Hamlet's Compulsive Revisions in Film, Television, And
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HAMLET’S COMPULSIVE REVISIONS IN FILM, TELEVISION, AND SOCIAL MEDIA By 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 © 2014 Kristin N. Denslow 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. 5 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 6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................................... 166 7 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 By 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 8 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. 9 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