to the common suppression of

Polish influences in war efforts.5 Even though To Be or Not To Be is only marginally

Polish, its vaguely Warsaw-like setting does not accurately reflect the political realities

4 Robert Stack, in a letter to the Los Angeles Times in 1997, writes “it [To Be or Not To Be] is now regarded as Ernst’s masterpiece, but at that time everyone, especially the press, lambasted it as in terrible taste.”

5 Biskupski posits several reasons for this including a lack of American interest in Polish subjects, the small presence of Poles in American culture, pro-Soviet Hollywood’s protection of Soviet interest at Poland’s expense, and the desire of many Polish Jews to forget about Poland rather than film it (8).

40 of its cast and crew, made up of only two Poles.6 Furthermore, other key figures—co- creator Melchior Lengyel and producer Alexander Korda—had motivation for outright repression of Polish themes.7 Biskupski objects to the film’s portrayal of the Polish

Resistance as primarily British-led, the Polish government’s ineptitude, and the presentation of Poland as a primarily “theatrical nation” (86). In other words, the film’s

Polish setting and Lubitsch’s statements about representing Polish miseries do not redeem what Biskupski reads as an overall anti-Polish rhetoric.8 Biskupski’s comments notwithstanding, the Polish/Jewish plight is not completely ignored by the film, and others convincingly argue for the film’s anti-Nazi, pro-Shakespearean significance. Both

Stephen Tifft and Hassan Melehy argue that the film’s humor undercuts Nazi and fascist rhetoric. Nicholas Jones suggests that the presence of the Shakespearean text equals resistance to Hitler, providing “occasions for political struggle and improvised theater”

(268). Joel Rosenberg’s reading, on the other hand, more acutely demonstrates the place of Shakespeare within the film’s Jewish sympathies, arguing that the cultural force of Shakespeare was “a means of resistance against the ongoing repression of thought, culture, and ideas” (213).

6 These are Jack Benny, the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants and Ryszard Ordynski, a technical adviser whom Biskupski credits for the correct spelling of Polish signs and names.

7 Lengyel also wrote a pro-Soviet propaganda film. Korda’s zeal for his adopted British home may explain important plot points such as the Polish squadron of the RAF, the eventual escape to England, and Shakespeare’s presence.

8 Poland was actually an interesting site for Shakespeare performance during the war as Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney’s recent study argues. Though Polish cultural activity was officially suppressed by the Nazi Regime, art and culture survived underground. Polish performances of Shakespeare during this time took on non-Shakespearean titles for sake of safety. Hamlet, for example, became The Danish Prince. Looked Through and Revised by David Rubinstein (Courtney 126). The only public performance of Shakespeare during this time took place in internment camps where they were permitted as a morale- booster.

In my estimation, the Shakespearean significance of the film falls somewhere between its anti-Nazi politics and its pro-Shakespearean tendencies. In fact, the film comes across as more ambivalent than this. The film’s “insensitivity” paradoxically yields a more sympathetic understanding of Polish miseries. And Shakespeare’s presence reflects the simultaneous ennui and resistance of the film. This non-adaptive adaptation—indeed a questionable shape—speaks volumes about the embedding of adaptation in the filmic unconscious. As a result of its political immediacy and its engagement with Hamlet and Merchant of Venice as well as the Nazi regime by way of the embedded play Gestapo, the film demonstrates an important register of filmic adaptation, by way of the link between Freud’s concepts of the death drive and the uncanny vis-à-vis the joke. What I referred to in the previous chapter as “revision compulsion” figures in a number of forms in Lubitsch’s film, demonstrating the powerful effects of repetition compulsion and repression. In this chapter, I will consider the film’s revision compulsion in three interrelated layers: the repeated joke, the repetition and revision of three plays-within-the-film, and the belated categorization of To Be or Not To

Be as a Shakespeare adaptation.

I will begin by studying the role of the death drive in the film’s two primary jokes: the interruption of Hamlet’s soliloquy and the comparison of Hitler with a piece of cheese. On the one hand, the repeated interruption of Hamlet’s contemplation in the film signals a move towards death; Tura cannot finish his speech, and indeed he never gets close. On the other hand, a joke about Hitler and cheese suggests another turn towards the death drive; in spite of its playful quality, the comparison anticipates shooting Hitler full of holes like a piece of Swiss cheese. That these jokes are not just

42 told but retold repeatedly in the film suggests a form of repetition compulsion, even when that repetition must be telepathic.9 These two jokes emerge from two plays embedded within the film’s narrative—Gestapo and Hamlet—which are both censored within the play. Ultimately, the repressed plays—released through the mechanism of the joke—are reworked into the comic plot of To Be or Not To Be. Through frenetic repetition and repeated censorship, the film finally gives way to the trauma (i.e., the

Nazi occupation of Warsaw) through the simultaneous staging of three plays: Gestapo,

Hamlet, and Merchant of Venice. Greenberg, who I argue is the film’s memento mori figure, performs these texts. When understood through the film’s censorship and repression of Gestapo and Hamlet, Greenberg’s performance breaks down the binary between life and death, illusion and reality, which leads to some ruminations on the place of adaptation in this non-adaptive film—in the sense that it merely quotes from, not repeats in a larger sense Shakespeare’s plays. Though To Be or Not To Be is not a faithful adaptation of Hamlet or Merchant of Venice, an extension of Freud’s understanding of the allusive joke, in which one replaces then reconstructs an object, informs my own theory of adaptation as it moves in the realm of the uncanny. Lubitsch’s film can only be considered as adaptation in a belated sense; this historically-evolving mode of adaptation sidesteps the taxonomic and fidelity-based discourses of adaptation and relocates adaptation as a shifting, morphing state. Here, adaptation can be read as hereditary but only by skipping a generation.

9 For example, Tura accurately anticipates how Ehrhardt (a man he has never met) will react to Siletsky. His humorous, awkward repetition of “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt” is later repeated verbatim by Ehrhardt himself.

Censorship and Repression in Gestapo and Hamlet

To Be or Not To Be contrasts two embedded plays—Hamlet and Gestapo—both of which embed the film’s repeated punch lines. The film begins with the Polish government censoring the Theater Polski’s production of Gestapo, a “serious play about

Nazi Germany.”10 The Nazis’ impending arrival makes the critical play too dangerous to perform, so the company replaces it with… Hamlet. The choice of Hamlet seems obvious. Not only does the play’s canonical status make it appear mostly harmless, but also its structure—a play-within-a-play—and themes—regicidal descent—create opportunities for political subversion.11 Hamlet covers over Gestapo, but traces of

Gestapo still show through because though Gestapo’s cancellation suppresses its onstage (and on-film) realization, the fictional play still appears in the margins of Lubitsch’s film. For example, in one scene, a poster for Hamlet is placed on top of the poster for

Gestapo, yet it only partially covers the image of the ostensibly more subversive play. In another scene after Gestapo’s cancellation, a chalkboard in the background lists

Gestapo on the rehearsal schedule.12 Though officially forbidden to perform the Nazi satire, the Polski troupe continues to prepare to play the Nazi parts. This visual marginalization and subtle realization of Gestapo takes place in the offstage portions of the theater. As I will demonstrate later, the onstage action of Gestapo and Hamlet must be displaced, relocated to offstage locations: alleys, hallways, and offices. It is this

10 Film and television quotes here and throughout the dissertation are my own transcription, unless noted otherwise.

11 Hitler himself deemed Shakespeare permissible for study and performance, a privilege not afforded to other non-German authors and ideas, with the exception of George Bernard Shaw in the first years of the Nazi regime. See Habicht and Ryback for more on Hitler’s inconsistencies regarding the ban on non- German authors.

12 Another layer of repression appears here as this rehearsal schedule is written in Polish.

44 onstage/offstage tension that suggests otherwise unremarked similarities between

Gestapo and Hamlet.

This problematic binary between Gestapo as subversive and Hamlet as safe ignores silent similarities between To Be or Not To Be’s two embedded plays that allow

Lubitsch to comment—at the level of the filmic narrative—on the contemporary

European political situation. By repressing Hamlet’s language and plot points, the film appears to only cite Hamlet, a seemingly innocuous formula based on borrowing

Shakespeare’s high culture status without considering the play’s subversive potential. In reality, though, the film’s subtle invocation of Hamlet draws out some political tensions that are as subversive as would be a performance of Gestapo. The very presence of

Shakespeare’s play in Nazi-occupied Warsaw suggests some basic political correlations between Hamlet and Gestapo. Not only do the suspicion, surveillance, and international politics of Hamlet fit with wartime contexts, but the play’s additional layer of a country overtaken by a usurper also links it specifically to the circumstances of wartime

Warsaw.13 One might even extend the comparison to parallels between Hitler and

Claudius, both of whom are smooth-talking, popular, and powerful politicians who also demonstrate emotional instability and aggressive, grasping pathology.

Both Hamlet and To Be or Not To Be are surrounded by talk of war that is easy to push to the margins but ultimately take over the narrative. In performances and films of Hamlet, the Fortinbras storyline, the most martial episode in the play, is often the first element cut for adaptation. Likewise, To Be or Not To Be pushes the reality of war to the sidelines for the purpose of personal dynamics and intrigue. In the film, as in

13 Rosenberg refers to Hamlet as the “quintessential drama of usurpation” (213).

Hamlet, we might consider the tension between interior and exterior threats. In spite of all the politics and intrigue inside Elsinore, the threat of Fortinbras’s return pervades the play, though this threat to Claudius’s rule takes place mostly off-stage or off-camera. By the end of the play, that exterior threat intrudes on Elsinore’s interior drama through

Fortinbras’s arrival. Similarly, in spite of the intrigue and drama within the Polski

Theater, war does come to Warsaw, displacing the Turas’ romantic tensions. In the film, even Maria’s dressing room becomes a site for the film’s mixed metaphors of sex and war; not only does she meet her lover and console her husband here, but also the first announcements of war are made here; even the language of seduction takes on a militaristic tone in the film.14 The film’s end, like Hamlet’s, is a scene of war. Hamlet ends with a takeover, albeit a peaceful one. And To Be or Not To Be ends with “warlike volley” as the actors parachute their way into England.

In addition to the thematic relationships between Hamlet and Gestapo, the film censors both plays by interrupting the performance and replacing it with a joke. Joel

Rosenberg remarks that To Be or Not To Be “suppresses” both Gestapo and Merchant of Venice within the film, repressing the Jewish-themed play in “open” resistance to the

Nazi regime. In Rosenberg’s view, these two plays are replaced by necessity with

Hamlet, but then they are played “belatedly” at the end of the film (236). What

Rosenberg does not acknowledge, though, is that the film also censors Hamlet, and in this way, the censorship of Gestapo and Hamlet actually allows for the film’s performance of Merchant of Venice, which is, in reality, the return of Gestapo with

14 For an example, see Maria’s responses to the romantic overtures of Sobinski and Siletsky.

Hamlet layered on for effect.15 Though Hamlet does not undergo the same type of government censorship as Gestapo, its presentation in interrupted “sound bite” form within the film suggests a different type of repression, which obliquely points to the inability of the theatrical troupe (and Lubitsch) to relate the entire account of what they wish to communicate to their (respective) audiences. The only embedded scene from

Theater Polski’s production is Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which is repeated four times in the film. Each time, however, an audience member walking out of the theater interrupts Hamlet’s speech. That the film never reproduces other scenes from the play and that this one scene is always interrupted effectively represses the play’s larger significance for the film’s themes. It reduces the play to only this famous soliloquy—the one passage in the play that even those unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s texts are likely to recognize—and thereby excludes from direct citation the complex political and psychological elements of the play that are, in point of fact, more directly related to the film’s message.

The interruption and repression of the full text of Hamlet figure a form of censorship, particularly following Michael Levine’s definition of censorship as both institutionally and individually imposed.16 In this sense, then, unlike the Polish

15 Interestingly, Rosenberg sets up a “triple censorship” in the film: the censorship of Gestapo, the censorship of Greenberg as Shylock, and the censorship of American filmmakers who were kept from representing Jews on film. This last point, while outside of the scope of my argument, is a major tenet of Rosenberg’s analysis. He concludes his article by provocatively arguing, “And in offering us (or, I should say, offering up) Greenberg, Lubitsch made telling allusion to the double vanished Jew: the Jew who was then disappearing from Europe, and the Jew who, in that otherwise noble era of classic Hollywood cinema, had all but disappeared from the American screen” (238).

16 Levine suggests that self-imposed censorship exerts as strong of an influence over the production of writing as institutionally-imposed censorship does. All writing undergoes a shifting combination of self- and institutional-censorship, and this censorship, far from being a negative, oppressive force, results in creative production. Also see Burt (Licensed by Authority) on the tension between institutional censorship and self-censorship.

47 government’s state-imposed censorship of Gestapo, the repression of Hamlet, exhibited through its repeated interruption, serves as the trace within the film of its own self- censorship in the name of both artistry and politics. Thus, not only is it humorous to repeatedly interrupt what are arguably the most famous lines of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy, but it is also politically subversive; to finish Hamlet’s soliloquy—and moreover, to finish Hamlet itself—would mean finishing Gestapo. After all, if Hamlet plays, everyone in the play dies. Likewise, if Gestapo plays, everyone—perhaps even those outside the play’s fiction (viz., the theater’s cast and crew who are rebelling against the Nazi occupation)—will die. The thematic link between the two plays establishes that Hamlet, like Gestapo, must be censored for the sake of its actors who die both on– and off-stage. Thus, if Hamlet’s soliloquy is interrupted, Hamlet cannot be finished, and it cannot become Gestapo. Interrupting Hamlet means preventing it from turning into an uncanny repetition of the censored play. Paradoxically, then, by not finishing Hamlet, Hamlet becomes Gestapo through the shared trait of the play’s censorship. Both plays must be to some degree repressed in the course of the film in order to escape the keen editorial eye of the censor.17

...then as comedy: Resolution through Joke-Telling

Since neither tragedy can work here and both plays must be censored, the film must resort to comedy to resolve its political tensions. The comedic plot of To Be or Not

To Be is in this regard the permissible resolution of both Gestapo and Hamlet. As Slavoj

Žižek, among others,18 argues, the genre of the Holocaust comedy film is the most

17 Perhaps this explains Ernst Lubitsch’s sly telegram to United Artists in which he proposes an alternate, if potentially bawdy, title for the film: The Censor Forbids. See Eyman and Kalat.

18 See also Richard Burt, “Shakespeare and the Holocaust.”

48 appropriate means of Holocaust representation because humor sidesteps the terrible, insistent reality of that which is unrepresentable. He writes that

laughter is one way of coping with the incomprehensible. If no direct realistic staging can be adequate to the horror of the Holocaust, then the only way out of the predicament is to turn to comedy which, at least, accepts its failure to express the horror of the Holocaust in advance and, moreover, projects this gap between the represented and its failed representation into its very narrative content. (68)19

Žižek’s argument, that comedy offers a way of circumventing a block on representation that tragedy cannot work around, relies on the fact that comedy must at the same time acknowledge the fundamental failure of representation. Its form signals that it can only be a substitute for a more direct representation, one that draws attention to its limits in this regard.

Likewise, Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, argues that the joke is both the cover for and the revelation of aggressive and tendentious elements of the unconscious. That the film’s political tensions are realized through the repetition of two jokes—the repeated interruption of “To be or not to be” and the retelling of the Hitler

= cheese joke—suggests that the telling of the joke liberates energies of the film’s unconscious. For Freud, the joke, like the dream, represents the return of the repressed in that both the joke and the dream abbreviate and create substitute-formations in order to work through repression and bring it to consciousness in an acceptable and transmissible form. The joke, through its primarily social function, releases the pent-up psychic energy through the laughter of the listener. Joking is a socially acceptable means of working through repressed hostilities. The hostile joke substitutes for the thing

19 Levine also comments on this theme by quoting a lengthy paragraph from Heinrich Heine in which Heine suggests that writers circumvent censorship through humor and irony. These moments of humor and irony are then the most honest. Levine continues that Hamlet is an example of this phenomenon in that he reveals his true madness through the pretense of madness (43).

49 itself, specifically the aggressive instinct that is repressed or sublimated as a condition of living in society. Freud argues that adults must redirect the aggressive instinct into more socially normative aggressions: violence directed towards the “other”—however it is constituted in the moment of the telling—and the hostile joke. Rather than directing violence towards members of one’s own group or towards those in positions of authority, we tell jokes that level our aggressions: “By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him” (122). The joke is thereby a means of safe, socially sanctioned retaliation and can

“make aggressiveness or criticism possible against persons in exalted positions who claim to exercise authority. The joke then represents a rebellion against that authority, a liberation from its pressures” (125). In this way, the hostile joke can become a means for actually oppressed individuals to safely stand up to an oppressor, by directing virtual retaliation to the oppressor.20

Lubitsch’s repetition of the two hostile jokes in To Be or Not To Be level the film’s aggression towards the Nazi regime. Both jokes make their objects (Hamlet and Hitler) into consumable, entertainment-driven commodities. In the first, Hitler is unfavorably compared to a piece of cheese, an aged, “stinky” product. This joke stems from the initial interrupted performance of Gestapo that opens the film but is retold later in the film by Nazi officials. The joke goes: “They named a brandy after Napoleon, they made a herring out of Bismarck, and the Führer is going to end up a piece of cheese.” The comparison of two earlier military leaders with consumable, aged products and the emphasis on the creation of these products by an ambiguous “they” levels a critique of

20 Note, for example, the Jewish whisper joke during WWII. See Kaplan.

50 and a threat towards Hitler. Like the Emperor Napoleon, who lives on only as an aged brandy, and Chancellor Bismarck, who comes back as pickled herring, would-be world ruler Hitler will return as a similarly aged product of fermentation characterized by its smelly by-products—with the added significance that this one, cheese, comes with bullet-shaped holes already in it. Thus, not only is it the destiny of these men to come back as effectively rotted food items, it is also their destiny to be bottled up or stored away and allowed to devolve into harmless foodstuffs in order that their demise may be enjoyed after they have ceased to be militarily and politically relevant. Thus the joke not only acknowledges Hitler’s “stinkiness” (like Tura’s Hamlet, Hitler stinks), but the joke also conceals an intent to kill Hitler, to put holes in him like a block or a slice of Swiss cheese. This cleverly, but not completely, disguised aggression is tied up in the politics of Gestapo as well as the on-screen arrival of the actual Gestapo in Warsaw. The possibility of telling the joke on stage is foreclosed by the censor’s arrival at the theater at the beginning of the film. But, to tell the joke is to perform Gestapo because the joke is representative, in a compact form, of the play’s aggression towards the Führer. The joke, like the play, lives on in the film through repetition.

This joke, like other Jewish whisper jokes, circulates throughout Warsaw.21 When

Nazi official, Colonel Ehrhardt, repeats the joke later in the film, the film’s audience—as well as Tura, the on-screen audience—recognizes it from its appearance in Gestapo.

Part of the humor arrives from the recognition that the “real” Nazi situation with Ehrhardt mimics the “fictional” Nazis with which the film opens. Not only is the joke told by and for

Nazis, it is met with a similarly negative reaction; Tura, here playing the part of a fake

21 For more on oral jokes in authoritarian regimes see Kaplan and Kessel.

Nazi, must express disapproval for the joke that mocks Hitler. Furthermore, in a telling reversal, only moments later we learn that a Polish rebel, Rabansky, has just been shot because “We have definite proof that this man was telling some outrageous, supposed- to-be-funny stories about the Führer.” The audience’s laughter in this scene arrives not through the joke itself; admittedly, this is not an especially funny joke. Rather, it laughs at the joke’s repetition, its appearance in “real life” and its ability to pass from agent to agent, each with possibly different reasons to ridicule the German leader. Yet, its third, offstage appearance, which results in Rabansky’s death, must then give the viewer pause. In a similar fashion, the humor of the repeated interruption of Hamlet’s soliloquy partly stems from our recognition of the original and our anticipation that it may be completed. In other words, “getting” the joke means recognizing its source and consciously or unconsciously following through a thread of influence to its end. And, as with the Hitler joke, we are then led in one case to pause at the gravity of one instance of the repetition punctuated with death.

The status of the “source” of the repeated element is a complicated issue here.

The Hitler joke makes this clear in that it stems from a fictional play; Gestapo, unlike

Hamlet, does not exist outside of To Be or Not To Be, and the film’s audience comes to this chain of repetitions with no original against which to match the repetitions. The first telling of the joke quotes from a (for us) fictional script to which we have no access; it begins, already, as a repurposed, repeated text. But, of course, the “To be or not to be” citations are similarly troubled. While on the one hand Shakespeare’s play is familiar to us—and perhaps above all these lines of Shakespeare—the dismemberment and

52 reassembly of the passage disconnects it from the play’s text.22 The issue at hand in the joke’s repetition is that it reveals, but only indirectly—because there is no direct way to reveal it—the thing itself. The aggression embedded in the jokes suggests the politics of the film’s unconscious. Both of the jokes are knowing and evident traces of the plays from which they come; though the full texts of the plays and their fuller significance have been repressed, these return in the condensed form of the joke.

In order to pursue this line of reasoning to its conclusion, we must consider in more detail the less obvious Hamlet joke, which indirectly levels aggression at the Nazi regime. The scenario plays out like a stereotypical bedroom farce; Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is repeatedly interrupted by a young, handsome Polish officer,

Lieutenant Sobinski, who stands up and walks out of the theater. Tura, the actor who plays Hamlet, is devastated, thinking this is a judgment on his acting, which is admittedly awful. What he does not know is that the phrase “To be or not to be” is a lovers’ code phrase agreed upon by Sobinski and Tura’s wife, Maria. When Hamlet begins that famous soliloquy, Sobinski is to meet Maria backstage. This scene, repeated several times in the film, always follows the same formula, compounding the comedy with repetition and with the tendentious element of the film audience’s

22 According to Marjorie Garber (Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers), to recognize a quote is to recognize the ghostly, the uncanny. Garber links the act of quotation with spectrality in that the quote always doubles its source, making the “original” source a spectral presence. She writes that “the use of quotation is itself always already doubled, already belated, since it cites a voice or an opinion that gains force from being somehow absent, authority from the fact of being set apart” (69). She continues, “a quotation is a ghost: a revenant taken out of context, making an unexpected often disconcerting appearance” (70). Like the revenant, the quotation derives authority from its reference to an absent source. Furthermore, calling attention to the quotation sets it apart, endowing it with even more authority. A quotation repeats, but it is not mere repetition. It alters. It rewrites. Ultimately, the quotation—embedded within a new text—is an adaptation, a repetition with variation. Furthermore, though Garber does not state this explicitly, the quotation functions as a figure of the uncanny, which “arises from a slippage in expectation” (Garber 83). The quotation is a dismembered, then reanimated text. It is a severed, dislocated, misplaced fragment that is reconstructed and reanimated in a new corpus (a new body).

53 knowledge of the cuckoldry. Tura is a suitable object for this joke; his vain, preening

Hamlet is a stinker, a ham; he is someone who obviously will never get the joke.

But this bedroom farce gives way to a hostility leveled through Shakespeare. We laugh at Tura, and we simultaneously laugh at the interruption of the famous speech because we know what should come next—the rest of the soliloquy—and what will come next—the lovers’ rendezvous. Sobinski walks out at the most clichéd moment in

Shakespeare’s entire canon and rewrites it before our eyes with a mocking and subversive meaning. Yet, the hostility towards the Prince of Denmark or Shakespeare disguises a more dangerous hostility felt towards the Gestapo, which is never allowed to play out in either Gestapo or Hamlet. The comedy of the interruption is not enough. Like the Hitler joke, the disguised aggression here—Hamlet must be interrupted in order to prevent Gestapo from being spoken—is embedded in Hamlet’s language, which is over- familiar to the audiences in the film and to the audiences of the film. Thus, the “To be” speech stands in for the entirety of Hamlet, in and out of the world of the film; it is a memento mori within the audiences’ notion of the play.23 Its quotation here, out of context and followed by farcical consequences, demonstrates that Hamlet must not only be repressed, censored within the film, but also this speech, in particular, must be shut down. Within Hamlet, the “To be or not to be” soliloquy functions as a memento mori, reminding the audience of their mortality. Hamlet’s speech within the play reminds the audience that death is always with us and that being and not-being exist simultaneously. A Renaissance audience, steeped in this tradition of daily, ritualized

23 The concept of memento mori, which I will explore more fully later in this chapter, is a Renaissance-era conventional reminder to the individual that “Remember, you will die.” The individual, by glancing at a memento mori object, was to be reminded of his or her mortality in order that s/he might be prepared for unexpected death at any moment.

54 reminders of death embedded in seals, rings, and paintings, would have understood the soliloquy’s importance to the play as a whole; Hamlet, in essence, does the work of memento mori in the soliloquy by considering death and life simultaneously.24 Hamlet sees these two states (being and not being) as existing on a continuum.

Yet this gravity in the midst of daily life is precisely why Hamlet, like Gestapo, must be censored. Tragedy cannot work here; it fails even when the film transforms the tragedy into a joke. At this historically traumatic moment—in the midst of an unfinished tragedy whose significance even for the Jews remains unclear—it is a given that death is with us. Lubitsch does not attempt to represent the fullness of the historical trauma in the film not only because he could not yet have known the extent of the Holocaust but also because, even if he anticipated its horrors, its scale and monstrous depths are, as

Žižek proposes, unrepresentable. Lubitsch wrote in a 1942 New York Times piece defending the film’s comedic tone that “I was tired of the two established, recognized recipes: drama with comedy relief and comedy with dramatic relief. I had made up my mind to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time.”

He thus treads a middle ground in the film between drama and comedy, in which he must downplay and even lampoon the seriousness of Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane, taking Hamlet’s great tragic speech and transforming it into the farce of a “ham” actor’s unknowing collaboration with his rival. Hamlet as great tragedy must be interrupted, and the comedic narrative of the film To Be or Not To Be must be allowed to take over. Yet,

Hamlet’s reduction and transformation into comedy actually provides Lubitsch with a

24 For more on the memento mori literary and visual tradition, see Harry Morris, Douglas Bruster, and Roland Mushat Frye. Harry Morris argues that the “To be or not to be” soliloquy is a memento mori text only in conjunction with the play as a whole; the speech and the play complement one another to form a comprehensive memento mori. Douglas Bruster emphasizes that this speech is the crux of the play, suggesting that it is central to an understanding of the play as a whole.

55 more appropriate, subversive memento mori through the figure of Greenberg. By transforming both Gestapo and Hamlet into bad jokes and farcical comedy, Lubitsch both represses and reveals the essential tragedy of the two plays. Yet, only by allowing the comedic plot of To Be or Not To Be to take over can Lubitsch address the horrors of the Holocaust. It is in this tragi-comedy that Gestapo and Hamlet are finally realized.

Alas, poor Greenberg

Once the comedy takes over, Lubitsch is finally able to do something with the death drive that contours Gestapo and Hamlet. This correlation between the death drive and the joke is also a move that relates to the uncanny. The repetition compulsion that reveals the death drive is present in both the joke and the dream, and it is in this sense of coming back, of inevitable and disruptive return, that the uncanny is encountered.

According to Elizabeth Wright, the joke-teller and the artist both move in the uncanny realm of the repressed, and “it is here that the uncanny rejoins the joke” (134).25

Lubitsch’s move towards the uncanny in the film occurs precisely at this nexus of humor, art, and the repetition endemic to the death drive, and it is in this way that we can speak of his revision compulsion, which is the product of censorship—both institutionally and individually defined. The film repeats to revise and revises to repeat as if trapped in an endless cycle of repression and release. Only through a massive revision—the combination of three plays into one—can this cycle be broken, but that revision can only be made by sacrificing the body of the Jew, Greenberg, an embodiment of the film’s need for a memento mori figure.

25 Wright extends this argument to literature and the arts, which “can present us with forms of the uncanny that life cannot, because the writer/artist has more access to illusion” (134). Nicholas Royle also acknowledges this connection between comedy and the uncanny, writing that “the uncanny is never from something comic: humor, irony and laughter all have a genuinely ‘funny’ role in thinking about this topic” (2)

This climactic scene, in which Greenberg must play the part of Shylock to the

Nazis, is a highly theatrical play-within-the-film that is never formally produced on a

Proscenium stage. This unnamed “play,” devised in the basement of the theater, is performed in the hallways of Theater Polski. Scripted by Dobosh and starring

Greenberg, this play enables the actors’ escape after their Polish Resistance covers have been blown. In this “play,” the Jew, Greenberg, confronts the Nazi’s with Shylock’s

Rialto speech from Merchant of Venice. While Theater Polski has already been the site for To Be or Not To Be’s other embedded plays—Hamlet and Gestapo—these censored plays were main stage, repertory fare. Institutionalization requires their censorship since institutional performance means playing by the rules of the censor and the audience.

Now, however, by moving offstage, Theater Polski can finally finish a play, and this play is the realization of both Gestapo and Hamlet. In other words, Greenberg’s nontheatrical performance undoes the censorship of Gestapo and Hamlet by layering on Merchant of

Venice. The paratheatricality here ultimately enables his performance in that the realization of Gestapo, Hamlet, and Merchant of Venice must occur in hallways, alleyways, and other marginalized spaces. This highly metatheatrical and meta-

Shakespearean scene is a Nazi/anti-Nazi play in the same sense as Gestapo.

Additionally, like both Gestapo and Hamlet, it is yet another play-within-the-film that confuses fiction and reality. The actors don Nazi costumes to confront and defeat the

Nazis, leading to confusion between who is an actor and who a Nazi. In this scene, the

Polski Theatre actors, with the exception of Greenberg, are Polish Underground anti-

Nazis dressed up as Nazis in order to dupe the real Nazis. They must therefore pretend to be the people they are trying to defeat.26 These are bumbling actors representing

26 Stephen Tifft writes that these actors adopt a “strategy of looking, speaking, and acting like Nazis in 57 bumbling Nazis.27 Bronski reprises his earlier Hitler performance and fools the Nazis, even though his Hitler could not fool the Poles.28

But this climactic off-stage performance does not lead strictly to the implied outcome of those plays. Though the Shylock performance does allow the actors to escape, it is only at the cost of Greenberg’s life. In this way, the film mixes genres; by invoking Merchant of Venice, the film simultaneously emphasizes the plight of Jews and

Poles and tragicomedically resolves the film’s plot. Here, as elsewhere in the film,29

Greenberg—a character clearly coded but never referred to as Jewish30—recites

Shylock’s Rialto speech, replacing the word “Jew” with “I” or “we.” He gives the speech three times: first in the hallway of the theater, then while shoveling snow from the sidewalk amidst the demolished buildings, and finally a hallway scene in which his audience includes an actor-playing-an-actor-playing-Hitler. The inclusion of the lines from Merchant of Venice, spoken by a character who is clearly coded as Jewish, substitutes for the otherwise absent Jew within a film that deals, openly, with the plight of (Jewish) Poles under Nazi rule. Though he wants nothing more than to play Shylock on stage, he can only recite Shylock’s lines in offstage locations, never on stage. This, of course, is the plight of the Jewish actor, and he is met with sympathy from his friend,

order to confound them” (3).

27 Robert C. Reimer suggests that this stereotypical presentation of Nazi ineptitude is actually damaging since it obscures the real human costs. These representations work to help us forget or ignore the tragedy.

28 This scene calls up another Shakespeare play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here, the Polski actors are both the rude mechanicals and the fairies manipulating and directing the activities of the forest.

29 The Merchant of Venice speech is performed three times in the film, only one time less than the Hamlet soliloquy from which the film derives its title.

30 Indeed, words that would make this explicit, such as “Jew” or “Jewish,” are never uttered in the film.

Bronski, who reassures him “What a Shylock you would have been.” By repeating this speech, Greenberg enacts his version of the film’s repetition and revision compulsion independently of the film’s other characters.

The film’s allusion to and interpretation of Merchant of Venice in this scene is played as strictly tragic.31 Like To Be or Not To Be, Merchant is ostensibly a comedy— after all, it ends with reunited lovers and Antonio’s losses made whole—yet Shylock’s character can be read as simultaneously villainous and sympathetic. While on the one hand he is “othered” and shunned from the company of the play’s Christians, his monomaniacal pursuit of Antonio’s pound of flesh is hardly a quality that must endear him to the audiences. In contrast to Shakespeare’s sympathetic villain, Greenberg’s

Shylock is strictly sympathetic, reciting the speech as a last statement proclaiming his humanity to the Nazi soldiers. Greenberg traps himself in the halls of the theater, surrounded by Nazis who may shoot him on sight32; he airs his grievances and defends his hatred to a silent Hitler stand-in knowing, as we do, that this (ersatz) Führer is

Bronski in disguise. Fake Nazis, however, rescue Greenberg’s fake Shylock, and they escape the theater and Nazi-occupied Warsaw. As has been frequently noted, however,

Greenberg’s Shylock speech is his final scene in the film; we never actually see him arrive in England with the other actors.33

31 See Zeno Ackerman for the complicated performance history of Merchant of Venice during the Third Reich.

32 Interestingly, Greenberg’s “othering” extends in this scene to his hiding spot. Whereas the other actors hide in the men’s restroom at the theater, Greenberg conceals himself in the women’s.

33 Gerd Gemünden, for example, notes, “the film deliberately leaves [Greenberg’s] whereabouts unresolved, thus instilling the happy ending of the film with a disturbing undertone” (71). In my opinion, this ending befits a Shakespeare comedy in that there are still dark, unresolved tensions.

Greenberg’s survival, and that of his friends, is solely based on performance. As he performs this poignant scene, he knows it was written and directed by Dobosh, with help from Shakespeare. When Dobosh proposes the scene, Greenberg’s usual response “It will get a terrific laugh” is met with a very quiet, almost inaudible line from

Dobosh, “No it won’t.” Dobosh continues, “If you don’t play it right, we’re all lost. And if you do play it right, I still can’t guarantee anything.” This scene fuses illusion and reality together because acting takes on real world consequences. On the one hand,

Greenberg is performing a role he has longed for throughout the film; yet, on the other hand, this high stakes performance will not result in widespread adulation and praise.

Rather, this performance is for the benefit of a small group, himself included. Whereas

Greenberg previously desired a main stage debut for his Shylock, now he must appropriate these lines for (off)staged self-preservation.

By borrowing these lines from Shakespeare, Lubitsch lends a sense of gravitas and authority to the scene. Lubitsch borrows Shakespeare’s lines in order to more forcefully speak out against the Holocaust without formally speaking out against the

Holocaust. The scene’s politics are grounded in the audiences’ recognition of the quotation. As with the Hamlet soliloquy embedded within To Be or Not To Be, in which understanding the lines’ significance requires a larger sense of the soliloquy and its place within the play, understanding the significance of Greenberg’s lines requires reversing Greenberg’s canny emendation of the original and (re)replacing its key nouns—substituting Greenberg’s “I” with “Jew.” Excising the Jew from the speech as repeated by Greenberg allows Lubitsch to call indirect attention to this plea of the persecuted through an omission that anyone in Lubitsch’s audience within and without

60 the film will recognize. The Nazi officers in this scene must be knowledgeable of this scene; their ability to substitute the play’s original language might be part of what damns

Greenberg and leads to his absence from the final scene in England. And, in an astounding move, Lubitsch can circumvent Production Code, which required him to represent fairly “the history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of all nations,” while still sending his message about the humanity of those most cruelly caught in

Hitler’s grasp.

Again recalling the film’s appropriation of Hamlet, Greenberg is a version of

Hamlet’s Yorick; he is the deliberate reminder that death is always with us. Greenberg embodies Yorick’s skull, thus becoming the speaking skull of the memento mori tradition. Throughout the film, he is the figure of comedy, a “fellow of infinite jest.”34 His repetition of “It will get a terrific laugh” at key moments in the film reminds characters and the audience that humor must be found in trauma.35 Yet, by the film’s end, he is revealed to be a living corpse, another Polish/Jewish casualty. In this scene, he visually resembles the figure of the skull conventionally associated with the memento mori tradition; his gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes take on the appearance of a man already dead. In the speech, Greenberg (as Shylock) is making a case for his humanity: “Aren’t we human? Have we not hands, organs, senses, dimensions, affections, passions?”

This insistence on humanity coming from a speaking skull compares the listener with

34 See Hamlet 5.1.185.

35 Rosenberg refers to Greenberg as the “angel of laughter” in the film because though he is never seen laughing, he is the film’s defender of comedy. Rosenberg writes that Greenberg dreams of a “world safe for laughter” which would also mean a world which is safe for Jews (222).

61 the speaker in the manner of the memento mori skull.36 Greenberg’s repetition of

Shylock’s speech serves as an injunction to the viewer to “remember me,” and it simultaneously serves as a reminder to retell his story. Tura and company hold up

Greenberg as their substitute in the presence of the Nazis.37 He is—and here the layers and echoes of substitution are especially numerous—the sacrificial lamb that gets them out of Poland.

It is important to remember that memento mori is not death itself. Rather it is the mark of a threshold, a perspective on the relation of life and death. As Garber points out, memento mori works like a perspective painting in which both life and death are represented simultaneously. Roland Mushat Frye argues that through the early modern memento mori tradition, “one was directed toward life—toward the effective living of life which must, in every case, be lived under the shadow of death, and which should be lived without anxiety, without dread, and without a preoccupation with transiency” (28).38

Greenberg’s presence in the film works in this double-vision, perspectival way. He is a figure of both comedy and tragedy, of life and death. In contrast to the early modern paintings that juxtapose vanity with mortality, Greenberg asks the film’s viewers to juxtapose humor with mortality. As the memento mori bridges the gap between death and life, Greenberg also reveals the film’s obsession with breaking down the gap between illusion and reality, themes representative of Hamlet, Shakespeare more

36 Marjorie Garber (“Remember Me”) argues that memento mori in Hamlet can be traced from the Ghost’s “Remember me”—“the proverbial phrase of the speaking skull” (4)—through Hamlet’s graveyard conversation with Yorick’s skull to his dying request to Horatio to “tell my story” (5.2.349).

37 Rosenberg reads into this scene that the Jew is ultimately expendable. This sobering statement is grounded in Tura’s statements once the troupe arrives in England in which he takes credit for being the hero of the story (235).

38 Frye reads the memento mori tradition in Hamlet as an explanation for a rational, thoughtful prince.

62 generally, and dreamwork. The break between illusion and reality arrives at the breach of theatrical and paratheatrical locations. The film’s onstage performances at first glance appear like the “insets” of Hamlet, scenes that Marjorie Garber (Shakespeare’s Ghost

Writers) refers to as “encapsulated artifacts” that distinguish fantasy from reality (172).

The film contrasts onstage and offstage performances with Greenberg as a focal point.

The film’s onstage performances, which include the opening Gestapo rehearsal and Hamlet soliloquies, serve as rehearsals for later off-stage plot points. In the

Gestapo performance, the audience is led to believe that this is part of the film’s plot.

Hamlet’s soliloquy, on the other hand, appears strictly as artifice; Tura’s belabored pause and the subsequent lines from the prompter’s box demonstrate the “hamminess” of the actor’s Hamlet. In a third onstage scene—when Sobinski shoots Siletsky—the two nonactors are caught in the stage spotlight while the actors employed by Theater

Polski are in the audience. Each of these onstage scenes prepares not only the actors but also the audience for equally important offstage scenes. The film’s offstage performances are built from the same artifice as their onstage counterparts. Scenes take place backstage in Maria’s dressing room (her affair, the initial announcement of war), the theater’s basement (the air raid, the plans of the Polish Underground), the theater’s office (in which Tura plays “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt”), the alley outside of the theater (where Greenberg and Bronski watch the troops march in, shovel snow, and where Greenberg recites his Shylock speech for the first two times), and the theater’s hallway, notable for being the scene of Greenberg’s final performance. These offstage locations are all the sites of war and political machinations, just like the onstage

63 locations. That they mirror the onstage scenes suggests that they are “visual metaphors” for each other.39

Greenberg’s physical marginalization within the film explodes the divide between representation and reality. Whereas Tura’s Hamlet delivers his speech on the Polski stage in front of a live audience, Greenberg’s lines are relegated to the theater’s offstage spaces: backstage, in the alley of the theater, and in the theater’s hallway. In fact, we never see his character in any mainstage performance. In this way, Tura and

Greenberg reflect the two sides—life and death—of memento mori tradition, contrasting

Tura’s worldly figure with Greenberg’s skeletal cadaver. Whereas Tura is all vanity,

Greenberg is all gravity. In the words of the memento mori tradition, “I was what you are; you will be what I am.” Thus the two men are not as separate as they may seem; rather, they are tied together by their respective Shakespeare soliloquies.40

Given these duel(ing) soliloquies, we can conclude that acting is what transcends both onstage and offstage spaces. Acting is no longer the realm of the stage, and it is no longer (nor was it ever) divisible from the self. That is, acting goes from being the job of “actors” on the proscenium stage to a necessity of everyday life in which the individual requires acting to survive. In this way, acting is the threshold between illusion and reality, a break that paradoxically acting seems to set up in the first place. In psychoanalytic terms, we might reframe this division as the gap between repression and

39 David Kalat, in his audio commentary for the 2013 Criterion edition of the film, points out that the film always precedes the “real” with a “fake.” For example, we see Tura’s fake Ehrhardt before the real Ehrhardt. Kalat uses a string of additional examples in order to suggest that the counterfeit and the real work in the same way. The “secret” meaning of the “To be or not to be” speech, according to Kalat, is the distinction “To be or merely appear to be.” The presentation of the “fake” before the “real” results primarily in humor, except within the character of Greenberg, a character who Kalat points out we are not meant to laugh at.

40 See Rosenberg, Gemünden, and Melehy on Tura/Benny as silently Jewish character.

64 revelation. Greenberg both acts and enacts the figure of the Jew; he sublimates his

Jewishness into the part of Shylock. But that sublimation puts him at even more direct risk, as he enacts his own Jewishness through the Shylock speech while surrounded by uniformed Nazis.41 Furthermore, if joke-telling is also an act that re-presents and discloses unconscious, repressed desires, this may mean that acting is the biggest joke of all. Greenberg’s desire to play Shylock is really a desire to play himself. Acting works through repetition; it releases pent-up psychic energy. Acting is the ability to adapt, to repeat. Acting literalizes psychic processes in that it is symptomatic of repetition compulsion and leads to compounding uncanny doubles through the layering of the self and theatrical roles.42

Adaptation and/as the Joke

Since the language with which Freud describes joke-telling in Jokes and Their

Relation to the Unconscious is strikingly evocative of the language of adaptation studies, Freud’s elaboration on the technique of jokes is helpful for understanding how

To Be or Not To Be works as a Shakespearean adaptation. Freud borrows his terms for the joke-work from his studies of dreamwork, establishing that the techniques of condensation, modification, allusion, unification, indirect representation, omission, and analogy apply to both processes (205). The appearance of most of these terms in taxonomies (and anti-taxonomies) of adaptation implies that the analogy of the two

41 This theme of an actor “becoming” his or her part can also be seen in George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947) and Douglas Hickox’s Theater of Blood (1973)—both of which take a Shakespearean actor as the figure of horror.

42 See Joseph Roach and Herbert Blau on doubling, surrogation, and ghosting in performance. Blau in particular is interested in psychoanalysis and performance. He sees the repetition of performance as indicative of the uncanny and the death drive: “What is being repeated in the tautological cycle of performance - replay, reenactment, restoration, the play within the play within—is the memory of the origin of the memory which is being solicited and resisted. It is in this recursive way that performance is a testament to a life which seems to look like death because it is always being left behind” (174).

65 processes extends also to the processes of doubling, translating, and transforming texts.43 The connection here between dreamwork, joke-telling, and adaptation demonstrates an unconscious drive that runs through all three processes in that each seeks to represent that which is embedded in the unconscious by appropriating techniques predisposed to failure. Freud suggests that allusion in joke-telling works through repression, replacement, and repetition. In other words, a joke locates an object, replaces it, then reconstructs it. The allusive joke sublimates the thing itself, replacing it with a more socially-acceptable, safer object while retaining enough traces of the original that the unconscious cathexis in it can be discharged in the joke. This technique plays out in To Be or Not To Be’s simultaneous repression and invocation

(indirect representation and condensation) of Shakespeare in two particular scenarios.

In the first, Gestapo is the object that is repressed and replaced with the embedded

Hamlet, and, as I have demonstrated, Gestapo is then reconstructed by the film’s narrative. In the second setup, the film finds an object (Hamlet), replaces it (with To Be or Not To Be) and reconstructs it (Hamlet within To Be or Not To Be). In these scenarios, the objects of the jokes—Gestapo and Hamlet—are at the same time present and absent. They move through the film spectrally, in that their reconstructions are approximations of an original which can only be represented in the abstract and figured indirectly or synecdochally. In other words, these objects are experienced as complete objects only in the imagination of the viewer. To reconstruct them means to

43 Linda Hutcheon includes the processes of subtraction/contraction, addition/expansion, and mimesis/imitation. Other attempts at clarifying the modes of adaptation include Julie Sanders and Gerard Genette. For an anti-taxonomic approach, see Thomas Leitch. Freud, however, recognizes the inevitable failure of terminology. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, he admits that pinning down definitions remains an elusive task (94). As in “The Uncanny,” Freud notes both the need for and impossibility of the task of defining with precision.

66 simultaneously construct them for the first time but retrospectively; the reconstruction is inseparable from the construction.

Since Freud’s process of allusion is deceptively linear, appropriating “haunting” terminology enables one to understand the movement of adaptation in general and the emerging, shifting, evolving status of To Be or Not To Be as Shakespearean adaptation in particular. The language of haunting and spectrality layers a nonlinear, recursive process onto allusion while simultaneously incorporating a sense of suspicion and surveillance. Though most OED definitions of “haunt” relate to habit, custom, and tradition, one clarifying meaning defines “to be haunted” as “to be subject to the visits and molestations of disembodied spirits.” Another revealing entry is for “haunting, n.” which is defined as “customary resort; frequenting; visitation by fears, suspicions, imaginary beings, spirits, etc.” According to these definitions, haunting connotes unsolicited visitation, or the specter as an uninvited and unwelcome guest. Thus,

“haunting” is not a neutral term but one associated with anxiety and compulsion imposed upon the haunted; the haunted individual is “subject to” a visitation which she or he does not desire, at least not consciously. To speak of haunting in adaptation, then, one must acknowledge this more sinister connotation. The haunting of an adaptation by a source text indicates a foreboding relationship between the two texts. That the specter returns indicates a need to resolve unfinished business.44

In adaptation, the specter of the “original” text or author must return due to an unresolved textual violence committed in the heart of adaptation. Like the hostile joke,

44 Derrida, in Specters of Marx, writes about the ghost of King Hamlet that “everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, but a reapparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play” (2). In this way, the ghost is simultaneously appearing for the first time and reappearing.

67 the adaptation must level an aggression—even if it is unconscious—at an object-text.

The adapter must reckon with the adapted text in a shifting, possibly inconsistent power struggle. This is true both in ostensibly faithful adaptations and in spinoffs and unconscious adaptations because the source, particularly if the source is iconic, wields a weighty influence over the adaptation. Even in circumstances in which the source text is a reverential object (e.g., a privileged object from the Shakespeare canon), the adaptation seeks to expose something about the source that the source does not, or cannot, express in its own terms. This exposing function, similar to Freud’s obscene joke, is a form of textual violence, since the exposed does not grant permission to the exposer. The source cannot participate in its own adaptation. It is now the property of the adapter and is at the mercy of his or her will. Even an adaptation initiated by the source’s author must evolve through re-vision. The very nature of trans-medial adaptation means violating the media-specificity of the source. Even when source and adaptation retain creative control from the same author,45 the aggression and hostility of adaptation works in two directions simultaneously: the adapter violates the source and the source returns to haunt the adapter.46

Typically, this source/adaptation aggression does not manifest itself explicitly; for example, adaptations, To Be or Not To Be included, rarely appear to be openly hostile to Shakespeare. As with joke-work, though, the “tendency” in adaptation is hidden;

45 One might consider recently popular novel-to-TV/film adaptations such as Song of Ice and Fire and Hunger Games in which fans vigilantly criticize each deviation from storytelling in spite of the fact that authors George R.R. Martin and Suzanne Collins are closely involved in writing the screenplays.

46 We could view this shift more neutrally in terms of market demand in which the consumer dictates the revision. Yet this critical re-orientation only shifts the description to capitalist economic terms. Then again, censorship, creativity, and license are always already conceived of as economic transactions. See Burt (Licensed by Authority).

68 hostility lurks in what is not said. While ostensibly an amiable, good-natured response to

Shakespeare, To Be or Not To Be still exhibits the two-way, dialogic yet aggressive, instinct that is endemic to adaptation, the joke-work, and the dream-work. Shakespeare, like Gestapo and Hamlet, haunts the margins of To Be or Not To Be in the way that canonical authors and texts always haunt any artistic endeavor. Though the allusions to

Hamlet and Merchant of Venice are seemingly decoupled from their Shakespearean contexts, Shakespeare keeps trying to come back in the film. Though this is not an adaptation in any straightforward sense—indeed the film is typically referred to as an appropriation, a spin-off, or just a citation of Hamlet—Lubitsch’s film, in its unconscious and its play with illusion and reality, becomes an adaptation only through its careful avoidance of adaptation in a more conventional sense. The film’s Shakespearean references encourage the Shakespeare-literate viewer to “read into” it, to impose a more literary, Shakespeare-based approach to the film that the film itself does not signify directly. Thus, regardless of whether Lubitsch means anything by his

Shakespeare references (and, indeed, this vantage point invites us to leave authorial intent completely out of the picture), spectral Shakespeare allows for new, diverse, and unconstrained (potentially valid) interpretations of the source text and new ways of making the source text signify in a context that Shakespeare could not have envisioned.

In other words, not only does the film help us understand Shakespeare differently, but

Shakespeare also enables us to understand the film in new ways.

While this conclusion may seem obvious, acknowledging its relevance reveals a curious shift in the marketing of this resolutely non-Shakespearean Shakespeare adaptation because even as the film seems to ask its audience to remember

Shakespeare, its 1942 Hollywood release sought to repress the signs of this

Shakespearean context as well as those of its complicated anti-Nazi politics. In this way, even though Lubitsch’s invocation and appropriation of Shakespeare is apparent

(i.e., he takes Shakespeare’s most famous line as a title and depicts two famous soliloquies within the film), the film’s original production materials suppress the

Shakespearean relationship. Later releases of the film, specifically the 2013 Criterion edition, reverse this dynamic and capitalize on the Shakespeare and Nazi themes. The contrived controversy of the film’s title provides an interesting starting point for understanding the repression of Shakespeare in the film’s marketing and allows us to look at the institutional forms that censorship might take, rather than the self-imposed, creative repression of the plays within the film. During post-production, the powers-that- were at United Artists objected to the film’s title; they were nervous about the dramatic, literary connotations of the film, and they worried that the Shakespeare reference would negatively influence the film’s marketing and reception because audiences would be confused about whether the film was a comedy or a drama. Lubitsch’s response was to propose alternate title: The Censor Forbids. On the heels of the proposal, United Artists received hostile notes from the film’s stars, Lombard and Benny, who objected to the change in title on the grounds that The Censor Forbids was too “suggestive” and in poor taste. In Lubitsch’s “retraction” of the (presumably disingenuously) proposed film title, he writes

I have never weakened on ‘To Be or Not To Be’ despite resistance by sales department because I know that anything unusual always meets with resistance. This title not only fits the structure but I firmly believe that the strength of several scenes in the picture would be enhanced by original title. (Qtd. Eyman 298)

This manufactured drama speaks to the complications of censorship in film production, in that “censorship” in this case goes beyond the prohibitions of the Production Code.

Rather, it involves a network of interested parties—directors, actors, producers, distributors—working together and at odds with various subsets of these agents in a complex, shifting literary, cultural, and political context. Hostility towards the “source” may be imposed by any number of agents in this group. Lubitsch, always adept at skirting the censor, took advantage of allegiances of the multiple parties with a stake in the production.

The film’s network of Shakespearean and anti-Nazi politics were similarly repressed in its paratextual promotional materials. At the time of To Be or Not To Be’s initial release, Hamlet’s influence on the film is variously demonstrated. The U.S. release references Shakespeare only in the film’s title; other promotional materials fail to reference any Shakespearean or Nazi connection. The film poster (1942), for example, sets Jack Benny and Carole Lombard’s faces against a cheerful yellow background. Two small illustrations depict the film’s romantic comedy themes. In the first, young men compete for the attention of an attractive, well-dressed woman

(presumably Lombard. The second shows the woman being chased by a man.

According to its poster, the film will be about a romantic comedy.47 The poster references neither Shakespeare nor Nazis and in no way indicates the film’s wartime setting. Rather, To Be or Not To Be is marketed as just another romantic comedy.

Though it may have been politically and financially expedient given the film’s

47 Though this is outside of the scope of this chapter, the “chase” depicted here seems more desperate than playful. The expression on the woman’s face looks as if she is fleeing the man. And in the other picture, she appears ambivalent about being the center of attention.

71 complicated historical moment, the U.S. release’s failure to reinforce the film’s

Shakespearean or anti-Nazi politics suggests the structures of repression and censorship explored in this chapter. The repression of the Nazi-related trauma as well as its Shakespearean connection relates directly to the timing of the film’s release; the stretch of time between its production and release is crucial. A 1942 audience does not need (or perhaps want) frank reminders of Nazism, especially in an ostensibly comedic film. Like joke work and dreams, then, the topicality—its status as “fresh, recent, and untouched by forgetting” (Freud, Jokes and the Unconscious, 151)—means that its traumatic content must be repressed if only to later be revealed in distorted forms.

While international releases in later years do emphasize the Hamlet and Nazi connections of the film, the 2013 Criterion Collection release is the first in the U.S. to do so in no uncertain terms. The image on the case cover shows Hamlet’s hand holding

Yorick’s skull over the face of a Nazi officer. The viewer observes from Hamlet’s position here, standing in the glare of stage lights, looking towards an audience of faceless Nazis, while addressing, presumably with a Hamlet soliloquy, Yorick’s skull.

This cover reveals the figure of the film’s death drive which previous U.S. versions ignored or suppressed. This 2013 cover explicitly links the Yorick skull with the Nazis, a reversal of the film’s equation of Yorick with Greenberg. By holding up Yorick’s skull in front of the Nazi audience, the image achieves two contrary effects: it makes Nazis the figures of infinite jest and it equates them with death and decay. Nazis, in 2013, are nothing but corpses: dead history, living only in the memory of their atrocities.

Furthermore, blocking out the faces of the Nazis in the audience makes them nameless and faceless, re-animated zombies. Identity does not matter because they are just

72 repetitions, copies of each other. There is still, of course, a layer of threat here in their inhumanity, something Lubitsch sidestepped by making his Nazis very human.

This evolution is what makes To Be or Not To Be’s adaptive status interesting; the film only emerges as an adaptation over time and only as it has been historicized, retroactively, as an adaptation. The 1942 U.S. release did not capitalize on

Shakespeare or Nazi themes (though the international releases did). But by 2013, even

American audiences are comfortable with the film’s connections to Nazis and

Shakespeare. Perhaps this is due to acculturation; we are now accustomed to

Holocaust narratives and humor in different ways than audiences of 1942. Whereas in

1942, the audience had some precedents upon which to draw for satire of Nazis

(Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and films of The Three Stooges are notable examples), those depictions never humanize the enemy as Lubitsch does.48 In the intervening years, audiences have not forgotten the Holocaust—indeed there are an abundance of

Holocaust films—yet, Lubitsch’s film still stands out for its complexity and its strange inconsistencies, which are a hallmark of its unconscious significations. Furthermore, its most recent release as a Criterion edition suggests that the film is now marked with the imprimatur of high culture. In 1942, United Artists was concerned that the audience might read too much high culture into the film, leading them to avoid it; Jack Benny and

Carole Lombard were not actors that audiences expected to see in that type of role. In

2013, however, Criterion wants that cultural cachet. It serves as a marketing ploy.

That the film’s adaptive status was historically produced collapses stable ideas of adaptation. Though alternately described as a citation, an appropriation, and a quotation

48 For more on this point, see Kalat’s audio commentary.

73 of Hamlet, To Be or Not To Be transcends taxonomic categories set up by adaptation studies. This is partly due to the film’s multiplicity; it takes “Shakespeare” as a source beyond the specific plays it cites. Furthermore, its source material is effectively spectral, extending to revisions of canonical texts, dismembered quotations, and fictional encapsulated artifacts. Not only are sources “Confronted with an overplus, a superfluity of fathers (Garber 179), they also must contend with a superfluity of sons. In this way, paternal undecidability is compounded by the undecidability of the characters and motives of the offspring. In this way, Lubitsch’s adaptation anticipates my discussion in

Chapter 3 of memes and the transmission of cultural ideas.

CHAPTER 3 HAMLET’S GHOST MEME: ACCIDENTAL SHAKESPEARE ON TELEVISION

Thus, every new revival of Hamlet is doubly haunted, on the one hand, by the memories of the famous Hamlets of the past (some within the living memory of audience members, others known only through historical reputation) and, on the other hand, by memories of the new interpreter, who comes with his own particular style and technique, in most cases also familiar to the audiences. The successful new Hamlet will add his unique voice to the tradition and join the ghosts with whom Hamlets of the future must deal. —Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage

And you tell me you’ve got some P.E. teacher directing? That just makes me want to puke all over your head, sir. Give me a chance to tell the Bard’s tale, and I give you my word on humble knee, whence you shall not say it wasn’t e’er to be. —Tobias Fünke (“Bringing Up Buster”)

To ask the question ‘is this Shakespeare?’ is to ponder the nature of the boundaries that extend around the designation ‘Shakespearian’, laden though that designation is with cultural power and value. ... those boundaries may have the illusion of permanence at a given moment, but in reality they are always in flux, constantly being renegotiated in response to a variety of cultural forces. —Douglas M. Lanier, “Post-textual Shakespeare”

That Hamlet keeps coming back in various stage and film productions and references in comic strips, novels, music, and art is by now a cultural truism. As Marvin

Carlson indicates in the epigraph to this chapter, Hamlet is an archive of cultural memory, and the play’s haunting of contemporary culture is visible even in phrases and images that creep into ordinary conversation and visual rhetoric. Yet, this embedding of

Hamlet in the collective cultural memory typically takes on ambivalence due to its characterization as both high culture (and thus boring or elitist) and quotable, own-able cultural commodity. On the one hand, mentioning the play can conjure a resentment of highbrow culture or memories of high school boredom; yet, on the other, Hamlet’s key elements—“To be or not to be...,” Yorick’s skull, the appearance of the Ghost—are cited regularly in the cultural ether. This tension between dismissal and reverence exemplifies

the popular cultural stance on Shakespeare in the 20th and 21st centuries in which allusions to and citations of Shakespeare figure deep ambivalence towards the plays.

Beyond the many, many cultural invocations of Hamlet—from now-canonical films by

Olivier, Zeffirelli, and Branagh, to more derivative forays through diverse genres including television, graphic novels, fiction, and abundant references in news articles, political cartoons, advertisements, and iPad apps—Hamlet also encroaches silently into culture in moments that one might describe as incidental or accidental Shakespeare.

Indeed, Douglas Lanier’s argument (“Post-Textual Shakespeare”) that the boundaries of what constitutes as Shakespearean are always in flux is particularly valuable in these moments.

I propose in this chapter that the concept of the meme, a term coined by Richard

Dawkins to describe units of cultural transmission but later adapted in a wider sense in

Internet culture, provides an interesting intervention in the discussion of what constitutes accidental Shakespeare, suggesting that versions of Shakespeare memes replicate and proliferate in popular culture, in important respects decoupled from the text of the play and its standing in the artistic and critical canon. In particular, I study subtle, unacknowledged references to the ghost meme from Hamlet in several popular 21st century television series—Lost, Six Feet Under, Gossip Girl, and Arrested

Development. In this ghost meme, a deceased or absent father haunts his son(s), producing in the latter a state of inaction or indecision. That Hamlet is never directly referenced in these popular appropriations is in some respects a defining characteristic of this structure as meme. In other words, as a meme, Hamlet circulates continuously and unconsciously, not always bound to the Bard’s reputation and his oeuvre, and

cultural artifacts can pick it up unintentionally. The meme is a unit of doubling and repetition; it proliferates wildly, spawns both replications and mutations, and never moves in a linear fashion. The meme could thus be said to participate in Lanier’s post- textual Shakespearean rhizome,1 in which the category of the Shakespearean, separated from its roots in Shakespeare’s language and theatrical history, becomes “a collection of narratives highly mobile from context to context, verbal style to style, genre to genre, media platform to platform” (107). Though Lanier’s examples of this phenomenon relate to artifacts still drawing on Shakespearean cultural capital, the

Shakespeare meme and the Hamlet ghost meme are logical extensions of his argument because the meme epitomizes these highly mobile narratives. Furthermore, as Lanier also points out, Shakespeare and adaptation does not just work in individual examples, but in “collective acts” (113). This “aggregate” participates in “reshaping our conceptions of Shakespeare in response to energies, paths of flow, tensions, pressures, and blockages within the larger social and cultural matrix, itself constantly in flux” (113). This explanation of the Shakespearean rhizome’s constant movement suits my discussion of the meme, itself a unit of near-constant fluctuation and reappearance. Though I study only two examples in particular in this chapter, versions of the ghost meme proliferate across media platforms and can never be completely tracked, archived, or documented.

My two primary examples, taken from the American television series Gossip Girl and Arrested Development, are particularly interesting given their adjustments of the

Hamlet narrative, even as they refrain, nearly studiously, from citing the play itself.

These series, typically defined by their intertextual engagement with other cultural

1 See Lanier (“Recent Shakespeare Adaptation”).

artifacts, thus register the ghost meme retroactively as presumably accidental citations of Shakespeare. In each, the Hamlet analogue is able to contend with the ghost of his father, particularly because these ghostly fathers are symbolically or procedurally alive in the series. In other words, Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl and the Bluth sons in Arrested

Development deal with a metaphorical ghost in the form of an absentee father. By rescripting the Hamlet narrative, the two series are able to avoid an ending in which

Hamlet—and the rest of the Danish court—must die. In Gossip Girl, the Hamlet character, Chuck Bass, is able to ultimately reclaim his agency through the confrontation with (and killing of) his father. In Arrested Development, on the other hand, the Bluth sons collectively form a composite version of Hamlet’s character, and each is in his own way haunted by the figure of the not-dead George Sr. The ghost meme in Arrested Development is doubly interesting because not only does the series embed the meme in its narrative arcs, but also the series is symptomatic of broader ramifications of meme theory through its open investment in doubling, repetition, and performance. Reading the “accidental” Shakespearean moments in popular culture through the lens of memes suggests that Shakespeare’s “stickiness” in contemporary popular culture is a matter of cultural circulation, selective thematic and narrative uptake, and memetic survival, traits which are characteristic of all forms of

Shakespearean adaptation.

Defining Memes: Biology and the Internet

The term meme originates from Richard Dawkins’s 1976 The Selfish Gene in which he defines the meme as a unit of cultural transmission roughly analogous to the gene. This single chapter in a longer text concerned with genetics proposes the term— shortened from “mimeme” and capitalizing on the relationship to both “memory” and the

French word “même"—to “[convey] the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (192).2 Dawkins’s now-famous examples of potential memes include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”

(192). Like genes, memes are replicators; they function solely to replicate cultural units.

According to Dawkins, a successful meme possesses three properties: copying-fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. In other words, the meme that survives faithfully copies its predecessor (though there may be important mutations that also enable memetic success), copies frequently, and continues copying itself for a long period of time. Of these three terms, fidelity requires the most clarification; even Dawkins confesses that when it comes to copying-fidelity he is on “shaky ground” (194). Rather than being a perfectly mimetic replication, the meme always involves some degree of change and adaptation to a new symbolic environment. As Bortolotti and Hutcheon clarify, in narrative adaptation “copying actually means changing with each replication—most often, changing medium” (447) but “recognition of the narrative [their equivalent for meme] has to be possible: some copying-fidelity is needed, precisely because of the changes across media and contexts” (447).3 This copy-with-a-difference can sometimes be described in terms of mutation, in which mutations of a meme encourage the preservation and long-term survival of the source, though in slightly different, more

2 Susan Blackmore argues that memes are a uniquely human phenomenon since we are the only species capable of imitation. In her view, the meme, as a replicator, seeks only to be copied and, because the meme has no additional agenda, it does not move towards a particular end point.

3 Similarly, Kate Distin suggests that memes walk the line between replication and reproduction. Others tend to see memes as either one or the other. Susan Blackmore, for example, sees memes as sheer replication and imitation.

resilient forms.4 Long-term survival requires a certain amount of “stickiness”; that is, successful memes become deeply embedded in cultural consciousness.5

It is in this vein that memes are most applicable to adaptation studies, given the recent rapid proliferation of what Susan Blackmore calls “meme-copying machinery,” an evolution that began with print but continues in television, film, and the Internet. The increasing fidelity and fecundity of memes due to the spread and power of these replication machineries results in an increased influence of memes on individuals and cultural forms. At the same time, however, technology leaves a memetic footprint, allowing one to trace the trajectory (or heredity) of individual memes in a way that was not available in the past. Thus, even though most studies of memes are conducted primarily in the social and behavioral sciences, the study of memes and their replication may help us understand the way that literary texts move and evolve in culture. The tropology of heredity is in fact another memetic structure that has overlaid the study of adaptation and appropriation since each generation (or new adaptation) provides a variation with a difference.6

The concept of the meme has been met with mixed reactions; some scholars, particularly Bortolotti and Hutcheon, have dismissed its terminology outright, choosing

4 Linda Hutcheon applies this theory of biology and mutation to narratives, suggesting that stories work through adaptation and “travel to different cultures and different media” (31). In addition, “like genes, they [stories] adapt to those new environments by virtue of mutation—in their ‘offspring’ or their adaptations. And the fittest do more than survive; they flourish” (32). For Hutcheon, these biological, genetic principles of adaptation apply directly to how stories spread and evolve culturally, though she does stop short of describing this activity as memetic (see also Bortolotti and Hutcheon).

5 Michael Bristol addresses “stickiness” when discussing Harold Bloom’s “strong poems” in which “an original poem can deeply and permanently affect a culture’s customary idiom of representation” (126). Bloom’s strong poem can affect even “those who read no literature” (126).

6 See Robert Aunger. This concern with lineage provides yet another resonance with Hamlet, a play itself obsessed with heredity, inheritance, and suppositional fathers, as explored in the introduction to this dissertation.

instead the term “narrative.” One concern in the scientific community is that the meme defies scientific rigor since its existence and location cannot be proven.7 Others argue that its application simply mirrors the rigorous, comprehensive work in the field of semiotics.8 Yet, the meme’s primary defenders—Susan Blackmore, Kate Distin, Daniel

Dennett, and Robert Aunger—insist upon its wider relevance, particularly in understanding religion, cognition, and human evolution. The meme has also been taken up in a range of academic disciplines including oral literature, performance studies, psychology, computer and information sciences, and marketing.9

In addition to its advocates in scientific circles, the meme’s widespread Internet usage indicates its cultural relevance, regardless of whether its existence can be proven scientific fact. The “Internet meme,” typically defined as the viral spread and eventual repackaging of an image, a phrase, a video, or any transmittable content on the

Internet,10 is usually conceived of very differently from Dawkins’s original uses of the term, thus redeeming the concept from its debatable origins.11 Internet memes

7 The two dominant theories for the “location,” or storage facility, for the meme are brains and artifacts. Aunger convincingly argues for an “intricate dance” between memes and artifacts in which memes exist in brains but the artifact serves as an intermediary in brain-to-brain transmission. Distin, on the other hand, argues that brains and artifacts both serve as filing systems for active and passive copies of the meme.

8 See Kilpinen.

9 See Drout (oral literature), Davis (performance studies), Blackmore (psychology), and Wu and Ardley (marketing). A longer study might go further into the distinctions between memetics, adaptationist thinking, social Darwinism, and many other threads of the interdisciplinary cross-section of humanities and sciences. See Sperber and Wilson and Carroll. Popular studies of the meme also abound, participating in what Aunger calls the “internet cult of the meme.” See, in particular, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

10 Shifman’s definition seems rather universally accepted, though I have some concerns with its limitations. She defines the internet meme as “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users” (n.p.).

11 Some theorists, most notably Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, insist on dispensing with the term entirely as it connotes a sort of automatic self-replication with which they are uncomfortable. They choose to replace the catchier term “meme” with the more awkward phrase “spreadable media.”

emphasize the digital transmission of and connectivity between individual memes, as well as the social and public expression of the meme. Internet memes are a highly participatory genre in which each meme contributes to a larger collection of texts, causes, events, and ideas.12 As Limor Shifman points out, though memes begin as

“virals” rapidly transmitted from user to user, the viral becomes a meme when multiple users simultaneously imitate, interpret, and repackage the “original” text as well as its copies.13 A popular example of this would be Beyoncé’s 2008 hit music video, “Single

Ladies,” which first spread rapidly as a viral Internet sensation but then was modified, repackaged, and refilmed by both professional and amateur interpretations and parodies of the pop music sensation. Metaphorically, Shakespeare’s plays work like

Internet memes in that they spread as groups of texts, performances, revisions, and memories that are continuously repackaged by “users,” (i.e., directors, editors, scholars, and fans). For example, the famously unstable text of Hamlet is fraught with inconsistencies between quartos and folios. Therefore, all editions, readings, and adaptations must do the interpretive work of recombination, revision, and repackaging based on the available texts. Thus, when Kenneth Branagh claims to film the “full text” of Hamlet for his 1996 film, even he follows a conflationist model of combining sources, patching together pieces from the Second Quarto, First Folio, and other sources which amplify the First Folio text.

12 Studies of the Internet meme often discuss the politics of representation (who is allowed to/able to participate in meme repackaging and how) as well as the code, language, and genre of memes. At the time of this writing, much work is left to be done on how memes allow for nontraditional writing situations as well as self-expression.

13 Shifman argues that virals and memes are different modes of engagement. A viral produces meta- commentary and a meme results in the distribution of a repackaged viral.

My own definition of the meme combines these two senses of the term; the work of the meme can be the purposeful repackaging that Shifman describes, but it also can be an unconscious movement of a cultural unit, more in line with Dawkins’s theory.

Though Shifman argues that memetic activity and transmission is always purposeful, the analysis of predigital memes, such as a Shakespeare meme, demonstrates that memes also can and do operate and proliferate without direct, unambiguous reference to their notional source. The meme, as defined here, connotes constant, compulsive circulation combined with both purposeful and accidental repackaging. This is not to say that human agency is altogether removed from the equation. Rather, humans sometimes play a crucial if largely passive role in the distribution of a meme. As products of cultural circulation, memes are bound to be taken up without intent.14 In a

Shakespeare and adaptation context, the meme draws from Dawkins’s trinity of memetic transmission (fidelity, fecundity, and longevity) in that a successful

Shakespeare meme copies some unit of the Shakespearean text faithfully and that meme then spreads prolifically and for a long time. The Internet definition adds the repackaging element of a Shakespeare meme; as Shakespeare’s texts are taken up over time and in different contexts—historical, national, medial, etc.—they are reworked and revised across a variety of media and for a variety of purposes. This reworking and

14 And, indeed, this can be demonstrated also in the digital age. For example, AV Club writer Erik Adams noted that in an episode of Gossip Girl, Serena and Tripp’s car crash results from almost hitting three wolves in the road. Adams speculates that this refers to the “Three Wolf Moon” meme which was circulating at roughly the same time. Adams does no more than speculate, and, of course, one can only speculate when such a fleeting reference might have emerged from any member of the fairly large creative team of a primetime network show. This demonstrates that the intentionality of the reference is often impossible impossible to determine. Whether the creators had the meme in mind or the meme’s current cultural circulation unconsciously influenced the plot development becomes irrelevant. The only memetic facts are that this episode, which aired on December 8, 2009, arrives around the same time that the “Three Wolf Moon” meme reached its peak. A Google Trend graph places its peak in May 2009 with additional high points in July and December of the same year.

revision takes place in all adaptive scenarios from theatrical performance to spin-off.

Yet, the Shakespearean meme can demonstrate a more radical form of adaptation in that any unit can be fragmented from the Shakespearean corpus and reintegrated into a new medial environment. Sometimes these references are not announced as such for reasons as diverse as political suppression, psychological repression, or sheer coincidence. The study of a Shakespearean meme, however, shows that any acknowledged or unacknowledged adaptive activity can participate in memetic activity because memetic activity is about endless circulation and repetition, not about intent.

The Ghost Meme from Hamlet

The frequent appearance of the ghost meme in 21st century television deems it a particularly suitable example of a Hamlet meme moving through culture. In contrast to some other memes within the Hamlet memeplex (memeplex being shorthand for meme complex), the ghost meme is primarily narrative-based. Its reduction and oversimplification of both the plot and criticism of Hamlet results in a thematic, rather than linguistic, presentation. In other words, very broad, limited readings of Hamlet’s haunting, revenge, and inaction surface more frequently than other themes, lines, or critically-justifiable readings of the play. The ghost meme works differently than cultural uptake of a given passage, such as Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which is reduced in many of its appropriations to a Shakespearean sound bite removed from its context.15 The ghost meme’s content consists primarily of the (perceived) appearance of the ghost of the father visiting the son. Of course, ghostly visitations function as narrative devices in numerous cases unrelated to Hamlet, so other thematic registers

15 See, for example, the reading of Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be in Chapter 2.

must be considered. Thematically, the ghost meme may involve such issues as vengeance, guilt, and psychological trauma. The meme includes some sort of narrative story-telling element (again, in contrast to a Shakespeare meme that signifies primarily linguistically or visually, like the hoisting of Yorick’s skull). The ghost meme’s flexible narrative content makes it an ideal study in accidental Shakespeare because its narrative and thematic content do not automatically register as Shakespearean. In other words, the ghost meme can (and does) circulate independently from an understanding of Shakespeare’s text, thus offering what is perhaps an extreme version of Douglas

Lanier’s “post-textual” Shakespeare.

This argument about Shakespearean memes, which takes multiplicity as a given, reflects a broader understanding of “Shakespeare” as always a multiple, always a complex of “Shakespeares.” Richard Burt (“Shakespeare, More or Less?”) argues that

“Shakespeare has always been ‘Shakespeares,’ mediatized and subject to dislocation, decontextualization, and fragmentation as the texts were revised, performed, printed and otherwise circulated” (3). There is no single “Shakespeare”; rather “Shakespeares always remain in transit, not a stable, locatable whole” (3). This statement is more or less applicable to the status of individual plays. There is no one, singular, canonical, and permanent "Hamlet" but only multiple, mutable, and sometimes inconsistent

"Hamlets." Dennis Kennedy goes so far as to suggest that these Hamlets exist only within the individual’s reading and viewing memory, and that Hamlet’s multiplicity is contained within a subjective conglomeration of experiences with Hamlet, what he refers to as a museum of Hamlet.16 Kennedy's argument, embedded as it is within

16 He writes, “I carry into each new production a jumble of reminiscences: of my first reading almost half a century ago, of many prior performances, my study of its textual, critical and stage history, its location

discourses on (cultural) memory, is evocative of the way that memes work. In the memetic viewpoint, the individual is not only a museum of Hamlet, but also a museum of an entire vortex of circulating cultural references. Any given individual at any given point will have a different context for those cultural moments. So, like Burt, who concludes that Shakespeare has always been mediatized, Shakespeare has always been memeticized, and those Shakespearean memes have been housed for centuries in brains, in books, and increasingly in various digital archives.

Searching for the Shakespeare meme correlates also with Burt's descriptions of the effects of Shakespeareccentricity and Shakespearecentricity (“Shakespeare, More or Less?”), each of which exert a pull on the text. The “Shakespeareccentric” exerts “a centrifugal pull on the text” and “is eccentric in that it more or less decenters

Shakespeare's language” (5). This “Shakespeareccentric” mode is more forceful in the unacknowledged Shakespeare meme, which in its total division from the

Shakespearean text appears to not even be related to that text. Yet, as Burt notes when describing the “Shakespearecentric,” “Something always counts as Shakespeare, and its gravity exerts a centripetal pull on other materials toward it” (5). The tension between these two modes becomes excessive in the memetic, and it places the burden (or perhaps the pathology) on the researcher attempting to discover or “prove” the inherently Shakespearean character of a given artifact, particularly when that artifact, its creators, or its disseminators do not openly acknowledge its source in Shakespeare’s texts or reputation. Thus, when studying the presence of the ghost meme in Gossip Girl and Arrested Development, one must acknowledge a certain forcing of my critical within Western culture, high and low, what I have written and thought about it. I am not a spectator, I am a museum of Hamlet” (342).

reading of the television series, my desire to make it count as Shakespeare. At every turn, “Shakespeare” feels just out of reach, only to return forcefully with another moment, another scene in which the Shakespearean character is present. This reading does not, then, seek to elevate Gossip Girl or Arrested Development by their association with Shakespeare. Rather, the forced reading is performed in order to bring to light that something might be missed precisely because the series’ creators did not— for whatever reason—make explicit (or perhaps recognize at all) the associations with

Hamlet that my argument will demonstrate to be relevant and productive new understandings of Gossip Girl and Arrested Development

Fittingly, the ghost meme points to the relevance of repetition compulsion, the uncanny, and the value of psychoanalytic interpretation in general, which relate not only to Hamlet but also to the concept of the meme more broadly. That is to say, the reading of this particular meme reinforces an understanding of memes in general, or more precise definitions of accidental Shakespeare. The examples here from Gossip Girl and

Arrested Development are notable because, even though both series explicitly reference Shakespeare in other respects, particularly in the context of the theatrical, they also embed Hamlet-like ghost narratives with no open acknowledgment of the source of the narratives in Shakespeare. To refer to these ghost narratives as reference, spin-off, or citation would be inaccurate because the narrative arcs are never openly grounded in the text of Hamlet.

The (potentially accidental) presentation of the ghost meme in Gossip Girl and

Arrested Development relies on psychoanalytically-inflected cultural shorthand that substitutes Hamlet for a character’s imprecisely-defined “daddy issues.” The series

present Hamlet in terms of fractured masculinity in that the presence of a haunting father results directly in the son’s failure. Other popular 21st century television series also present this meme without acknowledging its source, including the American shows Six Feet Under and Lost. Notably, each television repetition of the ghost meme tells the story in terms of young, wealthy, white, straight men struggling in the shadows of overbearing or distant fathers whose death and return (typically through some form of

“haunting” relationship) leads to the son’s inaction, indecision, and ennui. Though outside of the scope of this study, the lack of racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic diversity in these examples is striking, as if Hamlet’s haunted relationship with his father is only applicable to individuals within this very narrow demographic. When television women are subject to ghostly visits, these hauntings are by lovers (Grey’s Anatomy) and friends (Veronica Mars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) rather than parents. An informal survey of 21st century U.S. television reveals that the ghost meme’s intergenerational father/son haunting dynamic is not replicated in father/daughter, mother/son, or mother/daughter pairings.

The shows Lost and Six Feet Under each deploy the ghost meme in fairly faithful

(and unacknowledged) forms. In each of these examples, the hero must die (or disappear) to end the story, making this death the only logical end for a son haunted by his father. In these two shows, the Hamlet analogue is found in the main character. In

Lost, Jack Shephard sees visions of his father while trapped on a purgatory-like island after a plane crash. In fact, he was on the flight in the first place because he was transporting his father’s body from Australia to the U.S. His father’s ghost haunts him both on and off the island, and Jack’s depressive streaks are punctuated by these

ghostly visits. On Six Feet Under, Nate Fisher, whose father, Nathaniel, dies in an accident in the show’s pilot, has recurring conversations with the dead father. His father’s sudden death leads Nate to move home to help with the family funeral business. Through his conversations with his deceased father, Nate realizes he wishes he had known Nathaniel better when the latter was still alive. Nate, like Lost’s Jack, struggles with many family dynamics and “daddy issues,” none of which seem resolved by the show’s completion. Nate’s own death in the final season seems to be the logical end for the series’ melancholy lead.

Rewriting Hamlet in Gossip Girl

A more complicated example of the ghost meme can be found in Gossip Girl, which engages with the ghost meme more extensively, ultimately rewriting its basic narrative and offering the son a way out through a second death of his father. The CW’s network’s teen soap might initially appear to be a strange place to stalk a Shakespeare meme, yet, in addition to a steady stream of Shakespeare references, the show often resonates with Hamlet thematically by way of its representations of surveillance culture.17 Gossip Girl follows the lives and loves of elite Manhattan teenagers and their parents. Their stories (and their gossip) are uploaded to a website—“Gossip Girl”—via anonymous tips. In other words, as these teens go about their lives, they are being watched, photographed, and recorded by their peers, and these comings and goings are reported online via the Gossip Girl website.18 Gossip Girl is one of a series of CW

(formerly the WB network) shows obsessed with intertextual and popular culture

17 I will again study surveillance culture in Hamlet adaptations in Chapter 4.

18 For a discussion of the extension of Gossip Girl’s digital life to a Second Life fan platform, see Louisa Stein.

references. Shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Veronica Mars, Dawson’s

Creek, and Gilmore Girls all feature high school and college-age protagonists who speak in inflated prose about a network of film, literary, and pop culture references. That

Shakespeare surfaces in this network is unsurprising; he and his work often figure in these universes simply due to their high school settings and teenage protagonists.

Gossip Girl invokes Shakespeare in passing one-liners and clichéd jokes and references, typically involving educational or theatrical situations; content and form unite in episodes highlighting Shakespearean performance. In particular, one episode, “The

Big Sleep No More” calls up both Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, an interactive, immersive, site-specific performance experience staged in abandoned warehouses

(turned into the early 20th century McKittrick Hotel) based on Macbeth, and Howard

Hawks’s 1946 film of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep, following Gossip Girl’s obsession with film noir and classic Hollywood. The episode mixes performances; participants in the inset Sleep No More performance do not know whether to watch the actors in the play or to watch each other (watching the actors), as the Manhattan teens keep violating the rules of the performance and removing their masks. One must constantly question which is the real performance here.19 Additional Shakespearean material arrives through not only throwaway narratorial quips (Gossip Girl somewhat lamely ends one episode with “Shakespeare says ‘All’s well that ends well.’ And sometimes it just ends.”) as well as a story arc concerned with the new, young

Shakespeare teacher, Rachel Carr, who inspires the society girl Serena to write a King

19 Abigail De Kosnick, in an analysis of several contemporary television series, sees Gossip Girl’s pervasive theatricality as symptomatic of television’s efforts to amplify both theater and talk therapy, mobilizing these efforts in order to respond to Internet gossip culture. Gossip Girl in particular juxtaposes the spontaneity of the public performance of its characters with highly orchestrated performances, such as Sleep No More.

Lear paper filled with “nuanced observations” and plays the “naughty professor” who sleeps with her young male student, Dan Humphrey (“You’ve Got Yale!”). And, in a reference typical of teen-oriented television, a season three story arc concerning the forbidden love between Nate Archibald and Bree Buckley is referred to repeatedly (and often with tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek) as a “Romeo and Juliet” storyline. These kinds of Shakespeare references are almost stereotypical of teen television shows, particularly in the form of a Shakespearean “lesson” that is somehow learned by the protagonists.

Gossip Girl’s incorporation of the ghost meme frequently works thematically through references to (potential) incest, theater and performance, the rise and fall of

Manhattan’s kings, confusion of uncles for fathers, and, most importantly for my purposes, the haunting of a primary character by his deceased father, as well as the character’s corresponding crisis of masculinity. The show’s Hamlet character is the wealthy, privileged Prince of New York, Chuck Bass, son of hotel mogul and Manhattan power-player Bart Bass. From the early episodes of the show, the father/son relationship is fraught with conflict. Typical interactions between Bart and Chuck involve the two engaged in a constant power play; Bart is a womanizer, Chuck drinks too much, and neither one approves of the other’s behavior. Throughout the first seasons of the show, the two spar in an ongoing war that Chuck seems always destined to lose.

Unlike Hamlet, who contends with the ghost of his father “Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night” (1.5.10), Chuck Bass deals first with a spectral father, clearly projected from Chuck’s unconscious, then with a father returned to life who haunts

Chuck’s ability to manage his own destiny. The first haunting, which follows Bart Bass’s

untimely death, consists of Chuck imagining the ghost of his father chastising him (“The

Debarted”). Later, after Bart is shown to have faked his death, his reappearance sends

Chuck into despair and depression. When Chuck and his father ultimately have a rooftop confrontation that results in Bart falling off the building to his actual death (“The

Revengers”), Chuck’s Hamlet can finally move on from the scripted dramatic trajectory of Shakespeare’s text. Chuck’s character, as befits a Hamlet analogue,20 is obsessed with rooftops. Over the course of the series, he seduces several women on rooftops, almost jumps off the roof in a thwarted suicide attempt, and gets into several intense arguments in rooftop spaces. For this climactic scene with his father to take place on a rooftop seems logical, but it also leads to a provocative ending to the Hamlet storyline, suggesting an intriguing line of questioning regarding the play: What if Hamlet could have disposed of the ghost of his father early in the play? Would conquering the specter have saved the citizens at Elsinore?

The refashioning of the Hamlet meme is what allows Chuck to ultimately outmaneuver his dead-not-dead father, which is the only thing that allows him to be united with his lover. Prior to his father’s (second, and presumably real) death, Chuck has made clear to Blair that they can only be together once his father has died. Chuck realizes that only his father’s death will allow him to “be a man,” which is apparently what it takes to marry on-again-off-again girlfriend Blair. Chuck’s relationship with his father turns him into a wildly mercurial character. Though he is full of hubris (and often appears to be the show’s villain), he also, over the course of six seasons, becomes the show’s tragic character and arguably one of its heroes. The presence of the ghost

20 See well-known Hamlet adaptations of Olivier, Zeffirelli, and Almereyda for examples.

meme is what fleshes out his character. It’s a story we have heard before: the one- dimensional, spoiled rich prep-school student becomes the poor little rich boy trying to get out from under daddy’s shadow. His father’s life, death, and return are psychological blockages for Chuck; he is haunted by a father who wants him to act, but he is kept from acting because of the recurring influence of his father’s ghost. Even the title of the episode in which his father dies—“The Revengers”—calls up Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy.21 Whereas in Lost and Six Feet Under the Hamlet characters fail to come to terms with the father’s Ghost, Gossip Girl rewrites that narrative arc, allowing the

Hamlet character to ultimately conquer both the uncle and the Ghost of the father.

Furthermore, this narrative arrives silently; in contrast to the show’s heavy-handed inter– and meta-textual references, Chuck’s extended narrative arc is never announced as Hamlet. The show deliberately calls up Macbeth and King Lear, but its primary

Shakespearean intertext is Hamlet, through the series-long narrative of Chuck and his father.

Hamlet’s Arrested Development

That Arrested Development picks up on the ghost meme in a manner similar to

Gossip Girl may be unsurprising given the show’s notoriously dense narrative arcs and web of internal references. As Jason Mittell points out, Arrested Development’s complexity, in fitting with a contemporary American television tendency towards “primetime episodic seriality” (33), ties spectacle to narrative. The audience is engaged in the narrative experience that is mediated by the show’s push towards self-reflexivity and

21 Other Hamlet connections arrive through the character of usurping brother, Uncle Jack, who, after Bart’s death, finds that he will not be named head of Bass Industries. Bart has left the company to his teenage son, Chuck, instead. Through a series of machinations, Jack arrests control of the company.

breaking the fourth wall.22 Mittell writes that in these moments, “we watch the process of narration as a machine rather than engaging in its diegesis” (35). Thus, the audience of

Arrested Development becomes more interested in making connections, applying pet theories, and following the show down its intertextual rabbit hole than in losing itself to the show’s characters and plot. The show’s engagement with Hamlet reflects its other intertextual, citational moments, including sometimes obscure, sly references to My

Mother, the Car (“My Mother the Car”), Mystery Science Theater 3000 (“A New Start”), and various television and film projects of Imagine Entertainment.

Briefly, the Fox/Netflix comedy follows the story of the Bluth family, or to quote the introduction: “This is the story of a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together.” The first episode sets up this family struggle with the arrest of their patriarch, George Sr., at a Bluth Company party.

Michael Bluth, who expected to be named his father’s successor, is thrown into the role of keeping his very dysfunctional family together and keeping the family business afloat.

The series’ title applies equally to each of the family members, Michael included; the family’s arrested development makes them self-absorbed, manipulative, and incredibly naive. Intergenerational family dynamics and incestuous undertones abound in this family. There are no heroes here.

The most overtly Shakespearean material in Arrested Development can be found in one episode, “Bringing Up Buster,” in which cousins George Michael and Maeby

(along with Steve Holt) perform in the school’s rendition of Much Ado About Nothing,

22 For more on Arrested Development’s use of self-reflexivity, particularly as it relates to “comedy verité,” see Ethan Thompson, who writes, “As a mode of production adopted temporarily or in totality, comedy verité combines the ‘don’ts’ of observational documentary (manipulation, interactivity, effects) with its claim to capture reality” (67).

directed by Maeby’s father Tobias. The romantic mishaps of the play, coupled with the direct mention of Renaissance theater norms in which female roles were played by boys

(Cue Tobias—whose deeply closeted homosexuality is a running joke in the series: “Did you know that in Shakespeare’s day, that the women’s roles were played by men?

Fancy that!”), fits with the show’s themes of acting across gender norms. Tobias, a character known not only for his “never-nude” problem (he refuses to fully disrobe, even to bathe) but also for constant, seemingly unaware homosexual double entendres, confuses parts. He originally casts Maeby as Beatrice and Steve Holt as Benedick, but then, through a series of mix-ups, reverses the roles, making George Michael into

Benedick and Steve Holt into Beatrice. He thinks he is playing Cupid, matching up his nephew George Michael with Steve Holt. In reality, though, George Michael volunteered for the play only because of his forbidden, taboo love interest: his cousin Maeby. Tobias eventually resolves the mix-up by matching Maeby with the more suitable partner, Steve

Holt, later revealed to be yet another cousin. While the show’s overtly Shakespearean material is contained to that classic high school scenario of staging the school play, the humor it draws from taboo topics marks another thematic similarity with Shakespeare’s oeuvre. One need look only at Much Ado to recognize the double entendre and sexual innuendo that Shakespeare deploys.

Other moments in the series allude gently to Hamlet, though without engaging in the ghost meme narrative arc. One such moment is the one-off quotation in which two characters cite what they take to be the 7th commandment: “Be true to thineself and to thine own self be true” (“Justice is Blind”), a Shakespeare-speak paraphrase of

Polonius’s line “This above all: to thine own self be true” (1.3.78). The show also alludes

to the Jacobean revenge genre through the revelation that George Sr. was the 1970s serial killer “The Muffin Man” who killed his children’s teachers with baskets of poisoned muffins (“S.O.B.s”), though this detail more properly resembles The Revenger’s

Tragedy. Finally, the recurring reference to “Uncle-Father Oscar” echoes Hamlet’s reference to his “uncle-father and aunt-mother” (Hamlet 2.2.376).

In contrast to these passing references, the show’s largely unacknowledged ghost meme material carries across the entire series, influencing both plot and character development. George Sr. functions as the ghost who haunts his son(s). Even though he remains alive throughout the series (in spite of a faked Mexican funeral and burial), his presence (and frequent absence) serves to prevent his sons from ever actually taking control of the company. His sons keep getting called upon to run the company, but George Sr. eventually returns to put them in their places. George Sr.’s haunting qualities transcend to his physical location in the attic of the Bluth family model home, reinforcing the verticality often associated with Hamlet (see Olivier and Zeffirelli film adaptations for examples). As family members go about their days, their father’s spirit dresses in outdated maternity clothes and hosts tea parties for dolls he finds in attic boxes while simultaneously making demands of his children.

If George Sr. is the Ghost equivalent (albeit deeply flawed and very much alive), then one must ask whom it is that he haunts. In many ways, the series sets up Michael as the show’s main character, and thus, logically, the Hamlet analogue. And, indeed,

Michael fits the model well: he is the son who holds the family together after his father’s first disappearance (an arrest) and later his apparent death. Michael attempts to be the voice of reason throughout the series, and clearly he sees himself as the one family

member who remains sane as those around him devolve into self-indulgent fantasy.

Yet, as the show repeatedly reveals, his delusional behavior and self-absorption can rival that of his siblings. In spite of his insistence to his son, George Michael, that family is the most important thing, he frequently criticizes his family and threatens to leave them.

Though Michael may seem to be the protagonist (and Michael certainly sees himself in this role), the other brothers(-in-law) can also be described as Hamlet-like.

Youngest son Buster, for example, resembles the 20th century Oedipal readings of

Hamlet’s character. He is the coddled son who, through seasons’-worth of Freudian slips and apparently unaware, obviously erotically-charged references to his mother, demonstrates both Oedipal desire and an undisguised need to remove the father (and uncle) from the picture. In season four, when Lucille is incarcerated, Buster searches for alternative mother-figures, beginning with a stuffed doll of Lucille, then trying out Lucille

2 (his mother’s best frenemy), a stint in the Army, and the aptly-named Ophelia Love

(“Off the Hook”). Buster experiences a crisis of father-identification as he learns that his father’s twin brother, Oscar, is his actual biological father and thus his Uncle-Father

Oscar. His mother’s ongoing affairs with both men, as well as his own paternal confusion, mean that Buster must try to supplant multiple father figures in the battle for his mother’s affections. Beyond these Oedipal overtones, Buster spent years of his life in school, studying such esoteric subjects as medieval agrarian economies and cartography. Like Hamlet, who was studying at Wittenberg at the time of King Hamlet’s death, Buster discontinues his studies when the family is thrown into crisis; though this

is partly financial, it would be “most retrograde” in Lucille’s desires for Buster to leave the nest.

Gob (short for George Oscar Bluth, pronounced “Job”) puts on the more melancholy aspects of Hamlet’s personality. Like Hamlet, he has his father’s name, though it is compounded with that of his uncle, Oscar. His personality reflects both the vanity of his father, George Sr., and the self-loathing of Uncle Oscar. Gob is the outcast son in the sense that the family drama typically proceeds without him.23 This division from the family leads him to be a melancholy figure and a bit of a failure in love and in his career as a magician. Gob often feels as if he needs to impress his family, particularly his father who never paid much attention to him.24 Gob resembles the

Hamlet of “To be or not to be” though his melancholy reflections on life and death are staged not in terms of an actor-ly monologue but with Gob staring into the distance while Simon & Garfunkel’s lines, “Hello darkness my old friend,” play in the background.

Whereas Gob takes on Hamlet’s ennui, son-in-law Tobias exhibits the dramatic side of

Hamlet’s persona; he is the personification of Hamlet’s antic disposition. Tobias’s manic character resulted in him abandoning his career as a therapist to become an actor, in spite of his complete lack of acting skill. In spite of his questionable talents in this regard, Tobias takes great pleasure in instructing others in the art of acting (cf. Hamlet instructing the players in 3.2). Tobias is pulled in multiple directions, torn between his family and his desire to act, and he frequently combines the two, such as during his stint as Mrs. Featherbottom, housekeeper and nanny for his own family. In another acting-

23 Lucille goes so far as to refer to him as her least favorite offspring.

24 Kill Shakespeare also brings up the idea of a Hamlet whose father is detached from him in life only to ask vengeance of him in death. See Chapter 5.

related storyline, Tobias must sell the rights to his family in order to obtain a part playing

George Sr. in an episode of the reality series, Scandalmakers. While preparing for the role, however, George Sr. comes back into the picture, giving Tobias notes on the

“correct” way to play the part and insisting that he play George Sr. “like a man”

(“Motherboy XXX”).25

By each taking on one facet of Hamlet’s character, the four brothers represent a composite version of the Prince of Denmark. And in each of these personas, the brothers are beholden to, haunted by, the “ghost” of George Sr. Each exists in a state of arrested development produced by a combination of withheld affection, lack of trust, and general family trauma at the hands of their distant, then absent father. When the siblings think their father has died, they have difficulty expressing their grief at George

Sr.’s funeral, which is inconvenient since he eavesdrops from the attic. As each gradually becomes aware of George Sr.’s presence, each must find a way to appease him but none can ever succeed. Arrested Development repackages the narrative of

Hamlet, reducing the sons to a state of indecision and inaction due to the death, disappearance, and subsequent reappearance of the father figure. The Bluth sons remain trapped in a circular narrative that resembles one of Gob’s roofie circles; every time one son might break free from the family drama, he is drawn back into pattern of repetition and failure.26

25 Tobias is part of Arrested Development’s ongoing interest in adaptation, not only through film reference (Mrs. Featherbottom/Mrs. Doubtfire) but also through fake reality shows (Arrested Development is a mockumentary about the family; the episode of Scandalmakers is a fictional reality show about the family represented in Arrested Development.

26 “Roofie” is street slang for Rohypnol, an illegal drug in the U.S. often referred to as a “date rape drug.” It is known for inducing sedation and amnesia. In the show, Gob repeatedly ingests Rohypnol in order to forget shameful acts. What he succeeds in doing, though, is only forgetting that he took the Rohypnol.

This Hamlet-like ghost meme plays out in a show that in its narrative structure and thematic resonances embodies the theories of the memetic. That is to say, even as

Arrested Development contains an example of a Shakespearean meme, the themes and structure of the series help to define how memes work, demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between the theory and the analysis. Arrested Development often seems to be caught up in cycle of looping narratives, confusion based on doubling of roles, characters, personalities, or words, and an investment in the processes of theater and therapy, models of a theory of surrogation that is also emblematic of memes in general.

The series is invested in multiple forms of repetition simultaneously, and the story lines, though often knotted together, devolve into a dizzying array of references, performances, and interconnections. These qualities, groundbreaking in Arrested

Development but increasingly common in 21st century television characterized by

“episodic seriality” (Mittell), reflect the movement of memes in culture. So, even as the series offers the alert reader a version of the Hamlet story that may be referred to as a meme, it simultaneously reinforces the mechanisms that make memetic principles a worthy object of study.

Arrested Development, as a series, demonstrates an obsession with and anxiety about twins, doubling, and repetition, which is fitting for a show exemplifying the work of memes. The show repeatedly emphasizes a doubling of, and thus confusion of, family roles, perhaps to be expected in a family in which every character is in a stage of arrested development. This doubling of family roles includes an Uncle-Father Oscar, kissing cousins, and fathers, sons, and brothers sleeping with the same women. In particular, when it comes to sex, the brothers (and fathers) are often interchangeable.

100

Furthermore, there is a proliferation of twins (George Sr. and Oscar), mistaken twins

(Michael and Lindsay), missing twins, Andy Richter twins, and campus twin clubs.

Several non-twin characters also insist on their sameness: Michael suggests repeatedly that he and George Michael are just like twins, rather than father and son and Gob plays a game of professional one-upping with fellow magician Tony Wonder that devolves into the repeated insistence of “same!” Words and phrases are also part of this ongoing play with sameness, including such memorable moments as the bees/beads incident and the Gothic Castle/Gothic Asshole debacle, and double meanings, such as

George Sr.’s mantra: “There is always money in the banana stand” (“Top Banana”). The

Netflix season (season four) is particularly obsessed with twinning and doubling, even as it insists on being the “same” as the original series which aired seven years earlier on a different network.27 This repeated insistence on the sameness of slightly (or very) different people, words, or images embodies the spirit of the meme, which circulates through a combination of repetition and (often subtle) repackaging.

Furthermore, the show’s interest in doubling extends to two processes of doubling and repetition that are brought up repeatedly by the series: therapy and theatricality. According to Abigail De Kosnik, television has historically been bound up with theater and therapy. While the theatricality inherent to both theater and therapy should lead to individual self-knowledge, in Arrested Development that path towards self-knowledge is always thwarted. Both theater and therapy partake in a repetition

27 The series’ initial run on the Fox Broadcasting Company channel became a cult classic after its untimely cancellation. It lived on in syndication and through Netflix streaming. After a hiatus of seven years, Netflix produced a new season of the series with the same producers, directors, and cast. The only difference was a new, non-broadcast network.

101

compulsion that ends in a loop of failure and shame. Here, Joseph Roach’s explanation of “surrogation” might be particularly helpful. Roach writes that

in the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure, I hypothesize, survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates. Because collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely, surrogation rarely if ever succeeds. ... The intended substitute either cannot fulfill expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus. (2)

For Roach, the ongoing process of surrogation attempts to cover over communal wounds stemming from death, departure, or trauma, and performance represents one such type of replacement act; it “stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace” (3-4) making it another form of circulation not grounded in an original. So, while performance, such as the performance of theater or of therapy, attempts to substitute for some type of loss or trauma, it cannot replace. Theater and therapy can only ever supplement. In this respect, the idea of surrogation also points to an effect of the meme, always supplementing and adding to without erasing the “original”. Indeed, the original itself becomes irrelevant as surrogation constantly supplements for an original that does not exist.

In Arrested Development, the failed attempts at both acting and therapy exemplify this theory of surrogation and become interchangeable enterprises within the series. The two processes are exemplified in the character of Tobias, who is both a failed therapist and a failed actor. Tobias quits his career as “analrapist” (another of his bizarrely unselfconscious parapraxes: analyst+therapist) in order to pursue an acting career, though most of his actor-ly moments are variations on pseudo-Shakespeare- speak or poorly executed improv exercises, in which he adds “Yes, and...” in

102

conversation with other characters. When Tobias returns to his first career and works at

Austerity, a drug rehabilitation facility run by Argyle Austero, he ultimately cancels group therapy in order to produce a (very bad) musical version of The Fantastic Four.28 Tobias is simultaneously a poor therapist and a misguided actor, going so far as to mistake a methadone clinic for a Method acting class. Tobias constantly cycles back and forth between the authority of each career, alternately citing his expertise as a therapist or as an actor. Yet, in spite of De Kosnik’s argument that theater and therapy, as Foucauldian

“technologies of the self,” should produce self-knowledge, neither performative mode offers Tobias any opportunities for growth. He is eternally stuck in a wildly spiraling performative mode that offers no cathartic relief or resolution, just endless repetition and failure.

Thematically, each of these instances of repetition, doubling, and interchangeability as they relate to twins, mistaken identities, theater, and therapy converge in season four. In this most recent season, the narrative becomes increasingly circular, taking part in its own “roofie circle,” a phrase that describes how Gob, known for making bad decisions, repeatedly ingests “Forget-Me-Now” pills in order to live with his shame. As the narrator explains:

And soon Gob found himself experiencing what on the street is referred to as a ‘roofie circle’ whereby a roofie is taken the day after a degrading event too late to erase the memory of the degrading event itself but not too late to erase the prior day’s attempt to erase the event. Thus, with no memory of taking the roofie but the memory of the event very much alive, the victim of the roofie circle finds himself constantly trying to re-erase the memory but only succeeds in erasing the memory of the attempt to erase

28 This scenario is representative of Arrested Development’s own interest in adaptation. Tobias and Argyle adapt not the comic book or film of Fantastic Four but rather a (fake) failed film that Imagine Entertainment only made in order to continue holding the rights to the story. So, in the Arrested Development universe, there are at least four Fantastic Fours in circulation: the “real” comic book series, the “real” film(s), the fictional film, and the musical.

103

the memory. Days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and relationships grow testy. And what begins in shame almost always ends in a Mexican hospital with stage 4 syphilis. (“Colony Collapse” 4:7)

Gob’s roofie circles are attempts at moving on by forgetting, but as with all of the show’s neuroses and pathologies, resolution is denied. The roofie circle is symptomatic of season four’s narrative style, in which the same story is told from different angles across fifteen episodes. One police station scene comes back eight different times, and the audience gradually learns the relevance of each mise-en-scène detail from the first iteration, from Tobias’s freewheeling vocal performance to the background sound of coughing. In Arrested Development, there is no background; all details are potentially relevant. In fact, the process of catching background details and vague references and then making connections has become an internet pastime, a guilty pleasure for viewers caught up in their own fan culture loop.

This doubling and repetition compulsion that we see in Arrested Development in general and particularly in season four’s narrative roofie circles loops right back to meme theory and the compulsion to revisit, rewrite, revise, and rework. As Shifman writes, all memes are works of creative repackaging that still retain the memory of the old meme. Revision doesn’t erase the history; it only succeeds in producing a new spin on the old story. So, when shows like Arrested Development appropriate and extend the ghost meme (either consciously or unconsciously), they take part in this process of repetition and doubling. Arrested Development repackages the ghost meme and, through this replication, extends the longevity and fecundity of the ghost meme, though with varying degrees of copying-fidelity. The extended longevity and fecundity leads to the meme being taken up by other artifacts and other genres, ensuring that the

Shakespearean narrative will continue to appear “accidentally” in the future.

104

The presence of the ghost meme in Gossip Girl and Arrested Development complicates an understanding of what is or is not Shakespeare, a question that must constantly be addressed in a post-textual era. The shows’ narrative and meta-narrative can be described as both Shakespearean and not-Shakespearean. The incorporation of meme theory into adaptation studies allows for a more flexible form of fidelity to the

Shakespearean source because it recognizes as a form of adaptation an unacknowledged and fragmented instance of narrative uptake. The ghost meme, like other ideas, narratives, and literary themes, circulates constantly in culture. Because it contains a certain “stickiness,” that ongoing circulation results in the frequent uptake of the ghost meme in popular culture. This uptake then ensures the meme’s long-term survival. This circular process continues indefinitely until the meme dies out. In the case of Shakespeare, it appears that this will not be the case for a very long time.

105

CHAPTER 4 BETWEEN SURVEILLANCE AND SOCIAL MEDIA: TECHNO-AUTHENTICITY AND PERFORMING THE SELF IN GREGORY DORAN’S HAMLET

Outside the government, beyond the police; tracking down alien life on Earth, and arming the human race against the future. The twenty-first century is when it all changes. And you’ve gotta be ready. —Captain Jack Harkness, Torchwood

The readiness is all. —Hamlet, Hamlet

The BBC television series Torchwood, a spinoff of the long-running Doctor Who series, tells the story of a group of black ops agents who seek out alien life in Great

Britain and abroad, in order to keep the human race safe and armed for its future. To do this, the agents, led by the fearless and un-killable Captain Jack Harkness, hack into police surveillance to track down the “real” story of the crime at the center of each episode, which inevitably involves alien life. A typical example is the series’ second episode in which the Torchwood team intercepts an odd police report: a nightclub patron has been murdered, reduced to ashes at the moment of orgasm. Through their ability to access surveillance networks and stay a step ahead of the police and other

“amateurs,” Torchwood is able to successfully stop the alien who has inserted itself into a host human body. New recruit, former police officer Gwen Cooper, asks repeatedly how “you” (the Torchwood team) gains access to supposedly private, un-hackable police databases. Jack continually reminds her not only that she has become part of the

“we” of Torchwood, but also that Torchwood is a more qualified and more deserving user of the classified information than the government.

Torchwood’s obsession with surveillance is a hallmark of contemporary BBC programming, including shows such as Spooks (MI-5 in the U.S.), The Last Enemy, and

Doctor Who, which take their themes from the realities of Britain’s current surveillance

106

state. Some have suggested that the nation is the most surveilled nation on earth, with recent estimations by the British Security Industry Authority suggesting that there is one camera for every 11 people, totaling approximately 5.9 million surveillance cameras in all (Barrett).1 The rebooted Doctor Who series extends Torchwood’s fixation on the surveillance state in the form of the time and space traveling Doctor, who plays the role of an all-seeing camera that polices the universe and defends the powerless and the weak, often under the pretense of Galactic law. The Doctor is particularly concerned with saving the planet Earth and humans, a new-ish intelligent species, from destruction at the hand of vindictive or malicious alien races. Both Torchwood and Doctor Who take up wide-spread, constant states of surveillance as thematic material and craft characters who subvert the political and cultural crisis of the modern-day Panopticon.

Whereas Captain Jack Harkness and company use the state surveillance network as a means of doing the state’s job due to its incompetence, the Doctor actually becomes the technology, surveilling a multitude of planets and races as a defender of justice.

Together, these two very popular, related series present a counterpoint to mandated state surveillance that allows for new plot lines of individual agency and resistance.

The casting of Doctor Who’s tenth Doctor2 (David Tennant) as Hamlet in Gregory

Doran’s recent RSC/BBC Hamlet led many reviewers to refer to the play as the “Doctor

Who Hamlet,” a suitable phrase given that both Doctor Who and Doran’s Hamlet are notably concerned with surveillance culture. Doran’s Hamlet, first staged at the RSC

1 In the U.S., surveillance state politics are currently manifest in the NSA whistleblower scandal of Edward Snowden, who leaked thousands of documents that demonstrate the NSA’s ongoing surveillance of U.S. citizens.

2 For those unfamiliar with the series, its longevity is partially due to the Doctor’s ability to reincarnate, always in the form of a new actor who offers a new perspective on the role. David Tennant is the tenth actor to take on the part, making him the tenth Doctor.

107

and then filmed for the BBC, takes advantage of Tennant’s popularity, encouraging audiences to consider the intertextuality and ghosting that goes on between the Doctor and Hamlet. Tennant’s performances as both characters resonate with one other in many respects, particularly in the 2009 Hamlet TV film version, which includes additional layers of surveillance culture that the stage production did not. Like the

Doctor, Tennant’s Hamlet appropriates surveillance culture, watching the world around him as a means of ascertaining truth and enforcing justice. This watching sometimes takes the form of what I will refer to in this chapter as “techno-authenticity,” meaning that the watching is mediated by technologies that should ostensibly demonstrate the

“truth” or the “reality” of the situation. The Doran Hamlet TV production includes forms of surveillance and watching that are mediated by technological capability through the use of both CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras and a handheld camcorder.

I use the term “techno-authenticity” to describe this function because it suggests that technology be used as a control, as a means of forcing the truth of a given scenario. The purpose of techno-authentic devices is to document, authenticate, and authorize, yet they simultaneously disperse, proliferate, and extend into multiple media and archival forms in sometimes surprising, difficult-to-control ways. The modern-day

CCTV camera, for example, commonly found on street corners, at traffic lights, and in public and private buildings, attempts to document events as they happen for the sake of safety and security. This information can then be used to identify criminals and to provide evidence in courtroom proceedings. The CCTV camera, of course, has the potential added effect—this is a consequence of its Panoptic coerciveness—of either keeping citizens in line or requiring additional criminal creativity in order to evade the

108

camera’s all-seeing eye. Yet, CCTV footage is also limited in some real respects.

Analysis and interpretation is as crucial as the footage’s documentation of events; since it offers only a limited perspective of any scene, interpretation can be flawed.

Furthermore, the CCTV images can be distributed, copied, or corrupted in any number of ways, leaving open the questions of their absolute validity and their potential abuse of privacy. In this situation, correlating the judgment of truth-value with a technology exposes limits of both technology and truth. This tension of the techno-authentic archive is heightened in the Doctor Who Hamlet, which is openly concerned with Hamlet’s need to ascertain truth and find justice, ultimately suggesting that techno-authenticity can be untrustworthy.

Doran’s Hamlet inscribes a model of surveillance culture that is consistent with a central element of Shakespeare’s play; the individual crafts his or her persona in real time, mutably and inconsistently, even as s/he is being constantly watched by others.

Hamlet lives in a court defined by watching, and most of the characters’ eyes are specifically upon Hamlet for much of the play. By “directing” the performance of The

Mousetrap and employing his own camera, Tennant’s Hamlet appropriates the gaze that has previously been specifically upon him, turning his eye instead upon Claudius in order to ascertain the King’s guilt (and the Ghost’s truthfulness). In Doran’s Hamlet, the burden of eyewitness proof is shifted to a techno-authentic device: a handheld Super 8 camera with which Hamlet films not only the players and the play-within-the-play, but also his subsequent soliloquies in a form of video diary. Doran’s Hamlet demonstrates the seductive and elusive power of surveillance, and again reiterates that the surveillant, truth-telling technologies can be appropriated for both the purposes of resistance and

109

revelation. This Hamlet is in this respect especially relevant to the concerns of a social media generation wrapped up in a state of performative surveillance of even the most intimate behaviors. The lessons of Doran’s Hamlet demonstrate that the richness of

Shakespeare’s text is endlessly applicable to new generations and new conditions of social behavior.

Surveillance, Power, Techno-authenticity

My argument about the techno-authentic and its relationship to the surveillance state in Doran’s film stems—like many arguments regarding surveillance—from a

Foucauldian view of surveillance and power as presented in Discipline and Punish.

Foucault, of course, sees surveillance and power as mutually reinforcing concepts, adopting as metaphor Jeremy Bentham’s model of the Panopticon, an ideal prison with a centralized tower that allows the guard to potentially see all while no individual prisoner has a view of either the guard or the other prisoners. This is a model of total discipline and by extension, total control. The Foucauldian/Benthamite prison presents a

“system of individualizing and permanent documentation” (250) requiring not only constant visibility of the prisoner but also a centralized gaze. The Panoptic becomes, of necessity, integrated into everyday life; it “must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men”

(205). Thus, the Panopticon is a condition in which indefinite discipline is the norm

(227).3 The Doran Hamlet both embodies this Foucauldian model and defies it. Its emphasis on surveillance technologies that are also techno-authentic, puts in place this

Panoptic system for which the play allows, amplifying the play text with contemporary

3 By now, it is perhaps a cliché to even argue that Denmark functions as a panoptic prison.

110

systems of surveillance. In the film, the documentation of Hamlet by the CCTV camera is individualizing and permanent, yet it is not clear whether the surveillance is state- controlled, ghost-controlled, or some combination of the two. Where Doran’s model refutes the Foucauldian system, and indeed the reason I must derive my own terminology, is the fact that the film contains no centralized gaze. Rather, the gaze shifts constantly. The surveilled and surveillor are in flux; at one moment Hamlet is spied upon by an unidentified gaze behind the CCTV camera, at another Hamlet spies upon

Claudius. All are, at different times, offenders (becoming thus an “individual to know”

[Foucault 251]) and wielders of panoptic power.

Here, my neologism “techno-authenticity” is useful because it demonstrates this tension of technology, truth, verifiability, archivability, and subjectivity. Techno-authentic media become so through their archival functions. Simply put, they are technologies that attempt to document or corroborate the truth of another account—one that is notionally subjective and unreliable—of an event. In other words, the technologically- mediated representation is claimed not as an alternative version of the event—though, as Sébastien Lefait (Surveillance on Screen) observes, it must and can only be that— but as an objective, paradoxically unmediated (by prejudice or perspective) representation. Yet, unsurprisingly, this is a complicated process. Though surveillance ought to confirm and establish objective facts, it is still subject to error, subjectivity, and human interpretation. So, while a techno-authentic medium attempts to record and dispassionately adjudicate truth, it can and does sometimes fail in this pursuit.

Surveillance, government and otherwise, is notoriously one-sided, even in the age of big data. Lefait (Surveillance on Screen) notes, for example, that the use of CCTV cameras

111

establishes that “one film proof is no longer sufficient, as counterevidence footage caught by a different camera may be available” (xix). For Lefait, this fact suggests that surveillance films renew the Renaissance trope of the theatrum mundi, in that “real surveillance footage can be thought of as fictional, and fictional surveillance footage can be interpreted as real” (ix). The real and the falsified are difficult to distinguish, as the real becomes just another instance of a counter-real.

Surveillance in Film Hamlets

Gregory Doran’s TV film Hamlet extends elements of surveillance culture that

Shakespeare’s play sets in motion. As mentioned previously, the TV film heightens themes already brought out in the stage production, itself occupied with surveillance.

The main page of the RSC promotional website for Hamlet casts it as a spy thriller, featuring David Tennant’s face in close up with the lines, “My father’s died, my mother has married my uncle and I’m being watched.” The accompanying images on the screen demonstrate some of the visual devices that contribute to the production’s sense of paranoia, particularly glossy, reflective surfaces. The theme of watching is embellished in this online marketing, and the parallel significance with the audience’s status as “watchers” is not lost on Doran. In truth, the status of Doran’s production as theater, then film embeds forms of surveillance and watching into the production history, itself heavily influenced by fan culture—the ritualized watching of certain celebrity and artistic personalities. The Royal Shakespeare Company staged Doran’s Hamlet in 2008, at a time when its star—David Tennant—was at the height of his run as the eponymous character in the BBC’s Doctor Who, a part he played from 2005–10. The intertextual

112

links between the two roles, astutely documented by Andrew James Hartley,4 resulted in Doran’s production being referred to as “the Doctor Who Hamlet” and selling out performances to scads of youthful Doctor Who fans, many of whom had never attended a live performance of the Bard’s play. The popularity of this Hamlet, along with its stunt casting of David Tennant and Patrick Stewart (star of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Men film series), led to a filmed version by Illuminations for the BBC and broadcast in early 2009 on both the BBC and PBS.

Doran takes part in a long tradition of foregrounding Hamlet’s surveillance theme.

His truth-telling technologies appear in a play occupied with characters obsessed with the theatrical and its related modes of watching. These characters acknowledge their status as actors both literal (Polonius’s acknowledgment of previously playing Julius

Caesar [3.2.103–04]) and metaphorical (Hamlet’s lines throughout that refer to himself—and humans in general—as mere players on the stage), perform plays-within- plays (The Mousetrap of 3.2), reflect on actors acting (Hamlet’s “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba” at 2.2.559), and engage in theatrical metaphors (for example,

Hamlet’s head as a “distracted globe” [1.5.97]). The court itself is consumed with obtaining proof through watching. Various characters, though usually Polonius, vow to watch or observe in order to find out the truth. The play begins with the watch patrolling not only for the security of the kingdom but also to find visual proof of the Ghost’s visitations; they see the Ghost “upon the platform where we watch” (1.2.213). When asking Reynaldo to follow Laertes to France, Polonius instructs him to “Observe

4 Hartley’s analysis is specific to the stage production as it was published before the film’s release. Hartley convincingly argues that Tennant humanizes the two roles in unprecedented ways: “In Tennant those two roles (the Doctor and Hamlet) are rendered more approachable, more ‘human,’ partly through his desire, the earnest wish for a connection to Rose/Ophelia. He becomes more like us, easier to like, easier to connect to because we imagine that that is what he really wants” (n.p.).

113

[Laertes’s] inclination in yourself” (2.1.68) rather than just accepting evidence of

Laertes’s behavior through hearsay. Claudius and Polonius hide behind an arras to spy on Hamlet and Ophelia so that they will be observe Hamlet’s behavior unseen and be able to thus judge it objectively (3.1). Hamlet and Horatio plan to observe Claudius during The Mousetrap:

Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,

And after we will both our judgments join

In censure of his seeming. (3.2.84–87)

Polonius fatally hides behind another arras to observe Hamlet and Gertrude (3.4).

Claudius instructs Horatio to watch over the mad Ophelia: “Follow her close, give her good watch, I pray you” (4.5.74). Interestingly, with the exception of The Mousetrap and

Ghost scenes, the watching is heavily concentrated on the youth.5

Recent film adaptations frequently employ this surveillance theme.6 Both

Kenneth Branagh and Franco Zeffirelli incorporate observation and surveillance; though their pre-twentieth century settings preclude CCTV cameras, they each emphasize spying and watching through other means. Branagh includes a two-way mirror behind which Claudius and Polonius spy on Hamlet and Ophelia—a device that Doran also includes. Furthermore, Branagh’s repeated use of flashback, flash-forward, and other visualizing devices allows the viewer to observe offstage moments in the play.7 Rather

5 This youthful angle is particularly keyed up in Almereyda’s film which turns Hamlet and Ophelia into a pair of star-crossed lovers, à la Romeo and Juliet.

6 On surveillance in film Hamlets, see Burnett.

7 For more on the use of these filmic devices in Branagh, see the introduction to this dissertation. See also Richard Burt’s analysis (“Hamlet’s Hauntographology”) of these scenes in which he refers to these moments in Branagh as “fact-similes” (238, n. 25).

114

than including the Ghost’s story only through language, Branagh chooses also to illustrate it. He also includes scenes in flashback to which the play never directly refers, such as sexual relations between Hamlet and Ophelia or Claudius seducing Gertrude before the King’s death, though the latter may strictly be in Hamlet’s imagination rather than fact. Zeffirelli’s Hamlet is also full of watching, or, in Anthony Dawson’s view,

“glancing.” The film’s appropriation of both vertical and horizontal space privileges the watcher as the keeper of information, a device that Zeffirelli most likely appropriates from Laurence Olivier’s use of vertical spaces.8

Michael Almereyda, arguably the predecessor most influential for Doran, crafts a technology-driven Hamlet. In it, Hamlet is a filmmaker and Ophelia a photographer; both work in outdated mediums at the time of the film’s release—Hamlet records with a

Fisher-Price Pixel Vision camera made in the late 1980s and Ophelia still develops her own photos in a darkroom.9 Surveillance devices, including wires, CCTV cameras, and other techno-authentic devices, populate the film. Almereyda’s Hamlet incorporates a variety of collage-like interpolated scenes, many of which are mediated through technological devices. For example, the film works its way into the “To be or not to be” soliloquy through a sequence that begins with footage of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat

Hanh speaking about the universal need to “inter-be,” shows Hamlet writing the letter to

Ophelia that Polonius later reads to the King and Queen, and includes an inset of

8 Dawson sees this form of watching also in Zeffirelli’s repeated window shots, which become “a kind of frame within a frame, obsessively calling attention to the act of viewing, which both spectators and characters are equally engaged in” (202). See also Crowl (Shakespeare at the Cineplex) on the use of vertical and horizontal space in the film.

9 Samuel Crowl (Shakespeare at the Cineplex) conceives of Hamlet as a member of the Danish Dogme 95 film movement (191), in particular, whose video diary, “shot in grainy black-and-white, [gets] at the texture of his inner agony” (192).

115

Hamlet visiting Ophelia’s apartment where Polonius catches them together. From here, the viewer first hears a sound-bite of the “To be or not to be” speech, though Hamlet watches, rewinds, and rewatches himself speaking only the opening line as he moves a

(presumably loaded) gun between his forehead and throat.10 The full speech arrives a few scenes later when Hamlet speaks it while wandering the “Action” aisle of a

Blockbuster Video store. All of these moments speak to Hamlet’s role as not only a watcher but also as a postmodern filmmaker, cutting and pasting together shots and scenes from a variety of sources. But Hawke’s Hamlet is primarily concerned with self- expression and interiority; apart from his “film/video” The Mousetrap, Hamlet’s reflections on video are contained to self-reflection, or as Samuel Crowl (Shakespeare at the Cineplex) would have it, self-absorption (195).11 For Katherine Rowe, however,

Hamlet’s appropriation of digital tools as well as his constant replays are forms of resistance in which Hamlet wants to retain memory on his own, non-corporately- controlled devices. Hamlet’s surveillance of the world around him thus serves primarily as a means of personal archiving and meditation, allowing him to (re)create his subjectivity in a context of panoptical mediality through the mastery of that surveillance media.

Almereyda’s influence on Doran’s film is part of what sets the Doran TV film apart from its production on stage. The stage production’s interest in surveillance12 is

10 For more on sound-bite Shakespeare, see the analysis in Chapter 2 of the same catchphrase in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be.

11 Mark Thornton Burnett points out that Hamlet shies away from more public forms of surveillance, such as the paparazzi cameras (37).

12 Doran notes in a rare bit of editorializing in the production “scrapbook” that Hamlet lives in “an intensely dangerous world of hyper-surveillance, in which Hamlet himself seems largely politically disinterested” (n.p.).

116

embellished in the film with the inclusion of the CCTV and Super 8 cameras. Yet whereas watching and observing in Almereyda leads to a technologically-mediated interiority for Hawke’s Hamlet, Tennant’s Hamlet is not afforded the same privilege of self-reflection. As examined above, Hawke’s sullen Hamlet cultivates subjectivity through technology and can typically do so without interference. In Tennant’s world, however, all self-expression is spied upon, which means the self must be expressed in a newly medial version; subjectivity is possible for Hamlet, but that subjectivity is always performative since Hamlet is constantly watched by electronic eyes. Again in contrast to

Almereyda’s Hamlet, the technological devices in Doran are geared towards data capture, rather than data editing,13 and this sense of being caught in a reflection is present in the film’s mise-en-scène—a set comprised of black, glossy surfaces meant to reflect, albeit imperfectly, the bodies of the cast and emphasize the watchfulness of the court. Yet, this imperfect reflection suggests the limits of that watchfulness, a notion carried through to other visual devices meant to demonstrate only partial transparency: a fractured mirror following the shooting of Polonius, puddles on the ground when the

Ghost visits, a two-way mirror, and frosted glass windows. These set pieces, to which I will return, show a court that is obsessed with watching, but whose vision is always clouded. Whereas the citizens at Elsinore believe in eyewitness proof—one might note

Polonius’s vow to “find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre” (2.2.157–59)—the devices through with they attain this proof are flawed. The use of truth-telling technologies of surveillance amplifies this theme. But, whereas Ethan

13 Katherine Rowe describes Almereyda’s use of technology use as “belated” citing anachronistic examples such as floppy disks and faxes rather than email, in 2000—long after these technologies have become generally replaced by email and electronic file transfers. Doran’s film contains this similar sense of anachrony, using outdated technologies to demonstrate surveillance in a time when surveillance, particularly data surveillance, is such a part of the cultural consciousness.

117

Hawke’s Hamlet appropriates technology as a means of personal resistance and melancholy reflection, David Tennant’s Hamlet seeks to exist as an individual in a state always-already defined by surveillance culture. Surveillance, reflecting the film’s 2009 concerns, is encoded in Tennant’s world in a way that it was not for Hawke. Tennant’s resistance to surveillance, and his effort to turn it around on others in his pursuit of an unmediated truth—which is in fact inaccessible to him—is his existence.

Tennant’s Hamlet is not always the wielder of the technology. Rather, though he initially attempts to distance himself from it, he ultimately must turn to the technology in order to assert himself within this regime. The distancing effect in Doran’s Hamlet is produced through techno-authentic frames-within-frames. While Almereyda does use this same device, the frames serve to demonstrate Hamlet’s interiority while distancing the viewer as exterior to Hamlet’s grief and solitude. In Doran, the frames show that

Hamlet’s interiority is constantly under observation. As in the panoptic, the mechanisms of observation are always on display, reminding the observed that they are being watched. As we will see, Hamlet’s response is for the observed to become the observer, thus becoming part of the political drama, which extends back to his father, now a Ghost observing Hamlet, as well as to the consummate politician, Claudius, who, like Hamlet, performs as if for the camera.

From CCTV to Super 8: Modes of Surveillance in Doran

In Doran’s film, the CCTV cameras appear throughout the film, most notably in the ghost scenes (1.1, 1.4, and 1.5), the Nunnery scene (3.1), in Hamlet’s “rogue and peasant slave” speech (2.2), and in the final duel scene (5.2).14 These CCTV scenes

14 In contrast, the CCTV camera is only seen in Almereyda’s film when the Watch waits for the Ghost, ultimately capturing his image on camera (something which Doran’s CCTV camera cannot do).

118

are heavily concentrated in the first half of the film, until the turning point of the “rogue and peasant slave” speech. After this moment, the mediatic device temporarily switches from CCTV footage to Hamlet’s handheld camcorder but reappears leading into the film’s final scene. The CCTV scenes are marked by shots of the CCTV camera mounted on the wall as well as shots viewed either on the CCTV feed or through its viewfinder.

They are also frequently accompanied by sound effects, clicking and whirring noises that accompany the tracking of the cameras and frequently remind characters that they are under surveillance. Over the course of the film, the CCTV camera and the film camera gradually become indistinguishable. Though initially the high angle shots of the hall are characteristic only of the CCTV camera shot, these high angle shots are later shown through the TV film camera without the viewfinder markings.15

The opening scene includes several forms of eyewitness proof. The first, and most obvious, is the CCTV camera, which monitors the hallways of Elsinore throughout the scene. The film opens with what Lefait (Surveillance on Screen) refers to as a primary surveillance shot in which “the surveillance tool cannot be told from the film camera,” both of which are used for creative purposes (207). Doran’s opening shot contains viewfinder markings, and the camera moves with Barnardo as he paces. Each tilt and pan is accompanied by a mechanical sound effect, demonstrating the camera’s ability to track its subject accurately. Subsequent shots show the Watch encountering the Ghost, and the viewfinder demonstrates that while it can capture human subjects, ghosts are outside of its archival scope. Lefait (“This same…watch”) equates the point

15 The first of the non-CCTV high angle shots occurs in 1.5.148 when the Ghost is urging Hamlet and company to swear upon Hamlet’s sword. This supports Lefait’s argument (“This Same…Watch”) that the CCTV point of view is synonymous with the Ghost, but later examples are not as clear on this point.

119

of view of the surveillance camera with the Ghost’s, arguing that its “ambiguous subjectivity” is an atypical usage of CCTV shots in films (7).16 The CCTV camera lays the groundwork for a film that will be heavily invested in the techno-authentic as a constant state of surveillance. Characters, especially Hamlet, are clearly aware of its presence. For example, when Hamlet consorts with Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo following the Ghost’s second visit (1.5), he glances up at the CCTV camera before telling them his plan for confirming the Ghost’s veracity. The shot cuts to the CCTV viewfinder as Hamlet turns his back to it and drops his voice to a whisper. This CCTV camera is also quite powerful, as it has tracking and zooming abilities as well as audio capture; in other words, it is an idealized, panoptic CCTV camera. Its presence crosses the line between objectivity and subjectivity, or what Lefait (“This same…watch”) refers to as the tension between the “scopic regime of surveillance, which is supposedly objective, and that of audiovisual fiction, which evokes the ideas of deceit and illusion”

(9). It objectively captures its subject, but its capture is motivated by an unseen agency that directs its gaze.

The second techno-authentic medium in this opening sequence is the TV camera itself, which takes on the Ghost’s point of view. On the Ghost’s first approach toward the

Watch, it approaches from the TV camera’s angle. The dolly shot moves in rapidly towards the shot, and then shifts to a handheld camera. The Ghost focuses in closely yet shakily on each guard’s face, checking to see if Hamlet is present. Here, even the

Ghost is wrapped up in the techno-authentic, appropriating the TV film camera’s gaze to

16 He writes that “The opening suggests that the CCTV camera is diegetic, as a character whose face remains unseen operates it. The presence behind the surveillance camera, therefore, draws its mysterious quality from being liminal, just like the ghost who, in the play, occupies threshold locations” (7). Lefait ultimately concludes that the surveillance camera functions like the ghost, “at the same time, behind the camera, within its field, watching and being watched” (8).

120

seek out his son’s face. A third techno-authentic, as well as meta-theatrical, moment in the opening sequence is the continued use of a flashlight to function as a spotlight, reminding the viewer that surveillance and theater are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Francisco wields the flashlight as a device for literally shedding light on his subject. In fact, this flashlight is what enables the “big reveal” of the Ghost’s face. The CCTV camera has just shown the watchmen flailing in the dark fending off a ghost that the viewfinder cannot capture. Then, when the TV camera captures the same scene,

Francisco’s flashlight catches the Ghost like a spotlight, revealing Patrick Stewart’s face in close-up.

While this ghost scene establishes the CCTV device within the film and demonstrates the concern with observation as a means of truth-telling, other scenes prove more enriching to the study of techno-authenticity. The first is the nunnery scene

(3.1), which demonstrates the perceived agency of the CCTV camera. When Hamlet utters the line “Get thee to a nunnery,” the CCTV camera clicks suddenly, startling

Hamlet out of the moment. He remembers the camera’s presence, pauses, and asks

Ophelia, “Where is your father?”17 Sudden awareness of a technology that was previously relegated to the background heightens Hamlet’s suspicions. The machine- like noise of the camera and its timing make Hamlet believe that Polonius is behind the camera, operating it from some remote location in order to spy on Hamlet and Ophelia.

In reality, however, Polonius is observing in a low-tech mode, hiding behind a mirror.

Hamlet argues with Ophelia and glances back at the camera, which in this shot reflects

17 This is an interesting contrast to the same scene in Almereyda’s scene in which Hamlet discovers Ophelia wearing a wire while he is unbuttoning her shirt. Both films alert Hamlet to Polonius’s presence through an authenticating technological device.

121

the stained glass window, something that is supposed to be transparent but instead serves a decorative, aesthetic function. This shot demonstrates the ways that these technologies of transparency, the techno-authentic, can be misleading, a point to which

I will return. Like the stained glass window, the CCTV camera should demonstrate transparency. It should be thing that captures and authenticates truth, but it can only capture a clouded image.

Upon noticing the CCTV camera, which of course has been there the whole time,

Hamlet directly addresses it as if Polonius sits watching the live feed: “Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool no where but in ’s own house. Farewell”

(3.1.131–32). He drags Ophelia in front of the camera’s lens, and while delivering the subsequent lines, keeps referring back to the camera as if addressing its unseen audience. He runs out of the room, running back in only after Polonius has intervened in

Ophelia’s weeping and sent her away. Upon discovering Polonius, not Ophelia, waiting for him, Hamlet stops abruptly, looks about, and gazes into the two-way mirror (which

Claudius still stands behind), pausing pregnantly before responding to Polonius with an amazed “Well, God-a-mercy” (2.2.172). After this bit of stage business, the film continues on with Hamlet’s and Polonius’s witty repartee. This brief scene suggests that

Hamlet has previously run out of the room to investigate who is operating the CCTV camera. Though the film does not make it clear what or who Hamlet has viewed on the

CCTV footage, Tennant’s actions suggest that Hamlet’s investigation may have revealed Polonius and Claudius hiding behind the mirror. In this scene, spying is not only enhanced by but also complicated by techno-authenticity. The function of the surveillance camera is for powers-that-be to spy on the court, not necessarily just

122

Hamlet, but the film does not make clear who has the point-of-view of the footage.18 And just as the footage can be used against someone, the individual also has the ability to use the footage for his or her own purposes. This is the first evidence the film offers of

Hamlet’s ability to use the technology for his own purposes, but Hamlet’s appropriation of this technology to spy and discover Claudius and Polonius’s location is so subtle that it can be missed in a moment. Hamlet has technology so embedded in his life that in addition to the more highlighted displays of the techno-authentic technologies he subtly engages with them off-camera as well.

In another CCTV scene, immediately before the “rogue and peasant slave” speech (2.2), Hamlet appears to disengage from the techno-authentic by dismantling its apparatus. Once again, as in the nunnery scene, Hamlet is reminded of the CCTV camera’s presence due to the squeaking hinge sound that accompanies its movement.

The viewer sees Hamlet from the point of view of the camera as he runs to it, climbs a chair, and reaches towards the camera which goes dead as he rips it from the wall.

Hamlet throws the device across the room angrily, saying “Now I am alone.” Analyses by Klett and Lefait (“This same…watch”) assume this is an honest statement, that

Hamlet is finally truly by himself and can speak his soliloquy freely.19 Yet, given the dynamics of the nunnery scene in which Hamlet finds Polonius not behind the CCTV camera but rather behind the mirror, Hamlet cannot actually believe himself to be alone.

18 Lefait suggests that the CCTV camera is the Ghost’s point of view, though even this is not consistently true across the film. In this scene, however, this equivalence does make sense given that all the other potential subjects have been revealed by the TV film camera. That is, unless Gertrude is the secret brains behind the operation.

19 Lefait goes further than Klett, offering that “Hamlet creates a moment of intimacy for himself by tearing apart the surveillance camera gazing down at him” because he “understands that just because all the other characters have left does not mean that he is alone” (13). Lefait is primarily concerned, though, with Hamlet’s freedom from the Ghost, as embodied by the CCTV camera.

123

The previous scene demonstrates that due to court dynamics there is always the potential for “low tech” forms of watching. And, in fact, after the camera is torn from the wall, the TV camera angle switches to another CCTV camera-like high angle shot of

Hamlet dismantling the CCTV camera. Even though the CCTV camera is out of commission, its function is replicated by the TV camera. These repeated extreme high angle, non-CCTV shots are the most overtly theatrical in the film, more akin to traditional filmed theater than cinema. These shots can be read as privileging the television viewer with more information than the typical television camera offers. The position of the viewer is like that of a balcony-seat occupant in a theater who has a full view of the entire stage at any given time and can “zoom in” on any part of the action at will; as such, this viewer becomes the idealized, panoptic point of view. By including these shots and not coding them as CCTV footage, Doran equates the viewer with that camera, offering the TV viewer the privileged position of surveillance.

In spite of the fact that the scene begins with Hamlet peeling back a layer of meta-filmic surveillance by dismantling the CCTV camera, the film’s presentation of his

“rogue and peasant slave” speech capitalizes on its metatheatrical, self-reflexive content, while also foregrounding Hamlet’s new relationship to technology, in which he becomes the wielder of techno-authentic power. The soliloquy’s metatheatrical content includes Hamlet’s reflection on the First Player’s acting of Hecuba in which he is able to

“force his soul” (2.2.553) to become the part, weeping for the fictional Hecuba. It is also in this speech that Hamlet devises his plan to trap Claudius. Based on anecdotal evidence that

guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have by the very cunning of the scene

124

Been strook so to the soul, that presently

They have proclaim’d their malefactions (2.2.589–92)

Hamlet concludes that “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the

King” (2.2.604–05). Doran’s film amplifies these metatheatrical lines with visual references to theater settings. When Hamlet speaks of the phenomenon of guilty play- goers being so startled by the presentation that they confess their sins, Tennant crouches on the floor as the camera slowly tilts to show the chairs around the perimeter of the set which will shortly provide seating for The Mousetrap’s audience. Just as the

“guilty creatures” discover their guilt through the content of the play, the film’s viewing audience is reminded about its complicity in the watching dynamics of the scene; the audience watches Hamlet talking about watching Claudius in order to ascertain his guilt while Claudius watches The Mousetrap. Perhaps the film’s audience will likewise have its conscience “caught,” thereby convicting the audience members for their own surveillance practices.

Tennant’s performance in this scene is particularly manic, and it is also here that his performance most evokes his playing of the Doctor. When Hamlet asks “Am I a coward?” he approaches the camera, addressing the film audience directly, pausing as if he expects a response. This same type of break in suspension of disbelief occurs a few lines later when Tennant’s native Scottish accent becomes more pronounced in the lines, “Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!” (2.2.581).20 In contrast to the rest of the film in which he keeps that accent under control, Hamlet is so enraged by

Claudius’s villainy that he cannot keep himself in buttoned up, detached mode.

20 Branagh has a similar intonation to these lines, revealing Branagh’s own Irish accent.

125

Tennant’s Hamlet then becomes one of the “region kites” (2.2.579), encircling the camera like a bird of prey as he considers testing not only the Ghost of his father but also his uncle Claudius. The scene builds to a crescendo as the camera is trapped in the middle of the room while Hamlet stalks around it. Tennant shouts his final lines and runs out of the room.21 This pacing, whirling scene does not demonstrate a Hamlet who truly thinks himself alone. Rather, this Hamlet repeatedly breaks the fourth wall in both word and action. He has severed a mediatic layer by disposing of the CCTV camera, but, after the lesson of the nunnery scene, he must be at his most politic.22

Now that Hamlet has begun exploring the capability of technology for resistance, he undertakes to subvert the techno-authentic properties of these technologies. He amplifies their effect by employing a Super 8 camera,23 and he seeks to use this device to capture Claudius on tape during the Mousetrap scene.24 Throughout the sequence,

Hamlet’s camera moves around as rapidly and haphazardly as his eye, alternating between filming the action of the play to filming the reactions of Gertrude and Claudius.

The scene is set up as a theater-in-the round so that Hamlet, lying on the floor, faces

21 The constant running from place to place recalls Tennant’s often manic Doctor whose signature line is “Run!”

22 Following this scene, Claudius plots to send Hamlet, with his “brains still beating” (3.1.174) to England, concluding “Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go” (3.2.188). As Patrick Stewart’s Claudius utters these lines, he looks down at the discarded camera. Hamlet’s perceived madness requires documentation and archiving. The CCTV camera, though broken, is the means of keeping a (visible) eye on Hamlet’s madness.

23 Klett insists that Hamlet’s handheld camera serves as “an instrument of ‘sub-veillance,’” or “counter- organizational surveillance” (108). My only contention with her reading is the insistence on a Claudius/Polonius power structure as evidenced by the CCTV camera. The film, in actuality, is unclear as to who has access to and derives authority from the CCTV footage, a point which Lefait makes.

24 This scene provides another interesting counterpoint to Almereyda’s film in which The Mousetrap is a short film—or rather an edited, silent montage—that Hamlet presents at an invitation-only screening. Worthen argues that Hawke’s Hamlet is primarily an editor of digital information, which Worthen sees as the most contemporary message in an otherwise anachronous film.

126

not only the actors who perform on a rug in the middle of the hall but also the rest of the court. Hamlet’s position here has him looking through the performance at Claudius’s reaction as well as being the performance for Claudius and Gertrude. He watches the performance and the court, just as the court looks through the performance at him. This scene layers positions of watching and being watched in both diegetic fiction and nonfiction; each character simultaneously watches the fictional Mousetrap and the nonfictional court politics. Hamlet, in particular, is acutely aware of his observational status, as well as the play’s status as fiction “based on a true story.” He occupies the roles of actor and director in multiple layers of ongoing drama(s). Specific shots reinforce the watching/watched dynamic of the scene. For example, a racking focus shot during the dumb show moves from showing Lucianus pouring poison into the

King’s ear to Claudius’s reaction. The shot shows both images simultaneously; the diegetic fiction and nonfiction coexist. Hamlet’s camera continues to zoom in and out of the play and the audience reaction.

In contrast to Kyle Maclachlan’s guilt-ridden Claudius in the Almereyda Hamlet, though, Patrick Stewart is the consummate politician. His Claudius is always “on stage.”

When revealing the “point” of this metafiction, Hamlet leaps up from his seated position, announcing “‘A poisons him i’ th’ garden for his estate. His name’s Gonzago, the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian. You shall see anon how the murtherer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife” (3.2.261–64). Hamlet immediately then hides behind his camera as a very cool Claudius rises and calmly, but menacingly approaches Hamlet.

The extreme low angle shot of Claudius through Hamlet’s handheld camera shows

Claudius look directly into the camera, shake his head solemnly, as if correcting a

127

disobedient child, and walk away, remaining silent throughout. The court erupts into

“Lights, lights, lights!” and chaos, but Hamlet continues filming throughout the commotion, and even after the hall is empty, the camera still whirs away. Hamlet plays the role of sleuth-like filmmaker, documenting the truth of the situation by observation through a mediatic device. Doran’s film leaves out Hamlet’s line to Horatio to “Give him

[Claudius] heedful note, / For I mine eyes will rivet to his face, / And after we will both our judgments join / In censure of his seeming” (3.2.84–87) because Hamlet does not need Horatio’s noting. He does not need to compare eyewitness evidence with another character because he is storing his evidence in a more archivable and reproducible form through the camcorder. Hamlet has become the owner and operator of the techno- authentic device and can now use it for his own purposes. Yet, as the audience recognizes, this is but another version of the truth. Hamlet may believe his data-capture to be the most true version of event, but in the context of the play-within-the-play and his general condition as a medial subject, it can only be yet another unreliable record.

The handheld camera appears in two additional scenes in which Hamlet films his own soliloquies in a form of filmic “selfie” or video diary.25 Kenneth Rothwell, in writing about emerging technologies of the self in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, points out that

Hamlet’s soliloquies do not actually reveal his inner self, in contrast to what many readers appear to have concluded. He writes that instead, they are “fictions of privacy in reality delivered under the surveillance of a huge audience at the public playhouse”

(86). Beyond the fairly obvious statement on metatheater and suspension of disbelief, though, Rothwell also points out that “In the soliloquies, the prince generally directs his

25 David Tennant kept a similar sort of video diary while acting as the tenth Doctor on Doctor Who.

128

thoughts outwardly toward Elsinore and his relationship with the court, not inwardly, as has often been thought, toward profound examination of self” (86). Doran’s Hamlet underlines this point in the two soliloquies that Hamlet captures on his personal camcorder. The first diegetically filmed soliloquy shows Hamlet holding the camcorder, reciting “‘Tis now the very witching time of night” (3.2.388). The shot cuts to a viewfinder shot partway through this speech, as Hamlet reveals his plan to “speak daggers to her

[Gertrude], but use none” (3.2.396). This speech is heavily cut in the film version, fitting with Doran’s desire to rework Hamlet as a thriller. The camera angle cuts to an extreme close-up of Hamlet’s face, marked as camcorder-produced. The dramatic language, spoken in extreme close-up into a dated piece of technology suggests a provocative, sinister tone, foreshadowing the murder in the closet scene. The final camcorder scene occurs during the “How all occasions do inform against me” soliloquy (4.4) after Hamlet meets Fortinbras’s army. This entire speech is shown through the camcorder viewfinder shot. Hamlet again appears in extreme close-up in this also shortened speech. The cuts to this speech retain Hamlet’s final resolve that “My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (4.4.66). These two short speeches together come across as a vlog (video log), a genre of public self-revelation made popular on the Internet. These are soliloquies for a social media generation interested in self-presentation and public displays of self- reflection, a point to which I will return.26 That Hamlet films himself here suggests a documentary and/or distributory intent.

26 Klett offers an interesting reading of Hamlet’s red muscle t-shirt that he wears during his “To be or not to be” speech, suggesting that the shirt is a metaphor for Hamlet’s self-presentation in that it conceals and reveals simultaneously. She notes that “This T-shirt renders the reality of his body both visible (by clinging to Tennant’s slender frame and providing us with an illustration of what lies beneath the fabric) and invisible (by presenting a clearly fictitious vision of his body)” (112).

129

As Hamlet is becoming the wielder of the techno-authentic devices in the absence of the CCTV camera shots, the TV film camera repeats the extreme high angle shots that mimic the CCTV camera. These shots are not accompanied by the on-screen markers of the CCTV camera, but their similarity in angle suggests a correlation. The

CCTV camera shots return in the final duel scene and occur in rapid succession, in contrast to the earlier, more periodic reminders of its existence. These shots capture the entire action at once, in a mode reminiscent of the theater-goer who has more ability to see the entirety of the action at once. The line is blurred further between the CCTV and

TV film camera in this scene due to the lighting, which makes the non-CCTV footage look black and white. The two shots are no longer completely distinct.

Even as it deals in metaphors that deconstruct the truth-telling ability of techno- authentic devices, the film operates a second set of images—the sieve-like images of the Ghost’s armor and the frosted glass windows as well as fractured mirrors—dealing with issues of transparency and fragmentation; these reinforce problematics of surveillance technologies. Klett refers to these as reflective surfaces, a thematic similarity that Doran has in common with both Branagh and Almereyda. But, unlike these earlier directors who include intact mirrors and clear pools of water—images of reflection and transparency—Doran always comes back to the clouded reflective or transparent surface; the windows do not provide a view of the outside world, the broken mirrors fail to show the whole reflection, and puddles outdoors or glossy flooring indoors function as opaque mirrors, reflecting fragments of the subjects standing on these surfaces. Even the intact mirror in the hall is deceptive; the subject viewing his or her

130

reflection does not see that it is a two-way mirror. The imagery in this film, then, consists solely of objects unable to wholly reflect or provide a transparent window.

The fragmented mirror imagery begins at the moment of Polonius’s death, becoming a recurring device for the rest of the film. When Hamlet hears Polonius crying for help, he finds Gertrude’s pistol and shoots at the mirror. Polonius staggers out from behind the shattered mirror, which also reflects the frosted glass window. The shattered mirror is later the portal through which the Ghost of Hamlet’s father appears in the

Closet scene, and the mirror also becomes a feature of the great hall, as if it was transported from Gertrude’s closet in order to show the play’s increasingly fragmented characters, particularly Hamlet, Gertrude, and Ophelia. Following the death of Polonius, key scenes and speeches are addressed directly into the mirror. In Ophelia’s first mad scene, the audience initially only sees her in the mirror’s fractured image. In the scene between Hamlet and Horatio before the final duel, Hamlet speaks a number of his lines, including the famous “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10–11) directly into the shattered mirror, which in return reflects broken, distorted pieces of his face.27 Hamlet speaks with regret of Laertes, stating that he sees his own likeness in Laertes:

But I am very sorry, good Horatio,

That to Laertes I forgot myself,

For by the image of my cause I see

The portraiture of his. (5.2.75–78)

27 This image incidentally is used in the DVD and Blu-ray packaging of the production.

131

This statement, which emphasizes similarities between Hamlet and Laertes, is punctuated by images of brokenness—the shattered mirror and the chandelier lying on the floor—as well as frequent shots of the frosted glass windows. Two visual echoes between Gertrude and Claudius also reinforce the idea of a broken or opaque self- presentation. Claudius, after sending Hamlet off to England, stands at a sink, as if literally washing his hands of Hamlet. He peers up at his reflection in an old, broken mirror, urging England’s king on in the killing of his nephew (4.3.65–68). Claudius looks murderously serious here, apparently confronting his own clear reflection with brazen confidence. To reflect clearly, then, is to show the true darkness within. A contrasting example, the next shot shows Gertrude standing in front of the large shattered mirror from the closet scene, echoing the shot of Claudius in front of the broken basement mirror. But, unlike Claudius, Gertrude cannot look at her own reflection, broken as it is by the fragments of the mirror. She has her back to the mirror initially as if she seeks to deny the self-reflection that the mirror offers.

As noted above, Doran’s use of frames-within-frames distances the viewer from the action while simultaneously reminding the viewer of his or her complicity in this surveillance state. These frames-within-frames reflect, then, my dissertation’s argument that Hamlet is a play concerned with allegorizing its own future (re)adaptation. In

Hamlet’s first speech in the play, he instructs his mother that his internal grief about his father’s death supersedes the outward displays of mourning that he exhibits. He lists all of the things an actor might do to demonstrate grief: wear dark clothing, sigh repeatedly, shed tears, or look dejected. He summarizes,

These indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play;

132

But I have that within which passes show,

These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.83–86)

In other words, not only does Hamlet “seem” to be grieving his father, he grieves his father in a way that his actions cannot demonstrate. The techno-authentic devices in the film can only ever capture what “seems” to be truth with the possibility of additional truths always on the horizon. It is in this respect that even the characters in the play function as surveillance technologies; they observe Hamlet’s behavior and dress and make a determination about Hamlet’s inward state. What they cannot do, however, is see “that within which passes show,” and Hamlet’s acting of an “antic disposition” later in the play reveals this fact. Being caught in the multiple frames of the film does not lead to a demonstration of Hamlet’s interiority. Even at highly charged, seemingly heartfelt moments,28 one must always question whether Hamlet is “seeming” or “being.” Just as his “shapes of grief” (1.2.82) are “but the trappings and suits of woe” (1.2.86), his behavior throughout the film is able to be questioned as the trappings and suits of his interiority—and, of course, Hamlet’s inmost thoughts are not accurately represented by his external actions.

Social Media Shakespeare

Doran’s film fundamentally questions not only vision but also the capacity of humans and human-mediated technology to represent ‘truth’ and support justice. The technologies and visual metaphors that he employs suggest an always-incomplete transparency, a clouded truth, or a manipulable archive. It is in these ways that his

Hamlet is for a social media Doctor Who generation in which techno-authenticity is both

28 Tennant’s “To be or not to be” speech stands out in this regard.

133

a function of power and a way of reclaiming or reasserting identity. Social media can be seen as an instrument of power, controlled by a variety of institutional and corporately- driven entities to which users willingly submit often without the awareness of that fact.

As demonstrated by recent data-mining scandals—in which personal data is accessed by government and private organizations for purposes as varied as monitoring terrorist activity, acquiring and selling data for market research, or Facebook’s recent “study” on mood in status updates29—Internet surveillance occurs frequently without user knowledge or permission. Like Hamlet’s Denmark, which is famously a prison, Internet culture produces a form of ongoing surveillance that is, in a way, panoptic. What is striking in Doran’s film is Hamlet’s assumption that he is always caught in a technologically-mediated gaze that seeks the truth in his performance; he adjusts his performances accordingly. In the CCTV scenes, he does this through acting for that gaze or by reducing the camera’s accessibility to his words by dropping his voice or turning his back. Yet, Hamlet is equally capable of turning the gaze on others (and, reflexively, himself) through his filming of Claudius and of his own soliloquies. Critically,

Hamlet is not an editor, like Hawke’s Hamlet. Rather, he merely places himself in a position as (self-)surveillor.

Hamlet engages in a form of performative surveillance, a term coined by E.J.

Westlake to suggest that users engage with the panoptic in order to bridge the chasm between defining their own subjectivity and policing it within a community’s norms: “as people offer themselves up for surveillance, they establish and reinforce social norms,

29 In this study, Facebook’s data analysts manipulated the News Feeds of unknowing users, showing them either more positive or negative status updates from friends. They then tracked whether those users posted more negative or positive status updates. Though the study was not illegal, its ethics are in question since the users were not alerted to the research being done.

134

but also resist being fixed as rigid, unchanging subjects” (23).30 Because of a desire to connect and create community over social media platforms, Generation Y users are

“willing to offer themselves up for surveillance through performance and to act as the mechanism of surveillance” (31). In a similar vein, John Ellis argues that given the proliferation of amateur-friendly technological devices, more individuals have access to filming technology, which can democratize access and make production processes more evident to the broader public. Ellis suggests that, as more people become “filmers”

(rather than filmmakers), “The experiences of filming and being filmed, as well as of the distribution of the resulting material, have become more casual and mundane than at any previous moment in the development of moving-image culture” (186). Acts of watching and being watched are ever-present in many contemporary cultures, and the average individual is increasingly well-versed in visual argument. This state of recognition leads more and more individuals to willingly take part in Westlake’s performative surveillance.

Social media has a unique ability to make these processes of image creation, capture, and dissemination more visible, more transmissible, and more efficacious, pushing the boundaries of medial self-creation while still operating under an alternately corporately– and folksonomically-driven policing of normative behavior. In social media, the user crafts a persona through writing, images, videos, and other forms of digital

“sharing.” Through these means, the user has a fair amount of agency in self- presentation but this authority is always limited based on the platform’s format, rules, or requirements. Each Facebook user, for example, has the opportunity to define his or her

30 Westlake argues that Facebook News Feeds are not “deviant or passive” forms of identity creation for Generation Y users but rather active engagements.

135

identity in the “About” section of the profile.31 Here, the user can list basic information

(birthday, gender, relationship status), work and education, places lived and visited, and favorite music, movies, TV shows, and books. Pages the user has “liked,” uploaded photos, and events and groups s/he has attended or joined also appear on this page.

Through these fairly diverse means, the user can craft an identity based on biographical data and personal interests. Yet, these responses must also be scripted by not only the user’s sense of self-presentation (community-driven policing) but also Facebook’s infrastructure and code of conduct (corporate-driven policing). The individual user must not only consider the social norms of his or her community when deciding what pages, causes, or texts shape his or her identity, but the user must also follow structures put in place by Facebook. While the user can use his or her own words, the web interface dictates the number of allowable characters and categories of self-description.

Furthermore, the Facebook Code of Conduct confines users to modes of self- expression that are sometimes contentiously defined.32

Tennant’s Hamlet must constantly read and write in a place and time where actions of self-representation are acutely challenged by a surveillance culture, meaning that Hamlet must perform his (medially-created) self-representation. Hamlet demonstrates Westlake’s performative surveillance in that he engages with the gaze. In the play, Hamlet is able to claim a sense of agency by repressing his motivations—in other words, concealing the fact that he knows the details of his father’s murder. Yet,

31 Bakardjieva and Gaden refer to this type of scripted activity as a Foucauldian Technology of Sign Systems, though they apply it to MySpace, rather than Facebook, writing that “The self in MySpace is written not on a clean slate, but through a drop-down menu and a form-filling exercise inviting the individual to map him or herself out along the axes of cultural taste” (406).

32 A notable recent example is the removal of images of women breastfeeding because of a perceived violation of Facebook’s decency clause.

136

the line between his “true self” and his acted self is always in flux and never determinable. Doran’s film turns this theme toward a new, medial form of self- representation that is adapted to the media conditions of 2009. It is in this capacity that the situation for Tennant’s Hamlet is not so different from that of the 21st century “digital natives” that populate college classrooms who must contend with ever-increasing forms of social, public self-presentation. Technology, particularly social media, can be a boon to students, offering additional forms of community and professionalization not available to previous generations. Furthermore, public self-presentation is a social, professional, legal necessity. College students may be subjected to social isolation if they neglect their digital footprint; professionally, students may be in a better position for job prospects if Internet search results capture their profiles and prove them to be exceptional job candidates. Finally, in the legal realm, digital footprints can provide, in extreme cases, alibis or other forms of redeeming documentation. While the positive angles of techno-authenticity are fairly self-evident, some eschew this form of self- presentation due to privacy concerns or fears about the archiving of their identities, especially as it relates to the permanent preservation of a record of the self that might, in the future, fail to accurately or fairly represent the individual’s present moment. One might ask, though, whether these technologies are ever fully avoidable or if one can ever truly escape the Panopticon. Even Tennant’s Hamlet, who tears the CCTV camera off the wall, is never guaranteed his privacy, and thus his utterance of “Now I am alone” cannot be taken seriously.33 At heart, contemporary college students (among other

33 Revelations about NSA spying activities in the U.S. demonstrate that Hamlet’s concern and total lack of privacy is all-too-similar to our own. One might ask, then, if Doran’s production was produced a few years later how he might represent this very contemporary form of state surveillance.

137

segments of the population), are like Tennant’s Hamlet, thrown into a public, judgmental eye at every turn, and every—even every trivial—accident of their lives potentially has been recorded and archived away from their control to reformulate their pasts. Recent court cases, particularly the European Union’s decision that online users have a right to be “forgotten,” flesh out this point. EU citizens now have the right to file a form with

Google asking them to remove unfavorable search results based on outdated information,34 opening up issues of software efficacy as well as complaints about the public’s “right-to-know.”35 In this case, as in others, private, public, and professional identities collapse into one another, and the control over self-presentation is another form of self-preservation.

Among its many enduring qualities, the play Hamlet, particularly Doran’s version, teaches these issues of identity and identity politics in the medial condition of each of its adaptations. Sifting through Hamlet’s issues of techno-authenticity provides an instructive experience for students who are learning not only about literature but also about how to write with and about literature and then apply these skills to their own experience. As demonstrated in the Doran Hamlet, techno-authenticity is both the problem and savior of 21st century self-presentation. The 21st century individual is in a position of needing to assert his or her agency in the midst of constant, unceasing surveillance, both voluntary (social media) and state-imposed (consider the NSA issues currently under discussion in the United States). While the voluntary forms of surveillance may seem rather insignificant, one cannot and does not know how much

34 See Google’s official statement here http://www.google.fr/intl/en/policies/faq/

35 This is complicated even further by the fact that while European Google record can be expunged, the records can still be found on www.google.com.

138

data has been or is being collected and for what purposes that data will be used. No longer just an issue for “preppers” or conspiracy theorists—those who ready themselves for the collapse of civil society—citizens are increasingly concerned about the use of potentially one-sided evidence or inconclusive metadata. This surveillance always offers a limited angle of vision and a subjectivity, even as it touts its ability to document and archive objective information. Though the average individual will lack the power of

Torchwood’s Captain Jack Harkness to hack into these networks and turn them into the solution of problems that the creators of the networks ignore, s/he is able to subvert the technology in a way that allows for a limited, always medially-bound, self-presentation and self-preservation. One hopes that the situation is not as bleak as Hamlet’s and that the concerns about self-presentation relate solely to interpersonal dynamics. But, for

Tennant’s Hamlet, who only finds a degree of self-preservation within the media-logic of the play, his fate is determined from the first moments of the play, demonstrating that his self-preservation is provisional at most.

139

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

This dissertation proposes that the play Hamlet theorizes subsequent Hamlet-in- adaptation through processes of repetition and doubling—what I call “revision compulsion.” These processes can be characterized by a relation of “filiality”—heredity in the form of “descent with modifications” between generations. In this final chapter, I am interested in teasing out an answer to the question—Why Hamlet?

On a first glance, the question appears quite simple, and the answer possibly also simple. Hamlet is the canonical play resounding in the work of academics and theater-practitioners across the centuries who believe the play to be a work (or perhaps the work) of great literature; naturally, it sustains and engenders new readings and new adaptations. My aim in these pages was not and is not to refute or corroborate claims of this kind. Hamlet’s status as “Great Literature”—though perhaps what such a term means is open to debate—is evident from its near-ubiquity in college classrooms and theater playbills, as well as in the various forms of Shakespearean detritus filling up

Netflix queues, bookshelves, and gift shops. Yet, the greatest-work-in-all-literature argument only manages to partially answer the question of why Hamlet experiences a diverse array of cultural expression—from contempt to contemplation to convenient recognition—that leads to its near-constant recurrence in various and sundry

“questionable shapes.”

This dissertation has attempted to begin a more nuanced answer to the question

“Why Hamlet?” by presenting a number of interesting artifacts as evidence. In To Be or

Not To Be, the answer arrives in the form of a question, “Why not Hamlet?” That is to say, in the face of censorship and oppression, Hamlet is a logical choice both for its

140

acceptability and for its own themes of censorship and oppression. When Gestapo can’t play, why not play Hamlet? Yet, one notices as well that once Hamlet no longer delivers what the Polski actors needs, they move on to another Shakespeare reference—

Merchant of Venice—as a stand-in. In Chapter 3, the question shifts again from “Why

Hamlet?” to simply “Hamlet?” In that chapter, the discussion of Gossip Girl and Arrested

Development as containing versions of the ghost meme from Hamlet reveals that

Hamlet can and does arrive silently if not accidentally. The viewer is in the position of

Prince Hamlet inquiring “Dad?” to the Ghost. In the discussion of memes, it becomes clear that the individual units that make up Hamlet are divisible from the text itself. In other words, memes can operate as detached references, circulating in the cultural ether, reattaching and recombining at will, proliferating and generating new combinations. An issue that emerges from Chapter 4’s consideration of Gregory

Doran’s Hamlet film is that a third set of answers to the question of “Why Hamlet?” involves a correlation of the “Great Literature” argument with the enormous amounts of money that play can bring in. In these moments, the answer to “Why Hamlet?” becomes a business-like expression of Shakespeare as cultural commodity, as if the Bard’s name-recognition alone will sell movie tickets—or in this case, theater tickets and DVD purchases. Productions in this vein tend towards a more-or-less faithful interpretation of the play, typically as a vehicle for casting big-name actors, known for their performances in other cultural landmarks. It becomes, then, an issue not of “Why

Hamlet?”—the answer to which centers around box office numbers—but “Whose

Hamlet?”—or, jokingly, regarding Doran’s production, “Hamlet Who?”

141

In this conclusion, I’d like to put forth two “adaptations”—only in the sense of a revision compulsion that places tension on both fidelity and revision—that pose the question of “Why Hamlet?” yet again, underscoring that revision compulsion arrives in relation to the anxieties of filiality. These texts, both comic adaptations of Shakespeare, attempt to “reclaim” the character of Hamlet by rewriting him for the 21st century. The authors of each take up a form of authorial one-upmanship, positioning themselves vis-

à-vis Shakespeare-as-author and attempting to recreate a more suitable (often more masculine) Hamlet character, ennobling him in an effort to make him a hero. In the first example, To Be or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure, the possibilities for Hamlet’s character are as expansive as the 728-page variant of the “Choose Your Own

Adventure” book. The plot of Shakespeare’s play becomes only one possible plot in a series of alternate narrative paths derived from small decisions that the reader must make. Yet, in the face of seemingly endless possibilities, the reader must choose from options set out by the author and these options sometimes come down to an issue of artistic posturing. The comic book series Kill Shakespeare, on the other hand, offers another rewritten narrative for Hamlet, but one that is devoid of judgment or skepticism regarding the play.

From “Why Hamlet?” to “Why Hamlet?”

In 2012, comic writer Ryan North began a Kickstarter campaign1 to fund a

Choose Your Own Adventure version of Hamlet, titled To Be or Not To Be: That is the

1 Kickstarter is a crowd-funding website, which is to say that individuals can solicit donations, or “pledges,” for creative projects. See www.kickstarter.com. Due to North’s reputation among aficionados of web comics and the popularity of both Shakespeare’s classic play and Choose Your Own Adventure books, the initial fundraising goal of $20,000 was met within three and a half hours, and the total Kickstarter revenue totaled over $580,000.

142

Adventure.2 The book invites the reader to play as one of three characters: Hamlet (“an emo teen in his early 30s”), Ophelia (“an awesome lady in her late 20s, with a calm, competent, and resourceful demeanour”), or King Hamlet (and, of course, subsequently, the Ghost of King Hamlet) (4). The reader also has the option to follow the plot of

Shakespeare’s play by following a small skull icon—referred to as “Yorick skulls”— through the book. Other narrative arcs have Ophelia inventing indoor heating, the Ghost becoming a marine biologist (since ghosts do not need to breathe underwater), or

Hamlet dying in any number of ways. The end of each story arc features a different artist’s illustration of that ending.

North’s book embodies my concern in this project with adaption as variations on a theme. North does not want to tell one story, preferring instead for the reader to have open possibilities of recombination available. North frames it as giving the reader a chance to rewrite or rework Shakespeare, a desire that the introductory pages of the text suggest all readers have in common. This is also in the spirit of excess and abundance then—that the reader (and by extension, North) can surpass Shakespeare’s play. In the book, there is a play between consuming Shakespeare’s text—and by extension mastering or incorporating that text—and leaning on Shakespeare’s authority.

In some ways, the book attempts to erase mediation—telling the reader “you are

Hamlet”—but this is troubled by the narrator’s rhetorical self-assuredness. The narrator, presumably North, alternately assures the reader that this is his/her own adventure, but

2 The Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, popular in the 1980s and 1990s, are referred to as “game books,” in that the reader plays the part of one of the story’s protagonists and is presented with a variety of choices in how the narrative of the book will continue. Every few pages, the reader is presented with a choice and can flip to a different part of the book depending on the choice taken. Since North could not use the “Choose Your Own Adventure” lingo due to copyright restrictions, he refers to the book as a “chooseable-path adventure.”

143

follows that up by belittling the reader’s choices, particularly when the reader chooses the narrative path of Shakespeare’s play. North mocks Shakespeare by mocking the decisions made in Hamlet demonstrating a sort of irreverent reverence.

One of the techniques North uses in his text can help us understand the way that his book exhibits the tension of fidelity and revision. In several of Hamlet’s key speeches from the play, the reader can choose either the Shakespeare version—which s/he gets to by following the Yorick icon—or its “opposite.” For example, the reader can choose either “To Be” or “Not To Be.” The narration leads into that famous speech as follows:

You feel some introspection coming on. Yes. Oh man, this is going to be a big one. It’s gonna all boil down to this: is it even worth LIVING in a world where things don’t always go your way? Or to put it differently: “being alive is good, or MAYBE…being dead is good? Or to put it a third, more copula- tastic way: “to be or not to be?? Man. This is a big one, Hamlet. This is the speech this book is named after. I guess you’d better talk it out, huh? CHOOSE WISELY. You clear your throat and raise one hand in front of you. (101)

The reader then has the option to either “be” or “not be.” This introduction to the big decision—that of being or not being—is layered with narratorial intrusion, glossing

Shakespeare’s speech in crassly oversimplified terms while simultaneously pointing to the notional “big moment” in Shakespeare’s play. Even the final cue to “clear your throat and raise one hand in front of you” suggests a particular mode of performing the play, one seen also in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be. If the reader chooses “To Be,” s/he is taken to a page opening with “This is what you say to nobody in particular,” followed by the speech quoted directly from Shakespeare. North closes the page with “Man.

NICELY DONE, Hamlet” (16). Here, we see the narrator simultaneously mocking

Shakespearean soliloquies which are spoken to “nobody in particular” and venerating

144

the Shakespearean lines by choosing not to paraphrase them, as he does throughout much of the book. The facing page, however, offers the slightly revised version of

Hamlet’s soliloquy for the reader who chose “Not To Be,” including lines such as “To be? No, not to be, that is the answer” (17). After the conclusion of the soliloquy, in which

Hamlet concludes that not being is the answer because “ladies love a man of action,” the narrator’s text reads:

It’s a beautiful speech, and you’re not going to come up with any better last words than those. You chug some poison that’s sitting around, but unfortunately you choke on it a little as you drink so your last words are accidentally “Arrghah ggghhhhh bleh.” But nobody’s around anyway so no bigs, right?” (17)

By choosing the not-Shakespeare option, the reader finds the end of the story—

Hamlet’s death by suicide—and must begin the book again to start a new adventure.

At other moments, the narrator expresses disgust with and derision towards the decisions made in Shakespeare’s play, particularly as they relate to Ophelia. The reader may play simultaneously by the rules of the game book and by the plot of

Shakespeare’s play, but the reader is encouraged to rewrite Hamlet by choosing alternative paths. That is, if the reader wants to follow Shakespeare’s play, s/he must constantly be chastised and cajoled into making more interesting decisions.3 In the name of options, the text actually forecloses many productive readings of Hamlet by asking the reader to skip those plot points.4 For example, North has crafted a more 21st century friendly Ophelia; she is strong, independent, and loves science. So, when the

3 One might note, however, that they are more interesting precisely because Ryan North calls them more interesting. “Interest” is an author-defined category, presumably based upon his motive to undercut canonical interpretations of the play or, more generally, to use the “chooseable-path” mechanism to critique the supposed passivity of theater spectatorship.

4 Frankly, much of this has to do with genre and form, but personally I would really like to have seen a project that plays with point of view in Hamlet a bit more.

145

reader chooses to do something that betrays that characterization (i.e., play by the narrative of Hamlet), North attempts to convince the reader to choose otherwise, thus rewriting the play. A representative example is in the Ophelia’s opening scene from the play (1.3) in which both Polonius and Laertes lecture her about her chastity. Laertes’s first lines in North’s text are “If you sleep with Hamlet you’re a slut” (484). Ophelia is then presented with two options: “Slam the door in his face” and “Invite him to enter your room” (which is accompanied by the Yorick icon, indicating that it is the Hamlet choice). If the reader chooses the latter, the next page begins, “O-okay?” and continues with Laertes’s lecture. The options again read: “Throw him out of your room and slam the door in his face” and “Sit down beside him, for some reason, and tell him that he makes a lot of sense (somehow?) and you’ll do as he says.” The reader following the template of Shakespeare’s play is again confronted with a choice that evades the template, and the pattern continues until both Laertes and Polonius have said their lines

(in North’s paraphrase). The narrator finally segues away from the misogyny by saying,

“Listen, I’m going to cut our losses here. You’re not allowed to be Ophelia for a while”

(547), and forces the reader to play the role of Hamlet instead. According to the narrator, following the template of Shakespeare’s play—a template based on canonical- popular readings and receptions of the play—is the dumbest thing a reader can do.

Thus, North removes the reader’s ability to choose to follow a well-trodden and familiar path.5

5 For North, this derision of “the play” stems from his desire to produce a feminist Ophelia. Yet, this approach does not necessarily redeem Ophelia in the way that North seems to want. Rather, it replicates the conditions of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. In To Be or Not To Be, Ophelia is only allowed to make decisions insofar as she makes the “correct” decisions (as defined by North). This is, of course, a similar position to Hamlet’s Ophelia who must abide by the decisions of the men who surround her. A longer consideration of this topic might demonstrate how the writer forces Ophelia/the reader to play a more

146

What North’s text comes down to is artistic posturing, and this To Be or Not To

Be shares with Kill Shakespeare. North begins the introduction to his text with a biography of William Shakespeare who was “well known for borrowing from existing literature when writing his plays” (1). With this remarkably truncated description of

Shakespeare’s complex relation with his sources and precursors, North instructs the reader who wants to follow this plagiarized plagiarist’s story that

we’ve taken the liberty of marking with tiny Yorick skulls the choices Shakespeare himself made when he plagiarized this book back in olden times. They’re there in case you wish to put yourself in Shakespeare’s shoes, reading this book as he did, stealing plot elements wholesale, and classing up the language as he/you went/go. (1)

In this version, Shakespeare’s contribution to the textual history of Hamlet is to “class up the language” without messing with the plot elements that Shakespeare lifts “wholesale” from his sources. In the book’s acknowledgments, North mentions Shakespeare only in passing, choosing instead to focus on the web of acknowledgments extending back to

Mitochondrial Eve. North’s text is thus only one in an entire network of texts that could have come about depending on the creator’s ability and the people with whom that creator had interacted over the course of a lifetime:

I also want to thank everyone involved in the series of events that led to me being here today […] which means I’m thanking…pretty much everyone I’ve ever interacted with? And I’m also thanking everyone THEY’VE ever interacted with, for helping to make them so awesome. And if I’m doing that, I should probably thank the people who influenced the people who interacted with the people who influenced me as well, right? (474)

liberated role. He writes Shakespeare’s version of Ophelia off as “stupid” without dealing with the mechanisms of surveillance and repression that produce an Ophelia.

147

This is perhaps the danger of extending the work of adaptation widely into a network of references and influences; the list of acknowledgments, of parents and children in every form of filiality, could become endless.

Why Hamlet? Because Shakespeare

The comic book series Kill Shakespeare, a collaboration between Conor

McCreery, Anthony Del Col, and Andy Belanger, takes as its premise that after the events of the plays Shakespeare’s heroes and villains all occupy the same universe.

These characters express either devotion towards their god-like creator, Shakespeare, or they seek to rid their universe of his presence. In the first two runs of the series, this fight of good vs. evil pits Juliet, Othello, and Falstaff against Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and Iago.6 The character Hamlet arrives in this world while en route to England (offstage material found between Acts 4 and 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet). When the pirates attack, Hamlet finds himself afloat at sea and washes up in this new land. The two sides each try to recruit Hamlet to their cause, both believing that he is the prophesied

“Shadow King” who will either save the realm for or from Shakespeare. In this text, the reader is not given too many Hamlets (as with North’s text) but too much (often ill- conceived) “Shakespeare,” a phrase which here designates characters, settings, lines, references, and a smattering of “thee’s” and “thou’s” where they fit nonsensically.7 The series attempts to reclaim the character of Hamlet, whom Darwyn Cooke refers to in the

6 Later issues involve Prospero and Titus Andronicus as villains.

7 There has been a good deal of criticism of the comic book series’ use of stilted, pseudo-Elizabethan language, which I will refrain from reiterating here. The complaints are typically restricted to the following: incorrect usage of “thee” and “thou,” Shakespeare jokes that fall flat (one representative example: Falstaff brings Hamlet to the Merry Wives of Windsor brothel, saying “Aye, now here shall be the rub”), and the rewriting of plot elements from Shakespeare’s play (Rosencrantz tells Hamlet about Claudius’s letter before throwing it overboard).

148

foreword to the first trade paperback edition as an “emo douche.” In spite of early mixed reviews, however, the series does find its feet, but its success only comes about by removing the Hamlet-like elements of Hamlet’s characters. In other words, in order to succeed, McCreery, Del Col, and Belanger must un-Hamlet Hamlet.8

Unlike Ryan North, the creators of Kill Shakespeare allow for a certain universality and brilliance in the figure of Shakespeare, the poet-playwright.9 They craft him as a god-like writer who has written the Kill Shakespeare universe into being. He takes pity on his creations and seeks to help them after their plays are done, for example by rescuing Romeo and Juliet from the tomb. The defenders of Shakespeare’s name in Kill Shakespeare’s universe are referred to as prodigals and zealots who “risk their lives because of their belief in what Shakespeare represents. The spirit of

Shakespeare” (1.2).10 Yet, this god has limits, particularly in his inability to restore life to the dead. And Shakespeare, like Kill Shakespeare’s Hamlet, struggles deeply with guilt over what his creation hath wrought. The first presentation of Shakespeare in the series shows him to be a bitter, angry drunk whom Hamlet has to convince to save the prodigals. Though Shakespeare knows his magic quill11 can save his people in a fight against Richard III, he initially refuses to turn it over to Hamlet, saying “Through it I

8 Though his argument more broadly addresses the first two trade paperbacks of the series, Jason Tondro also recognizes the capacity of Kill Shakespeare to move beyond the text of Shakespeare’s plays while still possessing a sense of respect towards those plays. He sees the changes to the characters as positive and argues that these changes make the characters more appealing.

9 They do take a few cracks at the authorship controversy, such as the acknowledgments section which thanks “the big man himself…William Shakespeare (or Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward De Vere…)!” (n.p.).

10 In numbering the volumes and issues of the series, I will follow this formatting: series number.issue number. Here 1.2, then, refers to the first run, second issue. Currently, Kill Shakespeare is two issues into its fourth installment.

11 Michelle Ephraim discusses Kill Shakespeare’s tension between procreative, sexually active bard and his initial appearance as impotent, “un-penned and un-manned” (n.p.).

149

turned a heaven into a hell” (2.4). This Shakespeare describes himself as a former idealist—like the series’s Hamlet—but that time has changed him; he tells Hamlet, “You are a singularly determined and frustrating young man, Hamlet. You exasperatingly believe the world can be changed. You remind me I was once such an annoying whelp myself” (2.6). The series does maintain a somewhat tongue-in-cheek status about

Shakespeare, portraying him simultaneously as brilliant creator-deity and flawed human.12

Most interestingly, the creators of Kill Shakespeare take the plays as starting- points for the action of the series, conveniently placing the action of the plays outside that of the series. In Hamlet’s story, for example, Hamlet’s trip to England provides the premise for how he arrived in this strange land. The series begins in Elsinore just as

Hamlet is about to be sent away by Claudius. When showing the events of the past— the funeral of King Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude on the throne, Hamlet’s stabbing of

Polonius—the comic reverts to bluish-gray statue-like tones, a coloring that signifies past as past. Everything associated with the old Hamlet and the story of the play take on this shade. The action of the series, in contrast, is in deeper colors, marking a deep disconnect between the world of Shakespeare and the world of Kill Shakespeare. This coloring appears again later in a scene in which Hamlet and Juliet recall their past lives, i.e., the stories of their respective plays. Hamlet’s begins in the same bluish-gray tones, but then when he fills in the father-son back-story—an invention of the series—the colors shift again to the Kill Shakespeare color palette.

12 Ephraim sees this tension as a “bringing-into-being of a Bardbody—a proprietary relationship between the American reader and the made-in-America Shakespearean subject” (n.p.). Ephraim reads this as a sexualized, embodied relationship in which the aforementioned American readers “want his body…not to ruin him, but to be able to claim our carnal knowledge of him—a metaphor for our ability to do him again and again and again” (n.p.).

150

In order for Hamlet to fulfill the destiny laid out for him in Kill Shakespeare he must break the statues and move past the guilt of the Hamlet story arc. Only then can he find a new father figure—Shakespeare—and fulfill the prophecy of the Shadow King.

The book thus takes Hamlet out of the graveyard where his father’s “canonized bones” are buried and rewrites his story. Kill Shakespeare fills in blanks left open by Hamlet by writing in father/son baggage. Hamlet tells Juliet the story of his past in which

Every day I grew older, I could see that I became less and less his [King Hamlet’s] boy, his son. And more and more a usurper. Perhaps my father was not worthy of it, but I loved him. And because of my miscast love, I killed for him. I spilled blood for my father, who saw me not as a child to love and cherish, but as a rival to defeat. (2.2)

This characterization provides a reason for Hamlet’s delay and also provides the impetus for Hamlet to break with his Hamlet narrative and “become a man,” as Cooke’s foreword would have it. At the moment where the story bends from Shakespeare’s— when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern throw the King’s letter overboard en route to

England—the statues around the ship begin to crack. This is when Hamlet’s story can finally begin because his father’s ghost no longer paralyzes him.

Hamlet’s task is to fulfill the prophecy of the Shadow King, which in the series— at least at this point—means not being the King but being the catalyst for or harbinger to the “true King.”13 But in order for Hamlet to fulfill this role, he must find a new father figure and stand up to that person. He finds that in Will Shakespeare. Initially, Hamlet starts out on the journey of finding Shakespeare at Richard III’s behest. Richard recognizes Hamlet as the Shadow King; as such, he is the only one of Shakespeare’s characters who has access to the creator himself. Richard describes Shakespeare as a

13 At the time of this writing, the “true King” appears to be the as-yet unborn child of Romeo and Juliet.

151

tyrant who must be destroyed, and he promises Hamlet that he will return King Hamlet from the grave in payment for killing Shakespeare. The prodigals, particularly Falstaff, try to re-orient Hamlet, however, arguing that “We prodigals see thee as the one to return Shakespeare to his people. To save our father, our protector” (1.3). The concept of “father” is now doubled for Hamlet, who has to choose between his biological father—

King Hamlet—or his creator-father—Shakespeare. Ultimately, Hamlet chooses

Shakespeare. Yet, in order for Hamlet to make a choice in favor of Shakespeare, however, he must leave Hamlet behind. For this Hamlet, the past was prologue, and now he must create his own story. In order to get there, however, the series interestingly shifts Hamlet in and out of storylines of other Shakespeare characters, most notably playing Prince Hal to Falstaff and Juliet to Juliet’s Romeo. Falstaff kidnaps hamlet early in the series, which is Hamlet’s first introduction to the prodigals. He romps through the forest with Falstaff for a bit and escapes trouble in bawdy houses. But, eventually, Falstaff must die, and Hamlet moves from playing Prince Hal to playing

Juliet. Hamlet meets and falls in love with Juliet, the leader of the rebel forces, and in a delightful twist, the series offers up a reverse balcony scene, in which Juliet woos

Hamlet (2.2). Their love story continues through the series, even after Juliet finds out that Romeo does live.

Only after the epic battle at Shrewsbury—where the prodigals defeat Richard III’s forces and Richard is killed by Shakespeare himself—is the comic series able to “get over” Hamlet. Hamlet becomes a less important character in the series, and it is able to become more interesting as a result. Hamlet is still a major point in the plot, but his

Hamlet-like characterization becomes background so the story can move on. Ultimately,

152

the series might conclude with Hamlet re-entering the play’s narrative, but given the radical changes Kill Shakespeare offers his character, it would seem that that ending must be rewritten. The play’s Hamlet essentially dies in the third issue of the second series where he confronts Shakespeare for the first time. Once he has arrived in the

Globe Woods, Hamlet must cross a small moat to get to Shakespeare’s home, yet as he swims, he is pulled down underneath the water by Shakespeare’s discarded pages that now take the shapes of claw-like hands. One might say that the page traps Hamlet within the stage of the Globe Woods. The Hamlet of Hamlet is bound to drown in words, words, words. Yet, Kill Shakespeare’s Hamlet can escape those confines and break free of a stifling tradition that has Hamlet, the alleged “emo douche,” unable to act, change, or break free of critical or theatrical convention.14

Concluding Remarks

In studying Shakespeare and adaptation, it is as if one by varied indirections finds directions out. By studying the least canonical adaptations, one may still be redirected back to the text and its most canonical readings, and vice versa. Are we seeing a brave new world of post-textual, digital, Internet, folksonomic, and “nerd” culture Shakespeares? Whatthe alternate versions of Shakespeare studied in this dissertation offer are reflections on the instability of “the” Shakespearean text—a text which is, of course, always-already unstable in important respects. A reactionary stance to Hamlet arriving in its many questionable shapes is to dig ones heels into the primacy of the printed page or stage—and, this is not insignificant, a printed page or stage that is assumed to be more or less authentic and originary in terms of its proximity to a notional

14 Jason Tondro notes that Hamlet “does not defeat the paper monster; he does not tear, burn or otherwise destroy the text that is his source and our canon” (22).

153

First Folio and an imagined complete work. Instead, in order to find the text, we might need to forget the text, or at least consider it as one piece of the Hamlet puzzle. Instead of studying and teaching adaptation as a way of unlocking the texts, considering adaptations as adaptations in a filial sense—that is, neither as subsidiary to nor wholly separate from their sources—may provide valuable sources of understanding. Studying adaptation has a place in academic research and contemporary college curricula because it demonstrates the ranges of “writerly” reading,15 collaboration (thus enabling a discussion of early modern writing practices), digital tools and media, and simultaneous analysis of both print and visual culture. Studying adaptation is to engage with the variations, as well as the theme and to embrace the overwhelming surplus of texts. We do this not simply because it’s enjoyable—though it is!—but because it honors the text, both old and new, paternal and bastard.

One final image from the Kill Shakespeare series will provide some clarity to my argument here. In the third run of the series, the protagonists are lost and delirious on

Prospero’s Island. The final battle in this run is between Shakespeare and Prospero, who, like many, seeks the key to Shakespeare’s power. Shakespeare, unwilling to kill another of his creations, allows Prospero access to the space in his mind where the

“secrets” are contained. Prospero finds out that it is the horrifying prospect of the blank page—or, as Shakespeare refers to it, “the form of things unknown.” The void Prospero seeks in destroying Shakespeare’s world is the void of a blank page demanding to be written over (and, we may presume, over again). Shakespeare counsels Prospero that

“This blank page brings no peace until thou fill its ravenous maw. It will devour thy every

15 See Leitch.

154

inspiration, chew upon thy every insight.” In other words, the creator/writer/adapter will be condemned to creating/writing/adapting perpetually until that page is satisfied. What

Shakespeare ultimately learned and now passes on to Prospero—at least in the world of Kill Shakespeare—is that he was only ever rebuilding another Creator’s world through words. Prospero seeks to do the same—to rebuild Shakespeare’s creation for himself—but can only produce bad and incomplete copies. In this space, Prospero also learns the fate of Shakespeare’s characters, who, when they die, turn back into words on that page in order to “replenish the stuff that we are made of.” In this (admittedly maudlin) scene, one can see the crux of adaptation: the adapter goes to a blank page that is never actually blank. The creator seeks to fill a void, yet that void is populated with the words of those who have come before. In this sense, no act of creation is singular and no act of creation is a double. All writing both copies and creates, and the tradition of Hamlet adaptation—from line citations in To Be or Not To Be, narrative patterns in Gossip Girl and Arrested Development, and extra-textual thematic concerns in Doran’s Hamlet—shows an ongoing tension of remembering and forgetting, a repetition/revision compulsion. In this sense, adaptations of Hamlet, like Hamlet himself, are always engaged in an ongoing, revisionary process of remembering to forget and forgetting to remember their source(s), in order that they may become works in their own right that are simultaneously steeped in the traditions of yet other works.

155

WORKS CITED

Ackerman, Zeno. “Shakespearean Negotiations in the Perpetrator Society: German Productions of The Merchant of Venice during the Second World War.” Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity. Ed. Irena Makaryk and Marissa McHugh. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 35–62. Print.

Adams, Erik. “Gossip Girl: “The Debarted.” The A.V. Club. The A.V. Club, 8 December 2009. Web. 28 July 2014.

Alexander, Peter. Hamlet: Father and Son. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. Print.

Anderegg, Michael. Cinematic Shakespeare. Lanham: Rowman, Inc., 2004. Print.

Armstrong, Philip. “Watching Hamlet watching: Lacan, Shakespeare, and the mirror/stage.” Alternative Shakespeares. Volume 2. Ed. Terence Hawkes. London: Routledge, 2005. 217–38. Print.

Arrested Development. Created by Mitchell Hurwitz. Fox, 2003–06. DVD.

---. Created by Mitchell Hurwitz. 20th Century Fox Television, 2013. Netflix. Web. 28 July 2014.

Aunger, Robert. The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. New York: The Free Press, 2002. Print.

Bakardjieva, Maria and Georgia Gaden. “Web 2.0 Technologies of the Self.” Philosophy and Technology 25.3 (Sept. 2012): 399–413. Print.

Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1968. Print.

Barnes, Peter. To Be or Not To Be. BFI Film Classics. London: BFI, 2002. Print.

Barrett, David. “One surveillance camera for every 11 people in Britain, says CCTV survey.” The Telegraph. 10 July 2013. Web. http://telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/One-surveillance-camera-for-every- 11-people-in-Britain-says-CCTV-survey.html.

BBC Hamlet—Explore the Play in this RSC Production with David Tennant. BBC, 2009. Web. 15 July 2014.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. Print.

Bevington, David. Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

156

“The Big Sleep No More.” Gossip Girl. Writ. Cecily von Ziegesar et al. Dir. Vincent Misiano. Warner Bros. Television, 2011. Netflix. Web. 28 July 2014.

Biskupski, M.B.B. Hollywood's War with Poland 1939–1945. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2010. Print.

Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Print.

Bortolotti, Gary R. and Linda Hutcheon. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and ‘Success’—Biologically.” New Literary History 38.3 (Summer 2007): 443–58. Print.

Brebach, Emily S. “From Olivier to Kozinstsev: Visual Technique in Transforming Hamlet into Film.” Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium 12 (1981): 67–81. Print.

“Bringing Up Buster.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz. Dir. Joe Russo. 20th Century Fox Television, 2003. DVD.

Bristol, Michael. Big-Time Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Burnett, Mark Thornton. “‘I see my father in my mind’s eye’: Surveillance and the Filmic Hamlet.” Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. 31–52. Print.

Burt, Richard. “Hamlet’s Hauntographology: Film Philology, Facsimiles, and Textual Faux-rensics.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Deborah Cartmell. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 216–40. Print.

---. Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print.

---. “Shakespeare and the Holocaust: Julie Taymor's Titus is Beautiful, or Shakesploi Meets (the) Camp.” Shakespeare After Mass Media. Ed. Richard Burt. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 295–329. Print.

---. “Shakespeare, More or Less? From Shakespeareccentricity to Shakespearecentricity and Back.” Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Ed. Richard Burt. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007. 1–9. Print.

---. “‘SShockspeare: (Nazi) Shakespeare Goes Heil-lywood.” A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 437–56. Print.

157

Bruster, Douglas. To Be or Not To Be. London: Continuum, 2007. Print.

Calbi, Maurizio. Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Print.

Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2001. Print.

Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

“Colony Collapse.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz et al. Dir. Mitchell Hurwitz and Troy Miller. 20th Century Fox Television, 2013. Netflix. Web. 28 July 2014.

Cook, Patrick J. Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011. Print

Cooke, Darwyn. Foreword. Kill Shakespeare: A Sea of Troubles. Vol. 1. By Conor McCreery, Anthony Del Col, and Andy Belanger. San Diego, IDW, 2010. Print.

Courtney, Krystyna Kujawinska. “‘In This Hour of History: Amidst These Tragic Events’ - Polish Shakespeare during the Second World War.” Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity. Ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 122–42. Print.

Crowl, Samuel. Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Relationship Between Text and Film. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print.

---. Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. Athens: Ohio UP, 2003.

Crowther, Bosley. “Against a Sea of Troubles.” The New York Times (22 Mar. 1942).

---. “The Screen: To Be or Not To Be.” The New York Times (7 Mar. 1942), 13.

Davis, C.B. “Cultural Evolution and Performance Genres: Memetics in Theater History and Performance Studies.” Theatre Journal 59 (2007): 595–614. Print.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.

Dawson, Anthony B. Hamlet. Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Print.

“The Debarted.” Gossip Girl. Writ. Cecily von Ziegesar et al. Dir. Jason Ensler. Warner Bros. Television, 2009. Netflix. 28 July 2014. de Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

158

De Kosnik, Abigail. “Drama is the Cure for Gossip: Television’s Turn to Theatricality in a Time of Media Transition.” Modern Drama 53.3 (Fall 2010): 370–89. Print.

Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1993/4. Print.

Distin, Kate. The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

Doctor Who. Created by Sydney Newman, C.E. Webber, and Donald Wilson. BBC Worldwide, 2005-present. Netflix

Drout, Michael D.C. “A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory.” Oral Tradition 21.2 (2006): 269–94. Print.

Duffy, Robert A. “Gade, Olivier, Richardson: Visual Strategy in Hamlet Adaptation.” Literature/Film Quarterly 4 (1976): 141–52. Print.

Ellis, John. “The Digitally Enhanced Audience: New attitudes to factual footage.” Relocating Television: Television in the Digital Context. Ed. Jostein Gripsrud. London: Routledge, 2010. 183–93. Print.

Ephraim, Michelle. “Screwing the Bardbody: Kill Shakespeare and North American Popular Culture.” Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies (16 July 2013): n.p. Clemson University. 24 July 2014. Web.

Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1960. Print.

---. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XVII. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Hogarth, 1955. Print.

Frye, Roland Mushat. “Ladies, Gentlemen, and Skulls: Hamlet and the Iconographic Traditions.” Shakespeare Quarterly 30.1 (Winter 1979): 15–28. Print.

Garber, Marjorie. “‘Remember Me’: Memento Mori Figures in Shakespeare’s Plays.” Renaissance Drama 12 (1981): 3–25. Print.

---. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

159

Gemünden, Gerd. “Space out of Join: Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be.” New German Critique 89 (Spring/Summer 2003): 59–80. Print.

Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1997. Print.

Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, 2000. Print.

Gossip Girl. Created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. Warner Bros. Television, 2007–12. Netflix. Web. 28 July 2014.

Habicht, Werner. “German Shakespeare, the Third Reich, and the War.” Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity. Ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 22–34. Print.

Hamlet. Dir. Michael Almereyda. Perf. Ethan Hawke. Miramax, 2000. DVD.

Hamlet. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Kenneth Branagh. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1996. DVD.

Hamlet. Dir. Gregory Doran. Perf. David Tennant. BBC Home Entertainment, 2010. DVD.

Hamlet. Dir. Grigori Kozintsev. Perf. Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Lenfilm, 1964. DVD.

Hamlet. Dir. Laurence Olivier. Two Cities, 1948. DVD.

Hamlet. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Perf. Mel Gibson. Warner Bros., 1990. DVD.

Hartley, Andrew James. “Time Lord of Infinite Space: Celebrity Casting, Romanticism, and British Identity in the RSC’s ‘Doctor Who Hamlet.’” Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009): n.p. Web.

“haunt, v.”. OED Online. Sept. 2013. Oxford UP. 15 November 2013. Web.

“haunting, n.”. OED Online. Sept. 2013. Oxford UP. 15 November 2013. Web.

Hopkins, Lisa. “‘Demark’s a prison’: Branagh’s Hamlet and the Paradoxes of Intimacy.” EnterText 1.2 (Spring 2001): 226–46. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Print.

Jones, Ernest. “The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive.” The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (Jan. 1910): 72–113. Print.

160

Jones, Nicholas. “Hamlet in Warsaw: The Antic Disposition of Ernst Lubitsch.” EnterText 1.2 (Spring 2001): 264–88. Web.

“Justice is Blind.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz and Abraham Higginbotham. Dir. Jay Chandrasekhar. 20th Century Fox Television, 2004. DVD.

Kahn, Coppélia. Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. Print.

Kalat, David. To Be or Not To Be. Audio Commentary. United Artists: The Criterion Collection, 2013. Blu-Ray.

Kaplan, Louis. “‘It Will Get a Terrific Laugh’: On the Problematic Pleasures and Politics of Holocaust Humor.” Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Ed. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 343–56. Print.

Kennedy, Dennis. “Memory, performance and the idea of the museum.” Shakespeare, Memory and Performance. Ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 329–45. Print.

Kessel, Martina. “Introduction. Landscapes of Humour: The History and Politics of the Comical in the Twentieth Century.” The Politics of Humour: Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2012. 3–21. Print.

Kilpinen, Erkki. “Memes versus Signs: On the Use of Meaning Concepts about Nature and Culture.” Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies 171.1-4 (Aug. 2008): 215–37. Print.

Klett, Elizabeth. “The Heart of the Mystery: Surveillance in Michael Almereyda and Gregory Doran’s Films of Hamlet.” Literature/Film Quarterly 41.2 (2013): 102–15. Print.

Kliman, Bernice W. “Olivier’s Hamlet: A Film-Infused Play.” Literature/Film Quarterly 5.4 (1977): 305–14. Print.

---. “The Unkindest Cuts: Flashcut Excess in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.” Talking Shakespeare: Shakespeare into the Millenium. Eds. Deborah Cartmell and Michael Scott. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 151–67. Print.

Lanier, Douglas. “Post-Textual Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011): 145–62. Print.

---. “Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 104–13. Print.

---. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

161

Lefait, Sébastien. Surveillance on Screen: Monitoring Contemporary Films and Television Programs. Lantham: Scarecrow, 2013. Print.

---. “This same strict and most observant watch” (1.1.71): Gregory Doran’s Hamlet as Surveillance Adaptation.” Borrowers and Lenders 8.2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): n.p. Web.

Lehmann, Courtney and Lisa S. Starks. “Making Mother Matter: Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of ‘Reading Psychoanalysis Into’ Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.” Early Modern Literary Studies 6.1 (May 2000): 2.1–24. Print.

Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Print.

Levine, Michael G. Writing Through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Print.

Lost. Created by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof. Bad Robot Productions and ABC Studios, 2004–07. Netflix.

Lubitsch, Ernst. “Mr. Lubitsch Takes the Floor for Rebuttal.” New York Times (29 Mar. 1942).

Mahood, M.M. Shakespeare’s Wordplay. London: Methuen,1965. Print.

McCreery, Conor, Anthony Del Col, and Andy Belanger. Kill Shakespeare: A Sea of Troubles. Vol. 1. San Diego: IDW, 2010. Print.

---. Kill Shakespeare: The Blast of War. Vol. 2. San Diego: IDW, 2011. Print.

---. Kill Shakespeare: The Tide of Blood. Issue 5. San Diego: IDW, 2013. Print.

Melehy, Hassan. “Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be: The Question of Simulation in Cinema.” Film Criticism 26.2 (2001-02): 19–40. Print.

Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 29–40. Print.

Morris, Harry. “‘Hamlet’ as a “Memento Mori’ Poem.” PMLA 85.5 (Oct. 1970): 1035–40. Print.

“Motherboy XXX.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz and James Vallely. Dir. Joe Russo. 20th Century Fox Television, 2005. DVD.

“My Mother the Car.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz and Chuck Martin. Dir. Jay Chandrasekhar. 20th Century Fox Television, 2003. DVD.

“A New Start.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz et al. Dir. Mitchell Hurwitz and Troy Miller. 20th Century Fox Television, 2013. Netflix. 28 July 2014.

162

North, Ryan. To Be Or Not To Be: A Chooseable Path Adventure. Breadpig, 2013. Print.

“Off the Hook.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz et al. Dir. Mitchell Hurwitz and Troy Miller. 20th Century Fox Television, 2013. Netflix. 28 July 2014.

Olivier, Sir Laurence. The Film Hamlet: A Record of Its Production. Ed. Brenda Cross. London: Saturn, 1948. Print.

Pittman, L. Monique. “Adaptations of the Father: Paternal Authority Goes Imperial in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and As You Like It.” Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. 19–56. Print.

Pizzato, Mark. Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Print.

“A Rehearsal Scrapbook.” Hamlet. Royal Shakespeare Company, 2008. Web. 15 July 2014.

Reimer, Robert C. “Does Laughter Make the Crime Disappear?: An Analysis of Cinematic Images of Hitler and the Nazis, 1940–2007.” Senses of Cinema 52 (Sept. 2009): n.p. Web.

“The Revengers.” Gossip Girl. Writ. Cecily von Ziegesar et al. Dir. Patrick R. Norris. Warner Bros. Television, 2012. Netflix. Web. 28 July 2014.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Print.

Robson, Mark. “‘Trying to pick a lock with a wet herring’: Hamlet, film, and spectres of psychoanalysis.” EnterText 1.2 (Spring 2001): 247–63. Print.

Rosenberg, Joel. “Shylock’s Revenge: The Doubly Vanished Jew in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be.” Prooftexts 16 (1996): 209–44. Print.

Rothwell, Kenneth. “Hamlet’s “Glass of Fashion”: Power, Self, and the Reformation.” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. 80–98. Print.

Rowe, Katherine. “‘Remember Me’: Technologies of Memory in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet.” Shakespeare, The Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD. Ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose. London: Routledge, 2003. 37– 55. Print.

Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. New York: Routledge, 2003.

163

Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York: Vintage, 2008. Print.

“S.O.B.s.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz et al. Dir. Bob Berlinger. 20th Century Fox, 2006. DVD.

Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden, 2006. Print.

---. Hamlet. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton, 1996. 1189–234. Print.

---. Merchant of Venice. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton, 1996. 288–317. Print.

---. Romeo and Juliet. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton, 1996. 1104–39. Print.

Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2014. Kindle.

Six Feet Under. Created by Alan Ball. HBO, 2001–05. DVD.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Print.

Stack, Robert. “Storm Clouds.” Los Angeles Times: 87. 13 Apr. 1997.

Stein, Louisa. “Playing Dress-Up: Digital Fashion and Gamic Extensions of Televisual Experience in Gossip Girl’s Second Life.” Cinema Journal 48.3 (Spring 2009): 116–22. Print.

Thompson, Ethan. “Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom.” The Velvet Light Trap 60 (Fall 2007): 63–72. Print.

Tifft, Stephen. “Miming the Fuhrer: To Be or Not To Be and the Mechanisms of Outrage.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 5.1 (1991): 1–40. Print.

To Be or Not To Be. Dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Perf. Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, and Felix Bressart. 1942. The Criterion Collection, 2013. Blu-Ray

To Be or Not To Be. Dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Perf. Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, and Felix Bressart. United Artists, 1942. DVD.

Tondro, Jason. “‘These are not our Father’s words!”: Kill Shakespeare’s Defense of the Meta-Text.” ImageTexT 6.3 (2013): n.p. Dept. of English, University of Florida. 24 July 2014. Web.

164

“Top Banana.” Arrested Development. Writ. Mitchell Hurwitz and John Levenstein. Dir. Anthony Russo. 20th Century Fox Television, 2003. DVD.

Torchwood. Created by Russell T. Davies. BBC Worldwide, 2006–11. Netflix.

Westlake, E.J. “Friend Me If You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance.” Drama Review 52.4 (Winter 2008): 21–40. Print.

Worthen, W.B. “Fond Record: Remembering Theatre in the Digital Age.” Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance. Ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Wu, Yufan and Barry Ardley. “Brand Strategy and Brand Evolution: Welcome to the World of the Meme.” The Marketing Review 7.3 (2007): 301–10. Print.

“You’ve Got Yale!” Gossip Girl. Writ. Joshua Safran, Stephanie Savage, and Josh Schwartz. Dir. Janice Cooke. Warner Bros. Television, 2009. Netflix. Web. 28 July 2014.

Žižek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London: Verso, 2002. Print.

165

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kristin N. Denslow holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of

Florida (2014) and a MA in English Literature from Western Michigan University (2009).

Her research interests include Shakespeare in film, television, and media, as well as early modern theater and performance studies. She teaches courses in British literature

(particularly Shakespeare and other dramatists), literary adaptation, writing, and media studies. She is the recipient of a teaching award from the University of Florida Writing

Program, where she also received a fellowship to be a mentor for new instructors.

When not engaged in literary pursuits, Denslow advocates for local food issues, promoting education about and access to fresh food and gardening in her local community. Currently, she is a Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay where she teaches classes in composition and English literature.

166