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Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'57 PM

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

SPRING/SUMMER 2009 (/previous)

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

CONTENTS

"Nisht kayn Desdemona, nisht kayn Dzulieta": Yiddish Farrah Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and the Early Modern Lehman Father-Daughter Bond (/782243/show) (pdf) (/782243/pdf)

Time Lord of Infinite Space: Celebrity Casting, Andrew Romanticism, and British Identity in the RSC's "Doctor Who James Hamlet" (/782252/show) (pdf) (/782252/pdf) Hartley

A SIAN SHAKESPEARES ON SCREEN: TWO F ILMS IN PERSPECTIVE

E DITED BY ALEXA HUANG

Alexa Introduction (/1404/show) (pdf) (/1404/pdf) Huang

Mark Extending the Filmic Canon: The Banquet and Maqbool Thornton (/1405/show) (pdf) (/1405/pdf) Burnett

Martial Arts and Masculine Identity in Feng Xiaogang's The Yu Jin Ko http://borrowers.uga.edu/7158/toc Page 1 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'57 PM

Banquet (/1406/show) (pdf) (/1406/pdf)

Amy Shakespeare: It's What's for Dinner (/1407/show) (pdf) Scott- (/1407/pdf) Douglass

Woodcocks to Springes: Generic Disjunction in The Banquet Scott (/1410/show) (pdf) (/1410/pdf) Hollifield

Spectator Violence and Queenly Desire in The Banquet Rebecca (/1411/show) (pdf) (/1411/pdf) Chapman

Interiority, Masks, and The Banquet (/1413/show) (pdf) Yuk Sunny (/1413/pdf) Tien

The Banquet as Cinematic Romance (/1414/show) (pdf) Charles (/1414/pdf) Ross

A Thousand Universes: Zhang Ziyi in Feng Xiaogang's The Woodrow Banquet (/1418/show) (pdf) (/1418/pdf) B. Hood

From Ethnographic Impulses to Apocalyptic Endings: Blair Bharadwaj's Maqbool and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood in Orfall Comparative Context (/1408/show) (pdf) (/1408/pdf)

Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions (/1409/show) (pdf) Amrita (/1409/pdf) Sen

Indigenizing Macbeth: Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool Suddhaseel (/1419/show) (pdf) (/1419/pdf) Sen

"Mak[ing] . . . Strange / Even to the disposition that I owe": Poonam Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool (/1420/show) (pdf) (/1420/pdf) Trivedi

Dharma and Violence in Mumbai (/1421/show) (pdf) David (/1421/pdf) Mason

What If Lady Macbeth Were Pregnant?: Amativeness, William C. Procreation, and Future Dynasty in Maqbool (/1422/show) Ferleman (pdf) (/1422/pdf)

Ya-chen The Banquet: A Glossary (/1423/show) (pdf) (/1423/pdf) Chen

A PPROPRIATIONS IN PERFORMANCE

Sarah http://borrowers.uga.edu/7158/toc Page 2 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'57 PM

Rachel and Juliet (/782227/show) (pdf) (/782227/pdf) Johnson

Finding Romance under Constraint: Three Late Plays Alice (/782334/show) (pdf) (/782334/pdf) Dailey

B OOK REVIEW

Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Matt Stage, edited by Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia Kozusko (/782257/show) (pdf) (/782257/pdf)

C ONTRIBUTORS

Contributors (/1424/show) (pdf) (/1424/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2020

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Nisht kayn Desdemona, nisht kayn Dzulieta: (/current) Yiddish Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and the Early Modern Father-Daughter Bond (/previous) FARRAH LEHMAN, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA (/about)

ABSTRACT This essay examines three Yiddish "readings" of The Merchant of Venice — Joseph Bovshover's translation (1899), Avrom Morevski's critical essay (1937), and Maurice Schwartz's stage adaptation (1947) — that deal with Shylock's apparent betrayal by his daughter Jessica. Although these readings reflect sociocultural preoccupations with losing a daughter to intermarriage in a violently anti-Semitic environment, they also pick up on concerns present in the early modern English rendering of the father-daughter relationship and the sense of filial duty that informed it. Bovshover, Morevski, and Schwartz, I will argue, seem to have "read into" Shakespeare a correlation between the figure of the rebellious daughter and a wider preoccupation, shared in a sense by the early modern English and early twentieth-century Jews, with threats to national identity.

Writing in 1933, the Russian-Jewish actor Avrom Morevski rebuked

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those actors, directors, and critics who believed that The Merchant of Venice was an anti-Semitic story about a murderous Jew; he accused them of not actually reading the play. Morevski, whose work with the Vilna Troupe might have linked him to both formalism and Stanislavski,1 advocates "fidelity to the text" (Ginsburg trans., 1967)2 for both actor and critic, and reminds his readers that it is merely a bobe-mayse, or old wives' tale, that Shylock kills Antonio. Yet, Moresvki seems to depart from a straightforward text-based reading when he identifies who he believes to be the play's actual antagonist: "Yesike iz a farbrekherin!" ["Jessica is a criminal!"]. He argues that Shylock, despite his faults, is ultimately an abandoned father and that Jessica is thus no more respectable a daughter than is Regan or Goneril. She is "nisht kayn Ofelia, nisht kayn Desdemona, un nisht kayn Dzulieta" ["no Ophelia, no Desdemona, and no Juliet"] (Morevski 1937, 59-60). This attack on Jessica can certainly be read as an anti- feminist critique of daughters with minds of their own, but in another vein, it is clearly faithful to The Merchant of Venice, in which Jessica does not only elope with her forbidden lover, but also goes so far as to dupe and rob her father.

Morevski's argument against reading Shylock as a murderer seems to suggest that early to mid-twentieth-century Jews of European descent uniformly (and mistakenly) found The Merchant of Venice to be anti- Semitic. Indeed, this mis-reading has to some degree persisted within Jewish culture well into the late twentieth century: one popular primer on Jewish history, religion, and culture contains a separate entry for the character of Shylock in its section on anti-Semitism and claims that "the damage inflicted on the Jews by The Merchant of Venice has been far greater than a pound of flesh" (Tellushkin 1991, 466). However, there were many Yiddish translations and adaptations of Merchant circulating as texts and performances that either did not significantly depart from Shakespeare's play or reverently portrayed Shylock as a betrayed father while preserving the basic structure of Shakespeare's plot.3

In this essay, I focus on three Yiddish adaptations or readings that deal with Shylock's apparent betrayal by his daughter Jessica: the poet Joseph Bovshover's 1899 translation of the play, Morevski's Shailok un Shekspir, and finally, Maurice Schwartz's Shaylok un zayn tokhter, an adaptation first staged in 1947 for the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York City. Although these readings reflect anxieties about losing a daughter to intermarriage in a violently anti-Semitic environment, they also, quite significantly, pick up on concerns present in the early modern English rendering of the father-daughter relationship and the sense of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782243/show Page 2 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'58 PM

filial duty that informed it. Adapters and critics such as Morevski, Schwartz, and Bovshover seem to have "read into Shakespeare" a correlation between the figure of the rebellious daughter and a wider preoccupation with threats to national identity.

Michael Ragussis's study of various tropes of Jewish-Christian conversion that appear in nineteenth-century English literature posits that English authors not only dealt with issues of identity and race via the figure of the converted Jew, but also illustrated how "the survival of a minority population" could be endangered because of a daughter's rebellion, her "conversion or, what amounts to the same thing, her intermarriage" (Ragussis 1995, 136). Ragussis argues that this connection between "filial loyalty" and a population's or race's survival occurs in English literature "from Ivanhoe onwards" (137), but Yiddish readings of The Merchant of Venice, which maintain more "fidelity" to Shakespeare's play than one might initially imagine, suggest that the link Ragussis describes was present in English drama and perhaps in early modern England as well.

INTERROGATING THE PAST? Before I examine the three Yiddish texts under consideration, I find it necessary to address the fact that reading a late sixteenth-century text through the lens of twentieth-century adaptations can prove problematic in several respects. Stanley Fish's concept of the "interpretive community," for instance, may seem useful to a discussion of a group of writers and actors who shared a language and culture; the early modern meanings of The Merchant of Venice, however, might fall away under the assumption that interpretive validity is wholly a function of culture, "that no reading, however outlandish it might appear, is inherently an impossible one" (Fish 1980, 347). Fish implies that every action that the reader or member of an interpretive community takes is a drive towards interpretation, rendering it nearly impossible to distinguish between the ongoing sensory reactions that a text produces in a reader and the reader's conscious attempts to create meaning from that text.

It would also be a mistake to attempt to experience directly The Merchant of Venice as Morevski (or, perhaps, Shakespeare) might have performed and written about it. In her cultural history of the early modern family, Catherine Belsey notes that one cannot work to recover and interrogate the past while participating or pretending to participate in it (Belsey 1999, 3-4). At the same time, the reader who successfully situates him or herself only in the present must remain aware that he or

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she will not be able to easily or completely recover the past; texts are not as "relatively transparent" as New Historicists believe (17). Belsey addresses these problems by staging readings that "interpret[s] the residues of the past explicitly from the present" (9).

Belsey's claim that "we misread fiction if we misunderstand the practices of the period" (7) does not, in my view, shut out the possibility that post-sixteenth-century readings of Shakespeare also point to "residues of the past." In interrogating these residues, there is more at work than merely the critic's present and the text's past. Without incorrectly assuming that The Merchant of Venice was exactly what its adapters made of it, I will examine below the "residues" of an early modern connection between the father-daughter relationship and anxieties about national identity that turn up in a set of the Yiddish theater's readings and adaptations of the play.

BOVSHOVER: PROGENY AND THE "FLESH BOND" Joseph Bovshover's translation of The Merchant of Venice was first staged in 1899 and possibly published in the same year by a "Katzenellenbogen Press" (Berkowitz 2002, 172, 255 n.3);4 approximately a decade later, it was published in the United States with an introduction and a "Kurze Biografie fun Shekspir" [Short Biography of Shakespeare] that described the dramatist's childhood in the "shtetl" of Stratford-upon-Avon appended. For the most part, Bovshover produced a word-for-word translation of the First Quarto text in which Shylock, the semi-stereotyped Jewish usurer, demands a pound of Antonio's flesh and puts his ducats before his daughter.5 Although a direct translation of The Merchant of Venice may seem inhospitable to the Jewish audience for whom Bovshover was writing, there are some subtle moments in Shaylok, oder der koyfman fun venedig where the work becomes more of a reading than a translation.

Portia, explaining her dilemma to Nerissa, says, "azoy iz der viln fun a lebender tokhter gebondn durkh dem viln fun a toytn foter," a line that corresponds quite well to Shakespeare's "so is the will of a living daughter curb'd by the will of a dead father" (Merchant of Venice, 1.2.23-25),6 with the exception of the phrase "gebondn durkh." It seems telling that Bovshover uses gebondn durkh (literally, bonded through) where he could have selected ayntzamn,7oyfhorn [to stop], or even blaybn [to stay]. In spite of the more literal choices available to the translator, Bovshover selects gebondn durkh, aligning Portia's duty as a daughter with the flesh bond integral to Shylock's story.

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Shakespeare, too, aligns the flesh bond with the daughter's duty to her father in his construction of Shylock's reaction to Jessica's departure. It is often assumed that Shylock holds Antonio to the flesh bond because of greed, but as Salerio and Jessica remind the audience, Shylock wants the pound of flesh despite the fact that Bassanio's marriage to Portia allows Antonio to pay back his monetary debt (Merchant of Venice, 3.2.271-72, 285-87). In court, Shylock first refuses a payment of 3,000, then 6,000 ducats (4.1.40-42, 84-87). Although Shylock gives no clear reason for his refusal, a possible reading of his actions may lie in how he conceives of "flesh": Jessica is his "flesh and blood" (3.1.31). Earlier, he had attached no value to the flesh bond, asking, "what should I gain / By the exaction of this forfeiture?" (1.3.159-60). But after Jessica and Lorenzo elope, after his "flesh and blood" steals his money and runs off with her Christian lover, Shylock wants only to collect on the flesh bond: "If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge" (3.1.47-48). It seems — and Maurice Schwartz would also read Merchant this way in 1947 — that Shylock wants a piece of Antonio's flesh because Lorenzo has taken a piece of his flesh.

A concern with the daughter's duty to her father is also reflected in Bovhsover's rendering of the cast of characters, which identifies the princes as "yonge layt, vos shatkhn zikh tzu Portzia" and Bassanio as " [Antonios] fraynd, vos shatkhn zikh oykh tzu Portzia" (my emphasis in both), where shatkhn, a verb meaning to woo or court, serves as a translation of Q3's "suitor," and also evokes the shadkhan, the traditional matchmaker hired by parents. Lorenzo, meanwhile, is labeled "Yesikes gelibter," which connotes something significantly more illicit than the "in love with Jessica" of Merchant's list of dramatis personae. The loyal Portia is courted, while the rebellious Jessica runs off with her gelibter.

Perhaps Bovshover made an astute decision in light of Shakespeare's play, in which Portia is constructed, in contrast to Jessica, as an obedient daughter. Though she is unhappy about the casket arrangement, she vows "to die as chaste as Diana" unless she "be obtained by the method of [her] father's will" (Merchant of Venice, 1.2.102-103). And Portia's late father is vindicated in that the undesirable princes choose the wrong caskets, while Bassanio chooses correctly. Elizabeth Spiller points out that The Merchant of Venice was itself an adaptation that reflected a cultural preoccupation with filial obedience: in the Gesta Romanorum's telling of the story, the correct casket contained jewels, not Portia's picture. Maintaining the patriarchal line was so important to early modern fathers, Spiller argues, that http://borrowers.uga.edu/782243/show Page 5 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'58 PM

Shakespeare changed the contents of the final casket "to suggest that the Portia story is primarily about securing progeny" (Spiller 2000, 148).

In European and American Yiddish culture, the loss of one's "progeny" through intermarriage was a serious concern; in some writers' imaginations, it was more serious than the loss of one's health or livelihood. According to Leonard Prager, Jewish immigrants to America may have learned to deal with hardships like "sweatshops and crowded tenements," but the possibility that "they would lose their children to the 'modern' world, to Gentile America, and consequently be rejected together with their deeply-felt folk culture — this induced genuine anxiety" (Prager 1966, 507). In Prager's view, an adaptation that engaged the trope of children rebelling against, but then returning to the family, as in Jacob Gordin's The Jewish King Lear, could serve as a "symbolic affirmation of group solidarity and continuity" (507). Because "securing one's progeny" was critical in European and American Yiddish culture, the changes that Yiddish writers made when adapting Merchant can thus be seen as parallel to the changes that Shakespeare made in his own adaptation of the Gesta Romanorum tale.

MOREVSKI AND THE "JEWISH QUESTION" Whereas Prager is able to ask a "Jewish question" of sorts about Gordin's adaptation of King Lear — how "an inferior work" (judged so simply because Gordin, unlike S. Ansky, was not well-known outside the Yiddish theater community) could yet generate the "impact of art" in its audiences (Prager 1966, 507-8) — Morevski warns against asking "Jewish questions" about the audience and author in Shakespeare's plays. Morevski, amidst severe and virulent anti-Semitism,8 nonetheless critiques the significance of the insufficiently-defined "Jewish question" in The Merchant of Venice. He understands Shylock as a character on the European stage, not as a "real" Jew, and claims that Shakespeare uses what we might today term "ethnicity" not to attack or ridicule a stereotyped other, but to create a dramatic figure with "konkretn kharakhter" (Morevski 1937, 7). Jewishness (or Jewishness as it might have been understood in sixteenth-century England) is one facet of Shylock's character; his avarice is another. And this avarice is no more connected to Shylock's being a Jew than Othello's jealousy is connected to his being a Moor. Morevski asks, "Iz Otello a motiv fun shvartzhotlike tvishn vayse?" ["Is Othello's motif one of blacks amongst whites?"] and "iz Hamlet a tragedie fun a dener?" ["Is Hamlet a tragedy about a Dane?"] (3-4). Perhaps what Morevski is pointing out here is

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that to suggest that a "Jewish question" lies at the heart of The Merchant of Venice would be akin to putting forth the argument that Hamlet is informed by a "Danish question." Readers and audience members typically do not ask if Hamlet delays his revenge because he is a Dane, if he is melancholic because he is Danish, and they especially do not wonder what Hamlet has to say about the contemporary Danish man or woman.

Martin Yaffe's exploration of the Jewish question (here, Shakespeare's supposed anti-Semitism) points to one significant problem with filtering The Merchant of Venice through questions that we would likely never ask about Hamlet: in attempting to "challenge the widespread presumption that Shakespeare is . . . unfriendly to Jews" and reclaim the play "as a helpful guide for the self-understanding of the modern Jew" (Yaffe 1997, 1), Yaffe implies that Shakespeare's sixteenth-century play is somehow about the modern Jew. This type of interpretation seems to me far less useful (and less convincing) than an examination of an historically specific cultural response to a play that was nevertheless produced at the end of the sixteenth century. If there is a "Jewish question" at work, it is perhaps more similar to those asked by Michael Ragussis and James Shapiro (1996) than those that Morevski critiqued. Ragussis and Shapiro ask what issues of Jewish conversion might have had to say about perceptions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in the sixteenth century; Maurice Schwartz would bring a father-daughter race link which had telling connections to Shakespeare to the forefront in his play Shaylok un zayn tokhter.

SCHWARTZ: MERCHANT, "NEW AND IMPROVED" Schwartz's Shaylok un zayn tokhter was a stage play based on Ari Ibn Zahav's 1943 Hebrew novel, Shailok: ha-Yehudi mi-Venestyah. The play, first performed in the Yiddish Art Theatre in 1947 and published in English translation the same year, portrays Portia and Antonio as a Christian couple who have been married for fifteen years. Schwartz, known for his "new and improved" mode of interpreting the classics (i.e., the marquees for his productions would actually read "New and Improved, by Moishe Shvartz" beneath the play's title), eliminates Bassanio and has Portia and Antonio function as surrogate parents, rather than peers, to Jessica and Lorenzo. He also introduces Morro, the always-serious Torah scholar whom Shylock wants Jessica to marry; he calls Morro "a noble son of our people" in response to his depressing aphorism, "Our sufferings in the Ghetto strengthen our spirit to outlive our enemies" (Schwartz 1947, p. 57).9 But for Jessica, a young woman

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who speaks Italian and wants to live outside the Ghetto, suffering is not quite so noble: all she wants, she says, is "a little less suffering, less pining, less loneliness" (63).

Though Schwartz's Jessica is constructed as a lonely character trapped within her father's house, it is unlikely that theatergoers on Second Avenue in the 1940s would have been invited to fully sympathize with a daughter who rejects her father's history and language. At one point, Jessica describes herself as evil, apologizing to Shylock for "the sorrows I cause you . . . Evil winds pursue me and encircle me" (63). By the time the play concludes, it is impossible for Jessica, who has been converted to Christianity upon her marriage to Lorenzo, to convert back to her father's faith. Her drowning — a striking departure from Shakespeare's Merchant — is presented as the only way out of the dilemma that the play sets up for her.

That Schwartz renders a comic ending impossible and Morevski identifies Jessica as the only clear-cut villain in The Merchant of Venice can in part be explained by sociocultural preoccupations with losing a daughter to intermarriage in the years just preceding and just following the Holocaust. According to Prager, the Jewish immigrants to America who had been forced to abandon generations of family members because they were too old, too sick, or simply did not want to leave now lived with the fear that their own children would "desert their parents and 'Yiddishkayt'" (Prager 1966, 575). Schwartz himself made these fears clear in a film adaptation of Sholom Aleichem's 1894 Tevye der Milkhiker stories that he wrote and starred in less than a decade before Shaylok un zayn tokhter was produced. Though it spans several years of the life of a fictional Ukrainian-Jewish family, Schwartz's film focuses on a story in which Tevye performs mourning rituals for Chave, the daughter he considers dead because of her marriage to a Ukrainian gentile. The somewhat brighter Fiddler on the Roof musical would preserve Tevye's indignation, but have Chave stay behind with her husband; in Schwartz's telling, however, the eventual failure of Chave's marriage leads to her poignant return to her father's family. During this period, it becomes nearly impossible to conceive of losing a child through his or her (but usually her) voluntary intermarriage; daughters must return, like Sholom Aleichem's Chave, or die, like Schwartz's Jessica. A Jewish daughter who married a Gentile could no longer be seen as an Esther who saves her people by convincing her husband that they, like her, are virtuous; instead, she becomes a traitor who has abandoned her father and her people and, we might infer, can no longer produce fully Jewish descendants. http://borrowers.uga.edu/782243/show Page 8 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'58 PM

Shaylok un zayn tokhter surely, then, suggests a Jewish trauma narrative. But trauma was likely not the only factor that influenced Schwartz's portrayal of Shylock as a tragic protagonist and betrayed father; Henry Irving, whose influential performance predated Schwartz's adaptation by more than half a century, was well-known for his Shylock-as-protagonist. Irving's production supposedly cut so many of Portia's scenes that Shylock became a suffering figure capable of winning the audience's sympathy.10 And it is more than likely that Irving's Shylock influenced Schwartz, as the two men are connected through Jacob Adler. Berkowitz quotes a 1902 interview in which Adler praises Irving's Shylock (a performance he may have witnessed while living in London in the late 1890s), but still expresses concern that Irving presented a "caricature" to the audience (Berkowitz 2002, 175). Adler set out, it seemed, to consciously create a sympathetic, but proud, Shylock, a character he brought to New York City in 1901 and 1903. Schwartz, meanwhile, refused to add scenes from Merchant to his stage act until after Adler had retired, since Adler was so much associated with the role. The tragic Shylock, therefore, was likely not specific to the Yiddish theater or to Jewish readings of Shakespeare's play.

As an actor and writer, Schwartz was considered somewhat of a showman. Norman Holland remembers the marquee heralding Schwartz's Yiddish Hamlet at a Lower East Side theater: "In big letters, Hamlet. In smaller letters, By William Shakespeare. And in the biggest letters of them all, Translated and Improved by Moishe Schwartz" (Holland 1975, 419). The "improvements" Schwartz makes to The Merchant of Venice often involve characters speaking as though they were lifted out of a grade-school pageant, telegraphing the historical facts and state laws of Renaissance Venice to the audience. Ari Ibn Zahav, whose Shailok: ha-Yehudi mi-Venestyah served as Schwartz's direct source, saw Shakespeare the author as mistaken or uninformed, having, according to his introduction to the 1947 printing of Shaylok un zayn tokhter, "made no special effort to understand or familiarize himself with the Jew of his age." Ibn Zahav and Schwartz thus attempt to locate their retellings in an historical Renaissance Venice.

Some of the scenes that Schwartz seems to have invented in response to Shakespeare's supposed misunderstanding of Venetian Jewish culture are, however, actually very much based in Shakespeare's play and perhaps also in Shakespeare's England. Schwartz's Shaylok mourns his "beloved Leah" (Schwartz 1947, 38), the wife whom Shakespeare's Shylock mentions only once, in reference to a ring that Jessica took and reportedly exchanged for a monkey. With perhaps just a hint of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782243/show Page 9 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'58 PM

sentiment, Shakespeare's Shylock says, "I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys" (Merchant of Venice, 3.1.111-13). Here, Shylock (in both plays) connects one of his stolen items to the memory of his wife rather than to material wealth. And Schwartz's Shylock's forbidding Jessica to participate in Carnival is no invention: the scene is, quite probably, derived from Shakespeare's "lock up my doors" speech, in which Shylock orders Jessica not to even look out the window at the Christians dancing in the streets (2.5.28-39). As he adds, cuts, and reassigns roles, Schwartz works with a father-daughter conflict already present in The Merchant of Venice.

THE FATHER-DAUGHTER BOND AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Shakespeare's Jessica, like Schwartz's, sees herself as a sinner because she plans to act against her father: "Alack, what heinous sin it is in me / To be ashamed to be my father's child!" (Merchant of Venice, 2.3.16- 17). Shylock, meanwhile, does invite some sympathy in that he is robbed by the daughter whom he raised. While his cry of "My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter" (2.8.15) can easily be presented as evidence that if he shows any affection towards Jessica, it is of the same nature as the love that he has for his money, the line is reported by Salerio rather than spoken by Shylock. Besides, such an outburst is not uncommon in Shakespeare's works: Polonius, Lear, and Capulet all speak of their daughters in the language of currency.11 Morevski may claim that Jessica is "nisht kayn Dzulieta," but her relationship with Shylock often resembles Juliet's relationship with Capulet much more than it does Abigail's with Barabas.

Much like Capulet, Shylock, though sometimes sympathetic, is not exactly an upstanding father: for his daughter, he wishes "would any of the stock of Barrabas / Had been her husband, rather than a Christian" (Merchant of Venice, 4.2.293-94). It is precisely because Shylock is not a good father that Jessica cannot win. She is, as Launcelot Gobbo points out, caught between Scylla and Charybdis (3.2.13-25); if she is to marry the lover who would convert her to Christianity, she must disobey her father. Her dilemma is resolved comically, but the dilemma itself results from the fact that she must obey her father, even if he is wrong within the context of the Christian society that the play sets up. As Mary Janell Metzger has noted, even Jessica's conversion to Christianity cannot fully excuse her sin of disobedience: "For Shakespeare's audience," Metzger writes, "patriarchal authority was divinely ordained . . . Jessica's disregard for that authority thus creates the first obstacle to a

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Christian audience's acceptance of her as a Christian" (Metzger 1998, 59).

For sons and daughters in early modern England, filial obedience was a moral requirement of utmost importance. For instance, the 1603 pamphlet A Godly Form of Household Government, a proto-"parenting handbook" attributed to Robert Cleaver, advises that while parents are to some degree responsible for caring for and respecting their children, the father ultimately possesses the "authoritie and power to denie his consent" (Cleaver 1603, 3-4). "Let servants and children do as they list," parents are warned, "they do not onely disobey God, but also hurt those whom they should rule"; disobedient children will become cruel parents (135). Disobedience is forbidden, but if the purpose of the pamphlet's guidelines is to bring the Christian household closer to God, it would seem that Jessica, a Jewish daughter raised in a "hellish" house (Merchant of Venice, 2.3.2), should be permitted to act against her father. Marlowe's Abigail supplies an example of why this is not necessarily so: even when she converts, Abigail does not turn against Barabas. She requests that Friar Bernardine not reveal that Barabas is responsible for Mathias's and Lodowick's deaths and that he be converted rather than killed. She thus achieves a saintly (or "Christian") death when, both despite and because of her conversion, she manages to uphold her duties as a daughter. Catherine Belsey points out that the role of parents in Shakespeare's plays is more often than not one of "coercing their children into arranged marriages" (Belsey 1999, 85). She locates the "wholly unsubstantiated fear of female infidelity" that occurs in not only husband-wife but also parent-child relations in plays like Othello and Cymbeline in the early modern construction of the nuclear family (59). As Belsey's own study asserts, however, there can be no single reading of a text or cultural scenario; there appear to have been wider political implications for the fears of infidelity, miscegenation, and disobedient daughters that pervade The Merchant of Venice and other early modern English plays that engage the father- daughter relationship.

As both Ragussis and Shapiro assert, the Jew in English literature represented much more than merely an anti-Semitic stereotype. Ragussis argues that because "Jewish identity and English national identity were mutually exclusive" in the nineteenth century, writers questioned how one could "convert" from one nationality to another. In English literature, he writes, "the impossibility of racial transformation . . . becomes an analogy for the impossibility of religious conversion" (Ragussis 1995, 23-25). Shapiro explains how a similarly "racialized http://borrowers.uga.edu/782243/show Page 11 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'58 PM

sense of the Jewish nation" developed in early modern England because the Jews did not intermingle (or intermarry) with other nations, as the French and English might. "The Jews," Shapiro writes, "confound and deconstruct neat formulations about both racial and national identity" (Shapiro 1996, 168-70). To the English in both the nineteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Jewish people appeared to constitute a nation that isolated itself within another nation.

Shapiro also finds that the questions that the early modern English had about national identity were similar to the questions that might have been brought up among Jews in the early twentieth century: What did it mean, in sixteenth-century England, "if one's father was French and one's mother was English? What conditions did an alien seeking to become a denizen or naturalized English subject have to meet?" (Shapiro 1996, 8). They, like the nineteenth-century English writers of Ragussis's study, questioned to what degree nationality was racial, and whether it could be changed or, perhaps, "converted."

Francis Bacon, in his account of the Lopez affair — Roderigo Lopez, the physician supposedly responsible for an attempt on Elizabeth I's life and sometimes thought to have been a source for Shakespeare's Shylock and Marlowe's Barabas, was labeled both a Jew and a traitor — suggests that identity was about more than nationality and that nationality itself was a highly complicated matter: it was dangerous to base assumptions about loyalty on the country of an individual's birth. Bacon differentiates between nation and religion in relation to Jews, labeling Lopez a "Portugueze" who was "suspected, to be in sect, secretly, a Iew" (Bacon 1667, 154). Lopez, a converso, or practicing Catholic originally descended from Jews, is portrayed by Bacon as a man of Portuguese descent who is a subject, perhaps even an instrument, of the King of Spain. Bacon concludes via intercepted letters that before Lopez came to England, he "was won, to the King of Spain: And that, he was ready to receive his Commandment" (158). Lopez is able to serve the conspiracy so well because he is Portuguese and, as Bacon infers, Elizabeth would not have been suspicious of a physician who had been born in a country ruled by a known enemy of the king of Spain. Bacon's report of the affair thus seems to suggest that unanswered or unanswerable questions about national loyalty and naturalization almost led to the English monarch's murder.

Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which involves an international dispute about one "nation" paying monetary tribute to another, engages issues that are times quite similar to those in The Merchant of Venice. Imogen, the

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king's daughter, has disobeyed her father by marrying Posthumus Leonatus, a man of Roman ancestry who is nonetheless a far more suitable match than her stepbrother Cloten.12 Whereas Jessica may be at least partially redeemed by her conversion, Imogen's choice means that she dishonors the father who is already being swindled by the queen. Of course, what makes Imogen's dilemma as difficult as Jessica's is that if she marries Cloten, her stepmother's plot will succeed.13. Though Cymbeline can be read as a pastiche of Shakespearean tragedies- become-comedies, it connects a heightened demand for filial obedience with issues of primogeniture and a problematized concept of nationality. Imogen's husband Posthumus speaks of conflicted identities in a partially Celtic Britain that answers to the Roman authority from whom he descends: I'll disrobe me Of these Italian weeds and suit myself As does a Briton peasant: so I'll fight Against the part I come with: so I'll die For thee, O Imogen, even for whom my life Is, every breath, a death: and thus, unknown . . . Gods, put the strength o'th' Leonati in me! (Cymbeline, 5.1.22- 31) Cymbeline's Britain consists of Celtic Britons, Romans, Renaissance Venetians, and the king's family, which is not identified with a specific ethnic group, but opposes the tribute that Britain continues to pay to Rome. And Cloten, in a moment in which is he talking politics rather than pursuing Imogen, declares that "Britain's a world by itself, and we will nothing pay for wearing our own noses" (3.1.13-14). With the play's British countrymen, themselves part Briton, part Roman, and part undefined, forced to quite literally pay for wearing their own noses or nationality/race, the king is apparently plagued by the idea that his descendants, Imogen and Posthumus's children, would be Leonati, and therefore Romans.

Following a major break in the line of English kings after Richard II was deposed, succession was no longer a matter of primogeniture, nor was there any guarantee that the next English king would be English. By the time of Elizabeth's supposedly stable reign, there was an awareness that both the Infanta of Spain and several Portuguese princes had claims to the English throne, and might succeed the childless Elizabeth (Parsons 1594, Chapters 7 and 8). In a society in which control over the intertwined political and genetic aspects of royal succession had become critical, marriage without consent may have http://borrowers.uga.edu/782243/show Page 13 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'58 PM

been considered akin to political treason.

In her study of treason in the early modern era, Karen Cunningham identifies 1534, when Henry VIII decreed that it was treasonous to marry or "defile" one of the king's female relatives without royal consent, as the first time in English history that marriage and treason are linked by law (Cunningham 2002, 30). One of the most disconcerting aspects of treason for perhaps both governments and parents was what Cunningham describes as a complete split between action and thought, such that no one could be believed based on his or her actions. Othello's Brabantio alludes to this division when speaking of his daughter: "O treason of the blood! / — Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds / By what you see them act" (Othello, 1.1.169-71).14 Jessica, although nisht kayn Desdemona in Morevski's view, can nonetheless be read as exactly like Desdemona in that her actions do not betray her plans to leave her father's house, marry her lover without consent, and perhaps also, from the fathers' point of view, threaten a supposedly stable line of succession through miscegenation.

A number of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century texts, whether dramatic, prescriptive, or descriptive, seem to imply that when life, country, or identity was at stake, children's obedience and marriages were perceived as being of the utmost concern; Schwartz, Morevski, and Bovshover borrow this theme from Shakespeare's play and relate it to twentieth-century Yiddish culture. My purpose in asking what the Yiddish writers might have been reading in The Merchant of Venice has been neither to unequivocally link two distinct cultural periods nor to dismiss the possibility that Merchant does in fact engage a number of "Jewish questions." Rather, reading the Yiddish adaptations as they "read" Shakespeare's play allows us to examine some of the cultural tropes engaged by Merchant from a stance other than that of the critic situated fully in the present or the "participant" who believes (s)he is situated fully in the past.

Additionally, these readings supply possible explanations for specific questions about the characters in The Merchant of Venice. Jessica can be read as a tragicomic character, tragic because she disobeys her father, comic because she and Lorenzo are granted the comic ending that Cordelia, Juliet, and Desdemona are denied.15 And if her story is tragicomic, then her father's is tragic. Early twentieth-century Yiddish readings and adaptations of the play, despite their moments of bombast and untheatrical telegraphing, brought out this tragic element. They suggested, at a time when anti-Semitism meant not ridicule and

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stereotyping, but violent death, that The Merchant of Venice was not entirely about Judaism or a Jewish question. It was, perhaps above all, a drama that dealt with fathers, daughters, and the ways in which threats to national and cultural identity affected the bond between them.

NOTES 1. Konstantin Stanislavski was in attendance at several of the troupe's performances, and purportedly encouraged S. Ansky to translate The Dybbuk from Russian into Yiddish. 2. This phrase is taken from Mirra Ginsburg's translation of Morevski's Shailok un Shekspir. David M. Schiller notes that were it not for Ginsburg's translation, Morevski "would probably be unknown to the field of Shakespeare studies" (Schiller 2002, 256). The remaining translations of Morevski in this article are my own, and will quote, in YIVO-style transliteration, the original Yiddish from the 1937 Friends of the Jewish Theatre edition. 3. There are a significant number of Yiddish adaptations and translations beyond the three that I discuss here: Chapter 5 of Joel Berkowitz's extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of Yiddish adaptations of Shakespeare's plays discusses four Merchant manuscripts archived in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The Humanities and Social Sciences division of the New York Public Library holds promptbook fragments from a 1915 Yiddish production, as well as M. Zamler's Shaylok (Der Soyher fun Venedig): roman fray loyt Shekspirs tragedie (Warsaw: Heylas, 1929), a novel whose subtitle labels the supposed comedy a tragedy. 4. Though the date of the Hebrew Publishing Company printing (which employs neither page nor line numbers) is uncertain as per the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Berkowitz identifies an 1899 printing by a "Katzellenbogen" press and dates the Hebrew Publishing Company printing 1911. 5. While it is possible that Bovshover worked from a German or Russian translation — Berkowitz suggests that many Yiddish translators did so — his Shaylok seems to line up almost word-for-word with the text of the Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice, edited by John Russell Brown (Shakespeare 2004), which uses a First Quarto copytext and the dramatis personae list that first appears in the Third Quarto. 6. All quotations from this play are taken from the Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice, edited by John Russell Brown (Shakespeare 2004). 7. Ayntzamn is given as the equivalent of "to curb" in Uriel Weinreich's

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Yiddish-English Dictionary (1968). 8. Interestingly, near the conclusion of his book, Morevski considers European anti-Semitism and suggests that European Jews were burned [gebrent] for having produced Karl Marx (Morevski 1937, 94). 9. I cite page numbers for Schwartz's play because line numbers are not given in the Yiddish Art Theatre's edition. 10. A number of theater critics and historians have questioned whether Irving intended to portray Shylock as tragic, or if that characterization was a result of cuts to the text and Irving's soft-spokenness as an actor. At the very least, argues Alan Hughes, Irving "failed to convince the audience that Shylock was evil" (Hughes 1972, 249-68). 11. Polonius to Ophelia: "Think yourself a baby / That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay, / Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly, / Or . . . you'll tender me a fool" (Hamlet, 1.3.104-109); Lear to Burgundy: "When she was dear to us, we did hold her so, / But now her price is fallen" (King Lear, 1.1.197-98); Capulet to Paris: "Sir, I will make a desperate tender / Of my child's love" (Romeo and Juliet, 3.4.12-13). Capulet later calls Juliet "a whining mammet, in her fortune's tender" (3.5.184). Quotations from these three Shakespeare plays come from The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al (Shakespeare 1997). 12. It is not merely an unsuitable match in a romantic sense; Cloten calls Imogen "sister" (Cymbeline, 2.3.86), reminding the audience of the incestuous nature of the potential marriage. 13. Imogen expresses some remorse at having married against her father's orders: instead of encouraging the uncertain Pisanio not to carry out Posthumus's order to kill her in retaliation for her supposed infidelity, Imogen commands him to kill her so that Posthumus will suffer for having "set up / My disobedience 'gainst the king my father" (Cymbeline, 3.4.87-88) 14. The quotation comes from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Shakespeare 1997). 15. But even this comic ending is problematic; Jessica and Lorenzo's lovers' talk in 5.1 references some not-so-happy marriages, the first of which is Troilus and Cressida's. Sharon Hamilton questions the conclusion as well, astutely pointing out that Jessica's last line is "I am never merry when I hear sweet music" (5.1.81) and that she remains silent for the remainder of the final scene, an aspect of the text that could lead to multiple directorial interpretations (Hamilton 2002, 105).

REFERENCES

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Bacon, Francis. 1667. Resucitatio. London: Sarah Griffin for William Lee. Belsey, Catherine. 1999. Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Berkowitz, Joel. 2002. Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Bovshover, Joseph. 1911. Der koyfman fun venedig. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company. Cleaver, Robert. 1603. A Godly Form of Household Government. London: Thomas Creede for Thomas Man. Cunningham, Karen. 2002. Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fiddler on the Roof. 1964-1972. Book Joseph Stein, Lyrics Sheldon Harnick, Music Jerry Bock. New York, Imperial Theatre. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Ginsburg, Mirra, trans. 1967. Shylock and Shakespeare, by Avrom Morevski. St. Louis: Fireside Books. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1978. "Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism." Critical Inquiry 5.2: 291-307. Hamilton, Sharon. 2003. Shakespeare's Daughters. Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland. Holland, Norman. 1975. "Hamlet: My Greatest Creation." Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 3.4: 419-27. Hughes, Alan. "Henry Irving's Tragedy of Shylock." Educational Theatre Journal 24: 249-68. Ibn Zahav, Ari. 1943. Shailok: ha-Yehudi mi Venestyah. Tel Aviv: Yavneh. Ibn Zahav, Ari. 1947. Introduction to Shaylok un zayn tokhtev. Tel Aviv: Yavneh. Marlowe, Christopher. 1978. The Jew of Malta. Edited by N. W. Bawcutt. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Metzger, Mary Janell. 1998. 'Now, by my hood, a Gentile and no Jew': Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity. PMLA 113.3: 52-63. Morevski, Avrom. 1937. Shailok un Shekspir. Vilna: Friends of the Jewish Theatre. Parsons, Robert. 1594. A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England. London: R. Doleman [Parsons], Reprinted at N. with license, 1681. Prager, Leonard. 1966. "Of Parents and Children: Jacob Gordin's 'The Jewish King Lear'." American Quarterly 18.3: 506-16. Ragussis, Michael. 1995. Figures of Conversion: The "Jewish Question" and English National Identity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Schiller, David M. 2002. "'I Am Sure This Shakespeare Will Not Do': Anti-Semitism and the Limits of Bardolatry." In Harold Bloom's Shakespeare. Edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. New York: Palgrave, 247-58. Schwartz, Maurice. 1947. Shaylok un zayn tokhter. Translated by Abraham Regelson. New York: Yiddish Art Theatre. Schwartz, Maurice, dir. 1939. Tevye. Written by Sholom Aleichem. Prod. Henry Ziskin and Maurice Schwartz. Perf. Maurice Schwartz, Miriam Riselle. USA. Maymon Film, Inc. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Cymbeline. Edited by J. M. Nosworthy. Arden Shakespeare, second series. London: Thomson Learning. Shakespeare, William. 2004. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by John Russell Brown.1955; London: Methuen. Shapiro, James. 1996. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press. Spiller, Elizabeth. 2000. "From Imagination to Miscegenation: Race and Romance in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice." Renaissance Drama 29: 137-64. Tellushkin, Joseph. 1991. "Shylock." Jewish Literacy. New York: William Morrow.

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Weinreich, Uriel. 1968. Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary. New York: Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. Yaffe, Martin. 1997. Shylock and The Jewish Question. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zamler, M. 1929. Shaylok (Der Soyher fun Venedig): roman fray loyt Shekspirs tragedie. Warsaw: Heylas.

ONLINE RESOURCES YIVO: Institute for Jewish Research http://yivo.org/ (http://yivo.org/)

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Time Lord of Infinite Space: Celebrity Casting, (/current) Romanticism, and British Identity in the RSC's "Doctor Who Hamlet" (/previous) ANDREW JAMES HARTLEY, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHARLOTTE (/about)

ABSTRACT The article considers David Tennant's recent performance as Hamlet in the light of his portrayal of the tenth doctor on British TV's most iconic show, Doctor Who. It considers the way in which the two roles inform each other, particularly in the minds of the audience, and argues for a particular notion of British cultural identity manifested by both the TV show and the recent direction taken by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The recent success of the history play cycle at the Royal Shakespeare Company, built from a cast of home-grown company talent, few of whom boast much in the way of name recognition outside theater circles, led some to believe that this phase of Britain's most recognizable theatrical institution may mark a turning away from star vehicles such as last year's King Lear, with Ian McKellan. The announcement that the Hamlet that would define the 2008 season would feature David Tennant, star of the BBC's hit show Doctor Who, produced much cynical muttering about bottom lines in the face of the rebuilding of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and some genuine concern about the selling out of the solid and expressly theatrical company in favor of something shinier and more easily marketable, built around TV celebrity.

There is, of course, good reason for such concerns. The failure of Project Fleet, along with the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782252/show Page 1 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

loss of a permanent home in London for the RSC, the replacement of Adrian Noble with Michael Boyd, and the demolition of the old RST have marked a period of significant upheaval for the company and raised real concerns about its financial viability. The theater construction in Stratford is a 112 million-dollar project, and even after a fifty million-pound lottery grant, movement forward was considered sluggish enough that the Culture, Media, and Sports committee stepped in to press the company — and the Arts Council — to make progress before the lottery money was consumed by inflation. In such a climate, it is not surprising that the decision to cast Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius was seen in some quarters as transparent pragmatism designed to put bums in the seats of the temporary Courtyard Theatre, which houses the company pending the completion of the new RST. But while there are legitimate concerns with bringing in TV and film actors to play Shakespeare on stage, which have to do with styles of acting, vocal projection, relationship with a live audience, and so forth, there is also simple snobbery and the impulse to keep Shakespeare on stage unsullied by commerce in general and celebrity stardom in particular.

The apparent subordination of art to business was recently bemoaned by no less a figure than Sir Jonathan Miller, who lambasted the West End's "obsession with celebrity" and the RSC's casting of "that man from Doctor Who" (Jury 2008). Miller had two projects of his own declined by London theaters because — apparently — they did not have the built-in box office draw of well-known actors in key roles, but the remark remains ungenerous and dismissive. For such detractors, of course, pointing out that the Hamlet sold out long before its extensive run began, thereby building significant revenue for the RSC, only reinforces their point. But once the show did open, reviews were generally positive, and Tennant himself garnered significant accolades despite the talk of cheapening Shakespeare in the process of spoon- feeding an audience more at home with the idiot's lantern. Of course, where reviews were negative about Tennant's performance — notably, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express — the response was not overtly anti-TV, anti-star, or anti-Tennant, but couched in the more acceptable (if predictable) terms of gimmickry and shallowness. These were countered by stronger reviews in the Guardian, Times, and the Independent. It is ironic and telling — and here I am indulging some snobbery of my own — that it's the inferior papers that find fault with what they perceive to be a lack of depth.

I don't have a lot of patience for carping and am deeply skeptical about the self-aggrandizing aura of theatrical purism that such skepticism seems to imply, so I would like instead to pursue a consideration of the production not in spite of its sci-fi TV valences, but because of them. I considered Patrick Stewart's performance of Prospero in the RSC's 2006 Tempest in similar terms, but those were expressly personal and ultimately about the baggage I brought into the theater, but this Hamlet presents a different prospect. However much I made connections between Stewart's Prospero and his Picard, the performances were separated by many years (the original TV show ending in 1994, twelve years before this Tempest, with the final Next Generation movie being released in 2002). Tennant's Hamlet, by contrast, took place at the height of Doctor Who's popularity, the extended run of the theatrical production actually being a factor in the TV show's one-year filming hiatus. To contextualize this production of the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782252/show Page 2 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

Shakespeare play and its celebrated lead properly, something needs to be said about the nature and status of Doctor Who.

DOCTOR WHO Doctor Who first ran from 1963 to 1989, becoming a monolith of British popular culture. The title character is a Time Lord who travels the universe, usually with a female human "assistant" (later a "companion"), fighting evil manifested by various alien beings and races, including the Sea Devils, the Sontarans, the Cybermen and — most iconically of all — the Daleks.1

The Old Daleks The show was famous for its innovative use of electronic music, its creative (though much maligned) low-budget special effects, and its clever solution to changing actors in the title role. The Doctor, as he is always known, is effectively immortal, the last member of his race; and when he dies, he regenerates, but with a different body and personality. The show thus built into its premise the ability to replace its star, and in its initial twenty-six year run the Doctor was played by eight different actors, including William Hartnell, Patrick Traughton with his recorder, Jon Pertwee with his frilly shirts and antique car, Tom Baker with his multi-colored scarf, curly hair, obsession with jelly babies, and robot dog (K-9, of course); the transitions were made on camera, one actor "regenerating" into another.2 Each actor could bring something of his own flair and interpretive energy to the part because the character's personality was perceived to shift with each regeneration. The Doctor travelled through time and space fighting evil and righting wrongs primarily through wit, knowledge, and improvisation. He had an aversion to guns of all kinds, a trait that persisted with each incarnation of the Doctor. Throughout, the show was unique in targeting children and adults simultaneously, blending scary stories and the politics of the day with campy humor, and held a diverse audience until interest finally waned and the show was cancelled.3

Baker and Melkur By this time, however, the program had become the longest running sci-fi show in television history and an essential component of British popular culture, its galloping, spacey theme music, the Daleks, and the look and sound of the TARDIS (the Doctor's time-travelling spaceship fashioned to look like a 1950s police call-box) firmly engrafted in the national consciousness.

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Eccleston with Rose and Jack

The show was revived in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston in the lead, and though he committed to only one season, the new look (and its exploitation of CGI special effects) combined with familiar ingredients, more even acting, and richer, more thoughtful writing instantly catapulted the show back into the forefront of British pop culture. The great villains of the old show — notably, the Cybermen and the Daleks — returned with a vengeance, impressively and menacingly retooled for the times, the latter circumventing the old joke about their moving on wheels by acquiring the alarming ability to fly.

Cybermen

Daleks The following year saw a new Doctor, the tenth, played by Scottish actor David Tennant, appearing first in the double episode entitled "The Christmas Invasion," wherein the earth is threatened by a hostile species — the Sycorax — whose attempt at conquest through a form of mind control is thwarted when the newly regenerated Doctor is able to defeat the enemy leader in single combat with a sword.

Doctor Who

The newest version of the show takes its minor characters more seriously than any of its former incarnations, particularly in the development of the Doctor's companions. The dramatic consequence of this development has been the explicit portrayal of a romantic subplot as the first companion of the new series, Rose Tyler (Billy Piper), clearly fell in love with Christopher Eccleston's doctor and did not want to see him change. By the end of season two, however, her affection had clearly transferred to the new Doctor (Tennant), who was and was not the same man, and — most remarkably — he clearly reciprocated her feelings in ways the ninth Doctor did not. Story-lines determined that Rose had to be confined to a parallel dimension to which he could not travel, and the Doctor and Rose were finally cut off, leaving him scarred and even more distant than usual. As Rose was replaced first by Freema Agyeman's Martha Jones (a doctor in her own right) and then by Catherine Tate's brassy Donna Noble (a temp from Chiswick), the show embraced Tennant's romantic appeal, connecting him ever more deeply to the inner lives of the women around him and their families. In so doing, the show developed an unforeseen delicacy of touch in matters of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782252/show Page 4 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

character psychology, particularly in its exploration of the Doctor's inherent loneliness and isolation. As well as spawning spin-off shows The Sarah Jane Chronicles and Torchwood, the revived Doctor Who show has garnered numerous awards, including BAFTA's (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for best drama series and best writing for television.

Less than two months before the RSC's Hamlet opened, season four of Doctor Who ended with a dramatic two-part finale that commanded extraordinary viewing figures (almost ten million households, forty-seven percent of the TV viewing audience) and flirted with the idea of killing off Tennant's Doctor and replacing him with someone else. This exploited mounting rumors that this would be Tennant's last season as the Doctor, even leaving him apparently dying/regenerating at the end of the first installment. In the end, Tennant survived, but contact with both Rose and Donna was severed, apparently irretrievably. A Christmas special involving the Cybermen was advertised at the end of the show, but for fans — and given the Doctor Who merchandise that packs the aisles of every high-street Boots and Woolworths, this is clearly a considerably larger segment of the UK population than sci-fi normally commands — it would be a long wait for more of the Doctor.

THE DOCTOR WHO HAMLET At the beginning of his director's talk on 4 August 2008, Gregory Doran invoked Doctor Who only to say that with the exception of one episode (about which more shortly), he had not seen the show since its 1960s inception, mentioning it only to insist upon its irrelevance to the Hamlet production. His interviewer, Paul Allen, fed the idea by referring to Patrick Stewart's Star Trek alter ego as Jean-Luc Picu [sic.] This is understandable to a point. The production wants to ground meaning in the moment of performance, in the choices made by the director, design team, and performers, and they want those meanings to be independent of whatever is going on in the culture that seems irrelevant to their approach to the play. They want, moreover — and this is a common actor fantasy — to be able to overwrite all expectations with the power of their performance, changing the audience's sense of the play and, indeed, of those involved in its production by sheer commitment to their parts. Actors want — even need — to escape their former roles, if only because being unable to do so makes all their work on the present production seem fruitless.

But as I have said before, it is unreasonable to expect audiences to shelve their sense of an actor's performative past during a production, especially if — as in the case of Tennant — much of the audience came specifically to see this particular actor because of those past performances (Hartley 2007). In the case of this Hamlet, the professed desire to move away from the associations of Doctor Who is a little disingenuous, and though the director clearly was not interested in drawing explicit parallels between the protagonist of the play and the TV show, there were numerous echoes that would keep the TV show in the minds of the Hamlet audience in interesting ways.

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Hard-core Doctor Who fans would have noticed that the cast — as well as sporting other sci-fi icons Patrick Stewart (Claudius, formerly Picard and Professor Xavier from the X Men movies) and Oliver Ford Davies (Polonius, formerly Sio Bibble in Star Wars episodes one, two, and three) — featured several actors who had played small roles in Doctor Who: Zoe Thorne (the page, formerly Toclofane and The Gelth in four episodes), Andrea Harris (Cornelia, formerly Suzanne in "The Stolen Earth" episode), and Roderick Smith (Voltemand, formerly Cruikshank in the Tom Baker episode, "The Invisible Enemy").

Tennant is a Scot with a rich brogue, but he played his Hamlet with the same, neutral English accent with which he plays his Doctor. That Doctor, like those before him, has a distinctive costume, one chosen to suit his character — in this case, a slim-fitting dark suit that emphasizes his skinny frame and Converse-style sneakers. In the last couple of years, the costume has become so recognizable in the UK that it has spawned parody as in, for instance, the recent reunion episode of The Vicar of Dibley, in which Alice's bridesmaid outfit is a replica of Tennant's Doctor, and she is accompanied by flower girls dressed as Daleks.4 A narrow suit and sneakers were also core elements of Tennant's Hamlet costume; his black-tie ensemble was undercut by bare feet during the Mousetrap scene, and by sneakers (here in a parallel dimension pastel shade) in the final scenes. Neither suit nor sneakers was exactly the same as the Doctor's, of course, but they established a visual echo, an unobtrusive point of continuity between the two productions through the person of the actor. The incongruous pairing of suit and bare feet/sneakers suggested — as their analogous pairings do in Doctor Who — elegance and polish tempered by an earthiness and capacity for action that is a little dangerous, possibly even unhinged. It may be that such echoes are as much in the mind of the audience as they are on stage; one audience member remarked that when Hamlet first produced his switch blade and the light caught it, she was sure it was the Doctor's sonic screwdriver — but that, surely, is the point. Audiences remember and connect performances, and as if to emphasize the point, the BBC took the extraordinary step of airing the video adaptation of the Hamlet production on national television on Boxing Day (26 December) of 2009, in between the two parts of Tennant's final performance as the Doctor ("The End of Time," which aired Christmas day and New Year's Day).

The Doctor Looking Hamletic

What really keeps the Doctor in mind during this Hamlet is the presence of Tennant himself, who brings something of the same intensity and manic energy to the role that he brings to his Time Lord. His performance is marked not by an attempt to escape the Doctor, but by many of the same vocal and gestural touches — elements of what I have elsewhere called the actor's performative habitus, his "bag of tricks" and the physical vocabulary he has absorbed through training, experience, and habit (see Hartley 2009). Tennant uses his hands expressively, in quick flickering movements that are vaguely evocative (as Bruce Smith pointed out at

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intermission) of Renaissance oratory manuals. He counterpoints his frantic, flailing movement with moments of extraordinary stillness and focus. Above all, he is a gifted comic actor, able to undercut a ponderous moment with a throw-away quip, a flippant shift in vocal register, or an expansive facial expression. All of these characteristics Tennant brought to his Hamlet, creating a mocking, parodic — but simultaneously likeable — protagonist who many acknowledged as the funniest they had seen (Billington 2008).

David Tennant as Hamlet

The humor Tennant found in the role of Hamlet takes us beyond what the show itself was doing that might tap into elements of the Doctor and into those for whom it was a given: large portions of the audience. When I saw the show, there were a disproportionately large number of young people in attendance, particularly teenaged girls. Tennant's appeal has evidently spread from the stereotypical adolescent male, sci-fi geek to something broader and sexier. Many of these audience members were so thrilled to see their hero in person that the theater positively thrummed with delighted energy. Some would not have been out of place chasing Ringo through A Hard Day's Night, and their engagement with the actor as celebrity was perhaps — as some of the skeptics suggested — too totalizing for them to engage with the story and the role, but these fans were, I think, in the minority. What the fan audience's delight brought to the theater as a whole was a willingness to see the humor, to enjoy it, even where it shot between moments of darkness, introspection, and tragedy. This refusal to be overly weighted by the play's seriousness — particularly in the second half — intoxicated the audience and made for a more celebratory experience and a joyous connection with the protagonist. This in no way — at least from my experience and the majority of people I spoke to — undermined the seriousness of the play. Rather, the unexpected humor — or rather, the unexpected capacity to enjoy that humor — made sense of Robert Weimann's linkage of Hamlet to the comic, topsy-turvy punning of the Vice tradition (Weimann 1978). It was a revelation, and one that I doubt I could have had without that crucial element in the audience, the same element that jammed the barriers at the stage door in the hundreds, autograph pens and programs in hand, breathlessly waiting for Tennant to appear.

And it was this curious shift in the Doctor's audience demographic that helped facilitate another dimension of the RSC's Hamlet production, one that even the program cover embraces. Because while the Doctor has always had his fans, it has only been since he regenerated into David Tennant that he could be considered a sex symbol, and much of that — apart from the actor's good looks — is grounded in the story-lines of the last two seasons of Doctor Who. Emma Smith's shrewd review for the Times Literary Supplement sees the two roles as essentially different, despite significant resemblances: In fact Tennant's Hamlet is rather like his Doctor — sardonic, clever, verbally facile, isolated — but less mordantly intellectual and more febrile. Doctor Who's http://borrowers.uga.edu/782252/show Page 7 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

superciliousness as he bests circumstances and challengers in episode after episode here gives way to a radical susceptibility. Hamlet's loneliness is not that of superior understanding but of submission to events. His belated realization that "the readiness is all" seems here less an intellectually achieved stoicism, more a visceral understanding that he is the object rather than agent of events. (Smith 2008) Smith tracks the Doctor's separateness to his intellectual superiority, and there is some truth to that, but the isolation stems more deeply from what seems to be his most desirable attribute: his immortality. As the show has progressed, the Doctor's inability to age and die has become the core of what makes ordinary human relationships both desirable and impossible for him. Tennant's Doctor began life as a fighter: a feisty, playful, scientific genius of a fighter, admittedly, but a fighter, nonetheless. In his first episode, still weak from the regeneration process and with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, he had to discover who he was, what kind of personality had come with his newly regenerated body, and he found it after having one hand severed by the Sycorax leader's sword. "That's a fighting hand," he quipped, as the hand — thanks to the incomplete regeneration cycle — regrew. But if such a moment was visually recalled by the vigorous and thrilling fight scene with Laertes in the final act of Hamlet, the swashbuckling dimension of the Doctor was, by the end of season three, subordinated to his status as romantic hero, and this was the element on which the production drew most decisively.

Though the TV audience could not hear the whispered words, this Doctor confessed his doomed love for Rose at the end of season two, at the moment when she was taken away from him, and from that point on, his wildness, his deflecting humor and crazed sense of adventure were revealed as a device to keep the loneliness and fragility at bay. He was the last of his kind, one for whom the time was out of joint and whose ongoing, never-ending mission was not just to set it right, but to do so alone. The end of the story-line and the romance was the Doctor's unwilling acceptance of his essential separateness from Rose because he could not age with her. Far from being simply smarter than the humans with whom he interacts, this Doctor is deeply lonely, finally cut off from those he works hardest to save, and this marks the heart of the show's success. However fun and scary the older series was, the new version has given less attention to space and more to time, finding in the implications of the Time Lord's nature an inherent pathos that can be quite painful. It is a sci-fi device that achieves a romantic effect because the Doctor is separated not by his intelligence in the misanthropic manner of a Sherlock Holmes, but through the depth of his empathy, though the connection that empathy desires is always deferred.

The Doctor with Rose

This was also Doran/Tennant's Hamlet, a Hamlet beset by the crassness and superficiality of the world, a man more sinned against than sinning (his guilt in the deaths of Rosencrantz and http://borrowers.uga.edu/782252/show Page 8 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

Guildenstern significantly relieved by some deft cutting) whose love for Ophelia was genuine and whose grief at her death nicely counterpointed Claudius's political manipulation. For Hamlet, the gap between the public and private was excruciating, so that his dour, formal stiffness in the first court scene became a cramped, fetal sobbing for his first soliloquy. He felt for his mother, for Laertes — if only in the final moments, when he realized what had so pointlessly occurred — even, perhaps, for Claudius who was allowed the dignity of drinking his own death. As his shifting wardrobe suggested (dinner suit at one moment, jeans and T- shirt the next), he was a man out of time, trapped in a world where connection to those around him was impossible because the time was out of joint, a man who felt the pain of others without being able to relieve it.5 This Hamlet was (as Stanley Wells remarked) a return to the Victorian romanticism of Irving and Tree, in which the hero was out of step with the sophistry of the court, feeling too deeply for the world, a hero whose death ("The rest is silence") ended the play. Fortinbras entered wordlessly (surely a bewildering moment for those who did not know the play), but with a production so centered on the inner and unknowable mind of its protagonist, there really wasn't anything else to say. It is no accident that the program art inserts Tennant into Casper David Friedrich's icon of Romanticism, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (the wanderer above the sea of fog), the suited gentleman standing high on a rocky crag gazing out into the numinous tumult of nature, separate, tormented by insight, even lost and verging on suicidal. Such an image, I think, uses traces of Tennant's most famous role to inform the separateness of his Hamlet.

Tennant as Hamlet, with Yorick's Skull

The residual snobbery that some critics hung on to despite the apparent success of the production speaks to the rift between television and theater and the attention attracted by the production's "irresistibly unlikely coupling of high and low culture" (Smith 2008). John Morrison acknowledged that Tennant had done his job by filling the house, but dismissed his performance with the faint praise rooted in that high/low divide: "He's a good stage actor, but on this evidence, not a great one" (Morrison 2008). Some thought he lacked weight, some felt the character did not evolve adequately and that Tennant relied overmuch on showy, manic energy and glee (as when, after having been interrogated by Claudius, he was pushed off stage while taped to a desk chair and exclaimed a non-textual "Whee!"). Such criticisms, though I did not agree with them, may be justified, but beneath them one sometimes senses the refusal to be awed by the celebrity actor, a rearguard action against being wowed (or wheed) by television star power. Again, there are, no doubt, good reasons for such critical distance, but I worry whether they do not also manifest an impulse towards something that is fundamentally antitheatrical: the desire to strip the performance of its actors, to restore something textually pure, untainted by the theatrical means of production. After all, Tennant was not some pop singer or soap star taking over the Christmas panto circuit. He is an actor rejoining the RSC after a spell on television, just as Patrick Stewart did.6 Stewart's return to the stage received the

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same scrutiny, the same cynical asides about box-office appeal and low-culture gloss, despite his fuller track record of Shakespearean roles. Taken together, this Hamlet might even be seen as a hand-off from the sci-fi TV star of the past, in the person of Stewart's doubled Old Hamlet and Claudius, to that of the present, perhaps even with the spectre of Star Wars in the person of Oliver Ford Davis trumped by the Doctor's current appeal. Whatever else might be said about Doran/Tennant's Hamlet, there is no question that it was better received by audiences and critics than the RSC's other new summer offerings, The Merchant of Venice (dir. Tim Carroll) and The Taming of the Shrew (dir. Conall Morrison), which the Hamlet in some ways facilitated. These less than crowd-pleasing takes on famously troublesome plays were possible in part because Hamlet was bound to make money hand over fist.

And what's wrong with theater making money and building a new audience for Shakespeare out of TV fans? Yes, there are the dangers of the much touted dumbing-down that shadows all conversations about Shakespeare in culture and education these days, but theater companies have to ensure their success, and star actors have been central to Shakespeare since Burbage. As the body of the actor is a material component of practical theater that some critics seem to want to wish away, so is money and an attentive audience. But to want these things not to be relevant is to wish for a Shakespeare of the mind, a Hamlet not just out of time but out of the theatrical moment, existing only in the infinite hypothetical of imaginary audition.

"THE SHAKESPEARE CODE" There is one other specific intersection between Doctor Who and Hamlet, which occurred during the revived TV show's third season when the Doctor and Martha spent an entire episode in Shakespeare's London. The premise of "The Shakespeare Code" was a threat to the earth by a species called the Carrionites, who used language to alter reality, in this case by ventriloquizing the Bard through an interpolated speech at the end of his Love's Labour's Won. The Carrionites took the form of three witches, thereby supplying a gag origin-myth for elements of Macbeth (the production was set — anachronistically, for the dating of Love's Labour's Won — in 1599), a termination myth for the lost comedy, while also foregrounding the creation of Hamlet.

Shakespeare on Stage in The Shakespeare Code Episode

The story begins with the conclusion of a production of Love's Labour's Lost at which Shakespeare — manipulated by the Carrionite/witch Lilleth through a doll made in his image — announces a sequel that will premier the following night. The Doctor, who having seen the future, knows the play should not exist and resolves to investigate with Martha (to whom Shakespeare is clearly attracted and whom he calls first, a "queen of Afric" and later, his "dark lady"). The Doctor uses his trademark psychic paper (a convenient device by which he is able to talk his way into most situations) to conceal his identity, but Shakespeare — remarkably — http://borrowers.uga.edu/782252/show Page 10 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

recognizes the paper as blank, thereby confirming his genius. The Master of the Revels tries to prevent the play from being performed, at which point he drowns on dry land through more of the Carrionites' "witchcraft." Shakespeare is manipulated by Lilleth into penning the final word-code paragraph to the play, and Shakespeare extracts from the Globe's architect — now in Bedlam — the fact that the "witches" dictated the form of the new theater to him. One of the witches materializes and kills the architect, but the Doctor is able to dismiss her by recognizing and using her species' true name, Carrionite. They are, he says, a race that creates quasi-magical effects through an ancient science tied to the power of words. These three members are effectively imprisoned, but seek to use Shakespeare's verbal aptitude to create a fissure through which the rest of their species can enter and take over the world. As Love's Labour's Won concludes on stage, Martha revives the Doctor, who has been incapacitated, by restarting his left heart (Time Lords have two), but the last lines have been delivered by two baffled actors, and the portal is opened. Shakespeare attempts to prevent the final words from being spoken, but he is incapacitated by Lilleth, and the play proceeds. Martha is also incapacitated through the use of her true name, but Lilleth cannot identify the Doctor adequately to affect him. Instead, she steals a lock of his hair and fixes it to her puppet before stabbing it through the heart. The puppet is actually a DNA replication module, and her action causes the Doctor to collapse, apparently dead, until Martha revives him. As the Carrionites swarm, the Doctor tells Shakespeare that only his words can close the rift. Shakespeare improvises a stanza and Martha adds the final word, which seals the portal and confines the witches.

Though the tone of the episode owes much to Shakespeare in Love and is similarly playful in its teasing out of Shakespearean issues and problems, the end roots the episode in Shakespeare's repudiation of the frivolity of comedy for something of more weight. That "something" was to be a father's response to the death of his son Hamnet, the grief of which, we are told, had somehow facilitated the rise of the Carrionites in the first place. Hamlet was quoted twice in the episode, first by the author musing on mortality ("To be or not to be") and second by the Doctor when he realized the centrality of performance to what the Carrionites were trying to do ("The play's the thing"). The episode emphasizes Shakespeare's linguistic genius, giving his facility with words the power to alter the universe and, most tellingly, setting up clear comparisons with the Doctor's other abilities. It is the notion of the two brilliant men set apart from the rest of the world by the depth of their grief which strains hardest against the largely flippant tone. When Martha Jones starts to flirt with the Doctor, she is rebuffed by his recollections of Rose, becoming instead the object of Shakespeare's own casual desire.

Shakespeare with Martha Shakespeare even remarks on Martha's unwillingness to kiss him because of the Doctor, who will never kiss her. Shakespeare's clear-sightedness goes far beyond language, allowing him to identify his visitors correctly as being out of time and space; one gets the sense that his

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separateness, like the Doctor's, comes from knowing and feeling too much, however flippant he seems superficially. Both figures are thus rendered Hamletic according to a specifically Romantic model.

The Doctor as Romantic Figure

All of this weighs on Tennant's Hamlet, making the Shakespeare production an odd, but inevitable, teleology fulfilling the direction of his Doctor in general and "The Shakespeare Code" episode in particular. It extends those Shakespearean parallels and conflations — and as Iris Murdoch's Black Prince suggests, it is in Hamlet that Shakespeare sometimes seems most clearly personated — continuing a sense of character rather than creating it anew at curtain-up. There is a sense in which this is often the case with actors known primarily for other roles, but in this particular and — to my mind — happy piece of casting, the roles fuse in interesting and generative ways that enrich the performative moment.7 Some of this, I suspect, is about desire, the audience's desire to connect with two fetishized roles, both of which have an air of detachment. 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. This is more than celebrity fetishism and more than merely seeing the former role in the present one, because there is a manner in which the roles align, their respective histories augmenting the present performance in ways both materially irrelevant, but essentially real.

Apart from interweaving Tennant's Doctor with Shakespeare in general and Hamlet in particular, the episode also underscores the essentially British phenomenon that is Doctor Who and brackets it — with Renaissance London, the Globe, and its most famous poet — as a particular national concern, an index of historical community identity. There is a uniquely British affinity between these icons of high and low culture, which together form part of the national psyche in ways quite different from the more disparate culture of the United States, where it is rare to find — as one does in England — conversations that seem to engage almost the whole country. Indeed, the origin myths are reversed near the end of the episode when Tennant — already, it seems, in Hamlet mode — picks up a skull and remarks — since it is clearly not human — that it looks like it belongs to a Sycorax. Shakespeare seizes on the word and stores it away for future use as the name of Caliban's witch-mother in The Tempest. The Sycorax were, of course, the first race this Doctor fought, the race who gave him his fighting hand. Time, which seems linear (Shakespeare hears the word and writes it into a late play) becomes a mobius strip, circling back on itself, Shakespeare's word giving a name to a crucial TV villain, metadramatically announcing the centrality of Shakespeare to British culture and Doctor Who in particular. It is therefore telling that when Shakespeare and the Doctor fumble for the final word of their quasi-magical incantation to send the Carrionites back whence they

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came, the final word that does the trick is one lifted from another bastion of British fantasy: Harry Potter's "Expeliamus!" As the world of the Globe theater resolves, the Doctor comments "Good old J. K."8

CONCLUSION Doctor Who used to be British because few other people in the world watched it, and because its concerns were British in an unselfconsciously provincial way. Now it's British because the new series has invested more in time than in space, focusing particularly on familiar British places and people, celebrating the local instead of doing sci-fi (à la Star Trek) in quasi- universal terms. It has embraced its Britishness, championed it, shaking off the "stiff upper lip" brand of national identity in pursuit of something more contemporary, but still steeped in British cultural history. Numerous episodes are set in modern London (and others in places symbolizing British post-war rebirth, such as Cardiff),9 and they intersect with key moments and people central to British identity such as the Blitz, Queen Victoria, Dickens, and Agatha Christie; the show has also become a showcase for distinctly British guest stars (Anthony Stewart Head from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue, comedian Katherine Tate, Bernard Cribbins, Felicity Kendall, Tim McInnerny and Colin Salmon from the James Bond movies). Its views of London, Wales, and Scotland are underscored with regional dialects once virtually banned by the BBC, and the overall feel is of a TV show embracing its Britishness as the core root of its wit and ingenuity, rather than trying to do TV in the American style.

The End of Time

In this, Doctor Who is not so different from the RSC, currently gearing up to take the lead in the so-called "cultural Olympics" of 2012 with a world festival of Shakespeare: another nationalistic cementing of cultural identity, though one complicated by the markers of high art. The issue, I hope, is less about what is ours — British — in terms of Shakespeare, and more about what we are that involves his work in our past, present, and future. Tennant himself is a nice image of this celebrated localism, familiar from a disparaged medium but also a star, Hamletic by association with his other role as well as simply Hamlet, and adamantly provincial while still a king of infinite space. The program's cover art turns the wanderer towards the camera so that we can see his famous face staring back at us against the backdrop of cloud-capped mountains, (once German, now surely Scottish): a romantic hero as Byronic as Shakespearean, pensive, sensitive, daring and desirable, uniquely and recognizably British, but distant and out of reach as only a celebrity can be.

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1. The Daleks are an organic race encased in armor like tanks who are the mortal enemies of the Time Lords, beings without emotions other than hate and the desire for mastery. They are mechanized Nazis with squealing metallic voices (used primarily for shrieking "Exterminate!") and a distinctive visual form that has remained largely constant over the years. 2. The other Doctors were Peter Davison (the fifth Doctor), Colin Baker (the sixth), Sylvester McCoy (the seventh Doctor and also the actor who played the Fool in Trevor Nunn's 2007 King Lear opposite Ian McKellan), and Paul McGann (the eighth). 3. The BBC archive website for "classic" Doctor Who contains episode descriptions and backgrounds, many of which touch on issues of the day, as in, for example, "The Curse of Peladon," which was seen as an allegory of the UK's bid to join the European Common Market (see Doctor Who, Classic Series 2010). 4. Vicar's grotesque farmer Owen, Roger Lloyd Pack, also played the creator and leader of the Cybermen on Doctor Who. 5. Those jeans and T-shirts emphatically insisted on the show being modern dress, but it did not begin in those terms, and it was some time before it became clear that we were close to the present. The court scenes had that time-capsule feel, the suits perhaps early twentieth century, though the ceremonial guards with their plumed helmets could have been Napoleonic curasiers. It was only later, after we saw Fortinbras's camouflaged army absailing from helicopters and Laertes returning dressed for gangster revenge in a leather trench coat with black automatic pistol, that we were clearly in a later period. Of course, much of the apparent archaism was simply the vestiges of monarchical show — a gesture at royal palatial timelessness — but Hamlet was the only one who seemed uneasy in such a setting, the only one who seemed to slide emphatically into the present. 6. Tennant's last major RSC role was as Romeo in 2000 (Romeo and Juliet 2000). 7. I felt the same echoes between parts when I saw Tom Baker (the fourth Doctor) on stage in Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer shortly after concluding his record setting, seven-year stint as the Doctor. 8. Tennant's only major film role is, of course, as Barty Crouch, Jr. in the fourth Harry Potter installment, The Goblet of Fire. 9. Cardiff has become especially important to the show, as it is now produced by BBC Wales. The Welsh city is also central to Torchwood.

REFERENCES Billington, Michael. 2008. Review of Hamlet, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Guardian. 6 August. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/aug/06/theatre.rsc (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/aug/06/theatre.rsc) [cited 12 January 2010]. Doctor Who, Classic Series [cited 12 January 2010]. British Broadcasting System. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/). Hamlet. 2008. Director Gregory Doran, performers David Tennant, Patrick Stewart. Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. http://borrowers.uga.edu/782252/show Page 14 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

Hartley, Andrew James. 2009. "Character, Agency, and the Familiar Actor." In Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance and Theatrical Persons. Edited by Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 158-76. Hartley, Andrew James. 2007. "Remembering the Actor: Embodied Shakespeare and the Individual in the Audience." Shakespeare Bulletin, 25.3 (2007): 41-51. Jury, Louise. 2008. "Keep TV stars off West End stage, says Miller (just as Dr. Who arrives)." London Evening Standard. 9 June. Available online: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23492507- details/Keep+TV+stars+off+West+End+stage+says+Miller+ (just+as+Dr+Who+arrives)/article.do (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article- 23492507-details/Keep+TV+stars+off+West+End+stage+says+Miller+ (just+as+Dr+Who+arrives)/article.do) [cited 12 January 2010]. King Lear. 2007. Director Trevor Nunn, performers Ian McKellan, Romola Garai, Sylvester McCoy. Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Merchant of Venice. 2008. Director Tim Carroll, performers Georgina Rich, Angus Wright, James Garnon. Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Morrison, John. 2008. "David Tennant's Hamlet." Weblog post. 29 July. Available online: http://blackpig.typepad.com/john_morrison/2008/07/david-tennants-hamlet.html (http://blackpig.typepad.com/john_morrison/2008/07/david-tennants-hamlet.html) [cited 12 January 2010]. Romeo and Juliet. 2000. Director Michael Boyd, performers David Tennant, Alexandra Gilbreath. Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare in Love. 1998. Written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. Director John Madden, performers Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Judi Dench. Universal Pictures. Smith, Emma. 2008. "Doctor Hamlet." Times Literary Supplement. 13 August. Available online: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4522351.ece (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4522351.ece) [cited 12 January 2010]. The Taming of the Shrew. 2008. Director Conall Morrison, performers Stephen Boxer, Michelle Gomez. Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Tempest. 2006. Director Rupert Goold, performers Patrick Stewart, John Light, Mariah Gale. Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Weimann, Robert. 1978. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of the Dramatic Form and Function. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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ONLINE RESOURCES British Academy of Film and Television Arts. http://www.bafta.org/ (http://www.bafta.org/). British Broadcasting System. Doctor Who, Classic Series.http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/). Production Pictures, Doran-Tennant Hamlet Royal Shakespeare Company. http://www.rsc.org.uk/content/7234.aspx (http://www.rsc.org.uk/content/7234.aspx) Royal Shakespeare Company Archive. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. http://calm.shakespeare.org.uk/dserve/dserve.exe?dsqserver=srv- ex1&dsqCmd=index.tcl&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqApp=Archive (http://calm.shakespeare.org.uk/dserve/dserve.exe?dsqserver=srv- ex1&dsqCmd=index.tcl&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqApp=Archive).

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Introduction

(/current) ALEXA HUANG, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT | CAST OF MAQBOOL | CAST OF THE BANQUET (YE YAN) | NOTES | REFERENCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT The introduction to this collection of multimedia essays on Maqbool and The Banquet argues that (/archive) close examination of the films through a truly global array of appropriative strategies and cultural contexts can help combat the tendency to report on rather than analyze non-Western works and thus can also prevent Asian films from being seen as merely exotic and disconnected from Shakespeare scholarship. Especially valuable for Shakespeareans are the ways in which the two films refashion Hamlet, Gertrude, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and other characters to shed new light on the visceral and political experiences enabled by these Shakespearean tragedies.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

The past decades have witnessed diverse incarnations and bold sequences of filmic re-imaginings that gave rise to productive encounters between the ideas of Asia and of Shakespeare in the global cultural marketplace. The beginning of the new millennium is for Asian cinematic Shakespeares (Huang and Ross 2009, 1-3) as the 1990s were for Anglophone Shakespeare on film — a "citationally rich intertextual environment" (Cartelli and Rowe 2007, 2). Shakespeare has been a part of the film and popular cultures of various Asian countries, with Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet at the center of cinematic imaginations. Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (Macbeth, 1957) and Ran (Lear, 1985) are far from the earliest or the only Shakespeare films from Asia.1

Among other locations, Shakespeare films have been produced in India, Malaysia, Tibet, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Japan. Around the time that Asta Nielsen's cross-dressed Hamlet (1921) was filmed, gender-bending silent film adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and Two Gentlemen of Verona were being made in Shanghai and marketed to the European expatriate and

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Chinese diasporic communities there and in Canton and Southeast Asia. Since 1927, the Indian cinematic tradition has engaged Shakespearean motifs in diverse genres ranging from silent film and theatrical cinematization to feature films that localize the plays. Films such as Angoor (dir. Gulzar, 1981; based on The Comedy of Errors) and The Last Lear (dir. Rituparno Ghosh, 2007) suggest that the cultural flows no longer travel unilaterally from the West to the "rest." In 2006, Chinese director Feng Xiaogang adapted Hamlet, Hollywood visual language, and the martial arts genre in his feature film The Banquet. Films such as Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love have also inspired creative reinterpretations of these films and of Romeo and Juliet in Anthony Chan's Hong Kong film, One Husband Too Many, and Cheah Chee Kong's Singaporean film, Chicken Rice War. A Tibetan film entitled The Prince of the Himalayas (Ximalaya wangzi, China, 2006) with an all-star cast, reframes Hamlet in terms of ancient Tibet and local customs. Following the success of Maqbool (Macbeth, India, 2003), the first Indian film adaptation of Shakespeare to gain international recognition, director Vishal Bhardwaj drew on Othello, caste politics, and gang culture to explore specifiable universals in human emotions in Omkara (2006). If the collapse of Shakespeare's status in mid-twentieth-century India in the narrative of the Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare-Wallah (1964) signals "the end of cultural colonization" (Singh 2008, 233), the advent of Bhardwaj's internationally acclaimed films suggests a renewed rivalry between Shakespeare's globally circulating text and local representational practices (Bollywood and beyond) in the post-national cultural marketplace.

The rash of new Shakespeare films from Asia may be the result of increasingly aggressive trans- nationalizing strategies since the 1990s (Burt 2009). Asian audio-visual idioms have been appropriated, along with Shakespeare's text, on stage and on screen. Therefore, we need to ask: On what terms do international Shakespeare films reframe the relationships between different geo- cultural or virtual localities? In turn, what is entailed in the cultural practice of screening, in both senses of the verb, Shakespeare in transnational audio-visual idioms in modern times? How does Shakespeare become a necessary signifier against which popular and world cultures define themselves on screen?

These are some of the questions that have inspired the present collection of essays on Asian Shakespeares on screen, a collaborative effort to bring into productive dialogue studies of Shakespeare and both Asian and Western forms of cultural production. A few words about the rationale and design of the collection are in order. In 2008, at the Shakespeare Association of America's (SAA) annual meeting in Dallas were screened two provocative, visually stunning Asian films from China and India, respectively, with contrasting approaches to Shakespearean tragedy. Despite the less than ideal screening conditions in a ballroom, the films impressed the conference delegates with deeply moving story-telling and astute reflections on Shakespeare's place in today's world.

The Banquet (Ye Yan, or Legend of the Black Scorpion, dir. Feng Xiaogang, China, 2006), a martial- arts film in Mandarin Chinese, gives Gertrude and Ophelia, traditionally silenced women characters in Hamlet, a strong presence, though the centrality of the Gertrude figure in the film's narrative has been seen as problematic by some critics (Hand 2008, 430-31). As a bold period epic, the film is informed by rich intertextual traces of diverse themes from Shakespearean and Chinese sources.

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Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, India, 2004), hailed as a "Macbeth meets The Godfather" film, defies convenient categorization because it combines Bollywood gangster film, Muslim social drama, ethnography, and postmodernist artwork. The set design in one scene in The Banquet evokes Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Hamlet (1990), while the closing scene in Maqbool is connected to Luc Besson's Léon (1994) through its visual strategies.

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The Macbeths inhabit both the present-day Mumbai criminal underworld and India's film industry in an environment reminiscent of the world of the Scottish play. As national films with transnational networks of funding and artistic collaboration, The Banquet and Maqbool are self-conscious about their local as well as their international audiences. Both filmmakers engage productively with the inevitable tensions between different narrativized spaces and cinematic strategies. As a result, the films compel us to reconsider assumptions about the kinetic energy of Asian visual media and the textual foundation of English-language Shakespeare films. The screenings at the SAA set in motion a process of canonization by raising awareness and initiating debates about global Shakespeare. These two films were featured in the seminar on "Shakespeare and World Cinema" at the 2010 SAA in Chicago. Some of the most exciting conversations are captured in the thirteen essays in this collection.

Enhanced by film stills and clips, the multimedia essays in this special collection are also designed to be a teaching tool to advance the study of Shakespeare on film — informing, but also initiating, critical debate. Despite these two feature films' popularity, there is a dearth of open-access scholarly resources that do justice to the films as visual and textual feasts. Bringing together a film from India, a country with postcolonial entanglements with Britain, and a film from China, a country with a different, ambiguous relationship to the values represented by Shakespeare, enables us to ask new questions and to seek approaches that are attuned to the intricate dynamics between different localities. As an interdisciplinary forum that thrives on contrasting perspectives on The Banquet and Maqbool, the collection not only creates new pedagogical possibilities, but also demonstrates how http://borrowers.uga.edu/1404/show Page 5 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

the field can move beyond journalistic familiarity with new films. The contributors represent a number of different fields, including Shakespeare, English, performance, comparative literature, and Asian studies. As a corrective to the prevailing reportage mode that is often deployed when non- Western works are discussed, and to avoid relegating these films to predictably exotic objects that are newsworthy for their immediacy only (Huang 2009, 36), the collection offers concise, accessible essays on a truly global array of appropriative strategies rather than a review of each film. It opens with a comparative essay on both films by Mark Thornton Burnett, which is followed by seven essays on various aspects of The Banquet and six essays on Maqbool. While the cultural and historical contexts of Maqbool are readily available in English, the same could not be said of The Banquet, a film with equally rich allusions. Therefore, a glossary is provided for readers interested in exploring the imaginations of local history in The Banquet.

CAST OF MAQBOOL

Irfan Khan Maqbool Tabu Nimmi Pankaj Kapur Jahangir Khan (Abbaji) Naseeruddin Shah Inspector Purohit Om Puri Inspector Pandit Piyush Mishra Kaka Masumi Makhija Sameera (Abbaji's Daughter) Ajay Gehi Guddu (Kaka's son) Abbas Tyrewala Sadik Chikna Deepak Dobriyal Thapa Gyanchand Rikki Mughal Manav Kaushik Asif Ankur Vikal Riyaz Boti Pubali Sanyal Boti's wife Raj Boti's son Murli Sharma Devsare Firdous Irani Usman Vinod Nahardi Chinna Vivek Mishra Tavde Shammi Narang Bhosle Mohini Mathur Badi Bi Rakesh Pandit Qawwals at Dargah Sabir Khan Qawwals at Dargah Musharraf Khan Qawwals at Dargah Jaywant Wadkar Palekar Jitendra Shriamali Palekar's PA Bhupinder Sharma Mohini's secretary http://borrowers.uga.edu/1404/show Page 6 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

Jagdish Kansara Producer Shweta Menon Mohini Vinay Shukla Professor Rajeev Acharya Architect Anoop Joshi Caterer Ramratan Sen Ahmed Shankar Nihate Kaka's Murderer Dibyendu Bhattacharya Chinna's Killer Nadeem Khan Badi Bi's Killer Sanjay Bhutiani Custom Officer Richa Nayer Doctor Daya Shankar Pandey Masterji

Director: Vishal Bharadwaj Screenplay: Vishal Bharadwaj and Abbas Tyrewala Kaleidoscope Entertainment Pvt. Ltd.

Bobby Bedi producer Puja Bedi associate producer Rekha Bharadwaj co-producer Laurens C. Postma executive producer

Original Music by Vishal Bharadwaj Cinematography by Hemant Chaturvedi Film Editing by Aarif Sheikh Casting by Honey Trehan Art Direction by Jayant Deshmukh Costume Design by Payal Saluja

CAST OF THE BANQUET (YE YAN)

Zhang Ziyi Empress Wan (Wan'er or Little Wan) Ge You Emperor Li

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Daniel Wu Prince Wu Luan Zhou Xun Qing Nü (Master Yin's daughter) Ma Jingwu Master Yin (Yin Taichang) Huang Xiaoming General Yin (Yin Sun; Master Yin's son) Zhou Zhonghe Chamberlain Zheng Qiusheng Governor Pei (Pei Hong) Xu Xiyan Ling'er Liu Yanbin Messenger Ma Lun Pharmacist Xiang Bin Imperial Guard Zheng Chunyu Imperial Guard

Director: Feng Xiaogang Screenplay: Sheng Heyu and Qian Yu Huayi Brothers

John Chong producer Wang Zhongjun producer Wang Zhonglei executive producer Yue Woo-ping executive producer

Original Music by Tan Dun Action Choreographer, Yuen Woo-ping Cinematography by Zhang Li Film Editing by Liu Miaomiao Art Direction by Timmy Yip

How to cite this article: Huang, Alexa. "Introduction." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES

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1. Throughout this collection of essays, Asian names are kept in their original order (family name first, e.g., Feng Xiaogang), except for names better known in other forms, such as Akira Kurosawa. Many actors take on single-word screen names in Indian cinema and are known as such (e.g., Tabu).

REFERENCES Angoor. 1981. Director Gulazar, performers Sanjeev Kumar, Moushumi Chatterjee. India. A. R. Movies. Burt, Richard. 2009. "Mobilizing Foreign Shakespeares in Media." In Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace. Edited by Alexa C. Y. Huang and Charles Ross. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press. 231-38. Cartelli, Thomas, and Katherine Rowe. 2007. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chicken Rice War. 2000. Director Cheah Chee Kong, performers Pierre Png, May Yee Lum, Catherine Sng, Gary Yuen, Kevin Murphy. Singapore. Mediacorp Raintree Pictures. Company. 2002. Director Ram Gopal Varma, performers Ajay Devgan, Mohanlal. India. Varma Corporation. The Godfather. 1972. Director Francis Ford Coppola, performers Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan. USA. Alfran Productions. Hamlet. 1990. Director Franco Zeffirelli, performers Mel Gibson, Glenn Close, Alan Bates, Paul Scofield. USA. Canal+. Hamlet. 1921. Directors Svend Gade and Heinz Schall, performers Asta Nielsen, Paul Conradi, Mathilde Brandt. Germany. Art-Film GmbH. Hand, Molly. 2008. "Review of Ye Yan: The Banquet (directed by Feng Xiaogang)." Shakespeare 4.4: 429-33. Huang, Alexa 2009. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press. Huang, Alexa, and Charles S. Ross. 2009. Introduction to Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. 1-14. The Last Lear. 2007. Director Rituparno Ghosh, performers Amitabh Bachchan, Preity Zinta, Arjun Rampal. India. Planman Motion Pictures. Léon. 1994. Director Luc Besson, performers Jean Reno, Gary Oldman. France. Gaumont. Maqbool. 2004. Director Vishal Bhardwaj, performers Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapoor, Piyush Mishra, Ajay Gehi, Ankur Vikal. India. Kaleidoscope Entertainment. Omkara. 2006. Director Vishal Bhardwaj, performers Ajay Devgan, Kareena Kapoor. India. Big Screen Entertainment. http://borrowers.uga.edu/1404/show Page 9 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

One Husband Too Many. 1988. Director Anthony Chan, performers Kenny Bee, Anthony Chan, Cherie Chung, Anita Mui, Pat Ha. Hong Kong. Prince of the Himalayas. 2006. Director Sherwood Hu, performers Purba Rgyal, Dobrgyal, Zomskyid. China. Hus Entertainment. Ran. 1985. Director Akira Kurosawa, performers Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu. Japan. Greenwich Film Productions. Romeo + Juliet. 1996. Director Baz Luhrmann, performers Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes. USA. Bazmark Films. Romeo and Juliet. 1968. Director Franco Zeffirelli, performers Olivia Hussey, Leonard Whiting, John McEnery. USA. BHE Films. Satya. 1998. Director Ram Gopal Varma, performers J. D. Chakravarthi, Urmila Matondkar. India. Shakespeare-Wallah. 1965. Director James Ivory, performers Shashi Kapoor, Felicity Kendal, Geoffrey Kendal. USA. Merchant Ivory Productions. Shakespeare in Love. 1998. Director John Madden, performers Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Judi Dench. USA. Universal Pictures. Singh, Jyotsna G. 2008. "Afterword: The Location of Shakespeare." In Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Edited by Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia. Aldershot: Ashgate. 233-40. Throne of Blood. 1957. Director Akira Kurosawa, performers Toshirô Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Takashi Shimura. Japan. Toho Company. Ye Yan (The Banquet). 2006. Director Xiaogang Feng, performers Ziyi Zhang, You Ge, Daniel Wu, Xun Zhou. Huayi Brothers.

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Extending the Filmic Canon: The Banquet and (/current) Maqbool

MARK THORNTON BURNETT, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, BELFAST (/previous)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) The Banquet (dir. Feng Xiaogang, 2006) deploys a filmic method that, despite assertions to the contrary, is deeply read both in playing conventions and in the textual debates of Shakespeare's work. No less powerfully suggested is the film's awareness of its status as the latest in a long line of Shakespearean cinematic realizations. The outlines of the drama and the key players, for instance, are invariably doubly rephrased. Arguably taking energy from its contemporary surroundings, Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2003), too, is conscious, at least in part, of functioning as a remake. Allusions to the titular protagonist inheriting "Bollywood" and the fact that the Lady Macbeth figure is a type of frustrated actress, make logistical sense within the parameters of a film that openly confesses to being inspired by Macbeth. Central to the film's effect are the ways in which the traditional exercises of fatherhood are elaborated as the primary means through which power is transferred. Elsewhere, musical interludes in which a public woman's voice plays out the male protagonist's inner compulsions demonstrate the extent to which Maqbool pushes at some of the play's gendered preoccupations.

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The canon of Shakespeare on film is challenged and supplemented by two recent additions to the catalogue, The Banquet (dir. Feng Xiaogang, 2006), a Chinese version of Hamlet set in ancient China, and Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2004), an Indian venture which transposes Macbeth to modern Mumbai's urban underworld.

Of the two films, The Banquet suggests a greater degree of historical distance: unfolding in the Tang Dynasty period, it concentrates upon the intrigues between a select group of characters — Prince Wu Luan / Hamlet (Daniel Wu), Empress Wan / Gertrude (Zhang Ziyi) and, to a lesser extent, Qing Nü / Ophelia (Zhou Xun) and Emperor Li / Claudius (Ge You). The banquet of the title refers to the spectacular feast that marks the climax of the action and that, in the fiction of the film, commemorates the emperor's one-hundredth day of rule. At an immediate level, The Banquet would seem to display its indebtedness to a host of previous Shakespeare on film and, indeed, early modern dramatic undertakings: an early backward shot of the empress moving towards the throne references an over-the-shoulder publicity still of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet surveying his uncle's coronation, while the performative realities of a Hamlet who appears older than his (here) stepmother bring to mind Laurence Olivier's similar casting decisions, and Oedipal orientations, in his filmic recreation of Shakespeare's play.

Over-the-shoulder shots of Wan and Hamlet

Finally, the privileging of a banquet as the narrative cornerstone begs a Renaissance parallel and points to comparable deployments of eating and http://borrowers.uga.edu/1405/show Page 2 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

feasting as inverted and/or catastrophic celebrations in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English theatrical repertory.1 What this points up is a filmic method that, despite assertions to the contrary, is deeply read both in playing conventions and in the textual debates of Shakespeare's work. No less powerfully suggested is the film's awareness of its status as the latest in a long line of Shakespearean cinematic realizations.

An absorbed relation to Shakespeare's play is multiply revealed. A point often remarked upon by audiences — namely, the possibility of Gertrude's collaboration in the murder plot — is fleshed out in The Banquet in the implication that the empress does indeed have knowledge of the way in which the first emperor died. Similarly, a conspiracy (in the so-called "bad quarto") to dispatch Claudius appears in the film in the empress's scheme to have the second emperor removed.2 Incorporating such sequences, The Banquet emerges as a response to the questions posed by Shakespeare's play in the same moment as it pays homage to some of the immutable components of the "original." In part the film's felicity with manipulating the precursor narrative is linked to its enthusiasm for altering and adjusting the familiar chronology. Often, this takes the form of repeating, rather than singly representing, recognizable storylines: hence, Prince Wu Luan is twice exiled, while there are two internal plays- within-plays. Such a procedure makes for surprise and acknowledgement as Hamlet continually resurfaces, only in fresh and therefore critically arresting guises.

If the outlines of the drama are invariably doubly rephrased, then so, too, are its key players. The spirit of Ophelia inhabits both the palace attendant, Qing Nü, and the empress; behind the relatively benign Master Yin (Ma Jingwu) and the Chamberlain (Zhou Zhonghe) lie constructions of Polonius; and in Governor Pei (Zheng Qiusheng), and his protests against the emperor, one senses a dimension of Hamlet himself. The effect of these splittings, which are also types of expansion, is to reinforce salient Shakespearean preoccupations: incest, or the potential for a species of it, is stridently stated in the generational proximity of the prince and the empress, while political resistance, arguably localized in the play, is more widely distributed in the filmic equivalent. Amatory and sexual entanglements are prioritized thanks to the duplication of the prince's lovers; the divisions of Polonius allow for a bifurcated appearance of court politics; and, because masked versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are everywhere apparent, surveillance is elevated into a core narrative property.

More generally, the continued concern in the film with disguise, acting,

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and theater brings to the fore Hamlet's interest in metatheatricality. Indeed, The Banquet would even seem to go so far as to express an internal admission that the individual character can be understood as several selves: thus, when the empress is addressed as both "sister-in-law" and "empress mother," a forceful impression of a motile and shifting personality is afforded. The process comes to a head at the film's close in a scene where the empress, having achieved dominion, ascends to a new title, "Her Majesty, the Emperor." The designation signals, at once, the absolutism to which the empress has ascended; at a deeper level, it suggests the gendered opposites that the character now incarnates. But, in this struggle for sovereignty, The Banquet also wants to imply, there can be no clear-cut resolution. For, at the moment when Wan gains the throne, she is stabbed (it is not clarified by whom), indicating the ghost's revenge, the people's resistance, the work of an anonymous assassin or a combination of all three. In its conjuration of another self, as yet unidentified, in its representation of a fragile purchase of power and, above all, in its grimly playful variation on source, this represents a conclusion very much in keeping with the film's overall imperatives.

Arguably taking energy from its contemporary surroundings, Maqbool, too, is conscious, at least in part, of functioning as a remake. Allusions to the titular protagonist inheriting "Bollywood," and the fact that the Lady Macbeth figure, Nimmi (Tabu), is a type of frustrated actress, make a logistical sense within the parameters of a film that openly confesses to being inspired by Macbeth. Yet, over the course of the film as a whole, it is less the specific parallels with Shakespeare's play that impress as the intricate interrelations among image, plot and metaphor that throw light upon Maqbool/Macbeth's predicaments. Hence, in a sequence that incorporates a number of elements, the sight of Nimmi's cut foot (a metaphor for the prospective betrayal of her drug lord lover) is juxtaposed with the courtship of Guddu / Fleance (Ajay Gehi) and Sameera (Masumi Makhija) which, in turn, is deployed to illuminate the gathering force of Maqbool's passion for his boss's mistress. In addition, because the sequence is overlaid by a song whose lyrics refer to "love" and "madness," a sense of Maqbool's immediate condition, and incipient fate, is underscored. Counter-pointing of this kind is a filmic signature and gains credence both from musical traditions in Asian cinema and from a creative utilization of local ceremonial. Pertinent here is the way in which Sameera (who represents a female version of Malcolm) sings separately about the fear of being caught "red-footed": although the anxiety belongs with the character, the theme of an imminent discovery also speaks to Maqbool, with the aural story bringing to mind a conjunction of amatory and political entanglements. No less suggestive is the foregrounding of http://borrowers.uga.edu/1405/show Page 4 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

the characters' participation in the Muslim festival of Ramzan Eid: a commemoration of good will and friendship, the celebrations go hand-in- hand with the development of Maqbool's decision to dispatch Khan / Duncan (Pankaj Kapur) and thereby serve as an ironic commentary upon a gangland community singularly lacking in genuine festive virtues. Part of the communicative success of Maqbool resides precisely in such seemingly innocuous pairings and comparisons, qualifications and counter-implications.

Musical interludes in which a public woman's voice plays out the male protagonist's inner compulsions demonstrate the extent to which Maqbool pushes at some of play's gendered preoccupations. With the exception of a vituperative accusation that Nimmi is a "witch," there are, for instance, no female witches featured; rather, these roles are taken by the corrupt police inspectors, Purohit (Naseeruddin Shah) and Pandit (Om Puri), who specialize not so much in abstract predictions as carefully visualized horoscopes. The play's diagrammatized equation of women and the supernatural is here complicated and inverted, with the Shakespearean source's gendered identities being relocated and re-imagined. Thus, aristocratic masculine authority is unsettled via the scene in which Badi Bi (Mohini Mathur), an elderly female servant, reflects upon the unruliness of the nocturnal weather, while the issue of motherhood is initially brought to attention through the increasing feminization (embracing make-up and manner) of Kaka / Banquo (Piyush Mishra) and his stereotypically emotive relation to his son. Shakespeare's Macbeth upsets masculine and feminine categories; Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool executes a similar manoeuvre by reversing and shifting polarities that are already themselves often compromised.

In fact, it is not so much the status of the mother that Maqbool wishes to privilege as the place of the father. Known primarily as "father," Khan appears as patriarch at several levels, both in terms of the narrative (he is an adoptive parent to Maqbool) and in terms of the film's intertexts (the character's mumbling and shambling gait brings Marlon Brando's "godfather" to mind). The traditional exercises of fatherhood are elaborated as the primary means through which power is transferred, as when Khan gives away his daughter, Sameera, in marriage, thereby ensuring the continuation of his family line, or when Maqbool, after the drug lord's death, takes over the guardianship of the young woman, cementing himself as a new "father" in familial and dynastic fashion. Vividly encapsulated in these material and symbolic forms of fatherhood is a crucial biological consideration. For, at the film's close, it is revealed that Nimmi is pregnant, although ambiguity surrounds the child's http://borrowers.uga.edu/1405/show Page 5 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 9'59 PM

paternity. In a sense, the "true" parent becomes a moot issue: Maqbool, fleeing retribution, abandons the infant in the hospital and is subsequently mown down in the city streets, while Guddu and Sameera take over as mother and father. As befits a filmic drama centred upon protocols and corruption, ideas of legitimacy and illegitimacy are at this point allowed to circulate expressively; simultaneously, visuals and soundtrack are deployed to underscore the mixed legacies of the Macbethian protagonist. To a frozen image of Maqbool's head is added the cry of a child and a glimpse of crows flying overhead in a resonant tableau that encapsulates the need to read "the mind's construction in the face," the implied continuation of cycles of violence, hope for regeneration, and the perils of cultural forms of inheritance. The Banquet and Maqbool are films, then, that invite informed attention and that, in their emergence in the Shakespearean scene, look set to challenge inherited canonical notions and to diversify and expand the means whereby the Bard, in his various screen manifestations, is regarded and interpreted.

How to cite this article: Burnett, Mark Thornton. "Extending the Filmic Canon: The Banquet and Maqbool." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES 1. See, for example, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Bloody Banquet (1608-1609, revised 1620s) and Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women (c. 1625-1627). 2. Conspiracy is suggested in Gertrude's being informed of Claudius' villainy in the "bad quarto." See William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke (1603), sigs H2v-H3r.

REFERENCES The Banquet. 2006. Director Xiaogang Feng, performers Ziyi Zhang, You Ge, Daniel Wu, Xun Zhou. Huayi Brothers. Maqbool. 2004. Director Vishal Bhardwaj, performers Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapoor, Piyush Mishra, Ajay Gehi, Ankur Vikal. India. Kaleidoscope Entertainment.

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Shakespeare, William. 1603. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. London: N.L. and Iohn Trundell.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Martial Arts and Masculine Identity in Feng (/current) Xiaogang's The Banquet

YU JIN KO, WELLESLEY COLLEGE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) As cinematic clichés go, the image of the Asian martial arts master is about as well-worn as it comes. And yet in the hands of a director like Feng Xiaogang, the image is revitalized in ways that not only make it fresh again, but also reflect how the director re-imagines Shakespeare's characters. This paper considers the role of the martial arts in the conception of masculinity in Feng's The Banquet. As an adaptation of Hamlet, The Banquet subtly negotiates the strand in theatrical and critical history that effeminizes Hamlet as the sensitive melancholiac — but within a specifically global context in which China is an emerging superpower. As the paper examines how Feng refigures masculine identity in Hamlet, it will also argue that the film is confronting the issue of Asian masculine identity itself as represented in global cinema.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

In a fantasy sequence of the film Last Action Hero (1993), a parodic Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle that sends up action movies, Schwarzenegger takes on the role of Hamlet and converts the "sweet prince" into an action hero. "You killed my father," he says to Claudius, before flinging him out the window of a castle to certain death; after musing, "To be or not to be" in http://borrowers.uga.edu/1406/show Page 1 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(00 PM

between puffs on a cigar, he concludes, "Not to be," as explosives go off in the background and the entire castle is blown to bits. This little sequence is as cleverly insightful as it is comical; though Hamlet is cast by his father — and the play's genre — as an avenging hero, he hardly fits the role and could learn a few things from a Schwarzenegger-type action hero.1 Of course, it is precisely because Hamlet departs so radically from expectations and types that he has fascinated readers and theater-goers for centuries. Nonetheless, the meditative melancholy and existential searching that define Hamlet to such a deep extent and that the Romantics, in particular, seized on as the representative features of subjectivity and inner resistance, have often been gendered feminine, including by the Romantics themselves.2 Indeed, of all the major Shakespeare heroes, only Hamlet has a tradition of being played by and as a woman, as in the silent film of Hamlet (1921) with Asta Nielsen in the starring role.3 Imagining Schwarzenegger as Hamlet thus plays on the distinction between not only heroic action and contemplative inaction, but also outsized, superhero masculinity and delicate, sensitive femininity.

This legacy of a feminized Hamlet is, however, generally not of great concern to contemporary directors; though Claudius may try to shame Hamlet for displaying "unmanly grief," directors are far more likely to embrace the stronger legacy that associates sensitivity of Hamlet's kind with everything from rebellious self-invention and "grunge" subversiveness to prophetic clarity. However, in the case of the film The Banquet (2006) — a loose retelling of the Hamlet story by the contemporary Chinese filmmaker Feng Xiaogang — the image of a feminized Hamlet does, I believe, shadow the entire work, particularly in ways that reveal Feng's cultural location in the realm of international cinema. As Yomi Braester has recently argued, Feng (along with the more widely recognized Zhang Yimou) is very much the embodiment of a "cultural broker" — a major player in the transnational circulation of cultural and commercial capital that sustains the media industry across international borders (2005, 549). Indeed, the eponymous figure of the big-shot mogul (or dawan'r) in Feng's The Big Shot's Funeral (2001) is a self- parodic image of the filmmaker as international business mogul who has to negotiate the various forces and pressures — including those resulting from China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 — that shape the cinematic product. Within this global market, the image of China itself becomes a crucial form of currency whose value, or exchange rate, is left floating and open to continual modification. Surely Zhang Yimou was highly cognizant of this fact when he designed the stunning, magnificent Opening Ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, as was, as he has explicitly acknowledged in interviews, even the Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee when he made the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).4 As Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar have argued in China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, all so- http://borrowers.uga.edu/1406/show Page 2 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(00 PM

called Fifth and Sixth-Generation Chinese filmmakers (mid-1980s to the present) who aspire to a global audience are concerned at some level in their films with national identity.5 Feng Xiaogang, I believe, is really no different in being intensely conscious of the image that China, writ large, cuts for an international audience in his films. In The Banquet, this concern gets mediated principally through the Hamlet character (Prince Wu Luan), and in particular through the representation of his masculinity. As Feng translates Hamlet into Wu Luan, the character becomes a figure for Chinese masculinity.6

At the heart of Feng's revision of Hamlet lie two clichéd images. First is the image of the Asian martial arts master, which is about as well-worn a cinematic cliché as there is. Yet this cliché has enjoyed a remarkably sustained life largely because it has so many dimensions (not just Bruce Lee, but also Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat, and countless others) and is continually being revised. One notable feature found in many reworkings of the past two generations of Hong Kong martial arts movies has been the extensive use of wire-work in action sequences, which has given the aerial fight work a balletic, supernatural grace. One index of the artistic potential of this technique can be found in the films of Zhang Yimou, such as House of Flying Daggers (2004), in which Zhang seamlessly combines a romantic story of epic sweep with action sequences of ethereal beauty. In fact, Zhang's House of Flying Daggers, along with Shakespeare's own Hamlet, might be said to be an Ur- Hamlet for The Banquet. Zhang's film provides, more specifically, a graceful, dreamy vision of heroic action that would clearly appeal to Feng and recall, in the combination of traditionally feminine and masculine qualities, the elusive sensibility of Hamlet. However, Feng's representation of Hamlet/Wu Luan is also mediated by another well-worn cliché that has enjoyed a remarkably long life in the West: the effeminized Asian male. This image has been played with, deconstructed, and attacked, yet it still colors Western ideas of the East and of eastern masculinity in particular. David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988- 1990) has hardly been the last word, and Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993) has only complicated matters in interesting ways.7 Among the many fascinating elements of Feng's Shakespearean film is the complex way in which he reworks the cinematic image of the martial arts hero as a means of negotiating the balance between the feminine and masculine; he does so, however, in order ultimately to renew the masculine and offer a fresh vision of masculine national identity.

The opening sequence sets out the terms, and raises the stakes, of this negotiation (see Scott-Douglass in this issue), with cuts between the Emperor's assassins in black armor riding horseback, and Wu Luan, masked and clothed in gauzy white linen, practicing a mesmerizing dance in a grand temple-like theater in the mountains (Huang 2009, 231-33). A distinction is established http://borrowers.uga.edu/1406/show Page 3 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(00 PM

between, on one side, melancholy romance and the arts (see Ross in this issue), and, on the other, political power and male, martial action. The soundscape reinforces this distinction, switching between a haunting, lyrical love song (composed, it turns out, by Wu Luan himself) and the pounding of hooves and the clatter of armor.

The effeminization of the Hamlet-figure is further evident when Wu Luan manages to take up residence at the imperial palace. His first encounter with his Empress (and now aunt, though still formally his mother-in-law) — played by the stunningly beautiful Zhang Ziyi — is a case in point, as the scene reveals the degree to which his status is continually defined in relation to her. He shows up in her opulent "closet" (let us say) wearing his mask — looking rather like Jason from the Friday the 13th series — and carrying a sword case. As the two engage in a dialogue, Wu Luan kneels before her and asks whether the story of a scorpion having killed his father is true or not; she hugs his head and says, with tears in her eyes, "The pain in your eyes breaks my heart; do not ask so many questions . . . The best way to soothe your father's spirit is to make sure we two are well. Especially you." Though she is, as the narration tells us, four years younger than he is, she appears almost as a mother figure at this moment, protective of him as though she were driven in the end by the purity of an unconditional love. He, in turn, appears to be very much an adolescent (not unlike someone of Jason's age) who is infantilized by a more powerful female figure. Further, though Wan does come close to breaking down in a traditionally "feminine" way, she manages to catch herself and regain her self-possession. This is another instance in the film in which we find the Empress straining under extraordinary emotional or psychological pressure, but not cracking; whether she is sexually put upon by the Emperor or is witnessing the brutal beating of a general (Governor Pei Hong) who challenges her status, she maintains her composure and follows through with resolute action. Indeed, she is always shown to possess the uncanny ability — or rather, she is played as having that ability by the uncanny Zhang Ziyi — to discipline her emotions with the grace of someone guided by a higher vision, elusive as her particular vision may be for the audience.

In this first re-encounter with Wu Luan, the Empress's discipline expresses itself particularly as a switch from tender embraces and near breakdown to ever-so-slightly erotic caresses, from which he recoils and forcefully reassumes his posture of a subject. Once again firmly in control as his sovereign, then, the Empress playfully gets Wu Luan to open up his sword case and discovers a scroll on which is written the lyrics to the love song that had played in the opening sequence. With the scroll in hand, she initiates a truly balletic, aerial sword-play dance that is an extension of her graceful discipline. The dancing enables a moment of nostalgic reverie as the two http://borrowers.uga.edu/1406/show Page 4 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(00 PM

perform something that they seemingly learned together in their much younger days and thus becomes a vehicle for emotional release that avoids sloppy brooding and excess in the manner of Wu Luan.

With the dance, moreover, the Empress is firmly located in a line of female martial arts heroines that stretches back through not only the set of roles made famous by stars such as Lucy Liu and Michelle Yeoh, as well as Zhang Ziyi herself (particularly in House of Flying Daggers), but also extends to far earlier women warriors in the wuxia (or sword-fighting) genre of film. These are characters who often become paradoxically hyper-feminized by their martial arts prowess and thereby even more erotically charged; importantly, however, the particular androgynous mix of sexy, stylized artistry and lethal force define them as women of extraordinary, sometimes supernatural, power who can outduel men.8

For such characters, there is the danger of their being understood by reference to the orientalist and misogynistic "dragon-lady" cliché. The number of popular online reviews (e.g., Variety [Elley 2006] and DVDTalk [Review 2006]) that compared Zhang's Empress Wan with Lady Macbeth is one indication of how prevalent the cliché is in the minds of viewers, and how often it leads to terrible misprision. Charles Ross's and Amy Scott-Douglass's essays in this issue offer interpretations that are different from my own. But Empress Wan is no Lady Macbeth, at least not as the term is generally used, to describe a conniving, manipulative bitch whose feminine wiles and unnaturally masculine overreaching define her as evil. Rather, Empress Wan is a highly complex character who is, among other things, the film's primary figure of discipline — the kind associated with the arts of both dance and combat — and who thus stands in contrast to the brooding, impetuous, and sometimes befuddled Wu Luan. Though certainly purity might be a defining quality of Wu Luan's passions, he also appears, in contrast to the Empress and as Claudius says, a little too "unfortified," "impatient," "simple," and "unschooled" — that is, "unmanly" (Hamlet, 1.2.94-97).9

A related conclusion might be drawn about a scene that combines elements of both the play-within-the-play and the duel with Laertes from Hamlet. In honor of the Empress's coronation, Wu Luan practices a sword display with some of the palace guards, but (and some lacunae in the narrative leave matters a bit ambiguous) a guard, seemingly at the direction of the Emperor, uses a real sword he has hidden behind a pillar to attack Wu Luan. Throughout the entire scene, Wu Luan does earn his bona fides as a fighter, displaying some acrobatic and visually spectacular maneuvers. However, despite his fury at discovering the real knife, he eventually is pinned down and requires the intervention of Empress Wan, who glides in gorgeous slow-motion through the

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air to take up a weapon and deflect a potentially deadly blow. We are continually reminded that Wu Luan's martial skills, dazzling and impressive as they may be, remain inadequate in the end, requiring his rescue by a truly disciplined individual, Empress Wan. In other words, in a world of dynastic struggles and courts ruled by men, disciplined power of the Empress's kind is gendered masculine, while injured emotionalism and artistic absorption are gendered feminine.

Crucially, however, this is not the whole story. Empress Wan's ability to transform emotion into performance also makes her a figure of deception who is supremely practiced in the art of palace intrigue and power politics. In the most radical departure from the Hamlet story, a series of plots and counterplots entailing assassinations and poison is woven that pits not only Empress against Emperor, but Minister Yin (the Polonius-figure) and his household against both. In the end, however, the Empress plays the Yin household to her advantage and takes the crown. Yet the Empress cannot be pinned down as merely a scheming villainess with a ruthless hunger for power. Even in her dealings with her Emperor husband, she remains an elusive enigma whose passions — erotic and emotional — are never clear. As she plots to poison her Emperor husband, it is unclear whether or not she is faking when she falls into steamy dialogue with him and declares, with a tear rolling down her cheeks, that she has never before surrendered all of herself to anyone. Does the Empress find it tragic that she must execute this man? Even more fundamentally, it is never clear whether she plots out of thirst for power, as part of a grand scheme, or is driven to it by the fear, as Minister Yin's son (General Yin) assumes, of being discarded by the Emperor. Nor is it clear, again despite the tears she sheds for him, where Wu Luan ultimately stands in Wan's emotional landscape. And yet, as noted above, throughout it all she continually maintains a graceful, even sublime, self-composure as though she were divinely led. Or perhaps that, too, is a performance.

When Wu Luan says that he performs with a mask because artistry consists in conveying the "most complex and hidden" emotions with a mask, Wan responds first by deriding him for being so easily readable, then adds that the highest level of artistry is to "use your own face and turn it into a mask." Indeed, her elusiveness is the expression of supreme artistry. One might get tempted to say about Empress Wan what Rong Cai has said about Zhang Ziyi's character (Jen Yu) in Crouching Tiger: "Unintelligible and elusive, illegitimate female desire is disorderly and violent both in its structural function in the film and in its ideological characteristics" (2005, 454). I would say, however, that Feng Xiaogang has displaced Hamlet's famous complexity and illegibility onto the Empress and made her the greatest figure of intrigue in the drama. As a result, Wu Luan's emotional transparency appears all the purer and, http://borrowers.uga.edu/1406/show Page 6 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(00 PM

paradoxically, provides an index of his underlying masculinity. The very element of Wu Luan that makes him appear unfit and naively emotional also makes him appear, in contrast to the chameleon eeriness of Empress Wan, the embodiment of the masculine virtue of integrity. In fact, through his single- minded devotion to the old Emperor, Wu Luan is linked to Governor Pei Hong, the man who is beaten to death for using the title Empress Dowager for the Empress, thereby implying that the Emperor is a usurper. The public and gruesome execution (alluded to briefly earlier) might easily be understood as an emblem for the death of integrity in the kingdom; in this light, Wu Luan is also a figure for a lost and essential masculine ideal.

All of this comes to a head, and a climactic turning point of sorts is reached, during the eponymous banquet scene. The Emperor orders a feast for all the dignitaries of the land and requires attendance on punishment of death. During the entertainment at the banquet, the Empress offers the Emperor a toast and hands him a cup of poisoned wine; however, at just the moment when he is about to take a drink, Qing Nü — Minister Yin's daughter and the Ophelia- figure who has gone mad for love of Wu Luan — enters to announce that she and her fellow masked dancers will perform a love song in Wu Luan's honor (in fact, Wu Luan's very own song). The Emperor, believing that Wu Luan has been killed by assassins, offers the poisoned cup to Qing Nü as a token of his joining her in honoring Wu Luan. Qing Nü drinks the wine, then performs the song with other masked dancers, who are dressed as Wu Luan's fellow dancers had been at the beginning, but collapses and dies. At this point, Wu Luan reveals himself to have been (presumably secretly) one of the dancers. After briefly mourning Qing Nü, Wu Luan unveils a sword, accuses the Emperor of regicide, and then fights his way past the imperial guards towards the Emperor with newfound determination and lethal ferocity. At that moment, Wu Luan appears to put on fully the mantle of the avenging hero; one expects that, in this version of the story, he may very well accomplish vengeance and restore true masculinity in the kingdom. However, the Emperor, who now understands that the poisoned cup had been prepared for him by the Empress, calls off the guards and asks Wu Luan, with deep admiration, whether he was saved from death by the "tenderness" of "women's hearts" or by the fact that "a million calculations cannot compare with one pure heart." Then, turning his head upwards and asking the spirit of his brother whether he has protected his son to bring "honor" back to the family, the Emperor drinks off the poisoned wine. The Empress, on seeing her husband drink the wine, drops a tear and muffles her sobs. In this sequence, what fully restores the vision of Wu Luan's masculinity is ultimately not his readiness to engage in mortal combat and avenge his father, but the purity of his heart. Purity accomplishes revenge by inspiring Wu Luan's uncle to perform a final act of honor by taking his own life. Seemingly, it is recognition of this passing of purity from nephew to uncle http://borrowers.uga.edu/1406/show Page 7 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(00 PM

that provokes the tears in the Empress. Purity, that is to say, enables the male communion of father, brother, and son and restores, for the moment, the possibility of dynastic wholeness. In the end, masculine virtue becomes realigned with the artistry of dance and theater more than with mortal combat, and the elements that tend to become gendered feminine prove indispensable to defining the masculine. One might say that we catch a glimpse of an ideal vision in which a torn China is healed through this masculine virtue.

Just as quickly, however, things go tragically awry, as Minister Yin's son kills Wu Luan and is in turn killed by the Empress. In an unsettling coda, the Empress is shown mourning Wu Luan and the loss of her youth, symbolized in the loss of her name "Little Wan"; but she quickly changes her demeanor as she tries on with great pleasure her new title of "Her Majesty, the Emperor" while luxuriating sensuously in a long stream of silk that is the color of "the flame of desire," suggesting that desire reaches its apex in reaching the height of power. Then, from somewhere in the palace, a sword comes flying out and pierces her though, while the love song of Wu Luan plays in the background. It is a haunting ending that provides a chilling, but also elegiac image of what it means to renounce the kind of purity that defined Wu Luan. The Empress may seduce herself into believing that with "masculine" discipline she can reach the sublime state of being beyond caring about injured innocence, but as the song and its associations remind us, without a tender "woman's heart" beneath the mask, she risks becoming as impersonal as the faceless source of the flying sword that kills her.

One need not, and indeed should not, read The Banquet simply as an allegory of a Chinese search for national identity, but the complex way in which masculinity is represented in the film is particularly interesting, and possibly telling, in the context of China's twenty-first century evolution into a global economic superpower. As someone in whom the masculine is renewed by absorbing the feminine, Wu Luan stands as a figure that challenges and subverts the cliché of the effeminized Asian male by complicating the very terms of that cliché. At the same time, Wu Luan is in many ways the opposite of how the Chinese leadership is increasingly being viewed by China's economic and political rivals, including the U.S.: as ruthlessly calculating, inscrutable, and intent on achieving global power. In this context, Wu Luan's retreat into the arts, his emotional transparency, and his ineptness at power politics suggest an alternative model of national identity. It remains unclear, however, whether this alternative vision of a masculine national identity will resonate more strongly at home or abroad.

How to cite this article: Ko, Yu Jin. "Martial Arts and Masculine Identity in Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films

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in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES 1. For more on this connection between Hamlet and his representation in the film, see Eric S. Mallin, "'You Kilt My Foddah': or Arnold, Prince of Denmark" (1999). 2. Perhaps most famously, Goethe has his Wilhelm Meister say the following about Hamlet (in Thomas Carlyle's translation): "A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden it cannot bear and must not cast away" (1885, 1:223). The operative opposition is between a hero's masculinized strength and Hamlet's "lovely" nature. 3. A recent work treats quite exhaustively this phenomenon of effeminized Hamlets in performance: Troy Howard, Women as Hamlet (2007). 4. See Kenneth Chan, "The Global Return of the Wu Xia Pian (Chinese Sword- Fighting Movie): Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2004), in which he discusses the ways in which Lee's film negotiates anxieties about representing "Chineseness" (4) for a global market and in which he quotes Lee as saying, "The film is a kind of dream of China" (7). 5. See especially Chapter 1, "Cinema and the National." 6. For an excellent introduction to the issue of how gender and national identity intersect in Chinese films, see China on Screen (2004): Chapter 5, "How Should A Chinese Woman Look? Woman and Nation," and Chapter 6, "How Should Chinese Men Act? Ordering the Nation." 7. Allan Luke, "Representing and Reconstructing Asian Masculinities: This is not a Movie Review" (1997). 8. For an alternative perspective, see Rong Cai (2005). 9. The reference is to The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (1974).

REFERENCES The Banquet. 2006. Director Xiaogang Feng, performers Ziyi Zhang, You Ge, Daniel Wu, Xun Zhou. Huayi Brothers. Berry, Chris, and Mary Farquhar. 2004. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. http://borrowers.uga.edu/1406/show Page 9 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(00 PM

The Big Shot's Funeral. 2001. Director Xiaogang Feng, performers You Ge, Rosemary Kwan, Donald Sutherland. China Film Group. Braester, Yomi. 2005. "Chinese Cinema in the Age of Advertisement: The Filmmaker as a Cultural Broker." The China Quarterly: 549-64. Cai, Rong. 2005. "Gender Imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Wuxia World." Positions 13.2 (Fall): 441-71. Chan, Kenneth. 2004. "The Global Return of the Wu Xia Pian (Chinese Sword- Fighting Movie): Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Cinema Journal 43.4: 3-17. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 2000. Director Ang Lee, performers Yun-fat Chow, Michelle Yeoh, Zhi Zhang. Asian Union Film & Entertainment, Ltd. Elley, Derek. 2006. Review of The Banquet: Ye Yan (China-Hong Kong). Variety. 3 September. Available online: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117931451.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117931451.html? categoryid=31&cs=). Friday the 13th. 1980. Director Sean S. Cunningham. Georgetown Productions, Inc. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1885. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Translated by Thomas Carlyle. 2 vols. New York: Worthington Co. Hamlet. 1921. Directors Svend Gade Heinz Schall, performers Asta Nielsen, Mathilde Brandt, Eduard von Winterstein. Art-Film GmbH. House of Flying Daggers. 2004. Director Zhang Yimou, performers Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Ziyi Zhang. Beijing New Picture Film Co. Howard, Troy. 2007. Women as Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huang, Alexa 2009. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press. Hwang, David Henry. 1988-1990. M. Butterfly. Eugene O'Neill Theatre, N.Y. 20 March, 1988-27 January, 1990. Last Action Hero. 1993. Director John McTiernan, performers Arnold Schwarzenegger, F. Murray Abraham, Austin O'Brien. Columbia Pictures Corporation. Luke, Allan. 1997. "Representing and Reconstructing Asian Masculinities: This is not a Movie Review." Social Alternatives 16.3: 32-34.

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Mallin, Eric S. 1999. "'You Kilt My Foddah': or Arnold, Prince of Denmark." Shakespeare Quarterly 50.2: 127-51. Pang, Laikwan, and Day Wong, eds. 2005. Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Review of The Banquet. 2006. DVDTalk. 2 November. Available online: http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/25325/banquet-the/ (http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/25325/banquet-the/). Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. The Wedding Banquet. 1993. Director Ang Lee, performers Dion Birney, Jeanne Kuo Chang, Winston Chao. Ang Lee Productions.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Shakespeare: It's What's for Dinner

(/current) AMY SCOTT-DOUGLASS, MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT (/archive) Although the title of The Banquet (2006) suggests a large, public, celebratory meal, there is a noticeable lack of food in the film itself. Rather than cinematic representations of food, the film serves up a feast of Shakespearean references, including allusions to Hamlet, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, Othello, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, as well as various of the history and Roman plays. While both The Banquet and The Celebration (dir. Thomas Vinterberg, 1998) share a sense of themselves as national films working within an international market and a similar philosophy of Shakespearean borrowing, they differ in their philosophies of filmmaking.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

It might seem an insignificant observation, but for a film called The Banquet (2006), a title which suggests a large, public, celebratory meal, there is a noticeable lack of food. Though The Banquet delivers the feast its title promises, it never manifests itself in cinematic representations of food. Instead, the film serves up a feast of multiple references to several Shakespeare plays. The film is frequently described as a loose adaptation

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of Hamlet, but that is not the only Shakespeare on the menu. Indeed, if Shakespeare citations are part of the feast for the viewer in The Banquet, then I imagine that the menu might look something like this: Hamlet, served on a bed of history and Roman plays, with a side of King Lear and Titus Andronicus, a dollop of Desdemona for dessert, and the wines of Macbeth (bottle of red) and Romeo and Juliet (bottle of white) flowing throughout the film.

HAMLET The film's premise — that Prince Wu Lan's and Little Wan's love for each other is undercut when his father, the Emperor, marries Wan himself — has more in common with Aphra Behn's Oroonoko than Shakespeare's Hamlet. Similarly, Wan's conversation with her new husband, the late Emperor's brother Li, in which they agree that the new Emperor does not fit into his older brother's armor, recalls Charles I's dilemma upon inheriting the armor of his elder brother, the late Prince Henry, more than any scene involving Shakespeare's Danish prince. Larger comparisons to Hamlet become evident, however, within the first few miNütes of the film. The Banquet offers several beautiful parallels to Hamlet, seen largely in attributes of the male characters: Prince Wu Luan's (Hamlet's) love of theater and anxiety about women's sexuality; Emperor Li's (Claudius's) obsession with Empress Wan (Gertrude); Minister Yin Taichang's (Polonius's) total capitulation to the Emperor; and General Yin's (Laertes's) protectiveness of his sister.

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HISTORY AND ROMAN PLAYS One could devote an entire review to a discussion of The Banquet as a clever adaptation of Hamlet, but perhaps more interesting are the other Shakespeare parallels that run throughout the film. The first of these is the Prince Hal narrative. While the prince's penchant for theater recalls Hamlet's esteem for the players, the prince's theater-in-exile, at which he hides out from the king and court (shirking his responsibilities, as Little Wan points out to him) and rehearses a performance of seemingly no particular consequence, a performance that becomes crucial to the story by the film's end, has even more in common with the function of Hal's makeshift theater at the Boar's Head Tavern. The gravity of the similarities between Prince Wu Luan's narrative and the Henriad hit home during the scene in which Emperor's soldiers behead Wu Luan's proxy while the real Prince, wearing a white robe and white mask identical to his aides, hides under the water, which is similar to Douglas's defeat of Blunt while he is disguised as the king at the end of Henry IV, Part One.

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Unlike Wu Luan, whom The Banquet associates with Shakespeare's relatively sympathetic and effective Prince Hal, the film compares Wu Luan's usurping uncle, Emperor Li, to Shakespeare's despotic, tyrannical, and lackadaisical rulers. One of the film's first lines, "What need do I have for a kingdom?" puts one in mind at once of Antony ("He hath given his empire / Up to a whore" [Antony and Cleopatra, 3.6.66-67]), Richard II ("The name of a King? A God's name, let it go" [Richard II, 3.3145]), Henry VI ("Oh God! methinks it were a happy life / To be no better than a homely swain" [3 Henry VI, 2.5.21-22]), and Richard III ("My kingdom for a horse" [Richard III, 5.7.13])1 While Wan's ensuing, "teasing" suggestion that Li "give away the throne" so that they "can retire to the woods and live like hermits" recalls Henry VI's fantasy of abdicating the crown and becoming a shepherd, it is the allusions to Antony, not to mention Marlowe's Edward II, that are the strongest, for Li suggests he would be willing to give up the throne not out of discontent (like Henry VI) or desperation (like Richard III), but rather, out of desire. Li first offers to abdicate while massaging Empress Wan's naked back in bed — "Now that there is you," he tells Wan, "what need do I have for a kingdom?" Halfway through the film, Li repeats this question: "Who cares about losing a kingdom when in the presence of such great beauty?" he asks, while gazing at Wan in her red coronation robes. Li's appreciation of beautiful things extends to his taste in palace decor. "The Emperor was a thrifty man," Li tells his courtiers, "but I am not going to suffer the way he did. Pave the ceiling with flowers in gold leaf." As in the case of Shakespeare's Richard II, the film suggests that the kingdom cannot afford the sovereign's expensive tastes. His vanity (he compares himself to a snow leopard who stays inside in the winter to groom his fur), self- indulgence, and inclination to surround himself with flatterers are bad for the empire.

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KING LEAR AND TITUS ANDRONICUS In its emphasis on the narratives of a male sovereign figure rejecting his truthful courtier in favor of flatterers and of a woman sovereign figure delighting in the pleasure of exercising power over others in acts of sadistic revenge, The Banquet recalls two Shakespeare plays in particular: King Lear and Titus Andronicus. The similarities begin when Governor Pei Hong, chief advisor to the late Emperor, refuses to acknowledge Emperor Li's legitimacy. Pei bows before Wan, greeting her as the Empress Dowager rather than the Empress. The Emperor complains that Pei has "rearranged the hierarchy of the court," but leaves it up to Wan whether she will kneel to him as her husband. When she complies, Pei responds by laughing and looking up to the sky, asking, "Late Emperor, did your spirit in heaven witness this vile exchange?" The new Emperor kicks the truthful old advisor out of the court, just as the enraged Lear does Kent. Once outside, Pei becomes the Gloucester figure, subjected to an episode of ritualized violence while Emperor Li and Empress Wan watch from their thrones. Later in the film, after the Empress's plan to murder the Emperor is discovered, Wan's similarities to Goneril and Regan are made more apparent by Minister Yin Taichang, who calls her a http://borrowers.uga.edu/1407/show Page 7 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(09 PM

"venomous woman." But in Pei's torture scene, the Empress bears only a surface similarity to Lear's eldest daughters. Though it is difficult to judge the motivations of Wan, given the extent to which her character masks her true feelings throughout the film, her reaction of repulsion and guilt upon seeing Pei being tortured suggests that her participation in the scene stems not from personal vengeance, but rather from what she sees as the political necessity of illustrating her fidelity to the Emperor and of establishing herself as a Machiavel.

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Where Wan most resembles Shakespeare's vengeful villainesses is in her treatment of Qing Nü, daughter of Minister Yin Taichang, sister of General Yin Sun, and fiancée of Prince Wu Luan. Early in the film, Qing Nü functions as a parallel to not only Ophelia, but also Cordelia. She visits the prince, self-exiled in his bedroom in the Emperor's palace, promising to stay with him "so that when he is lonely, there will be someone to sing to him." Jealous of Qing Nü's engagement to the prince, Wan first orders her to be whipped and later instructs two men to brand her face and exile her to the South. The joy Wan takes in her power to exact revenge upon Qing Nü's body by demanding her torture is reminiscent of Tamora's pleasure at allowing her sons to rape and then ordering them to murder Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, in spite of the Roman virgin's pleas for mercy.

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OTHELLO As the film progresses, Qing Nü becomes less like Ophelia, Cordelia, or Lavinia and more like Desdemona. When he further instructs her to leave Wu Luan alone, unlike Ophelia, who allows herself to be manipulated by Polonius and Claudius, Qing Nü refuses to capitulate, promising her father, "My heart will never change." In the next scene between Qing Nü and Wu Luan, Qing Nü demonstrates that her commitment to the prince extends even past the point of his violence against her: after Wu Luan rapes her, she responds by cradling him in her arms in an embrace. When Emperor Li sends Wu Luan as a hostage to their enemy country, Qing Nü stands in front of the court and insists that she be given permission to go with her beloved, much like Desdemona before the Senate. Qing Nü's behavior constrasts with that of the Empress, who tells Wu Luan, "Go," claiming that his exile is evidence of the Emperor operating in the Prince's best interest. Finally, the lyrics to the song Qing Nü performs at the end of the film: "Trees live on mountains, and branches live on trees / My heart lives for your heart, but you do not see me" recall those to Desdemona's "Willow" song: "The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree / [. . .] / Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee" (Othello, 4.3.38, 40). As in "Willow," in Qing Nü's "Boat Girl" a female persona laments the loss of her beloved. And as in Desdemona's case, Qing sings this song immediately before her death.

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MACBETH AND ROMEO AND JULIET If Qing Nü morphs from Ophelia into Desdemona as the film progresses, Empress Wan has little in common with Gertrude from the start. Even before Wan seizes the red cloth intended for Qing Nü's wedding dress and appropriates it for her own coronation gown, forcing Qing Nü to sew and embroider the Empress's new signature-color robes, the parallels between Wan and Lady Macbeth are pointedly clear, particularly in Wan's all-out ambition and the strategies she uses to achieve political power: her sexuality, her ability to quell Li's anxieties about his masculinity, and her Machiavellian ability to mask her true emotions and to suppress any sympathy she might feel for her victims that would keep her from carrying out their punishments.

But another Shakespearean story line flows through The Banquet, one that helps to round out the character of Wan in particular: Romeo and Juliet. The parallels between the pairs of star-crossed lovers does not emerge until the middle of the film, when Wu Luan buys poison from an apothecary. Wu Luan visits the apothecary after being prompted by a white napkin with a drawing on it of Emperor Li murdering Wu Luan's father and a large red spot of blood coming from the late Emperor's head. This bloody napkin, dropped into Wu Luan?s room either by Wan or Qing Nü, references both Desdemona?s strawberry handkerchief and Lady?s Macbeth's "damn?d spot" on her "little hand" (Macbeth, 5.1.30, 43). Later, Wan purchases poison from the same apothecary (the set design, costuming, and camera filters make the scene look like it could have come out of Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet [1968] or Hamlet [1990]), who explains to Wu Luan and Empress Wan that the only thing more lethal than the poison he sells is "the human heart," a sentiment with which they both agree.

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emphasis on the lovers' forced separation due to familial obligations, societal expectations, and circumstance, is present from Wan and Wu Luan's very first scene together. The sonnet that Romeo and Juliet make together when they first meet finds its parallel in Wan and Wu Luan's beautiful dance-battle ballet. And as with Juliet, who plots with the Friar to be reunited with Romeo, there is a sense, throughout The Banquet, that Wan always hopes for and intends to meet up with Wu Luan eventually: she visits him frequently in his bedroom, she arranges for his escape from his uncle, and she prepares to crown him Emperor at the end of the film. Though Wan's love for Wu Luan manifests itself differently from Qing Nü's love, there is no doubt that Wan loves the prince. Their final scene together, with Wan holding the poisoned Wu Luan in her arms, recalls the scene at the Capulet tomb more than it does Gertrude's death scene. To a certain extent, The Banquet is about what happens when Juliet marries Paris instead of Romeo.

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One crucial difference between Juliet and Wan is that the latter does not kill herself after her Romeo dies. Wan's final scene finds her in the thoughtful mode of Shakespeare's contemplative sovereigns. "When was it that I started to forget my name?" she asks, evoking Lear's question, "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" (King Lear, conflated text, 1.4.205). Wan rehearses the story of her loss of identity after Wu Luan's abandonment, and finally, taking a page from Tamburlaine ("Is it not brave to be a king?" [Marlowe 2007, 2.5.51]), Lady Macbeth ("Unsex me here" [Macbeth, 1.5.39]), or maybe even Beatrice ("Oh God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace!" [Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1.303-304]) and definitely Queen Elizabeth I ("I have the heart and stomach of a king"), Wan declares herself not the Empress, but "Her Majesty, the Emperor."

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It would seem, then, that one of the primary reasons for all of the Shakespearean (not to mention Marlovian) borrowings in The Banquet is to add dimensionality to and create possibilities for the characters, in particular the women characters — dimensionality and possibilities that do not exist within the single play of Hamlet. But it also must be said that The Banquet could succeed independently of any Shakespearean allusions at all.

FESTEN AND THE BANQUET In this way, The Banquet parallels another recent Hamlet film, The Celebration (dir. Thomas Vinterberg, 1998), perhaps more recognizable by its original title, Festen, or "feast," in Danish. I find the films similar not only in their titles, but also in their story lines, themes, and uses of Shakespeare. Like The Banquet, The Celebration spins off of the story of Hamlet (exiled son Christian returns home following his sister's drowning to confront and dethrone his abusive and incestuous father at his sixtieth birthday party) with elements of King Lear (the film opens with Christian's brother Michael throwing his three children out of his car, only to be reunited with his youngest daughter at film's end) and Othello (the racist Michael responds to his sister's decision to bring her African- American boyfriend to the party by proclaiming, "How dare you bring a monkey to dad's sixtieth!").

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However, most audiences who went to see these films in theatrical release and most audiences who rent the films on DVD could probably care less about Shakespeare and did not have Hamlet, let alone King Lear and Othello, in mind when they sat down to watch the films. What many viewers bring to them, instead, is an interest in each film's particular cinematographic style. The Celebration appeals as the first Dogme film, and The Banquet as a wuxia martial arts fantasy film in the same genre as the highly successful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2000). Ironically, the directors of films that fall into these genres espouse opposite philosophies of filmmaking to very different visual effects. Dogme directors take a "Vow of Chastity," in which they agree to reject the very filmic and technological advances that wuxia directors seize upon, such as lighting, filters, speed editing, special effects, and computerization. What both The Celebration and The Banquet share, however, is a sense of themselves as national films working within an international market and a similar philosophy of Shakespearean borrowing: Shakespeare adds some complexity to the film's plot and characters, but is not particularly necessary to the success of the film; that is to say, Shakespeare is not the film's primary purpose or selling point.

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The end result in the case of The Banquet is that viewers need not know their Shakespeare to enjoy and appreciate the film. Indeed, I imagine that for most moviewatchers what is yummy about The Banquet is not the

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feast of Shakespearean allusions and characters it serves up, but the wonderful battle scenes, the gorgeous costumes, the beautiful, athletic, and graceful actors, and the amazing special effects that make the film wuxia. This reviewer, however, also finds it a nice treat to chew on the characters, plot lines, and allusions that make the film Shakespearean.

How to cite this article: Scott-Douglass, Amy. "Shakespeare: It's What's for Dinner." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES 1. All references to Shakespeare's plays are to The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (1997).

REFERENCES The Celebration (Festen). 1998. Director Thomas Vinterberg, performers Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Paprika Steen. Nimbus Film Productions. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 2000. Director Ang Lee, performers Yun- fat Chow, Michelle Yeoh, Zhi Zhang. Asian Union Film & Entertainment, Ltd. Hamlet. 1990. Director Franco Zeffirelli. Performers Mel Gibson, Alan Bates, Glenn Close. Canal+. Marlowe, Christopher. 2007. Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2. Edited by Anthony B. Dawson. New Mermaids edition. London: Methuen. The Norton Shakespeare. 1997. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton. Romeo and Juliet. 1968. Director Franco Zeffirelli, performers Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey, Michael York. BHE Films. Ye Yan (The Banquet). 2006. Director Xiaogang Feng, performers Ziyi Zhang, You Ge, Daniel Wu, Xun Zhou. Huayi Brothers.

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Woodcocks to Springes: Generic Disjunction in The Banquet

(/current) SCOTT HOLLIFIELD, UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, LAS VEGAS

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT Directed by Feng Xiaogang, Ye Yan ("The Banquet") is an amalgamation of visual styles and (/archive) narrative tropes: a detailed period epic developed from a mere historical sketch; a lush and stately study of court intrigue that favors whisper over decree; an artfully choreographed wuxia film that tempers precisely constructed sequences of action and movement with the subtleties of Chinese theatrical forms; and a reciprocation of Chinese cinematic influence on Western action films. As a generic hybrid, Ye Yan effectively establishes its rules of appropriation and balances them against a complex network of audience expectation and influence: a wuxia rooted in the literary-psychological rather than mytho-historical tradition; a film formally designed and structured, yet informed by the latest trends in wirework and CGI; Hamlet, and yet not Hamlet. At the same time, wary of overwhelming spectators in its whirlpool of source and influence, the film unsuccessfully attempts to outdo its virtues as its tightly wound, majestically paced narrative unravels.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

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General Yin Sun's crossbowmen thwart a late attempt on Prince Wu Luan's life. The sequence is roughly analogous to Hamlet's rescue by pirates.

A free, "thematic" adaptation of Shakespearean source material that recalls Akira Kurosawa's Ran ("Chaos," 1985) and the recent films of Zhang Yimou — such as the similarly designed and executed The Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jin dai huangjin jia, 2006) — The Banquet is set in the "Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms" period (tenth century CE),1 yet attempts no specific representations of historical or mytho-historical events. Director Feng Xiaogang's visually sophisticated film achieves a curious originality, however, when it ceases to be what it was apparently conceived as: an adaptation of Hamlet. Empress Wan (Zhang Ziyi), a Gertrude with elements of Ophelia, but forged in the Lady Macbeth mode, reveals herself as the film's center and commands it to follow her lead, as Amy Scott-Douglass and others observe in their essays in this collection. Introduced in a long dolly push,2 Wan, in an elaborate gown, glides through the great hall of the palace, with the opening credits materializing and vanishing in her wake.

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Wan's Entrance

Conceptually simple, but loaded with context, the sequence establishes the intertwined aesthetics of "Little Wan"'s conflicted character and of the film itself. A continuous emphasis on corridors and pathways (slow and stately indoors; slow-motion outdoors, as if natural movements were impeded by the centrality of the court) becomes one of the film's strongest leitmotifs. Yet The Banquet is not satisfied with being merely a stately period drama, a palace intrigue, a psychological study of a brilliantly passive schemer, or even an innovative riff on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Feng punctuates the narrative with elaborate, by now de rigueur action sequences. While a few of the sequences, such as a swordplay rehearsal for Wan's re-coronation,3 are dramatically appropriate and contextually sound, other scenes (notably an extended execution4 and an attack by crossbowmen concealed in snowdrifts)5 feel like trailers for other, more concretely wuxia films. In its quest to fulfill simultaneously a multitude of cinematic expectations, The Banquet demonstrates a complex network of positive and negative aspects of Shakespeare appropriation.

The cinematic narrative introduces Prince Wu Luan (Daniel Wu) as multiple, masked Hamlets in an outdoor theater,6 immediately establishing his liminal status — in a sense, he has been "eliminated" before the film begins and will be eliminated again before the sequence has concluded. Cementing him firmly among the supporting cast, the film never affords Wu Luan the sort of theatrical entrance — "A little more than kin and less than kind" (Hamlet, 1.2.65)7 — one expects of a Hamlet figure.

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A Wu Luan double serves his master. The backdrop is one of Feng's many devices to hyperbolize the bloodshed of Ye yan. Wu Luan, in keeping with Chinese and Japanese theatrical traditions, proposes that masks bring out the best in a performer. Wan accuses him of being a poor actor, since he cannot conceal his emotions by turning his true face into a mask, as she has.8 In a perhaps unintentional way, Wu Luan's preoccupation with art and appearances has emasculated him as a political threat to the usurping Emperor Li (Ge You).

The film strategically eliminates the possibility that Wan's character is a speculative attempt to fill the blanks in Shakespeare's Gertrude. Despite her penchant for selectively revealing aspects of herself, Empress Wan is herself a liminal figure, obtaining entry into exclusive arenas (political, sensual, public) by employing a variety of subtle disguises. Lady Macbeth may knowingly alternate between her public and private faces, but the former "Little Wan" wears at least two faces in every encounter, addressed in detail by Woodrow B. Hood in his essay in this collection. A critical moment in the film hinges on the court's open acknowledgment of Wan as Empress Dowager (which would render illegitimate Li's fraternal claim to the throne) versus Empress Mother, as she relates to her impending re-coronation.9 The Emperor is less concerned with Wan's bridal rights than with public approval of his right to rule or a marriage with his brother's widow.

Li and Wan's awareness of their relationship's questionable nature permeates their early scenes together. They refer to one another in moments of extreme intimacy as "brother-in-law" and "sister- in-law" — though Wan corrects him with "Empress" at one point prior to her re-coronation — each taunting the other with the implied incest. Li's interactions with Wan are primarily voyeuristic (for his pleasure) and servile (for hers), which ties the Emperor's scopophilia into that of Claudius in a curious, almost antithetical, manner. Li's visual and sensual preoccupations stem from a desire to

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memorialize his predecessor's achievements, but also to glorify them as his own and, concurrently, emphasize his brother's disregard of beauty in the interest of empire-building. Emotionally and aesthetically sensitive as usurpers go, Li requires particularly astute, logical counsel and seeks out such edification wherever he can find it.

In stark contrast to Gertrude, Wan uses physical intimacy, tempered with Iago-esque intimations, to assert power over, rather than delegate it to, Li the usurper. Her power over him resonates throughout the court as a sort of legend-in-the-making. The Emperor, on a redecorating campaign, admires the icon in the palace temple, a snow leopard that may well have been commissioned by his late brother. Minister Yin Taichang (Ma Jingwu) suggests a tiger instead and, making one of her many calculated entrances, Wan proposes a flying dragon.10 Li ultimately supplements Wan's dragon with a phoenix, which Wan then adopts as her power animal. Later, Qing Nü (Zhou Xun) is charged with embroidering Wan's usurped coronation gown (intended for Qing Nü's marriage to Wu Luan). When she expresses frustration in stitching the eyes of a phoenix, Minister Yin recommends she take inspiration from the eyes of her mistress, which inspire at once reverent awe and fear.

Compared to the static, almost sterile world of the palace, the outside world is a dangerous series of frontiers and official exiles, none more definitive than the royal threshold. While characters move through palace interiors in the slow, controlled motions imposed by ceremony,11 Feng presents several passages of exterior action — even the joyful approach of Qing Nü to the palace upon news of Wu Luan's return — in fluid, camera-imposed slow motion.12 In The Banquet's detailed universe, the world outside the court must be slowed down to correspond with the languid, introverted microcosm of the inner court. As in Shakespearean tragedy, most precisely Hamlet and Othello, personal obsessions obscure political realities, making conquest not only inevitable, but especially convenient for one's enemies. Wu Luan's return and slow-burn revenge bring external danger within the palace walls. Despite his limited, almost taken-for-granted character arc, Wu Luan is well-suited to survive whatever might threaten his life in exile, but must necessarily perish within the court. Wan's plotting exploits this revised atmosphere, adding those aspects of Claudius that Emperor Li eschews into her manifold character, but continually conflates her memory of youthful romance with actions selfish and irrevocable. As the cinematic narrative approaches a series of foregone conclusions, Ye Yan's balance of interiority and surface are stretched and sundered by similar tensions.

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Wan and Wu Luan's wire dance. Repressed intimacy manifests itself in swordplay.

Recent wuxia-influenced films have begun to imitate The Matrix series' imitations of the unique tropes of earlier wuxia films. The Banquet's amalgamation of cinematic devices and stylistic traditions results in a number of sublime moments, but several stylistic disjunctions isolate these moments rather than integrate them into a unified cinematic vision. The film presents the viewer, however elegantly, with a number of incongruities. The confrontation between Wan and Wu Luan upon his return, observed in part by Emperor Li, strives to establish dramatic and romantic tension between the former lovers, as well as between "Little Wan" and the Empress who possesses her. The scene's sensuous wirework foregrounds its emotional artifice when it attempts to make flashy visual poetry of their lost romance.13 Intercut with the spying Emperor, one notes a strong reconnection with Hamlet at a point where the audience may well have stopped seeking correspondences. Wan realizes that she may be performing not only for Wu Luan and the servants, but also for Li himself. Since the continuation of her romance with Wu Luan is impossible, given her dream of ruling the kingdom and his attitude toward her as a fallen woman known by both his father and uncle, the sense of danger the sequence attempts to conjure rings as either false or self-nullifying. Even the Emperor, assured that this relationship is no longer a threat to his sexual or political well-being, rubs his white jade Buddha14 and walks away. In contrast to this relatively subtle handling of principal characters, peripheral deaths are diminished by cartoonish sprays of CGI-enhanced blood.15

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The execution of Governor Pei Hong, impugner of the imperial marriage.

Ye Yan's foremost stylistic disjunction effectively splits the film in two. Rather than establish Wan's re-coronation in the visual language of her growing hold on the court — echoing perhaps her title- sequence entrance — the creative team generates a cinematographically unlikely, large-scale pull- back from action on the palace threshold to an epic exterior with thousands of artificial extras.16

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Feng deploys these extraneous devices as if uncertain whether the film's embrace of its inherent hyperreality is firm enough to be felt by subject and spectator alike. At roughly the moment that one recognizes Wan as its central figure, the film begins to break its well established visual and narrative rules, generating tone and mood in the service of specific moments rather than perpetuating a sense of thematic continuity or natural progression.

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The Re-Coronation Proclamation

The Banquet establishes a heightened sense of period and atmosphere, a rare attempt at self- contained verisimilitude that its eclectic interests and influences cannot either sustain or overwhelm. An over-reliance on conspicuous CGI effects and enhanced wirework — paradoxically employed to heighten a drama already perched on the narrowest precipice — pushes many scenes beyond cinematic genre poetry into something like live-action animé, in which the far-reaching Matrix effect is readily decodable. In a nod to a long-standing trend in Mandarin and Cantonese, not to mention American, period films, a decidedly non-tenth century, piano and orchestra driven ballad accompanies the closing credits. Even Ang Lee's ultra-serious homage to the wuxia tradition, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long, 2000), concluded with a modern love song in its final scene. The arrangement by Tan Dun (composer for both films) is rooted in Crouching Tiger's mournful score and, more significantly, the song appears over the film's final credit roll rather than accompanying its mystical final images. The Banquet's closing theme, "Only for Love," reprised from the piano and strings version that underscores the bitter and strange Little Wan/Wu Luan

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reunion scene,17 is a kind of aural synecdoche for the visual and narrative difficulties the film presents. The song is musically antithetical to the intricacies of an alternately eerie and robust score, creates an extreme disconnect between audience and the preceding narrative, and, crucially, appears to contradict the deliberate resolve of its central character. Could the Empress Wan, for all her subtle, controlled monstrosity, express "Little Wan"'s regrets?

In the film's elegiac denouement, Wan continues her obsession with rebirth, stunned to a slight madness by the outcome of her Machiavellian endgame. Fondling the red silk of her coronation gown, she addresses the ghost-memory of Wu Luan and wonders when and where she misplaced her identity.18 In the vicinity of a small stone koi pond, upon which the camera fixes as the piano and chorus of "Only for Love" summon us to emotional catharsis, Wan meets her end, recognizing her unseen assassin as she utters a final gasp. In The Banquet's final moments, as the camera pushes in to a single, unmanipulated shot of the koi pond, the murder weapon, familiar to us from earlier in the film, enters the water.19 The camera holds for well over a minute and as the ballad continues, floating weeds, displaced by the knife, drift back to obscure the koi. The closing credits roll over the image of the koi pond for another ninety seconds before fading to black. Who could these koi be that they merit such visual emphasis, rivalling Prince Wu Luan for screen time?

Wan feeds her fish, one last time. Just below the sword of the Yue Maiden, note one of four koi discernible in the pond.

This final scene is connected to an early beat in which Wan reveals her jealous, but futile passion for Wu Luan.20 While discussing with Qing Nü the prince's impending return, Wan feeds those very koi in the stone pond with an imperious gesture. Dampening Qing Nü's hopes for a reunion, she speaks of her own shared past with the Prince as a thing outgrown. Besides schemes and stratagems, these

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fish are the only thing nurtured by "the mother of the country" in the course of her narrative; at her end, only the koi will benefit from Little Wan's spilled blood. Emphasizing this subtle, but loaded point is a nearly three-minute shot of the fish tank itself. That The Banquet, a film keen on cleverly reiterating and reevaluating the minutiae of its symbolic world, could root the emotional resonance of its finale in such a small, early scene and do so little to support the connection strongly suggests the almost blunted purpose of the filmmakers.

How to cite this article: Hollifield, Scott. "Woodcocks to Springes: Generic Disjunction in The Banquet." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES 1. DVD Chapter 1: 00:01:22. 2. DVD Chapter 1: Clip from 00:04:54 to 00:05:23; still at 00:05:04. 3. DVD Chapter 8: Clips from 00:50:06 to 00:50:24 and 00:50:53 to 00:51:23. 4. DVD Chapter 7: Stills at 00:42:15, 00:42:27 and 00:42:38. 5. DVD Chapter 12: Clip from 01:20:17 to 01:20:45. 6. DVD Chapter 1: Clip from 00:01:42 to 00:02:05. 7. Shakespeare citations comes from The Norton Shakespeare (Shakespeare 2008). 8. DVD Chapter 8: Clips from 00:55:08 to 00:55:38 and 00:56:29 to 00:56:56. 9. DVD Chapter 6: Clip from 00:39:17 to 00:39:47. 10. See DVD Chapter 6 (00:37:54). 11. As in the opening credit sequence, referenced in note 2. 12. DVD Chapter 3: Clip from 00:18:21 to 00:18:37. 13. DVD Chapter 5: Stills at 00:26:31, 00:27:37, 00:29:09, 00:29:41 and 00:31:16. 14. I plead ignorance to the precise form and nature of Emperor Li's icon. Given the wide range of uses he puts it to (from issuing wordless commands to performing sensual massage), the image of a praying Buddha seems to me inappropriate. From certain angles, however, the carving suggests a larger figure with its hands upon the head of a smaller figure, as an elder conferring blessings on a child or younger sibling. 15. Stills at 00:14:02 (Chapter 3), 00:34:27 (Chapter 6), 00:42:50 and 00:42:52 (Chapter 7). 16. DVD Chapter 10: Clip from 01:02:08 to 01:02:23. 17. See DVD Chapter 5 from 00:26:46 to 00:28:47 (reference only). This earlier sequence, with its wire-dance of erotic pursuit, restates the youthful passions of the Empress and Prince while denying the possibility of their rekindling. 18. DVD Chapter 19: Clip from 02:03:11 to 02:03:41. 19. Ibid.: Still of the "Sword of the Yue Maiden" at 02:06:54, compare with still at 00:29:21 (Chapter 5); Clip from 02:06:45 to 02:07:11. 20. DVD Chapter 3: Stills at 00:19:40 and 00:19:54; Clip from 00:19:45 to 00:20:15.

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REFERENCES The Banquet (Ye Yan), DVD (2-Disc, R0). 2006. Directed by Feng Xiaogang. Hong Kong: Mega Star DVD. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 2000. Director Ang Lee. Asia Union Film and Entertainment Ltd. The Curse of the Golden Flower. 2006. Director Zhang Yimou. Beijing New Picture Film Co. Ran. 1985. Director Akira Kurosawa. DVD (2-Disc, R1), 2005: Criterion DVD. Shakespeare, William. 2008. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W.W. Norton. 336-424.

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Spectator Violence and Queenly Desire in The (/current) Banquet

REBECCA CHAPMAN, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) Unique among Hamlet adaptations, The Banquet resists the tendency in Hollywood cinematic tradition of minimizing Gertrude to a structural device used to develop the figures of Hamlet and Claudius. Instead, Empress Wan, loosely the Gertrude figure, emerges as a figure of adaptation itself, usurping the structural and visual focus as she usurps the throne. However, Wan's mysterious murder at the film's end poses the question of just how perverse an adaptation spectators are willing to accept.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet (2006) leaves the audience contemplating the haunting final scene long after the film ends. Empress Wan, loosely the Gertrude figure, manages to usurp the throne, only to be stabbed in the back by an unknown assailant. The spectator is left with two lingering questions: Who kills Wan? Why? And perhaps most shocking: How did the Gertrude figure become the most powerful player in the tragedy? In his reading of filmic adaptations of Hamlet, J. Anthony Burton notes a popular tradition in Hollywood cinema: the vanishing of Gertrude. Surveying the film adaptations of Laurence Oliver (1948), Tony Richardson (1969), Rodney Bennett (1980), and Kenneth Branagh (1996), Burton

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identifies an Anglophone cinematic tradition of minimizing Gertrude to a structural device in order to emphasize the development of those characters who become the real focus of the drama: Hamlet and Claudius. More to the point, these adaptations suggest that Hamlet and Claudius are better suited to the filmic medium; as Burton concludes, "There is a fault line that separates stage performance from screen renditions, to which Gertrude's character has proven especially vulnerable because of the extent to which her onstage movement helps define who she is and how she affects the action. The stage accommodates large movements across open space . . . The close-ups and camera techniques of film and video emphasize interior and psychological dimensions of character and relationship" (2006, 229). Hamlet and Claudius are men of thought and likewise translate well to film because film tends to privilege interiority; Gertrude is a woman of action who becomes lost in cinematic translation.

However, The Banquet, a film loosely based on Hamlet and set during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period in tenth-century China, stands as a unique mode of resistance to that which Burton rightfully identifies as the popular Hollywood reduction of Gertrude. Rather than vanish, Empress Wan occupies the position of the filmic vanishing point — that localized, but elusory point toward which all perspectives converge. In the film's opening sequence, a narrative voiceover traces the fall of the Tang Dynasty and the years of social turmoil and political instability that created a bitter struggle for power within the imperial family. As Emperor Li proclaims during the film's first sexual encounter between himself and Wan, "The tug between power and love has tormented past emperors for centuries." Against this struggle for power, the film figures Wan as a narrative and visual object of desire that both propels and deconstructs the male lineal right to the throne. For Andrew Gurr (1978), Hamlet might also be called "Claudius's Story," as the narrative quickly unfolds around his struggle to maintain order in the state. The Banquet, by contrast, tells Gertrude's story. Through the figure of Wan, the film offers an image of a woman who must continually renegotiate her role in a world where power and desire are continually at odds.

Wan emerges as a structural focal point in the film because of its adaptive strategy of weaving together Shakespeare and the Chinese heroic martial arts literary genre known as wuxia. In the opening sequence, the non-diegetic narrator marks the film's appropriation of Hamlet by explaining that his brother Li, who has usurped the throne and taken his sister-in-law Empress Wan as his wife, had also murdered the former Emperor. However, the narrator also marks the film's appropriation of Jin Yong's (Louis Cha's) popular contemporary Chinese novella,"The Sword of Yueh Maiden" (1970), by explaining that the former Emperor wedded his son Prince Wu Luan's fiancée Wan three years prior to the usurpation. The martial arts tale of adventure takes as its background the generations-long battle that began in the fifth-century Spring and Autumn and Warring Kingdom period, when the King http://borrowers.uga.edu/1411/show Page 2 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(01 PM

of Chuh beds his son's fiancée, an act that fractures the kingdom into warring factions. When swordsmen of Wu enter the lands of Yueh to do battle, they encounter an unassuming young shepherdess who, displaying unimaginable power, defeats them with nothing more than a bamboo staff. Wan represents an adaptive amalgam in the filmic fusion of Shakespeare and wuxia by performing the functions of Queen Gertrude and the Chuh fiancée, a strategy that retains the Oedipal dynamic often exploited in filmic adaptations of Hamlet by figuring Wan as both Gertrude and Ophelia, mother and lover. However, Wan also represents the fabled Maiden of Yueh. While this dynamic marks the opening narration as a subtle trace, it becomes conspicuous as the film progresses. For instance, during an erotic fight sequence, Wan wields what she identifies as the sword of Yueh Maiden against Wu Luan. The sequence not only figures Wan as the Yueh Maiden, but also marks her as far more powerful than the warring men who surround her, namely Emperor Li and Wu Luan. And as the story goes, she embodies an underestimated source of power in the struggle for royal authority.

While Wan occupies the pivotal point in the film's adaptive structure, she also embodies the process of adaptation itself. In our first cinematic encounter with the twice-Empress, the film visually marks her as caught between two regimes, trapped within the process of transitioning from one man of power to another. Initially framed in full shot, long take and later cutting to an overhead long shot, Wan slowly marches to Emperor Li, who now occupies the throne. The shots establish Wan as visually out of context. As she somberly approaches Li, her stark white and flowing gown contrasts visually with the dimly lit hall and darkly clad imperial guards who ominously flank her path.

The scene sartorially frames Wan as a disruption in Li's court and marks her as an othered presence, a haunting remainder of the past regime. The camera shifts to shot/reverse shot as Wan regards the new Emperor with defiance by refusing to http://borrowers.uga.edu/1411/show Page 3 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(01 PM

observe the proper address of "Your Majesty." When Li corrects Wan and reminds her of the change of power, Wan insolently defends herself by citing the demands of adaptation. "It is hard for me to adapt so quickly, Brother-in-law," she responds, with a disobedient laugh, again refusing him the title of Emperor. At this point in the sequence, Li exits the throne room, offering Wan a warning that "the kingdom shall not wait."

Yet, the kingdom and its new head, Li, do indeed wait on Wan, at times with arms quite literally outstretched in anticipation. As Li exits the throne room, he orders the guards to seal the door, leaving Wan trapped inside, perhaps until she consents to be his wife, and the new Empress. Before the doors close completely, however, the camera cuts to an extreme close-up of Li's hand. Somewhere between a demand and plea, and with his hand open as an offering, Li utters, "Sister-in-law," to which Wan responds, "The correct address is 'Empress,'" as her hand enters the frame to rest atop his. The gesture signifies Wan's consent to Li's demand, as well as her understanding of the reality principle of the court; but the visual semiotics of the scene differentiate this mode of consent from a complete surrender. Li's hand awaits hers in the long shot. The entrance of Wan's hand disrupts the stasis of the shot, adding movement and dynamism. In offering her hand, she acknowledges Li's new power, but still refuses him the title of Emperor. Rather, Wan names herself Empress and nods at Li's role as Emperor only metonymically, through his relationship with her.

In this first cinematic meeting between Li and Wan, The Banquet frames relationships among the revolution of power, the power of nomination, and the process of adaptation in terms of Wan's complex agency. What do we now call Wan? Empress? Empress, again? A woman sacrificed in the name of fraternity? None of these nominations quite fit. While she consents to Emperor Li, she cannot be reduced to a woman trafficked between men. For instance, when Wan reunites with Wu Luan, she admonishes him with the claim, "I have sacrificed enough for you and your father," yet she refuses to function as the sacrificial role of Queen Mother who willingly accepts a goblet of poison in the name of maternity.

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The camera deploys long shots and close ups to frame Wan, but neither offers a sense of her interiority; instead, the editing tantalizes the spectator with the possibility of knowing Wan's desires, a possibility that never comes to fruition. What can be gathered from the sequence and from Wan's complex engagements with both Li and Wu Luan is that, like adaptation itself, she performs contradictory loyalties in ways that shroud a clear understanding of her sense of fidelity.

Just as the spectator cannot know Wan's desires, Emperor Li and Wu Luan both misinterpret the Empress and attempt to figure her actions as exclusively sacrificial or malevolent, rather than strategic. For instance, the film frames Li as a failed translator during his first sexual encounter with Wan. Revealing himself as (almost embarrassingly) driven to competition by his desire for Wan, Li asks how he compares to his brother as a lover. When Wan explains that the former Emperor was wise and valiant, Li translates: "You mean to say, he was not very adept at pleasing you." Wan corrects him by explaining that the former Emperor had his moments, which Li translates: "But he was not often willing, am I right?" Li must believe that Wan sacrificed herself in her last marriage in order to validate his sense of dominance and fraternal rivalry.

In a similarly reductive move, Wu Luan mourns the Little Wan of his youth and insists that she is now a venomous woman bent on his demise. When Prince Wu Luan's mourning turns to violence and aggression, he focuses his rage on Qing Nü, loosely the film's Ophelia figure. Attempting to force the two female figures into one condensed function of feminine infidelity, he accuses Qing Nü, "You are her!" While Wan plays the sometime-Ophelia, Wan and Qing Nü cannot condense into one character in the narrative Wu Luan constructs around his pitiful situation. In this failure, Wu Luan moves beyond the boundaries of his pre-scripted role as the

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contemplative prince of inaction. Playing more Chiron and Demetrius from Titus Andronicus than Hamlet, Wu Luan attacks Qing Nü, shredding her gown and, as the spectator must imagine, raping her. Like so many critics and film adaptations of Hamlet, Wu Luan understands the women in his life as valuable insofar as they help him understand and navigate his desire to avenge his dead father. Elaine Showalter (1985) has noted the critical practice of treating Ophelia as an insignificant character in the play whose value extends only to what she can tell us about Hamlet — a critical practice all too similar to Anglophone cinematic treatments of Gertrude. In representing the Hamlet figure as sexually violent and wholly bent on forcing women into a system of signification that revolves exclusively around him, The Banquet points toward both the limits and the violence of these two parallel interpretative traditions. Following Wu Luan's death, the film reveals the full degree of his willful misinterpretation of Wan in one of the film's most striking tableau shots. With an overhead, full shot, the camera frames Wan as she bends over Wu Luan's body. The trail of her vermillion gown fans out in the shape of a broken heart, which appears to be consumed by the intricately embroidered flames that form the phoenix tails on her royal robe.

Typical of The Banquet's cinematic handling of Wan's elusive subjectivity, as soon as the camera offers a sense of her desires (in this case her love for Wu Luan), it also presents the spectator with a complication. While the camera clearly frames Wan's heartbreak over Wu Luan's death, the overhead shot suddenly cuts to a close- up of Wan as she stands stoically, accepting the role of Majesty and ultimate ruler. Once again, the filmic editing teases the spectator with a glimpse of Wan's subjectivity, only to conclude with contradictory cuts. The tableau suggests that Wan has always loved Wu Luan, but that she nevertheless rejects this love in favor

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of power. It is with this sense of affective uncertainty that the film continues from the bloody banquet scene into the final sequence.

At its close, The Banquet situates the spectator as a first-hand witness and criminal in the rise and fall of the new Emperor Wan. We watch as Wan caresses a swatch of fabric once intended to form a gown for her wedding to Wu Luan. It will now become her coronation gown. Taking stock of her journey to the throne, she delivers what will become her final soliloquy, one that wavers among its addressees. At times she seems to speak to her dead former lover and stepson Wu Luan, but toward the end of her speech she seems to be voicing her thoughts aloud to nobody in particular. Her address also shifts from communicating vulnerability to conceit as she laments the forgotten girl she once was and traces the marriages that have replaced her name of Little Wan with that of Empress. Now, however, she declares, "No one will call me Empress again. Instead, they will call me Her Majesty, the Emperor." As she declares her divorce from male lineage, Wan wears a dark robe that visually naturalizes her against the vermillion mahoganies adorning the throne room, forcing the viewer into a retrospective reminder of the first glimpse of the Empress. Contrasting with her initial appearance in the film, in which she dons a haunting white gown that signifies her resistance to Emperor Li, Wan's royal robes here suggest that she has quickly adapted to her new role as ruler. Undercutting Wan's triumphant speech, however, the camera suddenly cuts to a close up of the sword of Yueh Maiden as it hurls though the air, projected by an unidentified agent. The sword impales Wan through the back, its tip dramatically protruding through her left breast. Turning to face her attacker, she looks directly at the camera, forming an eye-line match with the spectator. With shock and betrayal written across her face, she points an accusing finger at us as the camera cuts away from her for the last time.

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The Banquet demonstrates the degree to which the tendency to make Gertrude vanish is not simply a problem of translation or a necessary simplification when one moves Hamlet from the page to the screen. As Thomas Leitch (2003) has argued, perceived differences in media are contingent on their historical moment rather than intrinsic qualities of the media themselves. Yet, as much as the film becomes a Wan-centric, wuxia-style adaptation of Hamlet, the Gertrude figure is still killed off. And so we are back where we started: the end. Although the film refrains from framing the hurling sword of Yueh Maiden from the spectator's perspective, Wan's accusatory gesture figures the spectator as the voyeuristic villain in the film. This final image of Wan begs these questions: What does it mean for the spectator to have murdered the embodiment of adaptation in a Shakespeare film? Or to murder a Gertrude figure who, against Anglophone tradition, functions as more than a structural device in the service of male character development? And to stab her in the back, at that? The final sequence offers a metacritical opportunity to question why we are imagined to desire Gertrude's death. Is this what we desired? Is this what we expected? (My money was on Wan from the beginning.) Katherine Rowe (2008) has pointed out the degree to which scholarship on Shakespeare film adaptations is governed by "media scripts," or unspoken, yet codified norms and expectations that we bring to readings of mediatized Shakespeares. The Banquet offers a filmic space in which to question the media scripts we are imagined to work within, and how that imagination aligns with our viewing practices and spectator expectations. Without the final sequence and with Wan living on as ultimate ruler in the film, would we have accepted The Banquet as an adaptation of Hamlet?

How to cite this article: Chapman, Rebecca. "Spectator Violence and Queenly Desire in The Banquet." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

REFERENCES Burton, J. Anthony. 2006. "The Lady Vanishes or, the Incredible Shrinking Gertrude." In Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of James P. Lusardi. Edited by Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter. Madison and Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 217-31.

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Gurr, Andrew. 1978. Hamlet and the Distracted Globe. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, for Sussex University Press. Hamlet. 1948. Director Laurence Olivier, performers Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Eileen Hurlie, Basil Sydney. Two Cities Films. Hamlet. 1969. Director Tony Richardson, performers Nicol Williamson, Anthony Hopkins, Marianne Faithfull, Judy Parfitt. Filmways Pictures. Hamlet. 1980. Director Rodney Bennett, performers Derek Jacobi, Patrick Stewart, Laila Ward, Claire Bloom. British Broadcasting Corporation. Hamlet. 1996. Director Kenneth Branagh, performers Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Kate Winslet. Castlerock Productions. Jin Yong. 2006. "The Sword of Yueh Maiden." Wuxiapedia. Available online: http://wuxiapedia.com/novels/jin_yong/sword_of_the_yueh_maiden (http://wuxiapedia.com/novels/jin_yong/sword_of_the_yueh_maiden) [cited 25 May 2008]. Leitch, Thomas M. 2003. "Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory." Criticism 45.2 (Spring): 149-71. Rowe, Katherine. 2008. "Medium-Specificity and Other Critical Scripts for Screen Shakespeare." In Alternative Shakespeares 3. Edited by Diana Henderson. New York: Routledge. 34-53. Showalter, Elaine. 1985. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism." In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Routledge. 77-94. Ye Yan (The Banquet). 2006. Director Xiaogang Feng, performers Ziyi Zhang, You Ge, Daniel Wu, Xun Zhou. Huayi Brothers.

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Interiority, Masks, and The Banquet

(/current) YUK SUNNY TIEN, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT The Banquet (2006), the first Chinese feature film based on (/archive) Shakespeare's Hamlet, explores and reformulates the nature of self and identity. Director Feng Xiaogang makes a clear distinction between the outer and inner selves, interpreting the outer self as a mask that is used to conceal one's emotions or inner self. On the other hand, the film challenges the binaries of interiority and appearance and suggests that behaviors can be internalized and gradually inhabit the inner self. The theatrical self and the inner self therefore can no longer be clearly differentiated.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

Hamlet proposes that theater is capable of stirring the soul — "The play's the thing" (2.2.604).1 He suggests that a good player does not artificially perform his role, but in fact "forces his soul so to his own conceit" (2.2.553). Hamlet draws our attention to a world with blurry divisions between the internal and the external, being and performing. Instead of being two distinct states, the external performance often induces inward change. These concepts of selfhood and identity, which remain among the most important concerns of the current critical debates surrounding Hamlet, are reconceived in The Banquet, the first Chinese feature film http://borrowers.uga.edu/1413/show Page 1 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(02 PM

based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, directed by Feng Xiaogang and released in 2006.

The film relocates Hamlet to ancient China during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, an era plagued by widespread turmoil. A key feature and motif of the film is a dance with white masks that purportedly originated in the Yue region of southern China. The opening scene of The Banquet portrays the melancholic Prince Wu Luan (Daniel Wu) and other players dancing with white masks in a bamboo compound. The dance movements bear traces of Japanese noh conventions. The masks not only create an illusion of multiple Hamlets, but also conceal the characters' emotions by projecting an outward dimension of the self. This is revealed again in a dialogue between the prince and Empress Wan (Zhang Ziyi) after a staged duel: Empress Wan (Gertrude): Why do you wear a mask when you perform?

Prince Wu Luan (Hamlet): It transports an actor to the highest state of his art. Without a mask, happiness, anger, sorrow and joy are simply written on his face. But with a mask, a great artist can convey to the audience the most complex and hidden emotions.

Empress Wan (Gertrude): You are incapable of even the most basic play-acting. Your sorrow, anger, bitterness, and uncertainty are there for all to see. You permit danger to follow you everywhere. You think hiding behind the mask can elevate your art? The highest level is to use your own face and turn it into a mask.

Assuming that private and public selves are discrete and separable entities, there is a clear distinction between individuals' feelings and their theatrically expressed behaviors. One of the paradoxes of the mask is its capacity simultaneously to conceal and reveal, to hide and show. The mask that conceals the characters' emotions also calls attention to them. While the mask protects its wearer from a discerning gaze, it nevertheless attracts attention by creating an air of mystery. The mask's double function of disguise and allure creates in the prince at once a desire to be seen and not to be seen. The mask is a soul-portrait, an outer casing that is a sensitive reflection of the inner life, and it possesses the capability of

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expressing deeper emotions and states of mind. More specifically, the mask signifies two contradictory forms of positionality and conflicting constructions of subjectivity in Feng's film. The white masks are used to hide the identities of the dancers so that the prince could escape the assassins. They hide the characters' sentiments by giving them a different persona. The mask hides an actor's facial expressions and at the same time forces the audience to divert attention to the actors' body movements to detect emotions that cannot be seen on the face.

Feng's film, just like Hamlet, invites its audience to consider multiple layers of meaning in the actors' actions and words. Even within the text of the play, the characters frequently doubt what they see and hear, and Hamlet constantly reminds Ophelia that appearances can be deceptive. In "The Mousetrap" scene in Hamlet, for instance, Claudius' guilt is obvious, and he explicitly reveals his guilty conscience when he runs off shouting, "Give me some light. Away!" (3.2.269). On the contrary, though shocked by the performance of this play-within-a-play, Emperor Li (Ge You) in Feng's film conceals his emotions and his guilt. He remains calm and walks slowly to the stage to praise the actors for their performance. As the empress suggests earlier, he masks his emotions with his own face.

The white mask in The Banquet also enables its wearer to observe without being watched. In Hamlet, the atmosphere of the court is defined by surveillance and spying. The characters spy on each other to protect themselves or to achieve their aims. Claudius and Gertrude solicit the help of Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and then Ophelia to spy on Hamlet in order to learn the true cause of his madness. In The Banquet, the prince frequently hides behind his white mask. In the fighting scene that opens the film, the masked dancers do not resist the assassins at all, but remain immersed in their own world. In other scenes, the characters are unaware that they are being clandestinely observed. For instance, when the prince first appears before Empress Wan, he secretly looks at her from behind his white mask while she is taking a nap. He also spies on Emperor Li to learn his reactions to the play-within-the-play. In terms of dramatic experience, the white masks also suggest a converse relationship between the actors and the audience. The actor, instead of being viewed by the audience, has moved from being the focus of attention to focusing his attention on others as an observer, whereas the audience has now become the object of the the prince's gaze.

Masks are also given other functions in the film. The ghost of Old Hamlet is represented by the dead emperor's helmet. When the prince returns to the palace, he comes face to face with his father's helmet. At the same

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time, the audience could hear the erotic conversations of Emperor Li and Empress Wan. Upon the prince's return, bloody tears flow through the helmet to signal the presence of the ghost of the wronged father.

Film versions of Shakespeare's plays often use a voiceover for soliloquies. However, the inner thoughts and feelings of Wan are expressed through her long soliloquy in The Banquet. In the final confession scene, after the deaths of Emperor Li and Prince Wu Luan, Empress Wan recalls her life and the loss of her position and identity: When was it that I started to forget my name? Perhaps it was the day your father married me. You left, and nobody used my name anymore. Gradually, even I forgot what it was. Then your uncle married me, and again I was called the Empress. But from now on, nobody will call me Empress anymore. Instead, they will call me Her Majesty, the Emperor. Initially, Wan put on a mask to hide her true interior feelings, but as time passes, her mask becomes her face and creates a new self.

Feng's The Banquet explores the connections and unexpected disjunctions between the outer and inner selves, interpreting the outer self as a mask that is used to conceal one's emotions or inner self. But the film also challenges the binaries of inwardness and outwardness, interiority and appearance, suggesting that merely superficial behavior can gradually internalize and penetrate to the inner self. The theatrical self and the inner self can therefore no longer be clearly distinguished. As suggested by the multiple adaptations of Hamlet over the centuries, not only is the Renaissance conception of self, as found in Shakespeare's drama, relevant to the current debate, but it is open to interpretation in a contemporary and cross-cultural context.

How to cite this article: Tien, Yuk Sunny. "Interiority, Masks, and The Banquet." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES 1. All references to Hamlet are to The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition

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(1997).

REFERENCES The Banquet (Ye Yan). 2006. Directed by Feng Xiaogang. Hong Kong. Mega Star DVD. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. Second edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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The Banquet as Cinematic Romance

(/current) CHARLES ROSS, PURDUE UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT In Feng Xiaogang's version of Hamlet, The Banquet, the film's music, (/archive) its slow motion duels, its beautifully photographed landscapes and horses, the weight given to Qing Nü's dreams and her songs, the heightened theme of adultery, and the odd ending suggest that the film is not a tragedy, but a romance. Romance, according to Fredric Jameson, is the genre that reveals the social or historical contradictions that produce the illusion of good and evil. In fact, Feng is following the historical shift away from the old notion of Hamlet as a play about revenge, and we can see this shift towards romance by looking at the different interpretations of Hamlet from the Renaissance to the modern era. In the filmography of Hamlet, the displacement of tragedy by romance is most obvious in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. This shift in interpretation and our understanding of the romance genre make us ask what social contradictions The Banquet tries to resolve.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

T. S. Eliot famously declared in 1919 that Hamlet is "certainly an artistic failure" (1919, 123), and it is not impossible that Feng Xiaogang, known for his comic films, recognized that failure is the closest any film can get to the original. There is, in Feng's The Banquet, no obvious overlap in

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dialogue with the Shakespearean original, at least in the English subtitles. One looks in vain for "To be or not to be," since Prince Wu Luan, Hamlet's counterpart, is much more given to slow motion sword-play than to soliloquies. The digitally contrived leaping, by the same technicians who produced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, may meet the audience's demand for cutting-edge effects, but this stylization distracts from our thinking about the play — which was Eliot's original objection. The spectacle suddenly works, however, in a different way; after a few absurd high karate kicks by Empress Wan (a staple of the form), right at the moment when Wu Luan and Wan, his former lover, step-mother, and soon-to-be wife of his uncle, slowly bend backwards, almost like spoons, in a beautifully synchronized pairing shot from overhead. The dance represents Wu Luan's desperate loneliness and Wan's entrapment, symbolized by the sword of the Yue Maiden that Wu Luan carries in the scroll of a song he has written about her. Perhaps inspired by Ophelia's snatches of old lauds about desperate lovers, the Yue Maiden can only be understood in terms of the ending of the play, but even before we reach that point it is obvious that Feng's cinematic talent has taken over and that his movie is no mere introduction to Hamlet for undergraduates, but an advanced lesson in film genre.

Few Asian versions of Shakespeare value lexical fidelity. Rather, as Feng's clever transpositions of plot and character show, he heeds Eliot's warning about the failure of Hamlet as a drama, and as so often happens with major filmmakers, his cinematic sense displaces traditional themes. The film's music, its slow motion duels, its beautifully photographed landscapes and horses, the weight given to Qing Nü's dreams and her songs, the heightened theme of adultery, and the odd ending of the film suggest that the real genre of The Banquet is not tragedy, but romance. In the filmography of Hamlet this displacement of tragedy by romance is most obvious in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, starting from the impossible series of coin tosses that all come up heads and leading to a fore-feeling that a world of science and logic is waiting, even if it is not yet fully understood. Similarly, and perhaps as a result of the film version of Tom Stoppard's play, a supernatural intervention occurs at the end of The Banquet. Wu Luan's death is not the final scene of the film; instead, the sword of the Yue Maiden abruptly kills Empress Wan, even as she is about to take sole political control. But where does the flying sword come from? Feng leaves the final scene unexplained, forcing us to consider each character more closely, to re-read the film almost as if we were reading a murder mystery and thereby challenging our suppositions about the genre of Hamlet. As if in answer to Eliot, The Banquet shows that Hamlet itself is as much a romance as a tragedy. I will start by reviewing http://borrowers.uga.edu/1414/show Page 2 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(02 PM

some key similarities between Hamlet and The Banquet, then look at the instability of tragedy as a genre, and finally consider how Fredric Jameson's theory of romance explains some of the key changes in Feng's cinematic version of Shakespeare.

Plot situations and character types, with appropriate changes determined by cultural differences and interpretation, transfer from stage to screen more easily than language does. Moreover, Feng freely transfers features of Shakespeare's tragedies from one character to another. Emperor Li and Wu Luan spy on each other, as Claudius and Polonius do in Hamlet. Empress Wan is at times an ambivalent Lady Macbeth and a scheming Goneril. Wu Luan and Empress Wan buy poison from a supplier right out of Romeo and Juliet (all discussed at length by Amy Scott-Douglass in her essay in this issue). Still, The Banquet retains the figure of a displaced and disgruntled nephew not obviously bent on revenging his father's most unnatural murder. Hamlet's rather brutal, but ambivalent dealings with Ophelia lead to both Wu Luan's rape of Qing Nü and her obvious willingness to endure even a Freudian doubling when he insists, in moment of passion, that she is the Empress. Further to illustrate Wu Luan's uncertainty, Feng Xiaogang greatly increases the sexual attraction between him and his uncle's wife, slightly altering the Oedipal fascination that twentieth-century directors, including Laurence Oliver, have added to the relationship between Hamlet and his mother. It is easy enough to see something creepy in Claudius's cloying passion for Gertrude — certainly Hamlet is obsessed by their love-making, and so Emperor Li's passion for his new queen's beauty, even his neurotic obsession with his brother's sexual prowess, seem by comparison reasonable.

Himself a borrowing, although he says nothing about borrowing or lending, Minister Yin does a fair imitation of Polonius by bending before the winds of political change. Similarly, his son Yin Sun responds appropriately to the impossible situation of his lovesick sister Qing Nü, who plays out her madness by singing, like Ophelia, to which she adds what Ken Kesey would have called "dream wars" with Wu Luan (Wolfe 1968, 108). She communicates with Wu Luan extra-sensorily, she says, certain that he really loves her and not the Empress — whom Wu Luan thinks he loves, but who is usurped first by his own father and then by his murdering uncle. We are never sure whether Qing Nü is right or wrong, since Wu Luan seems not to know as much about Empress Wan as we do — or he would not have mismanaged his performance at the Emperor's final banquet, the equivalent of the duel between Hamlet and Laertes that Claudius arranges. In this scene, Empress Wan prepares a poisoned chalice for her second husband, using poison stashed under one long http://borrowers.uga.edu/1414/show Page 3 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(02 PM

fingernail. But Qing Nü, prompted by the misguided Wu Luan, interrupts just before the Emperor can drink. As Minister Yin looks on — no rapier through the arras for him in this version — his daughter Qing Nü drinks, sings, and dies from the poison. Realizing that the cup was meant for him, Emperor Li commits suicide by drinking from it. He does so either, as he claims, because he really does love Empress Wan and cannot bear that she does not reciprocate, or because he knows Wu Luan will defeat him anyway. As Emperor Li falls, Yin Sun tries to stab Empress Wan for having prepared the poison that killed his sister, but Wu Luan seizes his dagger by the blade just before it penetrates her back. Empress Wan dispatches Yin Sun by a sudden backhand dirk to the neck, even as it is announced that the blade was poisoned. Wu Luan begins to die, and the Empress then weeps for him.

Although the film continues to the death of Empress Wan, at this point the tragedy offers a classical Aristotelian recognition, combined with a change of fortune. As Wu Luan realizes too late that Empress Wan plotted against her husband for his sake, his well-intentioned misperception leads to turmoil and deaths. The problem with this reading is that Empress Wan has so mistreated Qing Nü — having her lashed, branded, exiled to the South, and somehow mysteriously returned to court — that Wu Luan appears foolish in his devotion to her, however much one wants to excuse Wan's behavior on the grounds that she was forcibly married to Wu Luan's father and uncle. So it is hard to fit Feng's Wu Luan tidily into the classical pattern of a man whose admirable intelligence leads him through a sequence of decisive, moral actions that, due to circumstances he cannot control or reasonably foresee, unfortunately kill him.

But Hamlet's character has always been a problem in the definition of the play Hamlet as a tragedy. The original story in Saxo Grammaticus's Historical Danica, book 3 (ca. 1200) is about a hero who assumes madness or stupidity for the purpose of revenge. His father kills the King of Norway in single combat. His enemies send a courtesan (the ur- Ophelia) to seduce him, but he rapes her. He then goes to England, wins the king's daughter there, returns, and kills the usurper in a sword exchange. Saxo also has fratricide, incest, and the king's love of drink. Its tone is more brutal than that of Shakespeare's play: Amleth boils the Polonius figure and feeds him to the pigs. He vigorously burns down the palace. Still, he is somewhat melancholic. Polonius escapes physical boiling in The Banquet, but other elements remain, such as Qing Nü's rape and Wu Luan's moodiness. Some are suitably altered. Instead of feigning madness, Wu Luan retreats to the forest and the life of an artist, although the Empress Wan suggests — perhaps ironically, since it is not clear http://borrowers.uga.edu/1414/show Page 4 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(02 PM

whether she knows Emperor Li is listening — that Wu Luan's retreat is comparable to madness, since a real man should rule kingdoms and not write poetry. Wu Luan has no taste for rule, but never seems worried about being a real man. He is too skilled in fighting — in contrast to his uncle Emperor Li, who never duels, though at one point he twirls a sword with some skill.

The Renaissance version of the story adds a moral conflict to the physical perils of the original. This Hamlet is about a man called on to exact revenge for the murder of his father. His problems are that the murderer is a king, the source of his information is a ghost, the revenge must be suitable to be honorable, and there are spies everywhere. I cannot see that the great theme of Shakespeare's play, Hamlet's uncertainty over the possible demonic nature of the ghost, is present at all in The Banquet. Rather, the unknown natures he faces are those of Qing Nü, his dreamy loyalist, and Empress Wan, whose original passion for him may have been more inflected by her love of power than her passion. Still, the switch from uncertain ghost to uncertain women produces a dynamic reading of a key theme in the play.

By the nineteenth century, a romantic conception of Hamlet had developed. For readers in the post-Napoleonic world, Hamlet was about a man who lacks the opportunity to be great. Elsinore is a pit — but then, how can anyone measure up to Napoleon? Reason cannot stir the spirit, only depress it. Some of this romantic interpretation emerges in The Banquet when Wan berates Wu Luan for writing poetry instead of assuming rulership of the kingdom. More importantly, Qing Nü represents the power of the spirit — so much so that it is reasonable to suppose that even though she dies, she or her spirit throws the final sword that kills Empress Wan. In Shakespearean Tragedy, a principal modernist reading of Hamlet, A. C. Bradley argued that Hamlet is melancholic, incapable of acting not because he is depressed, but because he is disgusted and does not care. The counter-argument to Bradley has always been that Hamlet shows at times extraordinary energy. Neither paradigm really works for Wu Luan, however, which further indicates that Feng's film is not focused on the tragedy of character, but on other features of the story.

In The Wheel of Fire, G. Wilson Knight used William James's Variety of Religious Experience to explore why life seems to have lost its significance for Hamlet. His soul is sicker than events allow; his actions are cruel; he is bereft of intuitive faith, or love, or purpose, by which we must live if we are to remain sane, so he dwells on the foul appearances of sex, decay of flesh, deceit of beauty. Wu Luan and his world seem just the

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opposite. There is beauty everywhere; Feng's China is a land of green trees and weaving, of polished floors and beautiful chambers, not an unweeded garden and place of disease. Feng Xiaogang, in fact, reverses the key imagistic sequence in Hamlet, which is of disease and decay. Wu Luan seems eager to set the world right; his problem is to find an action that suits his artistic conception of performance, a theme drawn from the Players' section of Hamlet, to which Feng gives more prominence than any other director. The result of Wu Luan's conversations with Empress Wan is the need to use masks — the evil, but practical Emperor Li specifically says that he hates masks — even though this method produces ultimate disaster because Wu Luan does not understand that wearing a physical mask is less effective than feigning a mask, as Empress Wan does. On the other hand, if it is somehow Wu Luan's spirit, rather than Qing Nü's, that drives the sword of the Maiden of Yue into the back of Empress Wan at the end of the film, then it is possible to read the movie in Knight's terms, as a sickly delay before Wu Luan finally takes an action that is beyond shocking, but explains why he never complains that his father married Wan, the woman he loved. It was only his sick soul that loved her.

Most film versions of Hamlet might be described as at least partially feminist readings. These productions make the play about a woman who has no control over her life, goes mad, and kills herself. Her problems are an overbearing father, a jerk for a boyfriend, a hot-house existence, a lack of female companionship or understanding, and an ignorance about the facts of life. Earlier films make Ophelia childish. Modern versions make her angry. Feng gives the childish persona to Qing Nü and saves anger for Wan. But his film is feminist in a larger sense because, arguably, the central figure is not Wu Luan, but Empress Wan. Her role is far greater than Gertrude's, while Wu Luan's is much less than Hamlet's. Her rivalry with Qing Nü is distinctly absent in the relationship between Gertrude and Ophelia, whom Gertrude says she had hoped would marry Hamlet. Moreover, Empress Wan's attempts to find power in a world of male violence motivate the world of magic in The Banquet. She wields her sword on a par with Wu Luan and leaps as high. But where the supernatural in Hamlet symbolically represents Hamlet's destiny or fate, in The Banquet it provides an escape for a woman, or what Fredric Jameson would call a realm into which good and evil can dissolve. That dissolution is why we cannot pin down Wan's character. As vicious as she can be, she is the object of desire that ultimately escapes categories of good or evil. In the world of romance, her adultery is only what Jameson would call a baleful spell, not her at all.

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By concentrating so much on the female characters in Hamlet, Feng Xiaogang aligns his film with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which also defines Hamlet through the eyes of other characters. The theme is already in Shakespeare's play, since everyone has a different opinion about the cause of Hamlet's strange behavior. Feng extracts that uncertainty and focuses it not on Hamlet — who is not the object of others' analysis in the film — but on the death of Empress Wan. He then sets up the ending of the film by doing what cinema film does best: showing horses (which always act naturally on film), broad landscapes to suggest spaces beyond the narrow confines of our world, rugged men, beautiful women, and naturalistic method acting rather than heightened language. The elimination of language and actions that the audience knows exist in the full text in turn mimics the awareness of the limits of the world we live in, what Jameson calls the problem of the "world," which cannot be an object of perception in its own right. It is the function of the romance "landscape or village, forest, or mansion" (Jameson 1981, 98) to remind us that nature is not natural, but conditioned by society and history. The romance hero, however, is only a naïve spectator, not a deliverer from an upper world sent to battle some lower evil, as would occur if Wu Luan actually fought the Emperor Li. The real conflict is elsewhere, on a supernatural level, which is why Wu Luan and Li never fight, why Qing Nü's weapons of choice are her dreams and her songs, and why Empress Wan refuses to conform to any moral category.

In The Political Unconscious, Jameson offers a three-step definition of romance. First, it depends on an "ethical axis of good and evil," as Northrop Frye said. But second, insofar as they are illusions, good and evil need to be "historically problematized," (Jameson 1981, 96). Third, romance is therefore the genre that reveals the social or historical contradiction producing an illusion of good and evil. Adultery, the theme of Feng's previous movie The Cell Phone (2003) and very much central to his vision of The Banquet, is an obvious contradiction, since one cannot commit exclusively to two different people. Another contradiction may be in making ahistorical films today in Beijing. But whatever the cultural base is beneath the superstructure of the film, and whether or not Feng Xiaogang consciously or fully recognizes the cultural work his film does, The Banquet escapes Eliot's censure and succeeds insofar as it dynamically interprets the main elements of Hamlet.

Ethical oppositions are unimportant in tragedy, Jameson says, since to call Creon or Iago good or bad makes the plays melodrama. But where tragedies rise above good and evil to "stage the triumph of inhuman destiny or fate," romance does so as a form of "social praxis" to resolve a http://borrowers.uga.edu/1414/show Page 7 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(02 PM

"concrete historical situation" (Jameson 1981, 117). Romance is the story of "semic evaporation," meaning the dissolving of the "ethical binary," and the history of the form consists of the ways in which evil "generates the narrative but is resolved by it." In the medieval period, this transformation occurred in chivalric romances that posited a sudden awareness that what made one's enemy evil was precisely his identity with oneself, a moment of aristocratic solidarity that generally occurred when a knight unhelmeted. Magic served this transformative function during the Renaissance, while "new positivities (theology, psychology, the dramatic metaphor)" found their way into nineteenth-century romances. Modernism substitutes an absence or "absent presence" (134). Always there is a struggle between the older form and the contemporary materials, and so romance is a suitable genre for transitional periods. In general, the modes of social control change as the economy changes.

The clue to Stoppard's romantic reading of Hamlet is the way in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern defy logic, play with model airplanes and other devices, and seem constantly on the verge of recognizing the meaning of what Hamlet, whom they keep glimpsing, is doing. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fore-feel modern science (experiments with flight, for example), but they cannot escape their world. They feel, but cannot understand, that they are actors. They wonder if they should follow instructions to put Hamlet to death, but they are restricted by local hierarchies of power, such as orders from the king. This uncertainty arises because romances hide social domination, which defines good and evil, by projecting good and evil as magic. For example, acting can be good or bad, so it must be magic. Fortune can be good or bad, so it is really about social domination.

Because the film is a romance, performance takes on a magical quality in The Banquet, but cannot assure success. Similarly, Fortune can be recognized, but not controlled. And so the film ends with magical death of Empress Wan, not the moral mis-calculus of Wu Luan. We do not know who throws the sword that enters her back or even if it is the sword of the Maiden of Yue. It could be anyone's ghost: that of Yin Sun, who tries to kill her; of Wu Luan's father, whose memory she betrays when she makes love to Emperor Li; of Qing Nü, whom she torments; or of Wu Luan. If Wu Luan is the killer, he might kill Wan because he finally recognizes her evil. Or he might kill her for a much more romantic reason, which is symbolized by the sword that they had known in their youth and around which they dance so beautifully. Wu Luan wants Wan to join him in the afterlife.

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How to cite this article: Ross, Charles. "The Banquet as Cinematic Romance." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

REFERENCES The Banquet. 2006. Director Xiaogang Feng, performers Ziyi Zhang, You Ge, Daniel Wu, Xun Zhou. Huayi Brothers. Bradley, A. C. 1904. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Macmillan. Eliot, T. S. 1919. "Hamlet and His Problems." In Selected Essays, 1917- 1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 121-26. Frye, Northrop. 1957. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Knight, G. Wilson. 1930. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Methuen. Wolfe, Tom. 1968. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam Books.

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A Thousand Universes: Zhang Ziyi in Feng (/current) Xiaogang's The Banquet

WOODROW B. HOOD, CATAWBA COLLEGE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | ENTER THE DRAGON LADY — EMPRESS WAN | A THOUSAND POSSIBLE (/about) UNIVERSES — ZHANG ZIYI | SHIFTING AWAY FROM HAMLET | REFERENCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT Beyond its lush cinematography, wuxia wire acrobatics, eye candy costumes, and million yuan sets, Feng Xiaogang's 2006 film, The Banquet, presents more than a Chinese reimagining of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The film recenters the play by switching the locus of the protagonist from Shakespeare's titular character to the generally subordinate character of Gertrude. Though the switch creates some clearly problematic gender issues, Zhang Ziyi's intricate performance as Empress Wan offers potential for multiple interpretations.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

Beyond its lush cinematography, wuxia wire acrobatics, eye candy costumes, and million yuan sets, Feng Xiaogang's 2006 film, The Banquet, presents more than a Chinese reimagining of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The film recenters the play by switching the locus of the protagonist from Shakespeare's titular character to the generally subordinate character of Gertrude — even the title refers to the banquet of

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the Empress's coronation ceremony. Though the switch creates some clearly problematic gender issues, Zhang Ziyi's intricate performance as Empress Wan offers potential for multiple interpretations.

Zhang Ziyi's Empress Wan/Gertrude is less a pawn in the film and much more a queen on a chessboard. But what happens when you give Empress Wan/Gertrude the full latitude of movement, agency, and power imbued in that chess piece? Does the character become richer, allowing more insight for the audience? Or does the film pander to contemporary gender norms and crumble under the weight of its own culture's sexism? Probably, the most honest answer is that it does both. While in her essay in this collection Rebecca Chapman focuses on Wan as the structural focal point in the film's adaptive strategy, I would like to examine the new interpretive possibilities enabled by considering Wan as a central character.

If a filmmaker hires a leading world actress such as Zhang, she is unlikely to play a subordinate or supporting role. Zhang often plays independent and strong-willed characters and is clearly one of China's leading actresses. One wonders, therefore, how much of the script was rewritten to entice Zhang to take on the project. Certainly, the Empress/Gertrude character had to be made younger for the twenty nine year old actor, making her Prince Wu Luan/Hamlet's stepmother because of the lack of an age difference between the two.

Often in The Banquet, the story that Feng Xiaogang and his crew are telling through the total text of the film (spoken text, film shots, edits, underscoring, and such) can run parallel to, and even at times be at odds with, the performances of the actors, and this is particularly true of Zhang. Actors are never mere puppets, though the director (and often the producers) has the final say in the shape and movement of the film itself. But evidence of the original performances still exist and bleed through the work of directors, editors, producers, and the entire post-production staff.

ENTER THE DRAGON LADY — EMPRESS WAN In The Banquet, the text may highlight the Empress/Gertrude character, but the mere act of doing so does not create a gender-progressive film. Instead of a feminist version of the Hamlet story, we get a throw-back medieval view that represents women as either saints or whores. The film's medieval setting validates and therefore perpetuates the old, chivalrous (xia) views of gender. In this case, the Empress becomes the whore or, in colonialist terms, the Dragon Lady.

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The Dragon Lady, a concept of American coinage, comes from a colonialist/Western perspective on strong women in the East. A Dragon Lady is characterized typically by her beauty, seductive power, and evil nature, and she is always punished for overreaching. In this racist view, an Asian woman must be a beautiful and submissive flower, or she is to be a femme fatale, domineering and manipulative, but also doomed. The type ranges from over-simplified cartoon strip baddies to Western news accounts of real political leaders (e.g., Soong May-ling of China and Madame Nhu Ngo Dinh of Vietnam). In The Banquet, our Dragon Lady is a politically astute climber who realizes too late that her desire for power and control leaves a wide swath of destruction, killing her loved ones as well as her foes. To find the character emerging from a Chinese-made and produced film is disturbing and yet, unfortunately, not anomalous.

Shakespeare has provided very little context for Gertrude. As Baldwin Maxwell summarizes the situation, Gertrude "appears in ten of the play's twenty scenes, but in those ten scenes she speaks fewer lines than does Ophelia, who appears in only five . . . She speaks but one brief aside and never the concluding line of a scene" (Maxwell 1964, 236). Gertrude has often been perceived as weak ("Frailty, thy name is woman") or conniving. The role has been loathed by actors and critics alike since the 1800s, when "the wicked queen" interpretation began to flourish. For centuries now, this simple-minded interpretation of Gertrude has reinforced cultural sexism, despite the fact that the Ghost tells Hamlet to not "let thy soul contrive against thy mother" (Shakespeare 1939, 1.5.770- 71). George Kittredge, by contrast, thought that Gertrude seems to be exonerated in the play, arguing that the Ghost never accuses Gertrude of complicity in the murder and that Hamlet later seems to damn his mother merely because she shows no suspicion of Claudius (Shakespeare 1939, 170). In The Banquet, however, we get a new enactment of Gertrude's character that nevertheless reinforces the traditional view of her as a conniving Dragon Lady.

From the opening shots of the film to the closing moments, Empress Wan figures prominently in her quest for control and power, which is codified carefully through the film's design. In the opening shots, we see Wan dressed in the gold of Chinese royalty. Later, we see her in deep crimsons and vermilions, the color of "the flame of desire" (The Banquet) and the embodiment of her passionate and unsatisfied blood. Finally, by the last scene she is draped in black, perhaps to signify that she has become an impure creature. These shifts in color scheme create a visual crumb trail that allows the audience to follow Wan to her self-destruction. After an opening prologue and a brief introduction to the Prince/Hamlet character, http://borrowers.uga.edu/1418/show Page 3 of 8 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(02 PM

we meet our Empress, gliding down a long corridor of an expansive and expensive set towards her new Emperor. She trails a long, golden train in what feels like a Western bridal march down the aisle. Gold, in China, is traditionally the color of wealth and the color of the Emperor.

As we learn more about the Empress and her schemes slowly percolate, we see her donning the traditional Chinese wedding color, red. Adorned in this auspicious color, the Empress later details her own interpretation of and attraction to it — for her, red epitomizes a human desire akin to a rush of blood. As all of the characters meet their various fates, only the Empress survives to the last. Empress Wan's final moments are marked by a powerful monologue that she delivers alone in a courtyard and through which we learn finally her true intentions. Wan has gotten what she wants — the throne — but unfortunately, she has survived the coronation night calamity only to be assassinated by a weapon from an unseen assassin.

While Shakespeare's Gertrude is reduced to inaction and textual marginalization, Empress Wan's actions drive The Banquet's plot; through her two-faced, poisonous plans, she functions as the dominant agent in the destruction of the entire court. First, Wan decides to marry the Emperor for political expediency and to protect Prince Wu Luan, as we find out when she meets the Prince upon his return. Wan tells him that she has made her face a mask to hide her real intentions from her new husband. She also sends protection for her stepson, Prince Wu Luan/Hamlet, when the Emperor sends him away with the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern analogues. She then decides to poison the Emperor for his murder of her previous husband. In this way, Wan's actions become the central source of the tragedy.

Double faces are an essential component to the Dragon Lady character. She puts on the face of the dutiful wife to the new Emperor while obtaining poison to murder him. She gets Minister Yin/Polonius and General Yin/Laertes to buy into her plan to assassinate the Emperor and then double-crosses them, skewering General Yin/Laertes through the neck with a sword and exiling Minister Yin/Polonius to a northern wasteland. Empress Wan's actions cause the death of the honorable and loyal General Pei merely to curry favor for the Emperor.

By focusing on the Empress Wan/Gertrude character without grounding it in feminist theory, The Banquet's analogies with Shakespeare's Hamlet problematize Empress Wan/Gertrude's situation without solving the character's problems. We get a more complicated look at what drives her, but the choices of the filmmakers lead us down a gender regressive path.

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Prince Wu Luan/Hamlet and Emperor Li/Claudius are thus let off the hook because they have no real agency; only Empress Wan/Gertrude does.

A THOUSAND POSSIBLE UNIVERSES — ZHANG ZIYI One attribute that makes a performer great, especially in acting for the camera, is the ability to hold together many options at the same time. As an audience, we see actor/characters faced with a clear crisis that requires action, and we delight in watching them (sometimes at lighting speed) sift through the endless possibilities, make a choice, and then act. Metaphorically speaking, we see them simultaneously inhabit a thousand possible universes, before having to choose to live in a particular one. In a tragedy, these actor/characters unfortunately make the most devastating and deadly choices. In the nearly twenty films completed in her still young career, Zhang Ziyi often portrays complicated and deeply conflicted characters. Even in The Banquet, where she must play the Dragon Lady text, a more complicated subtext wiggles through her performance when the camera settles for a moment and does not cut away. Zhang has thus created a more nuanced performance than the script suggests, and her performance can be read in multiple ways. Zhang populates the film with startling moments of decision, but for the sake of brevity, I will focus on three central structural moments in the plot: when she gives up dowager status, when she makes her final choice to kill Emperor Li/Claudius; and when she gives her last monologue. Each moment has sufficient complexity to elicit multiple readings.

Early on, the status of the new Emperor influences whether Empress Wan will accept him as her true husband (giving him the throne's lineage) or stand as an Empress Dowager (giving the throne's lineage to her stepson, the Prince/Hamlet). General Pei has referred to her as the Empress Dowager, even though the court hails her as the Empress. Though she kneels to the new Emperor as his wife and subordinate, Zhang complicates the moment. With a stone face, eyes lowered in submission and her body held tight, she hesitates. She begins a deep breath before the film cuts away — a breath that could be read as steeling herself to make the tough, but smartest choice. As she kneels, she deepens her bow into greater reverence. Though the act traps General Pei (who has referred to her as the Empress Dowager) and sentences him to death, Zhang's nuanced physical actions open up the moment to various interpretations. Does she secretly regret having to put Pei in that position? As she sits in her lowest kneeling position, we see Zhang tilt her head towards the General with her chin; chin raising is generally considered a shift towards

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a higher status. Is she blaming the General for his stupid faux pas and hence his own death? Does she see a larger picture than we do? The breath Zhang takes before kneeling and the tilting of her head afterwards opens up the text.

One of the more complicated moments in Zhang's work occurs before the banquet, in the bedchamber scene. Seen from a point of view above their heads, Empress Wan lies with her head upon the Emperor's chest, caressing his arm tenderly. Her eyes are fixed and far away as she listens intently to how he responds to her question. After warming him up, she sits up and makes direct eye contact. Using metaphorical language, she warns him through tears that she plans to kill him; she is turning from ice to fire. He says that eventually her ice will melt in his mouth and that he will swallow her fire. In an intricately open-ended reaction, Wan bursts into tears, squeezes the Emperor with intensity, and begins to beat him furiously on his back with her fist. Is she punishing him for not understanding the metaphor or for putting her into a position where she will be able to pull off the assassination? Why does she change her status in the scene when she sits up to his level and bores into his eyes with her own? Throughout the scene, Wan is difficult to read. Only after the Emperor leaves at the end of this sequence do we realize that she has chosen to kill him. Curled up in a fetal position, half naked and with messy hair — presumably after having had sex with the Emperor — she calmly pulls out the poison and cuddles it to her chest for comfort. The complexity of her actions lie open to interpretation as we see Zhang wrestling with Empress Wan's moral choices.

In the final scene, however, the filmmakers sentimentalize the Empress once again as "Little Wan" — the name that the Prince/Hamlet called her when they were younger — by playing a sappy song as we see her slowly expire. However, Zhang once again creates a multitude of physical actions that open up the scene's interpretation. She wears all black, the opposite of the traditional Chinese color of mourning, which is white. She stands unmoving in the middle of the courtyard, eyes cast down and using a little girl voice, while the camera jumps from angle to angle as snow falls around her. Wan then says that all will now refer to her as "Her Majesty, the Emperor": she has assumed male/patriarch status. As she smiles to take her victory and gathers a bolt of red cloth to her chest, the blade (which looks like the Maiden of Yue's sword that is used by Prince Wu Luan) spears her through the back. The sentimental song begins to play while Wan points directly into the camera lens at us, the audience. Zhang's tightened voice, creepy smile, and blank stare leave us to wonder whether she has gone mad with never-quenched desire or whether she is http://borrowers.uga.edu/1418/show Page 6 of 8 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(02 PM

pleased with her accomplishments. Maybe, having removed the immediate threats around her, she has truly achieved a calm state, or perhaps the actress is no longer resisting the film's text but has simply begun to exceed the role of the Dragon Lady, with its moralistic conclusion. The possible readings of Zhang's own reading of Empress Wan seem to multiply endlessly.

SHIFTING AWAY FROM HAMLET Though a relocation of the protagonist of the Hamlet story may offer the potential for a new reading of medieval-versus-contemporary gender issues, films are themselves cultural products and bring with them the problems of that culture. Whether a film is produced in Hong Kong or Hollywood, the question of whether it is regressive or progressive on questions of gender is always a fair one. One rarely draws in box office money by deeply questioning a culture's commitment to gender equality; however, the performance of an individual actor, such as Zhang's performance in The Banquet, can be nuanced enough to be seen in many different ways. Certainly, an audience can buy into the Dragon Lady mythology. Upon further examination, however, Zhang's performance shows us an image of an individual woman who is sorting through a thousand different possible universes. The film text tells her what her final choices are; her job, as a good actor, is to allow all of these possibilities to exist at once, if only for a brief moment.

How to cite this article: Hood, Woodrow. "A Thousand Universes: Zhang Ziyi in Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

REFERENCES The Banquet. 2006. Dir. Feng Xiaogang. Perf. Zhang Ziyi, Ge You, Wu Daniel. Huayi Bros. Maxwell, Baldwin. 1964. "Hamlet's Mother." Shakespeare Quarterly 15.2 (Spring 1964): 235-46.

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Shakespeare, William. 1939. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Edited by George Lyman Kittredge. Boston: Ginn and Co.

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From Ethnographic Impulses to Apocalyptic (/current) Endings: Bharadwaj's Maqbool and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood in Comparative Context (/previous) BLAIR ORFALL, UNIVERSITY OF OREGON (/about)

ABSTRACT | THRONE OF BLOOD AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMPULSE | NOTES | (/archive) REFERENCES

ABSTRACT Maqbool's critical success, which was followed by director Vishal Bharadwaj's even more commercially successful adaptation of Othello, entitled Omkara (2006), raises interesting questions about the appropriation of Shakespeare in post-millennium India. What does a Shakespearean tragedy offer to the director and audiences in the (post) post-colonial environment of contemporary India? This essay examines the relationship between Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool and Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, addressing their mutual ethnographic impulses and apocalyptic endings.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

With its Indian release in 2004, director Vishal Bharadwaj's adaptation of Macbeth, entitled Maqbool, came as a surprise to critics and audiences. Although India has a long history of Shakespeare adaptation in theater and film, there had been no acknowledged Shakespeare adaptation in popular 1 http://borrowers.uga.edu/1408/show Page 1 of 8 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(03 PM

Hindi cinema in almost fifty years.1 Given the dearth of Shakespeare adaptations in a film industry that otherwise abounds in unacknowledged adaptations and complex appropriations, critics and audiences expressed happy surprise with Maqbool's release. Deepa Karmalkar's reaction in Screen, a weekly popular film magazine, is representative of its critical reception: "Credit is due to maker Vishal Bharadwaj for suddenly reviving Shakespearean literature" (Karmalkar 2006). Bharadwaj's revival of Shakespeare relocates Macbeth's Scotland, that "othered" geography in relation to England, into the contemporary, Mumbai underworld (formerly known by its colonial name of Bombay). In a geographical shift from Shakespeare's play, in which "Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against" Macbeth (Macbeth, 4.1.109-10),2 Mumbai's sea closes in as his gang brothers, police, politicians, and rivals all threaten Maqbool's usurped fiefdom when a smuggling deal for an unnamed package goes wrong. Like many contemporary film adaptations of Shakespeare, Maqbool uses no Shakespearean language. Instead, regionalized Urdu, which requires a bit of effort from Hindi viewers, marks the characters' Muslim identity and social world. The film is filled with Islamic signifiers, ranging from clothing and eating and fasting practices to a dramatized trip to a darga, or Sufi temple, which includes a religious musical sequence. Bharadwaj's adaptation of Macbeth then is contemporized, indigenized, and Islamified,3 marking it as outside the dominant culture and re-coded through the traditions of the Western mafia film and its influence on Indian gang film.

Bharadwaj's success raises interesting questions about the appropriation of Shakespeare in post-millennium India. What does a Shakespearean tragedy offer to the director and audiences in the (post) post-colonial environment of contemporary India? The popularity of "writing back" theories (Ashcroft et al., 2002) in postcolonial discourse makes it tempting to think of Maqbool as a response to a legacy of colonization and enforced bardolatry. Poonam Trivedi writes that with Shakespeare, as with cricket, Indian cinema has "appropriated another imperial icon" and done it well (2007, 157). This is true, but does not take into account the fact that Bharadwaj came to Shakespeare's Macbeth not through a colonial canon or global imperialism, but through Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. In an interview, Bharadwaj explains: A very dear friend had given me Kurosawa's Throne of Blood to watch. That was when I got a glimpse of the power of Shakespeare's writing (and Kurosawa's cinematic interpretation, equally powerfully). Later I went deeper into the story of Macbeth with my underworld framework in mind and was absolutely charmed by what the Macbeth metaphor could do in terms of power and depth to the story. . . (Bharadwaj 2003,

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47) Maqbool's kinship to Macbeth then is mediated through its relationship with Throne of Blood (1957), thus triangulating the texts and necessarily complicating Maqbool's use of Macbeth. A west-to-east-to-east transmission requires that the discourse about trans-cultural Shakespeare adaptations move beyond Shakespeare's universality, colonial importation, or accusations of plagiarism (which are often directed towards popular Indian cinema). Shakespeare film adaptations are unique because, as José Angel Garcia Landa explains, they have "multiple intertextual dimensions, connecting them — unlike most adaptations, or remakes — to the original text, to previous films of the same play and to stage productions, which in turn have an intertextual history of their own" (2005, 185). Kurosawa's influence on Maqbool cannot be underestimated and yet, like the majority of adaptations, Maqbool is not merely an Indian replication of Throne of Blood or Macbeth. Instead, Linda Hutcheon's definition of adaptation as "repetition but without replication" (2006, 173) suggests how Maqbool can be a unique and historically specific product of Kurosawa and Shakespeare, and of international literary and film histories.

THRONE OF BLOOD AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMPULSE Kurosawa's Throne of Blood adapts Shakespeare's medieval Scotland to feudal Japan during the Sengoku period (1477-1573), which was "marked by internecine wars among rival clans . . . [when] warlords violently seized domains . . . and were killed in turn by their vassals" (Price 2003). Relocated in time, space, and culture, Throne of Blood follows the main characters and plot lines of Macbeth, with significant additions, including noh performance styles — a choice that at first baffled critics, but later was hailed as an ingenious reworking of one cultural history into another. These filmed theater details include using the bare stage as a set, employing a chorus and traditional noh music on the film soundtrack, and actors' stylized mannerisms and facial expressions based on masks. It bears mentioning that noh was already an outmoded style of theater for Kurosawa's contemporary audience. As critics have noted, in the shadow of World War II this revitalization through Macbeth offered Kurosawa a stage on which to record noh theater tradition, a move toward ethnography and preservation in the contemporary medium of film.

Throne of Blood has been regarded as a conglomerate of disparate cultural practices, which "allows Kurosawa to interrogate both Japanese and Western cultural traditions through his manipulation of Macbeth, Japanese theater, and contemporary film conventions" (Suzuki 2006, 94). Throne of Blood and Maqbool share a number of similarities, including the http://borrowers.uga.edu/1408/show Page 3 of 8 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(03 PM

indigenization of most of Macbeth's plot, characters, and themes, the omission of the original language for a stylized dialect, the intensified kinship relationships appropriate to the feudal contexts of the play (the Sengoku period in Japan and a Mumbai criminal world of the mafia patriarch), the insertion of an impossible heir for the Macbeth couples, and apocalyptic endings that refute the play's claim of rightful order restored.

Maqbool channels Macbeth via Throne of Blood to stage a specific historic negotiation and representation of minority Islamic culture within India, as Hindu fundamentalism threatens to overrun the once diverse city of Mumbai. This, of course, is taking place during a period of rapid economic and social change, labeled as globalization, which arguably resembles the post-war period in Japan and is recorded through the filmed narrative of the Shakespearean tragedy that blends multiple mediums. Film scholar Moinak Biswas hypothesizes that the genre of the Shakespearean tragedy, unlike other contemporary media, including the realist film, provides the structure and distance to mourn the loss of the recent past due to the homogenizing effects of globalization (2006). In contrast to the stereotypical "Bollywood" family romance for which Indian cinema recently has become famous and in which "the current imagination of the family drama has a manic investment in erasing all ideological fissures from its domain" (Biswas, 2006), Maqbool, and later Omkara, are set within those fissures — the lives of people from minority, non-mainstream cultures.

When Maqbool's relationship to Throne of Blood is highlighted, Bharadwaj's attention to Islamic costuming, accent, food, architecture, and religious and social customs suggests a nostalgic ethnography of a waning Muslim milieu that is comparable to Kurosawa's post-war chronicling of noh theater traditions specifically and a period of Japanese Samurai history generally. Bharadwaj, through Kurosawa's mixed genres of tragedy and ethnography, creates a tragic ethnography to memorialize Mumbai as a city with threatened shores.

Throne of Blood and Maqbool's endings are apocalyptic, refusing, like Macbeth, "to give us the play's reassuring conclusion . . . in which a just political authority triumphs" (Price, 2003). The Macbeth couples are destroyed, the men being effectively, if not literally, beheaded. But both films leave lurking at the gates an unspoken danger greater than Macbeth, with his quite human motives and machinations. In Throne of Blood, that threat is an approaching army that remains off-screen. Significantly, Throne of Blood opens and closes with a single stone marker shrouded by fog and a disembodied chorus suggesting wide-scale massacre. Stephen Price writes, "Kurosawa gives us battles filtered through his perceptions as a twentieth-

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century artist well acquainted with the large-scale slaughters of his own time. The sense of apocalypse in the films is not of the sixteenth century, but of now" (2003). While contemporized, Maqbool's ending is also bleak even though an heir, albeit of questionable paternity, appears to survive after Maqbool's death.

The appearance of a potential child for the infamously childless Macbeths is perhaps Throne of Blood's strongest influence on Maqbool, a deviation not seen in other Macbeth adaptations. Bharadwaj elaborates upon Kurosawa's pregnant Lady Macbeth character, Asaji, who announces her pregnancy opportunely to manipulate further Washizu/Macbeth. While in Throne of Blood the child does not survive, Maqbool's premature son's future, as well as his paternity, remain uncertain. The choice to replicate and build upon the pregnancy trope connects the two films intimately, while distinguishing Maqbool from other Macbeth adaptations. The film-to-film reference links the two directors and places Bharadwaj, by association, into both the international art film canon and the Shakespeare-on-film canon. At the same time, the affiliation with Throne of Blood and Bharadwaj's public statements disassociate Maqbool from Bollywood clichés, specifically from those concerning Indian cinema's inferiority within the international film canon.4

However, even with the presence of a potential heir, in neither film is there a restoration of rightful power. Sameera and Guddu, the designated heirs of Abbuji's kingdom, are the children of killers who survive upon a blood market. Those intercepted smuggled goods that instigate Maqbool's final fall need not be named in the Indian context; viewers are well aware of the weapons smuggled into cities before carefully planned "spontaneous" communal riots, while fears of a "suitcase" nuclear bomb within Mumbai are not irrational, as the November 2008 bombings sadly demonstrated. Given this apocalyptic vision of Mumbai's future, Vishal Bharadwaj's desire to create a record of the recent past and to mourn the demise of a heterogeneous city and time by harnessing Shakespeare and Kurosawa's powers is an understandable project.

How to cite this article: Orfall, Blair. "From Ethnographic Impulses to Apocalyptic Endings: Bharadwaj's Maqbool and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood in Comparative Context." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

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NOTES 1. In my own research at the National Film Archives of India, I counted eleven Indian film adaptations of Shakespeare, including a shot-by-shot adaptation of Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet, acted and produced by Indians between 1927 and 1954. However, from 1954-1998, only one popular Hindi film — Angoor (1982), a loose adaptation of A Comedy of Errors — was released. Jayaraj's Malayalam adaptation of Othello, Kaliyattam, was released in 1997. Instead of an acknowledgment of its source text in the credits, Angoor provides as acknowledgment a literal wink from a Shakespeare image. The question of what constitutes an adaptation remains under debate. For the purposes of this essay, I suggest that an adaptation is a sustained engagement with the source text, in contrast to brief Shakespeare references within Indian films. 2. All references to Macbeth are from the edition of Robert Miola (Shakespeare 2003). 3. Mukul Kesavan identifies the Islamicate roots of popular Hindi cinema. The neologism "Islamicate" refers "not directly to the religion Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims" (Kesavan 1994, 246). 4. For a detailed discussion of the significance of the infant in Throne of Blood and Maqbool, please see "Shakespeare Adaptation in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: Pregnancy, Adaptation and Illegitimacy in Maqbool," in Blair Orfall, "Bollywood Retakes: Literary Adaptation and Appropriation in Contemporary Hindi Cinema" (2009).

REFERENCES Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. 2003. Director by Akira Kurosawa. Japan. 1957; DVD, The Criterion Collection. Angoor. 1982. Director Gulzar, performers Sanjeev Kumar, Moushumi Chatterjee. India. A. R. Movies. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 2005. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. Biswas, Moinak. 2006. "Mourning and Blood-Ties: Macbeth in Mumbai." Journal of the Moving Image, 5 (December). Available online: http://www.jmionline.org/jmi5_4.htm

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(http://www.jmionline.org/jmi5_4.htm) [accessed 10 August 2008]. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Kaliyattam. 1997. Director Jayaraj, performers Suresh Gopi, Lal, Manju Warrier, Biju Menon. India. Jayalekshmi Films. Karamalkar, Deepa. 2006. "Tragic Artifice." Screen (4 August). Available online: http://www.screenindia.com/fullstory.php?content id=13142 (http://www.screenindia.com/fullstory.php?content%20id=13142) [accessed 12 August 2008]. Kesavan, Mukul. 1994. "Urdu, Awadh, and the Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema." In Forging Identities: Gender, Communities, and the State. Edited by Zoya Hasan. New Delhi: Kali for Women Organization. 258-59. Landa, José Ángel Garcia. 2005. "Adaptation, Appropriation, Retroaction: Symbolic Interaction with Henry V." In Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Edited by Mireia Aragay. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 181-99. Maqbool. 2004. Director Vishal Bharadwaj. New Delhi, India. Eagle DVD Video. Omkara. 2006. Director Vishal Bharadwaj. Mumbai, India. DVD, Shemaroo Video. Orfall, Blair. 2009."Bollywood Retakes: Literary Adaptation and Appropriation in Contemporary Hindi Cinema," Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon. Price, Stephen. 2003. "Shakespeare Transposed." Essay in DVD materials from Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. Director Akira Kurosawa. Japan. 1957; DVD, The Criterion Collection. Shakespeare, William. 2003. Macbeth: An Authoritative Text, Sources and Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Robert S. Miola. New York: W.W. Norton. Singh, Brahmanand. 2003. "Interview with Vishal Bharadwaj." In Cinema in India. India: National Film Development Corporation. 47. Suzuki, Erin. 2006. "Lost in Translation: Reconsidering Shakespeare's Macbeth and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood." Literature/Film Quarterly 34.2: 93-103. Trivedi, Poonam. 2007. "'Filmi' Shakespeare." Literature/Film Quarterly 35.2: 148-58.

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ABSTRACT | THRONE OF BLOOD AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMPULSE | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions

(/current) AMRITA SEN, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT Vishal Bharadwaj sets Maqbool (Kaleidoscope Productions, 2004), his (/archive) adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, against the backdrop of Mumbai's underworld. Maqbool deftly blends the basic plot structure of Shakespeare's play with the increasingly popular genre of Bollywood gangland films. Bharadwaj's adaptation traces the rise and betrayal of Miya Maqbool (Macbeth), whose love interest, Nimmi, combines the ferocity of Lady Macbeth with the desperation and marginalization characteristic of female leads in Bollywood thrillers. Bharadwaj's film belongs to a long tradition of Shakespeare adaptations in India, both on stage and the silver screen. Echoes of Shakespearean dialogues in Bharadwaj's film co-exist with staple Bollywood song and dance sequences, creating a heady postcolonial mix.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

Maqbool, director Vishal Bharadwaj's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, opens with two corrupt cops, Purohit (Naseeruddin Shah) and Pandit (Om Puri), holed up inside a police van with a petty gangster, waiting for the midnight hour. In the eerie darkness, animated deliberations on the subtleties of police encounters alternate with interpretations of the city's astrological chart. While executing a hapless

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rival gang member, the cops inadvertently smear the misty horoscope of Mumbai with blood. The witches of Shakespeare's play, reincarnated as horoscope-touting policemen, prophesy the ascendancy over the city of gang lord Abbaji's lieutenant, Miya Maqbool. These opening shots firmly set in motion Bharadwaj's strategy in reconciling his Shakespearean material with the demands of a commercially viable Hindi film. Maqbool successfully fuses key aspects of Shakespeare's play with the theme of Mumbai's underworld made popular by Bollywood movies. The result is what Poonam Trivedi dubs a "cross-over" film — a hybrid entity that is imbricated in its postcolonial condition (2007, 153).

Maqbool joins a long tradition of Shakespeare appropriations on the Indian stage and screen. In the mid-nineteenth century, Shakespeare adaptations in India proliferated, largely from concerted efforts to introduce English education into the colony (Chakravarti , 41). Early indigenous productions of Shakespeare's plays moved from free borrowings of plots to more "critical appropriations which countered colonial hegemony" (Trivedi 2005, 47). It would be wrong, however, to assume a monolithic Indian tradition of Shakespeare adaptations. Different regions came up with their own distinct productions, often incorporating pre-existing local performance practices. The influence of these indigenous theaters on screen adaptations of Shakespeare cannot be discounted. As Rajiva Verma points out, the Bombay film industry (Bollywood) turned to adaptations popularized by the Parsi theater while producing its own versions of Shakespeare (2005, 270). Verma goes on to speculate that the Parsi theater not only provided screenplays for films such as the 1927 production of Dil Farosh (Merchant of Venice), but also inspired the highly inflated rhetorical style that came to mark Bollywood Shakespeare productions. From the onset, most screen adaptations, much like the play scripts, transposed Shakespearean plots into Indian contexts and included the now indispensable song and dance sequences. Even more "authentic" productions, such as Nargis Art Concern's Romeo and Juliet (1947), modeled on MGM's 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet, retained the song sequences (Verma 2005, 271). Significantly, while Macbeth enjoyed a strong presence on the Indian stage (second only to Othello), the play remained largely ignored by the Bollywood film industry prior to Maqbool (Trivedi 2005, 48).

Much like the early films influenced by the Parsi tradition, Maqbool contains several song and dance episodes (though modest in number compared to standard Bollywood fare). Dialogues in Maqbool are a far cry, however, from the exaggerated rhetorical style of the 1940's and 50's. Instead, Bharadwaj's adaptation masterfully reworks Shakespeare's http://borrowers.uga.edu/1409/show Page 2 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(03 PM

imagery to fit the muted, yet hard hitting depiction of Mumbai's gangland. As critics have noted, Maqbool fits in with the recent spate of Bollywood gangland movies, such as Vaastav, Company, and Satya (Trivedi 2007, 154). In its contemporary setting, Maqbool differs from Shakespeare appropriations such as the 1935 production of Hamlet, Khoon ka Khoon, which used primarily Victorian costumes and backdrops, or even Throne of Blood, which portrayed feudal Japan (Verma 2005, 271). Instead, Maqbool continues the trend set in 1981 by Angoor (Comedy of Errors), which transposed the bard's plot into modern India. Further, while literary scholars have in the past pondered the existence of Lady Macbeth's offspring, director Vishal Bharadwaj offers a tangible solution in his adaptation, which is discussed at length by William C. Ferleman's essay in this collection.

Maqbool (Irfan Khan) trying to console Nimmi (Tabu)

Set in Mumbai, Maqbool charts the rise and ultimate destruction of Miya Maqbool (Irfan Khan), the principal henchman of Abbaji, alias Jahangir Khan (Pankaj Kapoor). The confusion of moral order at the heart of the witches' chant in Macbeth's opening act reverberates throughout the movie. Mumbai appears more in the clutches of gangsters rather than legitimate political authorities. The policemen Purohit and Pandit (literally meaning "priest" and "wise man") function as supernatural agents obsessed with maintaining cosmic balance, as well as incompetent lackeys providing comic relief. Abbaji (literally "father"), the Duncan figure in Maqbool, differs vastly from the benevolent monarch in Shakespeare. On the night prior to the murder, Maqbool learns from the http://borrowers.uga.edu/1409/show Page 3 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(03 PM

disgruntled cop, Purohit, that Abbaji had possibly murdered his predecessor to acquire control of the gang.

Purohit (Naseeruddin Shah) and Pandit (Om Puri) working out astrological charts

In the opening sequences, Maqbool closely follows its Shakespearean original. The astrologer-cops, alongside their prophecies, reveal the context of the recent troubles plaguing Mumbai's underworld. Abbaji's brother has been killed by a rival gang, spurring swift retribution. Maqbool exacts revenge on the perpetrators, just as Macbeth had succeeded in thwarting the Norwegian attacks. The victorious lieutenants Maqbool and Kaka (Banquo) retreat to the farmhouse to await further orders. There they encounter Pandit and Purohit, who regale Maqbool with the brilliant prospects guaranteed by his astrological chart: Pandit: Your comet has entered the seventh position in your Venus chart. This position heralds your kingly reign. Forget Bollywood . . . In six months, Abbaji's throne is going to be Miyan's. King of Kings.

Purohit: Shut your trap, sonuvabitch . . . Shut up.

Maqbool: If I believed in any of this mumbo jumbo, Pandit, I would have sliced your tongue off right here.

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Pandit predicts that Maqbool will soon control the gang's investments in Bollywood. Incredibly, the henchman overlooking Bollywood operations is soon revealed as a traitor, and Maqbool is appointed in his place. Kaka, his interest piqued, demands to know his fortune, as well. The cops skirt the question and instead, prophesy that Kaka's son, Guddu (Fleance) will be the antidote to Maqbool.

Maqbool mockingly holds a gun to Nimmi's head

Apart from astrological mysteries, the scene at the farmhouse also reveals Maqbool's secret love for Abbaji's mistress, Nimmi (Tabu). Maqbool here resorts to the familiar fare of Bollywood masala, offering tangled love affairs and conflicting loyalties. Against the quotidian operations of the crime family, the film chronicles the hidden loves brewing in Abbaji's Mumbai stronghold. Maqbool and Nimmi's simmering passion for each other serves as a foil for the more rambunctious romance between Abbaji's daughter Sameera and Kakaji's son, Guddu. Bharadwaj replaces Duncan's two sons with the gang lord's rather naïve daughter. Later, Abbaji's acceptance of Guddu as his future son-in-law sets him up as the indisputable heir to the crime family, thereby threatening Maqbool's own ambitions.

Nimmi, Maqbool's sweetheart, embodies an interesting reworking of Lady Macbeth, blending more powerfully than most other characters the Shakespearean and Bollywood influences of the film. But unlike in the case of Lady Macbeth, ambition alone does not drive Nimmi. Abbaji's mistress shares much in common with the fallen women who emerge as http://borrowers.uga.edu/1409/show Page 5 of 11 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(03 PM

love interests of rising gang lords in films such as Dayavan (1988) or Vaastav (1999). Of course, Nimmi — unlike the female leads of these popular gangster films — is not a common prostitute, though she undoubtedly shares their desperation and marginalization. At the engagement, amidst laughter and merriment, Guddu and Sameera feed each other. Abbaji's newest heart-throb, a Bollywood starlet, proceeds flirtatiously to offer him food. Abbaji makes clear his preference for the newcomer, signaling an imminent switch in mistresses. Nimmi, abandoned and forgotten, watches the couple from the sidelines. Yet for Nimmi, murdering Abbaji amounts to more than mere ambition or revenge. Instead, it translates into survival, a shot at a life with the man she loves — Maqbool. While Nimmi had resorted to insinuations earlier, she now explicitly goads Maqbool to murder. Wearing the sacrificial garland reserved for slaughtered goats, she exclaims: Nimmi: It's time you sacrificed me, too. Jahangir has got a new mistress. How can I face going home? Everyone knows I'm Jahangir's mistress. He looks disgusting with his clothes off. Must be my father's age.

Maqbool: And he is my father. I've been brought up in this house. Nimmi persists in her pleas for the murder. She informs Maqbool that he has to choose between two deaths — Abbaji's or her own. The murder therefore is triggered by ambition as well as love. Nimmi, like many Bollywood heroines, needs to be rescued, although in this film, she orchestrates her own release.

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Nimmi in sacrificial garland with Maqbool (Irfan Khan)

Once the pair tacitly agrees on the deed, Maqbool begins to hallucinate. He cries out to his aged servant demanding that the blood from the morning's slaughter be cleaned up, only to be told that the stains had been washed away hours ago. Nimmi, on the other hand, appears to be more impervious to the moral consequences of the impending act. At night, Maqbool enters Abbaji's bedroom as Nimmi lies vigilantly beside the sleeping gang lord. The single shot that kills Abbaji also smears Nimmi with blood. Trapped inside the mosquito net, she tries to brush away the blood-splatter — a gesture that would later become the hallmark of her madness. The murdering duo pin the blame on an inebriated guard.

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Nimmi splattered with blood during the assassination

Maqbool's subsequent inability to retain control over the underworld coincides with political upheavals plaguing the state. Mumbai's underworld, as well as its political leaders, appear to be embroiled in a constant struggle for survival. Scenes in which a group of kidnapped politicians try to convince assembled journalists that they are in fact on vacation belong to the absurdist theater rather than to Shakespeare. Maqbool's destruction, much like the fall of Raghu in the Bollywood blockbuster Vaastav, results from the withdrawal of political patronage.

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Nimmi's descent into madness

Maqbool succeeds in the domestic as well as the international markets precisely because the film melds the betrayal and chaos portrayed in Shakespeare with the murky, sinister Mumbai underworld. The film includes the love plots so essential to mainstream Bollywood movies; simultaneously, however, Maqbool opens up questions of corruption, terrorism, and communal harmony that have taken the center stage in recent Hindi films. In 2006, director Bharadwaj revisited gangland as the setting for yet another reworking of one of the Bard's plays in Omkara (Othello). William Shakespeare and the underworld evidently form a great mix — at least in Bollywood.

How to cite this article: Sen, Amrita. "Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

REFERENCES Angoor. 1981. Director Gulazar, performers Sanjeev Kumar, Moushumi Chatterjee. India. A. R. Movies. Chakravarti, Paromita. . "Modernity, Postcoloniality, and Othello: The Case of Saptapadi." In Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres, and Cultures. Edited by Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Easche, and Nigel Wheale. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 39-55. Company. 2002. Director Ram Gopal Varma, performers Ajay Devgan, Mohanlal. India. Varma Corporation. Dayavan. 1988. Director Feroz Khan, performers Amala, Tinnu Anand, Mangal Dhillon. India. F.K. International. Dil Farosh (The Merchant of Venice). 1937. Director D. N. Madhok, performers Ishwarial, Khatun. India. Khoon ka Khoon (Hamlet). 1935. Director Sohrab Modi, performers Sohrab Modi, Naseem Banu, Shamshadbai. India. Minerva Movietone.

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Maqbool. 2004. Director Vishal Bharadwaj, performers Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapoor, Piyush Mishra, Ajay Gehi, Ankur Vikal. India. Kaleidoscope Productions. Omkara. 2006. Director Vishal Bharadwaj, performers Ajay Devgan, Kareena Kapoor. India. Big Screen Entertainment. Romeo and Juliet. 1947. Director Akhtar Hussein, performers Anwar Hussain, Nazir Kashmiri, Nargis. India. Nargis Arts. Satya. 1998. Director Ram Gopal Varma, performers J. D. Chakravarthi, Urmila Matondkar. DVD: Digital Entertainment (DEI). Throne of Blood. 1957. Director Akira Kurosawa, performers Toshirô Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Takashi Shimura. Japan. Toho Company. Trivedi, Poonam. 2007. "'Filmi' Shakespeare." Literature/Film Quarterly 35.2: 148-58. Trivedi, Poonam. 2005. "'It is the bloody business which informs thus . . .': Local Politics and Performative Praxis, Macbeth in India." In World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Edited by Sonia Massai. London and New York: Routledge. 47-54. Vaastav. 1999. Director Mahesh Manjrekar, performers Sanjay Dutt, Namrata Shirodkar. India. Adishakti Films. Verma, Rajiva. 2005. "Shakespeare in Hindi Cinema." In India's Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance. Edited by Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 269-90.

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES | TOP

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Indigenizing Macbeth: Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool

(/current) SUDDHASEEL SEN, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT Vishal Bhardwaj, a filmmaker and composer of Bollywood scores, has (/archive) achieved considerable popular and critical success worldwide with his two adaptations of Shakespeare, Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello). Both films are very different from those postcolonial adaptations that tend to "talk back" to Shakespeare; instead, Bhardwaj represents the strain of a transcultural adaptation of Shakespeare whose beginnings lay in the nineteenth-century Parsi theater's first forays into indigenizing Shakespearean plays for local audiences. With Maqbool, Bhardwaj creates a film that is unique among those few global cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare that have successfully indigenized Macbeth at the level of setting, plot, language, and generic conventions without diluting the complex issues raised by Shakespeare's play.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

Vishal Bhardwaj, who began his career as a composer of Bollywood film scores, is now regarded as one of India's most innovative young directors.1 Based on Macbeth, Maqbool is Bhardwaj's second film and his first adaptation of a Shakespearean play. Although it is set in the murky underworld of Bombay (Mumbai), features Bollywood actors, and draws freely upon the conventions of the Bollywood film, the film remains close to Shakespeare. In its extremely complex and successful reworking of Macbeth in a different

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medium (film), language (Hindi/Urdu), time and setting (present-day Bombay), Bhardwaj's adaptation is comparable to Throne of Blood, by Akira Kurosawa, who is one of Bhardwaj's favorite filmmakers.

India has a longstanding but, as of now, little-known tradition of adapting Shakespeare into film in its vernacular languages. The Bombay film industry grew out of the Parsi theater, whose repertoire included several Shakespeare plays that were indigenized to suit local performance traditions. This led to several film adaptations of Shakespeare in Hindi and Urdu by the erstwhile members of the Parsi theater in the early years of the twentieth century. After Indian independence in 1947, this tradition took a back seat, but the late 1990s saw a resurgence of interest in Shakespeare adaptations, no doubt partly because of the success of English-language adaptations by Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann, and others. Bhardwaj's films ride on the crest of this new wave of film adaptations of Shakespeare in India. Bhardwaj himself has stated in an interview that he aimed to go beyond Indian audiences: as he says, he "wanted to touch a chord with international audiences, so there were many commercial considerations" in adapting Shakespeare (interview with Raja Sen, "Today Othello" 2006). In this, he has succeeded very well, indeed: Maqbool (2004), based on Macbeth, and Omkara (2006), based on Othello, are the first Indian film adaptations of Shakespeare to have gained international recognition; they have been screened at several international film festivals and are discussed in Daniel Rosenthal's 100 Shakespeare Films (2007), published by the British Film Institute.

Maqbool is set in the criminal underworld of modern-day Bombay (now called Mumbai).2 Two corrupt policemen (the equivalent of the weird sisters) predict Maqbool's rise to power by means of horoscopes, which Maqbool manages to do by killing Abbaji (the Duncan figure), the head of a crime family who treats Maqbool as if he were his own son. Additionally, Maqbool is deeply in love with Abbaji's mistress, Nimmi, who successfully instigates Maqbool to kill Abbaji after the latter gives the hand of his daughter, Sameera, to Guddu (Fleance), the son of one of his lieutenants, Kaka (Banquo). The policemen predict that Maqbool will be safe as long as the sea does not enter his house, but this is what happens, so to speak, as customs agents foil a vital smuggling deal at the port and raid Maqbool's home with the intention of arresting him. Instead, the customs agents find the dead body of Nimmi, who has, in the meanwhile, given birth to a child; whether it is Abbaji's or Maqbool's remains uncertain. When Maqbool, attempting to take his newborn son and flee the country, sees the child being taken care of by Guddu and Sameera at the hospital, he decides not to continue this life of violence and vengeance. Instead, as he emerges from the hospital, he is killed by Boti, another gangster who has joined with Guddu against Maqbool as their common enemy. In the http://borrowers.uga.edu/1419/show Page 2 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(04 PM

memorable final shot, Maqbool's dying impressions are conveyed by a gradually reddening screen, as noises of commotion gradually fade into nothingness.3

Critical reception of the film has ranged from qualified admiration to generous enthusiasm. Poonam Trivedi (2007) and Douglas Lanier (2007) have found qualities in this adaptation of Macbeth that make it stand out among the film adaptations of Shakespeare's play — its economy of narration, its focus on the Abbaji-Maqbool (i.e., Duncan-Macbeth) relationship that makes Abbaji's murder even more loaded than would be the case if Abbaji were not a father- figure to Maqbool, its ingenious recasting of the weird sisters as a pair of corrupt policemen having connections with the underworld, and, perhaps most significantly, the recasting of the love between Maqbool and Nimmi (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth) as a forbidden romance. Indeed, Maqbool, Abbaji, Nimmi, and the others are all caught in a web of ambition, as well as of sexual desire. Maqbool is driven to kill Abbaji as much by his love for Nimmi as by his resentment at the idea of having to serve under Guddu, who would become the heir to Abbaji's gang through his marriage to Sameera. Such complex motivation leads to Maqbool's murder of Abbaji on the night before Guddu and Sameera's wedding. On the other hand, Nimmi's hatred of Abbaji is triggered by their age difference — Abbaji is old enough to be her father, and she feels repelled by his appearance — and also because Abbaji has acquired a new mistress. Furthermore, Maqbool is strengthened in his resolve to kill Abbaji once he learns from the corrupt policemen that in all likelihood, Abbaji himself killed his mentor in order to head the gang. Consequently, after Abbaji himself is murdered, there is little doubt in anyone's mind that Maqbool is the killer, and the members of the gang soon regroup, isolating Maqbool in the process.

The murder of Abbaji more than halfway after the film begins and the relatively quick move to the denouement have been seen by some as creating a structural imbalance (Rosenthal 2007, 123); but this can be understood as the consequence of the radical reworking of the relationships tying Abbaji, Nimmi, and Maqbool. In fact, as Lanier has observed, the second half of the film, following Abbaji's murder, "closely parallels Macbeth in plot, motifs, and character" (Lanier 2007, 217). Those who see Maqbool with Shakespeare in mind will note the ingenuity and thoroughness of Bhardwaj's adaptive approach. For example, the banquet scene is replaced by a meeting of Maqbool's gang, from which Guddu and Kaka (Fleance and Banquo) are missing. When Kaka's dead body is brought back, only Maqbool thinks that Kaka is alive and looking at him and so becomes visibly disturbed. Maqbool's fear of Kaka's gaze is tied to Abbaji's murder scene, in which Abbaji dies looking at Maqbool. His blood splashes over Nimmi, who like her Shakespearean counterpart, becomes increasingly obsessed with imaginary http://borrowers.uga.edu/1419/show Page 3 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(04 PM

bloodstains. Another brilliant reworking is the recasting of Macbeth's downfall with the foiling, by the port authorities, of Maqbool's attempt to offload contraband and the subsequent raid of his home. The coming of the sea is the film's suggested parallel with Birnam Wood, a parallel that, given the setting in Bombay, would have had to be abandoned if any literal transposition had been attempted. Shakespeare's supernatural dimension is interestingly recast in metaphorical terms, even as the very real setting of crime and criminalized politics is conveyed through a realist idiom.4

Adapters of Macbeth have often reworked the play's ending. While some (such as William Davenant and Giuseppe Verdi) have emphasized a return from chaos to order, others (such as Roman Polanski and Eugène Ionesco) have depicted a cyclical pattern of violence. Bhardwaj, uniquely, treads a middle ground. On the one hand, he realizes the redemptive potential of the play not in a return, at a social level, from anarchy to order — the Bombay underworld remains corrupt and violent — but at a personal level: Nimmi's newborn child is taken care of by Guddu and Sameera in an act of humanity that transcends personal and gang rivalries. But even this reading can be undermined by the film's repeated suggestion that the unkindest cut of all has always come from the most unexpected quarters — from Abbaji, who killed his mentor, to Maqbool, who kills the person who brought him up as a son.

Though Maqbool claims to be only a "loose adaptation" of Macbeth (Trivedi 2007, 153), the film actually employs a range of strategies to incorporate the Shakespearean text in interesting, visual ways. For instance, the day before Abbaji's murder, Maqbool is seen as cooking food for the guests in a huge cauldron as he plots the murder. Later on in the day, a little before the murder, he hallucinates that blood is coming out of the cauldron, an image that provides further incitement for the act he plans to commit. Thus, while Bhardwaj departs from Shakespeare at a literal level, he nevertheless is able to bring together the cauldron and dagger scenes of Macbeth in a way that shows his deep understanding of their significance and his ability to incorporate them in a radically new setting. The policemen's prediction of rain, which is extremely unusual for the time of the year, comes true and creates a suitably tense atmosphere right before Abbaji's murder. At the same time, the scene also translates into cinematic terms the Shakespearean technique of mirroring an upheaval in the moral order by an unnatural upheaval in the natural order. Bombay mafia dons, the film suggests, constitute the true rulers of the state, with their strong behind the scenes presence in various aspects of life, from politics to the Bollywood film industry itself. Indeed, Abbaji makes Maqbool responsible for negotiating deals with Bollywood stars as a reward for his loyalty.

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Given the increasing critical and academic focus on Bollywood and Hindi commercial films made in Bombay, Bhardwaj's Maqbool has often been read in terms of Bollywood conventions (which I discuss later). To do so exclusively, however, is to miss out on other aspects that are equally vital, such as the relationship of Maqbool to other Shakespeare adaptations, especially that of Kurosawa, whose Throne of Blood also radically relocates Shakespeare both in terms of setting and performance styles (noh and Samurai film), and to other Indian and international cinema (The Godfather [1972], Léon [The Professional]), and Bollywood gangster films such as Satya (Varma 1998) and Company [Varma 2002]), to which Bhardwaj makes sly intertextual allusions — a useful strategy for a director who wants to make his film accessible to a wide range of audiences. Bollywood conventions have themselves changed over time, and Bhardwaj is one among several filmmakers working in Bombay who have departed from the conventions of the formula Bollywood film of say, the 1970s and '80s.

The setting of Maqbool — the Bombay underworld — is sharply etched, and it plays a much more important role than the stock urban or (idealized) rural settings of many previous Bollywood films. Bhardwaj's attention to setting is accompanied by a focus on language: the characters in Maqbool use a spectrum of language, from Hindi slang and colloquialisms spoken in Bombay (popularly called "Mumbaiya Hindi") to Urdu, reflecting the fact that Bombay is perhaps India's most cosmopolitan city, where people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds live and work together. There are visual images, too, that reinforce this cosmopolitanism, albeit in the seedy premises of the Bombay underworld: in the predominantly Muslim world of Maqbool, Muslims and Hindus cooperate with each other.5 Such attention to detail is among the hallmarks of a small and experimental new group of Bollywood filmmakers who have departed, at least in part, from the conventions of mainstream Bollywood films. One such director, Ram Gopal Varma, in films such as Satya (1998) and Company (2002), provides critiques of urban corruption, just as Maqbool, while remaining an adaptation of Macbeth, also does. In fact, one of Bhardwaj's greatest strengths is his ability to successfully indigenize Shakespeare at the level of setting, plot, language, and generic conventions without diluting the complex issues raised by Shakespeare's play.

Bhardwaj's use of some Bollywood conventions in Maqbool may be as much a matter of choice as of compulsion. The presence of Bollywood trademarks such as "family scenes of festivity and weddings, catchy music, dances, and songs" (Trivedi 2007, 153-54), including an "item number,"6 is all the more strange for a filmmaker who has dismissed mainstream Bollywood as kitschy (interview with Raja Sen, "Today Othello" 2006). In a globalized world that equates Bollywood with Indian cinema, in no small measure because the http://borrowers.uga.edu/1419/show Page 5 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(04 PM

powerful Indian diaspora and the well-oiled publicity machines of the Bollywood industry actively promote such a view, it is impossible for a filmmaker making films in Hindi to escape from the hegemony of Bollywood itself. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha has observed, While Bollywood exists for, and prominently caters to, a diasporic audience of Indians, and sometimes (as, for example, with Bhangra-rap) exports into India, the Indian cinema — much as it would wish to tap this "non-resident" audience — is only occasionally successful in doing so, and is in almost every instance able to do so only when it, so to say, Bollywoodizes itself . . . (, 29; italics in original) Bhardwaj also betrays an uneasy relationship with his Shakespearean source, a possible reason for which is that, in the Indian context, cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare have fared better when their relationship with Shakespeare has gone unannounced.7 Moreover, to adapt Shakespeare also means to risk comparison with other Shakespeare adaptations made all over the world for nearly a century, some of them acknowledged classics of cinema.

Bhardwaj's Maqbool has much to offer to those who are interested in transculturated Shakespeare. The ingenuity and thoroughness with which Bhardwaj and his scriptwriter Abbas Tyrewala relocate Shakespeare's play to an entirely new socio-cultural setting is without parallel among Shakespeare films (even Kurosawa set the film in Japan's historical past); but such ingenuity is not the be-all and end-all of this film.8 Bhardwaj is able to realize the tragic potential present in the sincere love between Maqbool and Nimmi (paradoxically a "forbidden" relationship); the scene in which Nimmi dies in the arms of Maqbool reaches an intensity that prepares the audience for the tragic ending. Bhardwaj's ability to achieve this without alienating purveyors of conventional Bollywood films is nothing short of astonishing. With his next adaptation of Shakespeare, Omkara, set in semi-rural Uttar Pradesh and dealing with issues of gender rather than of race or caste, Bhardwaj has shown that he can make a very different kind of Shakespeare film. One hopes that he goes on to make more. As of now, Maqbool can safely be placed among the most significant films produced in India in recent years; equally, it is among those few global cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare that have successfully indigenized Shakespeare without abandoning the richness and complexity of the original plays.

How to cite this article: Sen, Suddhaseel. "Indigenizing Macbeth: Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ http://borrowers.uga.edu/1419/show Page 6 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(04 PM

(http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES 1. Born in Bijnor, a small town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Vishal Bhardwaj has directed only six films so far, to considerable acclaim. One of his earliest mentors was the writer-filmmaker Gulzar, who had made one of the most commercially successful adaptations of Shakespeare, Angoor (1981), which was based on The Comedy of Errors: they later collaborated on Omkara (2006). The director's last name can be spelled in two different ways. I use the spelling he currently uses (Bhardwaj) rather than the more common one (Bharadwaj). 2. Bhardwaj may have been influenced in his choice of setting by Ram Gopal Varma's gangster film, Satya ("The Truth," 1998), for which he had composed the score. 3. It has been suggested that the closing scene of Maqbool is "borrowed shot-for- shot from Luc Besson's Léon (1994)" (Jess-Cooke 2006, 178). Indeed, Maqbool can also be linked intertextually with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), which also employs Shakespeare as an intertext (Jess-Cooke 2006, 177). 4. In his film, Bhardwaj recasts the role of prophecy considerably. When the policemen predict to Maqbool that he will become enmeshed in a love affair, he already knows that Nimmi is in love with him; their prediction that Maqbool will take over Abbaji's gang in a few months' time is likewise greeted by Maqbool with a smile. In most cases, their prophecies spell out what can already be understood, either in terms of individual motives or in terms of what the policemen call the restoration of balance in the universe. 5. Mukul Kesavan has argued that the use of Urdu in Bollywood film made possible the nostalgic evocation of the culture of the Urdu-speaking élite of India (1994, 251), an aristocratic culture that started crumbling with the arrival of British colonialism. Bhardwaj's film evokes this culture, but with a difference. The late 1990s, when Bollywood's connections with its criminal underworld, controlled mostly by Muslims, were exposed, provided a topically relevant setting for Maqbool, which alludes to both the past glory and current decadence of this culture. Does this make Maqbool one of those more recent Bollywood films that, according to Chadha and Kavoori (2008), present the Muslim as the demonized "Other" in Indian cinema? It is not an easy question to answer. On the one hand, the fact that Kaka and Boti, the only relatively loyal gangsters in the film, are also practically the only Hindus among the lot, does indeed suggest that an anti-Muslim subtext is at work. On the other hand, Omkara, set in an equally murky rural Uttar Pradesh, features only Hindu

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criminals. It could, therefore, be argued that the setting of Maqbool demands a new approach towards the depiction of the culture of the Urdu-speaking élite in Indian film, but it is a point that can, of course, be challenged. 6. These are "songs inserted into a film, primarily to titillate the audience" (Alter 2007, 134). The item number for Omkara has, in fact, achieved a popularity of its own. 7. The most commercially successful Hindi film based on Shakespeare, Gulzar's Angoor, does not state its relationship to The Comedy of Errors, though it has Shakespeare winking at the audience at the end of the film. 8. Repeated viewings of the film, in fact, reveal how carefully its parts hold together. For audiences that do not speak Hindi or Urdu, multiple viewings may, in fact, be necessary for a better understanding, given the complexity of the (reworked) plot and the swift pacing of the film.

REFERENCES Alter, Stephen. 2007. Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking. New Delhi: Harper Collins. Bhardwaj, Vishal, dir. 2006. Omkara. Performers Ajay Devgan, Kareena Kapoor. India. Big Screen Entertainment. Bhardwaj, Vishal, dir. 2004. Maqbool. Performers Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapoor, Piyush Mishra, Ajay Gehi, Ankur Vikal. India. Kaleidoscope Entertainment. Chadha, Kalyani, and Anandam P. Kavoori. 2008. "Exoticized, Marginalized, Demonized: The Muslim 'Other' in Indian Cinema." In Global Bollywood. Edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar. New York: New York University Press. 131-45. The Godfather. 1972. Director Francis Ford Coppola, performers Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan. USA. Alfran Productions. Gulazar, dir. 1981. Angoor. Performers Sanjeev Kumar, Moushumi Chatterjee. India. A. R. Movies. Jess-Cooke, Carolyn. 2006. "Screening the McShakespeare in Post-Millennial Shakespeare Cinema." In Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 163-84. Kesavan, Mukul. 1994. "Urdu, Awadh, and the Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema." In Forging Identities: Gender, Communities, and the State. Edited by Zoya Hasan. New Delhi: Kali for Women. 244-57.

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Kurosawa, Akira dir. 1957 Throne of Blood. Performers Toshirô Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Takashi Shimura. Japan. Toho Company. Lanier, Douglas. 2007. "Film Spin-Offs and Citations." In Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Edited by Richard Burt. 2 vols. Westport: Greenwood Press. 1:132-365. Léon [The Professional]. 1994. Director Luc Besson, performers Jean Reno, Gary Oldman. France. Gaumont. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2003. "The 'Bollywoodization' of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4.1 (April): 23-39. Rosenthal, Daniel. 2007. 100 Shakespeare Films. BFI Screen Guides. London: British Film Institute. Sen, Raja. 2006. "Today Othello, Tomorrow Hamlet?" Interview with director Vishal Bhardwaj. The Rediff Interview. Available online: http://www.rediff.com/movies/2006/jul/27vishal.htm (http://www.rediff.com/movies/2006/jul/27vishal.htm) [accessed 30 November 2007]. Shakespeare, William. 1999. Macbeth. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller. New Cambridge Shakespeare. 1997; New Delhi: Foundation Books. Singh, Vijay. 2004. "Maqbool is Not an Underworld Story." The Rediff Interview. Available online: http://health.rediff.com/movies/2004/jan/29vishal.htm (http://health.rediff.com/movies/2004/jan/29vishal.htm) [accessed 18 July 2008]. Trivedi, Poonam. 2007. "'Filmi' Shakespeare." Literature/Film Quarterly 35.2 (April): 148-58. Varma, Ram Gopal, dir. 2002. Company. Performers Ajay Devgan, Mohanlal. India. Varma Corporation. Varma, Ram Gopal, dir. 1998. Satya. Performers J. D. Chakravarthi, Urmila Matondkar. DVD: Digital Entertainment (DEI).

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"Mak[ing] . . . Strange / Even to the disposition (/current) that I owe": Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool

POONAM TRIVEDI, UNIVERSITY OF DELHI, INDIA (/previous)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) Shakespeare forms a kind of a benchmark in Indian culture; local responses to his works determine their distance from our own past. On stage, there have been several successful adaptations of Macbeth performed in indigenous Indian styles. But with Maqbool, we have hit another level of appropriation. Here, it is neither ethnicity nor authenticity that is aimed at, but rather, a postcolonial maturity in contemporizing the universality of Shakespeare according to our own current concerns. Maqbool has unfixed Shakespeare from the grip of the English medium school and made him a free-floating signifier available for anyone with the nous to take him on.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

The opening sequence of the film Maqbool, Vishal Bharadwaj's Hindi adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth (2004), begins with a conversation floating out of a rain-drenched van while a finger traces out a horoscope grid on the window pane. The ensuing dialogue, punctuated by throaty laughs, concerns the difficulties of staging an "encounter" and forecasting

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the future of Mumbai to determine whether Maqbool (Macbeth) was destined to reign over it. This beginning, like Shakespeare's in Macbeth, strikes the keynote of values reversed, treachery, and violence, but one localized in the dynamics and lingo of Mumbai's underworld. That this opening dialogue of the witches occurs between two policemen — a duo of clairvoyant comic cops who attempt to monitor and control the underworld through their compulsive drawing and divining of horoscopes — is startling and makes strange a well-known tale.

This recasting of the witches as a pair of conniving cops is the most original of the transpositions in the adaptation (there have been dozens of adaptations of Macbeth to gangland situations, but the witches have never before been visualized as policemen). It not only naturalizes and makes believable the unnatural and the supernatural, but also breaks the supernatural down into a gamut of recognizable relations and inferences. And this comprises the larger achievement of Maqbool: providing a sharp, fresh take on Macbeth that continually surprises, not only through its acute social localization, oblique political comment, and its intertextual relations with other Bollywood films, but also through its cinematic "retextualization" of Shakespeare's imagery.

The policemen/witches, Inspectors Pundit and Purohit, "juggle" and "equivocate" between don Abbuji's (Duncan's) men and the law: they act as go-betweens, privy to deals and payoffs. They chase, encounter, and interrogate, but fail to make the prisoners speak. They even seem to be hand in glove with the gangs, turning up in the nick of time to bail them out. In such bumbling attempts at duty, they are the scapegoat cops of every Bollywood film. But as conniving abettors and simultaneous upholders of the law, they provide an exposé of the nexus that has developed in the last decade or so between the police and the underworld in Mumbai, providing also a sly, searing glance at recent scams and prison escapes in India, in which it has been proven that the police have given a helping hand. As an interfering pair, the comic cops intersect with the vice/devil, clown/fool tradition, acquiring as well shades of the Shakespearean wise fool. They take on some of the ribaldry and critiquing function of the Porter when they are caught by the camera pissing in unison into the night rain off the first floor balcony following a celebratory party ("drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things . . . nose- painting, sleep, and urine" [2.3.25, 28]).1

These cop-witches thus constitute the radicalism of the re-imagining of Macbeth, which hangs a new question on a canonical text: who are the witches/weird sisters, and what is their magic power? Weird, in Anglo-

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Saxon, meant not evil, but fate. Are the witches marginal people trying to assert power by "prophesying" or "equivocating" on both sides? In Shakespeare's play, the witches kill, avenge, trade in body parts, and lead Macbeth on. In the film, the cop duo promises much, but delivers little. Yet they justify all their actions through a grass-roots philosophy of maintaining a balance of power, a shakti ka santulan, by letting fire and water confront and confound one another: Aag ko pani ka dar bahut bada hai. They believe in letting the gangs fight it out among themselves, let dog eat dog. The ambiguities of the Shakespearean text are exploited, with suspense, in the film, so that by the end a suspicion begins to creep up the back of our minds that this prophesying, which instigates Maqbool's ambition and creates a power struggle, is merely a ploy, planted by the witches/police to seduce the chieftains/gangsters into liquidating each other. No less cannily than in the play, reality and unreality are juggled.

Localization in Maqbool receives another twist through its intertextualities with Bollywood traditions, making it a film that needs to be read as much from its spaces of discursive difference as from its Shakespearean center. The film locates itself in the popular genres of the Bollywood gangster and city film, as well as in the Muslim social film; it is a direct inheritor of recent critiques of urban violence, such as Satya and Company, which generally are accepted as fictionalizations of real- life gangsters and masterminds of terror, such as Dawood Ibrahim and Chota Rajan, who exert a mafia-like hold on the people and institutions of Mumbai. The radicalism of Maqbool lies in its use of a Western canonical text to expose a festering urban and political culture. Maqbool and Macbeth are narratives of people who depend on bloodshed and violence for their living; who, to consolidate their positions, are sucked into treachery and revenge; and who end up eliminating each other. Maqbool positions women in a seductive, but ultimately destructive role, and though it valorizes violence as a livelihood, it ends by asserting the moral that violence does not pay.

In a literary film adaptation, retelling initiates its own alternative referentiality. With postmodernist "play" and self-reflexivity, Maqbool stretches its localization to dare to talk of its own lifeline (Bollywood), offering tongue-in-cheek jibes at the recent exposures of the notorious nexus between the underworld and the film industry in Mumbai. There are several references to Bollywood, all of which reveal it to be another field of action for the mafia, where the financing and fixing of films, like gold smuggling, illegal occupation, and contract killing, is admitted to be part of their dhanda, or business. In the one family scene of relaxation http://borrowers.uga.edu/1420/show Page 3 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(04 PM

after dinner, the conversation turns to the fortunes of Bollywood; Kaka (Banquo) quips that Abbuji's life was worthy of being filmed and then goes on to brag that it will not auger well if this year they cannot get out a film with "Bhabhi" — i.e., Nimmi, the mistress of Abbuji who is also the Lady Macbeth figure. "Tell me, Bhabhi, which director do you want: Karan Johar, Ram Gopal Verma, Mani Ratnam?" he reels off grandiosely, offering her the pick of the actual best, only to be reduced to a stammer by an icy stare from Abbuji, who is definitely not pleased. The business or dhanda of Bollywood will not include the family because, as Maqbool has let drop earlier in the conversation in a kind of double irony, the gangsters believe that Bollywood is peopled by the cheap and vulgar kind — ghatiya. Another glance at the equation between the film world and the underworld is made through Inspector Pandit's observation that had Abbuji "not been in the underworld, he would have been in films; what an actor he is" after watching Abbuji enjoy a nautch, or dance performance, with some composure immediately after a strategically simulated emotional shakeup in which Abbuji is reminded of the police raid at his own wedding that left him bereft of his god-father figure. Again, this is something we suspect was stage-managed by Abbuji himself. Such seemingly casual self-references in the film are not simply narcissistic, however, but rather function as sharp critiques, tearing off the veil of make-believe that covers the underhand dealings of both the film and the extortion industry. They also establish a parallel between the king-making delusions of the underworld/Bollywood and the royalist ambitions in the theater of war in Macbeth, where "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face" (1.4.11-12). Duncan's observation on the traitor Macdonwald self-reflexively exposes Abbuji, and by analogy, casts back a doubt on the Scottish king's manipulations.

More than the localization of plot and character, it is in the cinematic visualization of Shakespeare's imagery that a creative coalescence of the Shakespearean with the local occurs. Unusual placements of Shakespeare's images accost one at unexpected turns in the narrative, forcing at times a revelatory extension of meaning. These cinematic enactments are not intrusive — merely calling attention to themselves — but are instead integral to the new narrative while they resonate simultaneously with the old. A loud, raucous chatter of crows and other birds, for instance, visualizes Lady Macbeth's statement that "[t]he raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements" (1.5.38-40) and forms the background "music" to Maqbool and Nimmi's first long scene by the roadside, where she plants the seeds of treachery in his mind. The cawing of crows, in fact, becomes a choric comment on all talk of murder: it accompanies the new ACP Devasare's http://borrowers.uga.edu/1420/show Page 4 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(04 PM

questioning of the Inspector duo on his first day; it forms the background to Abbuji's questioning of the dead Moghul's son Boti (Macduff); and it chimes with Nimmi's aggressive stroking of the fires of ambition and eroticism in Maqbool.

The festivity of the engagement party celebrations takes the place of the banquet in honor of Duncan, in the backdrop of which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth plot his murder. A huge steaming cauldron, which in the play is full of "Double, double, toil and trouble" (4.1.10), is now glimpsed in the kebab makers' shop, where a rival gang gathers to plot further machinations of crime and revenge. The atmosphere of fear and terror unleashed by the usurper Macbeth, as reflected in the line "Each new morn, / New widows howl" (4.3.4-5), is represented graphically and aurally in Sameera's (Duncan's daughter's) wild scream of anguish and hate when Maqbool pretends to commiserate with her on the breakup of her engagement after Kaka's death and Guddu's (Fleance's) flight. The dagger soliloquy is encapsulated in a brief sequence in which Maqbool hallucinates that the blood of the goat butchered for the wedding feast has not been washed clean. The haunting of Banquo's ghost is given a fresh spin when Kaka's body is brought in, disrupting Abbuji's prayer meeting; as Maqbool touches the body in a pretended show of grief, the eyes of the dead body suddenly flip open, completely throwing Maqbool off his guard.

The most creative transposition and illustration, however, is of the central image of the play, in which "Pity, like a naked new-born babe, / . . . / Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye / That tears shall drown the wind" (1.7.21, 24-25). The naked babe is visualized in Nimmi's new-born son, who is seen being cradled lovingly by Guddu/Fleance and Sameera at the film's end, the very sight of which weakens Maqbool's blood-lust, blowing his horrid deeds into his own mind's eye, making him drop his gun and walk out in a gesture of surrender, leaving the camera to mark a tear staining the glass visor through which Maqbool was looking at the babe. Pity, as the naked babe, remains an unborn child in the play Macbeth, emphasizing the sterility of the Macbeths. In Maqbool, its embedded meaning is released to force a final moment of anagnorisis, a self-realization of the futility of a life of bloodshed. Since in the film, the child is born of premature labor, it is also a visualization of the child who was "untimely ripp'd" from "his mother's womb" (5.8.16, 15). This figure, forecast as the one who will vanquish Macbeth, thus becomes the two- fold instrument of the reassertion of the good.

At the very end in the play, Macbeth's head is cut off and brought on

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stage, a sign of just deserts for the "butcher king." In the film, Maqbool walks out of the hospital, having dropped his guns, and is shot down by Macduff/Boti, who happens to see him outside. But no shriek or blood is shown; instead the camera pans, then tilts its line of vision to ground level, cuts to a view of the sky above, and finally cuts back to a close-up, framing only Maqbool's head as it falls and rolls on the ground. As the viewer looks from Maqbool/Macbeth's field of vision, spiritual music begins. There is then another cut. The camera swivels up to show a clear blue sky, rare in the film, heralding Macbeth's closing sentiment that "the time is free" (5.9.21). Such cinematic visualizations create a "retextualization" of the source text, adding to and releasing embedded meanings, almost as if the deferred possibilities of Derrida's différance were being caught.

The localization has a larger significance, too. Shakespeare forms a kind of a benchmark in Indian culture, so that local responses to his works determine their own distance from our past. On stage, there have been several successful adaptations of Macbeth performed in our own indigenous styles. But with Maqbool, we have reached another level of appropriation. Here, it is neither ethnicity nor authenticity that is aimed at, but rather, a postcolonial maturity in contemporizing the universality of Shakespeare into our own current concerns (Trivedi 2007). Maqbool re- writes Shakespeare in recognizably contemporary Indian terms. This third generational postcoloniality is reinforced through the persona of Vishal Bharadwaj, the director, scriptwriter, and music director of the film. A backwoods boy from the small town of Bijnor, UP, Bharadwaj, by the creativity shown in Maqbool, has released Shakespeare from the grip of the English medium school and made him a free-floating signifier available for anyone with the nous to take him on. The Indian people seem at last to have appropriated Shakespeare, like cricket, as an imperial icon and have done it well.

How to cite this article: Trivedi, Poonam. "'Mak[ing] . . . Strange / Even to the disposition that I owe': Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES

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1. All references to Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al., second edition (1997).

REFERENCES Company. 2002. Director Ram Gopal Varma, performers Ajay Devgan, Mohanlal. India. Varma Corporation. Maqbool. 2004. Director Vishal Bhardwaj, performers Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapoor, Piyush Mishra, Ajay Gehi, Ankur Vikal. India. Kaleidoscope Entertainment. Satya. 1998. Director Ram Gopal Varma, performers J. D. Chakravarthi, Urmila Matondkar. India. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. Second edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Trivedi, Poonam. 2007. "'Filmi' Shakespeare." Literature/Film Quarterly 35.2: 148-58.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Dharma and Violence in Mumbai

(/current) DAVID MASON, RHODES COLLEGE

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT Maqbool not only reimagines Macbeth as a struggle for power within (/archive) the hierarchy of organized crime in Mumbai, but it also reiterates the religious conflict of Shakespeare's own England. The film's use of dharma, a concept embodied in the insidious plotting of two corrupt, Hindu police officers, offers a colloquial counterpart to Shakespeare's sense of Fate. These policemen promote a "balance" of power between Muslim gangsters by circumscribing and insidiously directing the violence that the film's gangsters inflict on one another. By the end, the cause of the violence is obscured by the wretched assurance that maintaining a "balance" between forces assures an interminable cycle of violence.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

At first glance, Maqbool is a rather unimaginative retelling of the Macbeth story. As a means of preserving the violence of Shakespeare's tale in a twenty-first century setting, the film resorts to mobsters and their code of brutality-for-brutality, which has been endlessly mythologized by cinema. Hence, Miyan Maqbool, the film's title character, wrestles with the temptation to knock off the head of his crime family, and then, once he has committed the murder, confronts the whirlwind of death that

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naturally follows among unscrupulous men suddenly without a central authority to respect or to fear. Though a well-crafted film, including outstanding performances from all involved — notably, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Tabu, and Slumdog Millionaire's Irfan Khan in the title role — Maqbool's gangster motif demonstrates little ingenuity. However, what the film's gangster story lacks in originality is more than compensated for by its brilliant religious subtext, an examination of religious tension on the Indian subcontinent that cleverly re-invokes the Protestant-Catholic hostility of Shakespeare's England.

The greatest impediment to peace and stability in India for the past six decades has been violence — brutal, savage, relentless, Elizabethan — between Muslims and Hindus. In May 2008, an Islamic group claimed responsibility for several bombs that exploded in coordination in busy market areas of Jaipur, killing at least eighty. In 2002, more than one thousand Muslims in Gujarat were killed in widespread anti-Muslim riots following a fire on a train that killed a group of Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, itself the site of an ongoing religious dispute that led to bloody, India-wide Hindu-Muslim clashes in 1992. The recitation of ugliness might go on, but this brief list should be sufficient to establish a correlation between modern India and sixteenth-century England, where, between the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, thousands of Protestants and Catholics killed each other. Shakespeare's work is now commonly read as composed under the influence of this communal violence, and, whether one understands Shakespeare's world view as predominantly Catholic or Protestant, certainly Macbeth lends itself readily to interpretations that see in it a recapitulation of the cyclic storms of religiously fomented violence that had beset England during the time of Shakespeare's own memory.

For obvious reasons, Macbeth lends itself easily to new dramatizations of the experience of cyclical violence, but the real conflict in Maqbool — the conflict that promises to sustain itself quite independent of any of the individuals who promote it — exists on the fringes of the story. For the most part, members of Maqbool's gang are Muslims, and the gangsters' common religion is emphasized repeatedly: through the funeral they all attend early in the film, the ritual slaughter of a goat, to which the viewer's attention is drawn and which provides the premise for the first of Maqbool's guilty hallucinations, a henchman's refusal to drink alcohol, and various moments in which characters conduct themselves in prayer. Consequently, the death that races through the story seems very much the product of intra-communal, rather than inter-communal, conflict.

But the first image of the film, which recurs throughout, is a rectangular

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astrological diagram, a patently Hindu figure drawn on a foggy bus window by one of two policemen who seem to be in the pocket of the Muslim gangsters, and, indeed, are in the bus in order to execute a rat. A version of Macbeth's three hags, the two policemen "predict" Maqbool's ascension in the gang's hierarchy, and help to bring it about, under the cryptic justification of shakti ka samtulan, or a "balance of power." At first, it seems as though their primary concern is the preservation of Maqbool's gang; after all, they execute a traitor within the first few minutes of the film. But by the end, when they set free one of Maqbool's principal rivals, Riyaz Boti — who, ultimately, shoots Maqbool in the back — it becomes clear that the "balance" the corrupt officers have pursued all along is merely a cynical method of law enforcement. As long as the gangsters kill each other, everyone else will live more securely. Both officers are explicitly Hindu. Besides their personal investment in astrology, both officers wear their hair in shikhas, tufts of hair left growing from the crown of the head as a sign of Vaishnava devotion. We find, then, that the intra-communal violence of the movie, by which Muslim kills Muslim, is inter-communal after all, but insidiously so, as it has been instigated and nourished by the Hindu authorities so that its bearing is only inward, toward a small, blind Muslim community at the center of the story from an arc inscribed and veiled by a Hindu establishment.

These Hindu policemen and the control they exercise ultimately rise in the film to the level of ineluctable fate. Besides filling the function of Macbeth's witches by reading astrological diagrams to foretell Maqbool's rise, the officers' amoral manipulation of circumstances so as to promote "balance" identifies them plainly as agents of dharma, a concept as central to Hinduism as its meaning is obscure. Though the term's roots in the early development of Brahmanical Hinduism have to do with the proper conduct of ritual, it is popularly understood nowadays as the natural (which is to say, the proper) order of the universe, maintained through a balance of all its properties. In the narratives of Hinduism, divine power sometimes enters the world destructively in order to restore balance and preserve dharma. By invoking "balance" and by promoting it through their own murderous activity, Maqbool's Hindu officers not only perceive the workings of fate, but identify themselves with it. After the cascade of murder has begun, one of the officers warns his partner not to eat Saturn, when he finds him picking over an astrological chart constructed of sweets, since Saturn eats people. "Who does it want to swallow?" asks the officer, chewing on a piece of the chart. His partner replies, smiling, "Who do you want eaten?" They are agents of divine power, easing the world of an imbalance of evil. http://borrowers.uga.edu/1421/show Page 3 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(06 PM

Consequently, it may be that the religious subtext of Maqbool valorizes Hinduism. While Muslim gangsters thrash ignominiously in petty vendettas, extortion, alcohol, and illicit sex, Hindu authority overcomes the mean sins of mortality through cooperation with the transcendent forces of existence. On the other hand, the film may be exerting a critical view of Hinduism's conceit. Perhaps we should find the officers' unprincipled machinations distasteful. The presumption of the Hindu right in India, the notion that Hindus ought, ultimately, to exercise final authority, must surely share the blame for the communal violence that persistently erupts on the subcontinent — which is only to say that Maqbool's religious vision is complex. Considering the complexity of the religious circumstances of Shakespeare's England, Macbeth is an especially appropriate muse. If we cannot determine exactly what position this film takes with respect to its religious communities, we are also still arguing about whether Shakespeare's plays exhibit a preference for Catholicism or the Church of England.

How to cite this article: Mason, David. "Dharma and Violence in Mumbai." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

REFERENCES Maqbool. 2004. Director Vishal Bhardwaj, performers Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapoor, Piyush Mishra, Ajay Gehi, Ankur Vikal. India. Kaleidoscope Entertainment.

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What If Lady Macbeth Were Pregnant?: (/current) Amativeness, Procreation, and Future Dynasty in Maqbool (/previous) WILLIAM C. FERLEMAN, OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY (/about)

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES (/archive)

ABSTRACT In Maqbool, Vishal Bhardwaj's unusually perceptive rewriting of Macbeth, an emphasis on Macbeth's future dynasty is rather conspicuously developed and reinforced (Trivedi 2007, 153). Murder and betrayal are not of much consequence in the modern Mumbai criminal underworld; these acts are quite simply part of the Mafia trade, and Macbeth/Maqbool is from the start an ignoble, cold-blooded murderer. It is love (or rather, sexual desire) and not treacherous murder that is the predominant transgression in Maqbool. The transgressive love affair between Macbeth/Maqbool and Lady Macbeth/Nimmi (including Nimmi's scandalous pregnancy) is developed as a key motif in the film. Maqbool seeks to combat the policemen's prophecy that Kaka's (Banquo's) children will attain political rule in the future. Maqbool fights for his own future dynasty and is not seriously concerned about his personal political rule within the Mumbai gang. The film concerns forbidden sexuality, procreation, and Maqbool's desperate but determined hope for a future dynasty.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue,

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edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

Freud claimed that in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Macbeth is not grossly concerned about his personal political ambition; Macbeth is perhaps primarily preoccupied with his future dynasty. "Macbeth is incensed by this decree of destiny," Freud writes. "He is not content with the satisfaction of his own ambition, he desires to found a dynasty and not to have murdered for the benefit of strangers" (Freud 1991, 32). Freud's proposition that Macbeth acts mainly, but not exclusively, out of concern for his future dynasty is present in Shakespeare's play, albeit in rudimentary and marginal form. But in Maqbool, Vishal Bhardwaj's unusually perceptive and seminal retextualization of Macbeth, an emphasis on Macbeth's future dynasty is conspicuously developed and reinforced. Poonam Trivedi claims that the film is a "retextualization" because it not only augments Shakespeare's play by reimagining critical scenes, but also because the film, though admittedly still an appropriation, sufficiently mimics or contains much of the mythos, character, and imagery of Shakespeare's play: "For what is strikingly significant about the film is how much of the original text is retained, and engaged with, within the adaptation, in terms of the plot, character, imagery and not just theme and atmosphere" (Trivedi 2007, 153). She points out that the film's retextualization comments on a "festering urban culture"; that the film too aligns itself with postmodernist, self-conscious filmic practice by alluding to the realities of Bollywood cinema and its ostensible nexus to the Mumbai criminal underworld; and, moreover, that the film aligns itself with the genres of both the "Bollywood gangster and the Muslim social film" (154).

Beyond these themes, I think, Maqbool develops a different dimension of Macbeth by positing a fecund, pregnant Lady Macbeth alongside the curious conception that Macbeth could probably, if ironically, be "selfless," insofar as he seeks to secure his future dynasty at his own peril. Murder and betrayal are not of much consequence in the Mumbai criminal underworld; these activities are simply part of the Mafia trade, and Maqbool is from the start an ignoble, cold-blooded murderer. Instead, sexual desire is the predominant transgression in Maqbool. The transgressive love affair between Macbeth/Maqbool and Lady Macbeth/Nimmi is set in relief as Maqbool seeks to combat the policemen's prophecy that Kaka's (Banquo's) children shall attain future political rule. Maqbool is not seriously concerned about his personal, self- centered leadership within the Mumbai gang; rather, he unconsciously fights to found his own future dynasty. Maqbool concerns forbidden http://borrowers.uga.edu/1422/show Page 2 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(06 PM

sexuality, to be sure, but only as it refers to a necessary instance of procreation in order to effectuate Maqbool's desperate, but determined hope for a future dynasty.

This is evident in the first few scenes of Maqbool. Macbeth aspires to be prince; his energy is motivated by a specific occurrence of lust for political power; Maqbool's aspirations, however, are not centered on the political here and now, but on the policemen's prophecy concerning Kaka's future rise to political rule and prestige: that is, Kaka's future dynasty. The two policemen astrologers first note that Maqbool will rule the Mumbai gang, of which he is a part, as "King of Kings." But the crafty policemen later take care to warn Maqbool personally that he will reign as Mafia don for only six months. (Incidentally, this critical timeline is absent from Shakespeare's play.) The policemen unequivocally relate that Kaka and, in particular, Guddu, will attain power within the gang. The policemen state that Fleance/Guddu's astrological sign is auspicious: "He's the antidote to Miyan." Maqbool listens to the policemen's prophecy concerning his own political rise, but is not particularly interested; Maqbool apprehends such information incredulously. He claims that if one of the policemen told the truth, he would cut out his tongue. But when Maqbool learns from the oracular policemen that Kaka's line, and not his own, will produce future political dominance, he becomes inordinately concerned. A close-up of Maqbool's face appears; his eyes give him away. Macbeth, however, acts differently when he learns from the three witches that Banquo will beget future kings. The Third Witch states to Banquo: "Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none" (1.3.65). Such intelligence notwithstanding, Macbeth becomes lustful about his imminent political rule, not his future dynasty. While Macbeth interprets the witches' prophecy as evidence of his future rise, Maqbool interprets the policemen's prophecy as evidence of his future demise. Therefore, Maqbool strives to conquer the prophecy of doom by narrowing his actions to matters of procreation and future dynasty.

This is best understood in the context of the interpolations concerning Lady Macbeth and Nimmi. Nimmi's subtle, but nonetheless aggressive, sexuality cannot be overstated — the figure of Nimmi (skillfully acted by Tabu) is extraordinarily comely, but also demanding and conniving. Nimmi's Lady Macbeth is indebted to Sarah Siddons's conception of the role and holds "all the charms and graces of personal beauty" (Wilders 2004, 21). The lover of a Mumbai underworld don, Nimmi cunningly tempts Maqbool into an illicit and amorous love affair, the result of which is her pregnancy. In one memorable scene, Nimmi manipulatively states to Maqbool, "There are 12 moles on my body. Do you want to count http://borrowers.uga.edu/1422/show Page 3 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(06 PM

them?" In her first scene with Maqbool, Nimmi voices a similarly lubricious, enticing line: "Is that all you're thirsty for?" In Shakespeare (and in Polanski) Macbeth indeed "murdered himself when he murdered Duncan" (Rothwell 2000, 156); in the film, Maqbool murders himself when he agrees to "fall" in love with Nimmi. Maqbool fails to pay heed to the don's wise advice: "Love is a disease." The Macbeths are, ironically, a rather tranquil and committed couple. They quarrel briefly; only the implication exists that Lady Macbeth has a defined sexual authority over Macbeth. Maqbool is quite another matter. The film centers its attention on courtship: Maqbool is unmarried and ostensibly uninterested in women; he must be seduced into a transgressive affair by Nimmi. Their relationship is unstable because Maqbool is understandably reluctant to love Nimmi, the don's mistress, and because he suspects that Nimmi will perform a substantive role in his destruction.

Macbeth is probably the Shakespearean character with the most vivid imagination; his fantasy-making is, in fact, responsible for his fate (Bloom 1991, 1). Macbeth's vision concerns the transgressive murder of Duncan. Maqbool, on the other hand, is enslaved to his erotic dreams. Maqbool imagines the don and Nimmi making love and is noticeably haunted by the fantasy. He has disturbing visions of the don kissing Nimmi's feet and sensually touching her fine, dark, long hair. These dreams directly relate to human procreation and also dynasty. Maqbool's dreams or images, ironically, are neither unreal nor unnatural: they betray actual, if unseen, events in the film. In one scene, Nimmi points a gun at Maqbool and compels him to profess his love for her. This phantasmagoria is a retextualization of Macbeth's dreadful dagger scene; in Maqbool, however, a gun replaces the dagger, and Nimmi wields the gun. Nimmi fires the gun and misses slightly, nearly killing Maqbool. This dream sequence insinuates that Nimmi will lead to Maqbool's death. Maqbool therefore has every reason to fear Nimmi. Like Roman Polanski's use of Shakespeare's metaphor of the "caged bear," in which the bear is, partially, "an ironic reminder that Macbeth will become his own trapped animal" (Crowl 2008, 148), the loaded gun in Nimmi's hand speaks to Maqbool's helplessness relative to the intimate, intimidating presence of Nimmi's seductive sexuality. Nimmi's power in this scene is intense; however, it is also considerably volatile and deranged, suggesting her own death. (She will perish due to a combination of giving birth and guilt, but she does not commit suicide.) Nimmi's sexuality intimates that she is fertile and will soon become pregnant; the gun emblematizes her sexual power over Maqbool, the gun/dagger being pure, ironic phallic symbolism (Donaldson 1998, 103). In contrast to Lady Macbeth's willed barrenness ("Stop up th'access and passage to remorse" [1.5.42]), Nimmi http://borrowers.uga.edu/1422/show Page 4 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(06 PM

is remarkably fecund (on this topic, see Adelman 1992, 135). This scene epitomizes sexual duality and, then, the motif of human procreation. Nimmi hands the gun back to Maqbool; Maqbool batters her and calls her a "whore." In so doing, Maqbool cedes to Nimmi a singular, sexual power over him. Thereafter Nimmi and Maqbool embrace, with a picturesque "body" of water in the background.

Maqbool admirably exploits two critical episodes in Macbeth to underscore the themes of sexuality and procreation. On the subject of Lady Macbeth's imagined infanticide, Macbeth responds: "Bring forth men-children only, / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males" (1.7.72-74). Nimmi embodies this romanticized image of the masculine-maternal breeder, becoming pregnant and fulfilling Macbeth/Maqbool's dynastic aim: "to have children himself, children who can succeed him" (Freud 1991, 32). The film anatomizes a maternal Lady Macbeth as Nimmi produces Maqbool's heir. One may refer to Nietzsche's Zarathustra on the subject of the production of the male warrior: "Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly" (Nietzsche 1969, 91). To be sure, Nimmi's prime role as a woman is to produce, via pregnancy, Maqbool's "warrior" heir. She threatens to abort Maqbool's child, but refrains from doing so; rather, Maqbool is the babe who is annihilated: he is rendered "selfless." Maqbool recognizes that as a new era dawns, he will be assassinated just as the don was assassinated. His rule reaches its nadir as he becomes painfully aware that Macduff/Boti will murder him. Maqbool does not attempt to quarrel with Boti when Maqbool leaves the hospital after visiting his baby son. Maqbool willingly dies, unlike the unyielding Macbeth, in accord with that truthful part of the policemen's prophecy, that his rule will be limited to six months. But Maqbool successfully produces a male heir who could frustrate Guddu's leadership. The policemen's prophecy is incomplete: the tricky, quizzical coppers, who are "both corrupt and bumbling," neglect to mention Maqbool's male heir and his future dynasty in their prophecy; their objective is to maintain a balance of power in Mumbai and "seduce the chieftains/gangsters into liquidating each other" (Trivedi 2007, 157). Maqbool's son — assuredly not the embodiment of the "good" — is set to become another future Mumbai gangland murderer — indeed, his proper, bloodthirsty heir.

How to cite this article: Ferleman, William C. "What If Lady Macbeth Were Pregnant?: Amativeness, Procreation, and Future Dynasty in Maqbool." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). http://borrowers.uga.edu/1422/show Page 5 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/9/20, 10(06 PM

Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

REFERENCES Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge. Bhardwaj, Vishal. dir. 2004. Maqbool. Performers Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapoor, Piyush Mishra, Ajay Gehi, Ankur Vikal. India. Kaleidoscope Entertainment. Bloom, Harold. 1991. Introduction. In Major Literary Characters: Macbeth. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. 1-5. Crowl, Samuel. 2008. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: W. W. Norton. Donaldson, Peter S. 1998. "Olivier, Hamlet, and Freud." In Shakespeare on Film. Edited by Robert Shaughnessy. New York: St. Martin's Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1991. "Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytic Work." In Major Literary Characters: Macbeth. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. 31-34. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin. Polanski, Roman. dir. 1971. Macbeth. Performers Jon Finch, Francesca Annis, Nicholas Selby, Martin Shaw, Terence Bayler, John Stride. UK/USA. Columbia Pictures. Rothwell, Kenneth S. 2000. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Macbeth. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trivedi, Poonam. 2007. "'Filmi' Shakespeare." Literature/Film Quarterly 35.2: 148-58. Wilders, John. 2004. Introduction. Shakespeare in Production: Macbeth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-75.

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ABSTRACT | REFERENCES | TOP

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The Banquet: A Glossary

(/current) YA-CHEN CHEN, CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK

(/about) ABSTRACT

(/archive) While parallels between The Banquet and Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays seem easy to spot for viewers with an eye for them, the Chinese intertexts are opaque and more challenging to grasp, as several contributors demonstrate in this collection. Furthermore, while the cultural and historical contexts of Maqbool are readily available in English (through essays here and elsewhere), the same could not be said of The Banquet, a film with equally rich allusions. This section examines the Chinese literary and historical traditions that inform director Feng Xiaogang's interpretation of Hamlet, focusing on three key elements in the film: Empress Wan as a parallel to Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty; the film's allusion to the sword of the Maiden of Yueh; and the banquet as a redaction of the historical "banquet in Hongmen." As an extended glossary, this section is designed to elucidate these connections for readers interested in the Chinese background of the film.

Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).

EMPRESS WAN AND EMPRESS WU ZETIAN

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At a press conference, Zhang Ziyi (the actress playing Empress Wan in The Banquet) associated her character with the historical Empress Wu Zetian (624-705 A.D.), the only female ruler in imperial Chinese history.1 Wu Zetian was a spouse of the Emperor Taizong, Li Shimin (599-649 A.D.), of the Tang Dynasty. In the film, Empress Wan is also the first emperor's spouse. Historically, Li Shimin's son fell in love with Wu Zetian; in the film, the first emperor's son, Prince Wu Luan, also falls in love with Empress Wan. Like Wu Zetian, who was a concubine for two emperors, Empress Wan marries both the first emperor and Emperor Li. Last, but not least, Wu Zetian turned herself into a female ruler; Empress Wan follows her path. Interestingly, "Wan" is the given name of Wu Zetian's favorite female court official: Shangguang Wan'er (664-710 A.D.), a talented poet serving in the court who drafted imperial edicts for the empress.

THE SWORD OF THE MAIDEN OF YUEH Historically, it was not uncommon for women in the Tang Dynasty to study martial arts,2 and the film portrays Empress Wan as a woman who excelled in martial arts and swordplay. In this context, the film's use of the yuenü jian (the sword of the Maiden of Yueh) as a central symbol of the forces of history draws on King Goujian of Yue's campaign to preserve his country in the Spring and Autumn Period.3 According to folklore, a young woman from the State of Yueh meets a mysterious old man and is given a sword. An ape in the forest fights with her and in so doing teaches her the skills of swordplay. Later on, this woman passes on her skills to King Goujian, who names the sword "Maiden of Yueh."4 The story has been reworked into many genres, including Jin Yong's (Louis Cha) popular martial-arts novella, "The Sword of Yueh Maiden". (For a brief discussion, see Rebecca Chapman's essay in this collection.) King Goujian is best known for his quest for vengeance; having lost his nation to King Fuchai of Wu in 494 B.C., he suffered a great deal of shame and physical travails before defeating Fuchai and reclaiming his lost lands. Although historical records do not show clearly the connection between the legend of the sword of the Maiden of Yueh and the historical King Goujian, refined weapons, including "The Sword of the King of Yue" (yuewang jia; 55.7 cm in length and 4.6 cm in width) were excavated in Hubei, China in December 1965. Prince Wu Luan's sojourn in the Yue region in The Banquet clearly draws on this widely circulated legend of revenge.

THE BANQUET IN HONGMEN

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The Banquet draws on another event in Chinese history, the hongmen yan (the banquet in Hongmen) in 206 B.C. Towards the end of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.), Liu Bang (247-195 B.C.) and Xiang Yü (232- 202 B.C.) were two of the most influential military generals vying for control of China. Xiang invited Liu to a banquet in Hongmen and attempted to kill him. Arrangements were made for swordplay entertainment; the dancer was charged with the mission of killing Liu while entertaining him. Despite his knowledge of the scheme, Liu attended the banquet, ultimately using a bathroom visit as an excuse to leave the dining hall and escape. The murderous swordplay, disguised as entertainment, in the film brings to mind this ill-begotten banquet.

How to cite this article: Chen, Ya-chen. "The Banquet: A Glossary." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexa Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/).

NOTES 1. Wu Zetian was originally a low-ranked concubine of Li Shimin, the Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (599-649 A.D.) and became a nun after Li Shimin's death. Yet her beauty amazed Li Shimin's son, Li Zhi, the Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty (628-683 A.D.) when he visited the temple where she was a nun. Li Zhi fell in love with her and brought her back from the temple to the royal palace. He turned her into his concubine and later into his queen in 655 A.D. Wu Zetian gave birth to two emperors who inherited Li Zhi's royal throne, Li Xian and Li Dan. After her degradation of Li Dan, she proclaimed herself a female ruler and named her short-lived dynasty "Da Zhou," "Wu Zhou," and "Nan Zhou" in 690 A.D. See Jonathan Clements, Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced, and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God (2007) and Dora Shu-fang Dien, Empress Wu Zetian in Fiction and in History (2003). 2. Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi (History of Chinese Women's Life) (1984), p. 118. 3. Paul Cohen, Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth- Century China (2008). 4. The English subtitles use "Yueh," while standard pinyin Romanization of the Chinese characters should be Yue.

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REFERENCES Chen, Dongyuan. 1984. Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi (History of Chinese Women's Life). Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore. Clements, Jonathan. 2007. Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced, and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God. Stroud: Sutton. Cohen, Paul. 2008. Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dien, Dora Shu-fang. 2003. Empress Wu Zetian in Fiction and in History. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers. Ye Yan (The Banquet). 2006. Director Xiaogang Feng, performers Ziyi Zhang, You Ge, Daniel Wu, Xun Zhou. Huayi Brothers.

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