Actes Des Congrès De La Société Française Shakespeare, 34 | 2016, “Jeunesses De Shakespeare” [Online], Online Since 29 February 2016, Connection on 08 July 2021

Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare

34 | 2016 Jeunesses de Shakespeare Young Shakespeare

Laetitia Sansonetti (dir.)

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/3626 DOI: 10.4000/shakespeare.3626 ISSN: 2271-6424

Publisher Société Française Shakespeare

Electronic reference Laetitia Sansonetti (dir.), Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 34 | 2016, “Jeunesses de Shakespeare” [Online], Online since 29 February 2016, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https:// journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/3626; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.3626

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Avant-propos Laetitia Sansonetti

Foreword Laetitia Sansonetti

Pièces de jeunesse?

Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing: An Early Diptych? Sophie Chiari

Young Shakespeare/Late Shakespeare: The Case of Pericles Lucy Munro

Jeunesse des personnages

Enter Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet, 1589 Terri Bourus

Learning to be Boys: Reading the Lessons of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Marston’s What You Will Edel Lamb

« So young, and so untender? » : le don du père à la jeune génération dans Le Roi Lear Anne-Kathrin Marquardt

Shakespeare pour la jeunesse, ou l'éternelle jeunesse de Shakespeare

“Appertaining to thy young days”: The End of the Academe in Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Curriculum for the Future Daniel Bender

“A Classic for the Elders”: Marketing Charles and Mary Lamb in the Nineteenth Century Kate Harvey

Shakespeare dans Candy : mais est-ce vraiment pour les enfants ? Sarah Hatchuel and Ronan Ludot-Vlasak

Hamlet dans la culture populaire : le cas du Stick Figure Hamlet de Dan Carroll Pierre Kapitaniak

YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE GREAT BARD!You never expected it to be easy did you, Marcia? Marcia Williams

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Avant-propos

Laetitia Sansonetti

Le pari jeune

1 Dans leur texte de cadrage pour le Congrès 2015 de la Société Française Shakespeare, « Jeunesses de Shakespeare », Dominique Goy-Blanquet et François Laroque évoquaient le « pari jeune » que représente l’œuvre de Shakespeare.

2 Les participants au congrès ont tenu le pari en proposant des communications, réunies ici dans leur version revue et corrigée, qui abordent différents sens de la relation entre Shakespeare et la jeunesse : la jeunesse du dramaturge lui-même lorsqu’il compose certaines de ses pièces, mais aussi la jeunesse de ses personnages, car les deux questions sont souvent liées, sans oublier le rôle que peut jouer un corpus shakespearien devenu « canonique » (mais pas fossilisé, au contraire) auprès de la jeunesse de nos jours (ce que l’on pourrait appeler l’éternelle jeunesse de Shakespeare).

3 Différents enjeux émergent et s’entremêlent, recoupant ces trois sens. La jeunesse est perçue comme l’âge de l’apprentissage, où le caractère et les facultés cognitives ne sont pas encore pleinement développés et ont besoin de la supervision d’un adulte pour se former. Les personnages jeunes sont donc dans une minorité qui peut être source de comédie (à leurs dépens) ou d’inquiétude, mais qui peut aussi les pousser à se rebeller contre l’ordre établi en se moquant des normes imposées par leurs aînés. De même, les jeunes lecteurs sont souvent considérés comme insuffisamment capables de comprendre toute la complexité de l’œuvre de Shakespeare et se voient proposer des versions qui ne correspondent parfois ni à leurs attentes, ni à leurs besoins. Des contre- exemples récents montrent que la transmission des pièces à un jeune public peut renouveler la réception de ces textes canoniques. La jeunesse du dramaturge lorsqu’il compose certaines de ses œuvres est placée sous le signe de la même ambiguïté : selon une vision téléologique qui ferait des pièces de la fin de carrière le couronnement de son art dramatique, le « jeune Shakespeare » serait-il encore un apprenti dont les productions manquent de maturité ? Le rapport au temps de la composition, qui inclut des processus de collaboration et de révision, mais aussi à la conception du temps telle

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qu’elle apparaît dans les pièces, remet en question une interprétation trop simpliste de « l’évolution » shakespearienne.

4 Le rapport de la jeunesse à la maturité, entre subordination et rébellion, invite à s’interroger sur ce qui définit la jeunesse, qui fait son identité, par rapport à ces générations précédentes qui entendent lui servir de modèle – point de vue selon lequel Shakespeare est nécessairement toujours notre aîné. Les codes du passé n’agissent pas nécessairement comme des carcans dont il faudrait se libérer, mais peuvent aussi servir à la construction d’une identité propre, fluide, toujours en phase de redéfinition, par le biais de la réappropriation, voire du détournement.

5 Ces codes, justement, peuvent être intellectuels ou moraux, mais ils sont avant tout, dans le cadre du spectacle vivant qu’est le théâtre, esthétiques. Face à la difficulté de la langue, c’est souvent par le biais du recours à l’image, non pas comme procédé de substitution, mais comme médium complémentaire, que passe la réappropriation, comme un retour aux sources de la scène, où les corps donnent vie et voix au texte.

Des pièces de jeunesse ?

6 Sophie Chiari s’intéresse à une pièce dont la datation est plus que problématique, puisque la pièce elle-même, « Peines d’amour récompensées », ne nous est pas parvenue, et n’a peut-être jamais existé. En proposant de penser Peines d’amour perdues comme la première partie d’un diptyque de jeunesse dont la seconde partie serait Beaucoup de bruit pour rien, Chiari nous invite à nous interroger sur la notion de suite. Il ne s’agirait plus de considérer des événements dans leur consécution chronologique mais selon une forme de complémentarité logique.

7 Lucy Munro propose une étude minutieuse et fascinante de Périclès, pièce dont la datation a été estimée diversement selon les époques : d’abord considérée comme une pièce de jeunesse, elle est maintenant rangée parmi les pièces de fin de carrière. Munro fait ressortir les enjeux textuels inhérents aux variations de datation, en lien notamment avec les questions de collaboration, mais aussi l’évolution du personnage de Marina en fonction du texte établi par les éditeurs. L’analyse de Munro permet ainsi de repenser l’opposition entre pièces de jeunesse et pièces plus tardives.

Jeunesse des personnages

8 L’essai de Terri Bourus articule remarquablement le débat au sujet de l’âge de Hamlet à celui de la datation de la pièce dans ses diverses formes grâce à une étude qui mêle une analyse textuelle des variantes d’une édition à l’autre et une approche empathique des sentiments liés à la jeunesse. La possibilité d’un Hamlet adolescent, craignant de devoir partager son héritage avec un éventuel demi-frère que pourrait avoir sa mère encore jeune avec son oncle, ouvre ainsi de nouvelles perspectives.

9 Edel Lamb s’intéresse à deux pièces mettant en scène de jeunes garçons placés en situation d’apprentissage, Peines d’amour perdues de Shakespeare et What You Will de John Marston, dans lesquelles elle analyse les processus de formation des identités genrées à l’époque élisabéthaine. Elle met en regard le statut de ces personnages avec celui des jeunes acteurs de la même période pour jeter un nouvel éclairage sur la

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représentation des difficultés à parvenir à l’âge d’homme adulte dans ces deux pièces, mais aussi sur le talent nécessaire à jouer les rôles d’adolescents.

10 En s’appuyant sur les recherches dans le domaine de l’anthropologie du don, l’article d’Anne-Kathrin Marquardt montre que le don si particulier que fait Lear de son royaume à ses filles dans Le Roi Lear cause un conflit générationnel entre les parents et les enfants. L’analyse permet de repenser l’opposition entre d’une part les deux filles aînées qui ont reçu chacune une moitié du royaume et se montrent ingrates, Regan et Goneril, et de l’autre celle qui, accusée d’ingratitude, n’a rien reçu du tout, la plus jeune des trois, Cordélia.

Shakespeare pour la jeunesse, ou l’éternelle jeunesse de Shakespeare

11 Que peut dire « Shakespeare » aux jeunes, et comment ?

12 C’est cette question qui guide Daniel Bender dans son approche pragmatique, ou pour utiliser son propre terme « pracadémique », de Peines d’amour perdues. Pour combler l’écart entre la langue de Shakespeare et les préoccupations quotidiennes des étudiants américains, il propose d’utiliser des situations susceptibles de trouver un écho dans la vie quotidienne des jeunes de nos jours comme base à des activités visant à développer des compétences aussi nécessaires au vingt-et-unième siècle qu’elles l’étaient du temps de Shakespeare : l’éloquence, la gestion de l’argent et le contrôle de sa sexualité.

13 Kate Harvey retrace la fortune d’un ouvrage qui a fait découvrir les pièces de Shakespeare à des générations d’enfants et semble avoir conditionné le genre même de l’adaptation pour enfants des pièces de Shakespeare jusqu’à une date récente, les Tales from Shakespeare de Charles et Mary Lamb. Elle fait notamment ressortir la distribution des rôles entre petits garçons et petites filles envisagée par les auteurs, distribution qui fait écho au statut subalterne auquel a longtemps été cantonnée Mary Lamb elle-même.

14 Sarah Hatchuel et Ronan Ludot-Vlasak s’emparent d’une série culte de la fin des années 1970, l’anime Candy, pour en analyser les références complexes aux œuvres de Shakespeare, mais aussi à leurs adaptations cinématographiques les plus célèbres, références qui, loin de n’avoir qu’une fonction décorative, construisent en réalité une véritable éthique de la représentation théâtrale. Si les pièces de Shakespeare aident les personnages adolescents de Candy à devenir adultes, Hatchuel et Ludot-Vlasak avancent qu’il en va de même pour la série auprès de son jeune public.

15 Pierre Kapitaniak s’intéresse à une autre forme d’adaptation dont le public ne serait pas non plus une « jeunesse » figée, mais plutôt de jeunes adultes capables d’apprécier tout l’humour du créateur du webcomic Stick Figure Hamlet. Dan Carroll joue en effet avec des codes visuels proches du dessin d’enfant (les bonshommes-allumettes) qu’il mélange aux codes générationnels de sa propre jeunesse (les figurines du jeu vidéo Pac-Man). Kapitaniak montre que cette œuvre, depuis son mode de financement (participatif) jusqu’à sa diffusion (via internet), correspond à une approche résolument « jeune » des adaptations shakespeariennes.

16 Marcia Williams est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages illustrés dans lesquels elle met en images les pièces de Shakespeare, qu’elle imagine représentées au théâtre face à des spectateurs curieux, fascinés, et parfois un peu polissons auxquels ses jeunes lecteurs peuvent s’identifier. Avec passion (et beaucoup d’humour), elle explique sa démarche,

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faisant elle aussi référence aux Lamb, dont l’entreprise a servi à motiver sa propre volonté de proposer à un jeune public une version des pièces susceptible de procurer avant tout du plaisir à la lecture.

AUTEUR

LAETITIA SANSONETTI Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

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Foreword

Laetitia Sansonetti

A “trust in youth” challenge

1 In their rationale for “Young Shakespeare”, the 2015 Conference of Société Française Shakespeare, Dominique Goy-Blanquet and François Laroque called Shakespeare’s works “a ‘trust in youth’ challenge.”

2 The speakers met the challenge with papers (gathered here in their revised versions) tackling various meanings of the relation between Shakespeare and youth: the playwright’s own young age when he wrote some of his plays, but also the age of his younger characters, for the two issues are often linked, as wells as the role a canonised (but not fossilised, far from it) Shakespearean corpus can play for today’s youth – which shows that Shakespeare remains forever young.

3 Several interconnected themes emerge. Youth is considered to be a period of learning, when character and cognitive faculties are not fully developed yet and need supervision from an adult to mature. Young characters are in a minority that can be a trigger for comedy (at their expense) or anxiety, but it can also lead them to rebel against the established order by making fun of the norms imposed by their elders. Likewise, young readers are often taken to lack the skills needed to understand Shakespeare’s complex works and thus are sometimes offered versions that do not meet their expectations or cater to their needs. Recent counter-examples have shown that retelling the plays for a young audience can help reinvent the reception of those revered texts. The playwright’s own youth when he composed some of his plays is equally ambiguous: seen in a teleological perspective that would look at the later plays as the crowning achievement of his dramatic art, “young Shakespeare” might still be an apprentice whose output lacks maturity… Taking into account the time needed for composition, which involves processes of collaboration and revision, but also the conception of time that features in the plays, allows to question interpretations of Shakespeare’s “evolution” that would be simplistic.

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4 The relation of youth to maturity, between subordination and rebelliousness, opens up a path of enquiry to determine what makes youth, what defines its identity, with regard to the older generations that intend to serve as its role models – a point of view according to which Shakespeare will remain our elder. The codes inherited from the past do not have to feel like straightjackets out of which we might need to wriggle free, they can help build a fluid, independent identity, always redefining itself through appropriation and even misappropriation.

5 Those very codes can be intellectual or moral ones, but above all they refer to the live show that is drama, and as such are of an aesthetic nature. Faced with a difficult language, appropriations often resort to images, not as a substitution device but as a complementary medium, thus harking back to the experience of the stage itself, where bodies give texts a voice that allows them to live.

Early plays?

6 Sophie Chiari tackles a play which is quite difficult to date, since no copy of “Love’s Labour’s Won” has survived – and none may ever have existed. By suggesting we should consider Love’s Labour’s Lost to be the first half of an early diptych whose second half would be Much Ado about Nothing, Chiari invites us to rethink our ideas about the concept of series. It is no longer about events seen in their chronological order but according to a form of logical complementariness.

7 Lucy Munro offers a fascinating meticulous study of Pericles, showing that the play has been dated diversely at different times: it was first taken to be an early play, but has now joined the category of the late plays. Munro highlights what is at stake for the editing processes with such variations in dating, as far as collaboration is concerned, but also with regard to the character of Marina, depending on the text established by the respective editors. Munro’s analysis thus reshuffles the opposition between early and late plays.

Young characters

8 Terri Bourus’ essay brings together the debate around Hamlet’s age and the controversies over the dating of the play itself in its various versions, thanks to a study of textual variants from one edition to the next combined with an empathetic approach to feelings associated with youth. That Hamlet might actually be a teenager worrying about a potential half-sibling born of his mother by his uncle, with whom he would have to share his inheritance, is a thought-provoking perspective.

9 Edel Lamb studies Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and John Marston’s What You Will, two plays in which young boys are staged in learning contexts. She analyses how gendered identities were shaped in Early Modern England but also, by focussing on the status of the period’s young actors, she shows how the two plays highlight both the difficulties for boys to become adults and the talent necessary to play teenage roles.

10 Building upon anthropological studies of gift-giving, Anne-Kathrin Marquardt shows that the peculiar type of gift bestowed by Lear upon his daughters in King Lear triggers a generational conflict between parents and children. Her analysis allows to rethink the opposition between the elder daughters who were each given one half of the kingdom

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and both prove ungrateful, and the younger one, Cordelia, who was accused of being ungrateful and thus given nothing at all.

Shakespeare for young people – Shakespeare, forever young

11 How can “Shakespeare” speak to young people?

12 In order to find an answer to that question, Daniel Bender chooses a pragmatic – or, to use his own term, “pracademic” – approach to Love’s Labour’s Lost. To bridge the gap between Shakespeare’s language and US students’ everyday preoccupations, Bender suggests using situations that are likely to strike a chord with today’s young people in order to design classroom activities aimed at developing skills that are as necessary today as they were in Shakespeare’s time: speaking eloquently, managing one’s money efficiently, and controlling one’s sexuality.

13 Kate Harvey surveys the reception of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, a book that brought “Shakespeare” to generations of children and was so popular that it seems to have conditioned the very genre of “Shakespeare for children” until a very recent date. She highlights the gendered distribution of roles between little boy readers and little girl readers that was planned by the authors, establishing an interesting parallel with Mary Lamb’s own subordinate form of authorship.

14 The subject of Sarah Hatchuel and Ronan Ludot-Vlasak’s article is the cult anime Candy Candy from the late 1970s, in which they study the complex references to Shakespeare’s plays, but also to their most famous film adaptations. They show that those references, far from being merely decorative, actually build a proper ethics of performance. Just as Shakespeare’s plays help Candy Candy’s teenage characters become adults, they argue, so does the series help its own young audience grow up.

15 Pierre Kapitaniak’s study of the webcomic Stick Figure Hamlet reveals another type of adaptation aimed not at a static “youth” but at an audience of young adults fully capable of appreciating the humour of its creator. Dan Carroll plays with visual codes close to children’s drawings (with his stick figures), mixing them with codes from his own youth (figures from the Pac-Man video game). As Kapitaniak shows, from its financing strategies (through crowdfunding) to its broadcasting means (on the Internet), this work endorses a decisively “young” approach to adapting Shakespeare.

16 Marcia Williams has authored many comic books in which she retells Shakespeare’s plays, imagining them staged at the theatre in front of an audience of curious, fascinated (and sometimes naughty) spectators with whom her young readers can identify. With her typical passion (and sense of humour), she explains her outlook, referring to the Lambs, whose endeavour proved an incentive for her to provide young audiences with retellings of the plays that would first and foremost be good reads.

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AUTHOR

LAETITIA SANSONETTI Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

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Pièces de jeunesse? Early or Late?

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Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing: An Early Diptych?

Sophie Chiari

1 Love’s Labour’s Won is something of a mystery in the Shakespearean canon. It is not the only one, though, since the lost play Cardenio, by Shakespeare and Fletcher, is also problematic. Yet, we do know that “Cardenno” was played at court in 1612-1613 and that it was duly registered for publication by Humphrey Moseley at the Stationers’ Hall in September 1653, whereas the information related to the performance of Love’s Labour’s Won is entirely missing.

2 Part of the difficulty with Love’s Labour’s Won is that the play, if it was ever performed, was never registered. Its title is obviously that of an early comedy which “must have either been missed when Heminge and Condell compiled the Folio (after all like Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while Timon of Athens was only squeezed in as a filler when copyright problems almost excluded Troilus and Cressida), or […] must have got into the volume under a different name.”1 Two solutions can thus be offered: either the text of the play, like many others at the time, was entirely lost, or it was performed and then published under a different name. The logic underpinning the current scholarship on Love’s Labour’s Lost/Won is not entirely satisfactory for treasure seekers as the general response has been to subsume the unknown title under the identity of a familiar play rather than celebrate the possibility of a new Shakespeare play.

3 What could this “familiar” play be? Many different suggestions have been made by editors and critics as speculations started early. In a letter dated February 28 1767, which he sent to a Cambridge scholar named Richard Farmer, Bishop Percy said that he had identified Love’s Labour’s Won as All’s Well that Ends Well. Impressed by Bishop Percy’s “discovery,” Farmer included the suggestion in his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), unlikely though it may have been.2 All the same, he was followed in this by Edmund Malone who, after dating All’s Well to 1598 on stylistic grounds, also identified that comedy with Love’s Labour’s Won.3

4 This hypothesis has been discarded because, on the basis of topical allusions and intertextual echoes, it is now suggested that All’s Well was not completed before

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1603-1604. And according to the latest Oxford edition of the Complete Works, the only comedy thought to have been written by 1598, but not listed by Meres, is The Taming of the Shrew, probably one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies.4 Identifying The Shrew as Love’s Labour’s Won might be justified by Gremio’s claim that taming Katherine would be like rolling all of Hercules’ labours into one (“Yea, leave that labour to great Hercules, / And let it be more than Alcides’ twelve”, 1.2.255-256),5 but then, it would follow that Love’s Labour’s Lost, probably composed after The Shrew, should be considered as a prequel of sorts. Even though this hypothesis is not totally implausible, one should keep in mind that, whereas “historical” prequels generally make sense because they satisfy the audience’s need to know more about their origins, comedic ones are always commercially risky undertakings for the simple reason that what matters most in a comedy does not lie in its premises, but in the virtuoso way the plot unravels at the end.

5 That is the reason why I would like to discuss an alternative theory, as to me The Shrew appears as a less likely candidate than Much Ado About Nothing. A.E. Brae and Frederic Gard Fleay were probably the first important critics to designate Much Ado as their favourite choice,6 and, in doing so, they had to solve several challenging issues. Indeed, for all their similarities, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado remain very different plays. The first is set in Navarre, the second in Messina, and while love is thwarted in the first play, it triumphs in the latter. Because these differences contribute to underline the complementarity of the two comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost, that early play neatly structured by its four matching pairs and full of dense, sometimes acrobatic verbal wit, has recently been coupled with Much Ado in the RSC’s repertoire.

6 In this double bill, the former is presented as a kind of prologue to the latter, boldly subtitled Love’s Labour’s Won. Why should a comedy first conceived as an autonomous piece need a sequel, one might ask? A possible answer is that Love’s Labour’s Lost does not meet all the criteria of the comic genre. It deprives us of the expected happy ending and closes on the dark note of the death of the King of France. The sad news brought by Marcadé in the last act casts a shadow on the many exchanges of wit that have been going on before. The comedy’s symmetrical structure is therefore blown apart by the sudden appearance and unpredictability of death, disease, and loss. Present-day audiences may feel hard done by, which makes the idea of a sequel called Love’s Labour’s Won both fairly logical and rather intriguing in itself. But this poses the question of whether Shakespeare was such a marketing expert as to reel in audiences with a teasing suggestion of the next instalment in which the lovers would be reunited at the end. Rather than provide definitive answers, this paper will revisit the recent scholarship on what is now often referred to as Shakespeare’s “lost play,” trying to elucidate the question of whether Shakespeare, as a skilled young playwright, did intend to write a diptych. Was Love’s Labour’s Won meant as a sequel and, if so, what concrete elements may confirm this and make it a fact?

1. Bridging the gap

7 In the early 1590s, a budding English playwright presented new works on the early modern stage, and while some of them may be regarded as new generic experimentations, they also belonged to the well-known traditions of revenge tragedy, Plautine comedy, and Commedia dell’arte, to quote but a few. The newly created plays

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and the old pieces taken as models were implicitly linked to one another as part and parcel of literary continuation. The mid-1590s were a period of intense creativity for the young, but experienced William Shakespeare. Around 1595, his company performed Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and this dramatic ebullience “was perhaps the result of Shakespeare’s busy writing activity during the plague time.”7 A few years later, probably during the same decade, Much Ado was produced on the London stage.

8 As a matter of fact, both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado were published during the author’s lifetime. While the presence of Shakespeare’s name on the title-page of Love’s Labour’s Lost has been noted by all commentators, the title-page of the Much Ado quarto also proves particularly interesting: Much adoe about / Nothing / As it hath been sundrie times publickly / acted by the right honourable, the Lord / Chantberline his servants. Written by William Shakespeare. / London, Printed by V.S. for Andrew Wise, and / William Aspley. 1600.8 While Love’s Labour’s Lost was the first play printed under the playwright’s own name, it is actually thanks to the quarto edition of Much Ado About Nothing that Shakespeare’s name appeared for the first time in the Stationers’ Register.9 We do not know how long before August 1600 Shakespeare wrote his play, but the title-page tells us that the comedy had already been “sundrie times” acted. This does not come as a surprise: unless plays were really popular, no stationer would immediately publish them, especially as getting hold of a manuscript was rarely an easy task for them.

9 Curiously, there is no record of the intended publication of Love’s Labour’s Lost in the Stationers’ Register, but the quarto specifies that the play was published in 1598 by Cuthbert Burbie, maybe under a revised form. The title page of the 1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost indeed claims that this is a “newly corrected and augmented version” of the play. Burbie (who also published the “good” quarto of Romeo and Juliet in 1599) may therefore have replaced a rather poor, or “bad” (and now missing), quarto by a better one.10

10 According to Andrew Gurr and Richard Dutton, the manuscripts of Love’s Labour’s Lost, along with 1Henry IV and Richard III, may have been released by Shakespeare’s company in 1597-1598 “only because they faced a financial crisis when unable to use either the Burbage’s new Blackfriars venue or the Theatre.”11 Like Lukas Erne however, one may question this argument.12 Theatrical apparel representing the most precious goods of Elizabethan theatrical companies, selling costumes would certainly have secured much more money than merchandising manuscripts.

11 Be that as it may, both plays were performed before the turn of the century, and both appeared in print with Shakespeare’s name on the title-page. Apart from their linguistic exuberance, they also share a number of common themes. While the playwright explores the various meanings of “honour” in history plays like 1Henry IV, he takes up the same concept in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing and he simultaneously emphasizes its more positive aspects, derived from Aristotle,13 as well as some of its pernicious effects. If a ridiculous sense of honour guides the men’s behaviour in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a firmer sense of honour and reputation underpins the action of the French Princess and her ladies-in-waiting. In Sicily, on the other hand, female honour is aligned with chastity, while male honour is associated with courtly etiquette. The theme of war is another connection worth noting between the two plays. While the French wars provide Love’s Labour’s Lost with a disquieting background, a war

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has just come to an end at the beginning of Much Ado.14 This is the reason why the cross-cast productions of the RSC are both set before and after the First World War in an English country house closely modelled by Simon Higlett on Charlecote Park. However, in both cases, the war is metaphorically replaced by the battle of the sexes which Shakespeare uses to describe the anxieties of a strongly patriarchal society. Lionizing lovers rather than soldiers, the two plays are also characterized by the presence of shallow young aristocrats and witty ladies who refuse to be subordinate to men. This interest in female agency is counterbalanced by lighter moments, as the two plays rely as much on farcical humour (thanks to Costard’s and Dogberry’s malapropisms) as on refined (albeit aborted) masks and spectacles to seduce both popular and learned audiences. This list would be incomplete without the mention of two remarkably similar couples: the young Rosaline and Berowne, on the one hand, and the more mature Beatrice and Benedick, on the other. These voluble characters spar and bicker even as they fall in love. In Christopher Luscombe’s production, Edward Bennett and Michelle Terry take on both pairings while it must be pointed out that the overall cross-casting is far from being literal or systematic. As a result, Beatrice and Benedick seem to evolve much more in a Shakespeare spin-off than in a sequel of sorts, and audiences are generally happy when, at the end of Luscombe’s version of Much Ado staged as Love’s Labour’s Won, they at last get to lock lips. As Russel Jackson wonders, Who knows what Shakespeare intended? All the comedies have overlapping but different ideas about people being separated and coming together. [But] the central pairs [in these plays] are the kind of people who are too smart for anybody else – and almost too smart for each other. I would say these are Shakespeare’s two screwball comedies.15

12 On a less visible level, the two comedies are full of legal terms, which suggests that they may have targeted the same demanding audience, namely that of the Inns of Court. Given that the Inns students enjoyed linguistic games and complex literary devices, Shakespeare may have felt the need to parody Lyly’s euphuistic style in the two comedies. But there is more to it. Love’s Labour’s Lost explicitly deals with the sort of bawdy issues that were dealt with in ecclesiastical courts, always much concerned with fornication and the procreation of bastards. It also clearly pictures the coterie world of the inns, reproduces its revels and its topography, and problematizes the traditional question of male bonding versus marriage. As to its possible companion piece, it is partly based on the problem of slander and it offers a dramatic version of the type of case often brought before the common law courts. Hero’s predicament, in the play, is particularly gloomy if one thinks that female pre-marital unchastity had only been considered as a “punishable offence” since the 1550s.16 As Daniel Kornstein notes, “[p]erhaps the dramatist overheard some lawyers at the Inns of Court chattering about an important new case”, or perhaps the inspiration for Much Ado About Nothing “came from a real life slander case” like the 1593 case of Davies versus Gardiner, in which “a woman engaged to be married” turned out to be “falsely accused of having an illegitimate child” and “los[t] her marriage as a result.”17 So, the two comedies seem to have had a strong legal appeal even though they addressed different forms of jurisdiction.

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2. Renaming the play

13 In spite of these similarities, the bittersweet Love’s Labour’s Lost and the exhilarating Much Ado about Nothing remain poles apart. In Love’s Labour’ Lost, there are no marriages at the end—at least not until a year of mourning has passed, according to what the Princess decrees. A resigned Berowne is more or less forced to acknowledge that “Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill” (5.2.339-340). In Much Ado, not only does Jack have Jill, but he also marries her.

14 Precisely because of these discrepancies, Greg Doran, the current artistic director of the RSC, feels that the two plays belong together. In the 2014-2015 season brochure, he writes: “So strong is my sense, that I am sticking my neck out to say that we have come to the conclusion that Much Ado About Nothing may have also been known during Shakespeare’s lifetime as ‘Love’s Labour’s Won.’”18 For a man of the theatre, what essentially matters is that the production concept works on stage, and in this case, it does, not least because the same visual environment helps unify the two plays. But for scholars willing to support this hypothesis, what are the clues available?

15 In 1598, Francis Meres, a cleric and schoolmaster, published his lengthy Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury. Being the second part of Wit’s Commonwealth . This 666-page book was entered on the Stationers’ Register on 7 September 1598, and a now famous passage from the chapter entitled “A comparative discourse of our English poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian poets” gives us useful indications regarding the dates of composition and the popularity of some of Shakespeare’s plays: As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour’s Lost, his Love’s Labour’s Won, his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.19

16 A significant number of plays by Shakespeare had been published before 1598.20 Much Ado, which is not even mentioned, was only printed in 1600, i.e. two years after the publication of this list. Yet, there is evidence that it was performed before 1600, not just because the title-page of the quarto version tells us so, but also because this quarto quotes a player who no longer was with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1600. The name of Will Kemp is included as a prefix for some of Dogberry’s speeches, and Kemp is known to have left the company in the course of the year 1599 in order to embark on a career of solo clowning. Consequently, Much Ado About Nothing could well have been in the repertoire of the summer of 1598 and, as these facts taken together suggest, it was probably renamed.21

17 The use of alternative titles or subtitles for plays was indeed an established practice at the time.22 For instance, The Seven Deadly Sins (c. 1585), a “most deadly but lively playe”23 now lost and attributed to Richard Tarlton, was probably divided into two different parts and renamed Five Plays in One and Three Plays in One.24 Those plays were in the repertory of the Queen’s Men in the mid-1580s. One could also cite the case of “Longshanks” (listed as such by Henslowe on August 29, 1595, and mistakenly referred to as “ne”, i.e “new”), which probably referred to Peele’s mutilated Edward I published in 1593,25 or that of “Muly Mollocco”, which has been identified with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar ( c. 1588). Similar examples are numerous and they testify to the

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instability of early modern titles. While plays were often renamed after their leading roles, theatre managers often tended to simplify titles for the sake of efficacy, and companies sometimes suggested alternative titles to give old plays a new look. As to the spectators themselves, they often felt the need to re-appropriate the plays which they had seen by giving them new names.

3. The Sense of Sequels

18 If Much Ado was indeed renamed Love’s Labour’s Won, was it because audiences were bored with the initial title? The answer is almost certainly no. Granted, the published quarto was not a best-seller,26 but its title-page specified that Much Ado had been acted several times. If the spectators had been unhappy with it, the play would simply have disappeared from the stage. Moreover, we know that it was still performed at Court in 1613, since the first documentary evidence actually dates back to the month of May of that same year.27 Did this happen because the spectators saw it as a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost? After all, building on the success of Marlowe’s two-part Tamburlaine (1590),28 Shakespeare was past master in the art of writing historical sequels. This, of course, does not imply that the plays of the tetralogies were then performed as a sequence. This actually never happened in Shakespeare’s lifetime, which is also the reason why the numerous inconsistencies between the individual plays probably mattered less than today.

19 In the 1623 Folio, the plays were posthumously gathered as “Histories” and aptly re- entitled The Life and Death of Richard the Second, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, The Life of King Henry the Fift, The First Part of King Henry the Sixt, The Second Part of King Henry the Sixt, The Third Part of King Henry the Sixt and The Life and Death of Richard the Third. All the same, this impeccable sequence is too good to be true. Originally, parts were not systematically indicated: a play simply called The History of Henrie the Fourth was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 25 February 1598, and it was appropriately followed by a piece which was clearly conceived as a sequel this time, namely The Second Parte of the History of Kinge Henry the iiiith, entered on 23 August 1600. Written earlier, the second tetralogy is characterized by more confused denominations. As 1Henry VI was not published until 1623, we cannot expatiate on its original title, but it was simply referred to as Harey Vj by Philip Henslowe 29 who often failed to identify the first parts of sequels.30 2Henry VI appeared in a 1594 quarto under the title of The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster. This seems to indicate that 1Henry VI was actually a prequel written after the Contention (in which case Henslowe would not have failed to identify 1Henry VI as part one of a sequence, but would have thought it rather useless to number it as such). Finally, what is now known as 3Henry VI was then published as The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York, and the Death of Good King Henrie the Sixt. So the neatly ordered vision of history generated by the two tetralogies was only achieved in retrospect, just like a teleological approach of Shakespeare’s history plays can only work with the benefit of hindsight. Yet, internal evidence testifies to the fact that, for Elizabethan audiences, they functioned “as a kind of serial”31: in other words, the reception shaped the production, and playwrights had to be versatile enough to adjust their creations to the audiences’ fantasies.

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20 Whether it be chance or coincidence, one does find the word “sequel” in one of Shakespeare’s historical plays, Henry V,32 where the word comes to signify a “sequence” or an “order of succession; […], a series” (OED, †5.). The playwright could, after all, write comic sequels on demand, and tradition has it that Elizabeth asked the playwright that Falstaff be “resuscitated, excerpted, and in love.”33 Whatever the truth of the matter may be, Shakespeare did decide to resuscitate Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, first published in 1602. This exemplifies the playwright’s ingenuity in that he was able to invent a new type of sequel which definitely breaks all illusion of reality and, more importantly, of generic unity.

21 Incidentally, the word “sequel” properly understood as an “ensuing narrative” (OED, 734) also appears in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, where it takes on a derogatory meaning. In act 2 of the comedy, a mocking Silvia interrupts Valentine who has just told her that, even though he found it difficult to write her letter to a “secret, nameless friend of [hers]”, yet he would write “a thousand times as much” (2.1.107-108). When she tells him that she has already “guess[ed] the sequel” (109), she suggests that she understands the nature of his enterprise: this was a labour of love on the part of Valentine. On a more general plane, what Silvia says here can be taken as a subliminal criticism of the new literary craze for commercial sequels that flourished in 16th- century Europe. According to William Hinrichs, these were characterised by three basic structures. The first kind of sequel “precedes the lived time of the originating text’s imaginative world”: in morphological terms, we would call this a prefix.35 The second form of sequel, or infix, “expands it from within by extending an episode or adding details to it.”36 The last major structure, or “suffix”, that could then be found, was the most common one because it consisted in “add[ing] on at the chronological end.”37 Each of these forms shatters the original ending of a text by establishing a new conclusion. In other words, it contributes to the general instability and indeterminacy of early modern texts and it ultimately “undermine[s] any notion of definitive closure or definitive origin.”38

22 In order to undermine “any notion of definitive closure”, a sequel has to be associated with a play whose denouement, evoking the next adventures which the spectators might expect, cannot be reduced to a “textual threshold into a strategic promotional space.”39 The end of the first piece must also be perfectly conclusive. This means, in turn, that, according to the codes of the time, a play like Love’s Labour’s Lost would have been a poor prequel. Indeed, far from alluding to thrilling adventures to come, Shakespeare’s comedy of youth offers the gloomy vision of Berowne visiting “the speechless sick” (5.2.837) in an “hospital” (5.2.857)—a situation totally unsuited for the stage—and of ladies cloistered in “a mourning house” (5.2.800)—hardly an exciting perspective for early modern theatre-goers. On top of that, it posits its generic indeterminacy right from the beginning: Ferdinand’s lines (1.1.1-7) are comparable to an epitaph and work as a kind of proleptic warning for careful spectators. The play, moreover, emphasizes and relentlessly comments upon its own absence of closure: why then attach to it a companion piece whose function would be minimal, since it would not be able to undo an already aborted ending?

23 What I want to argue here is that if the idea of considering the open-endedness of the comedy as a call for writing a sequel makes sense in the 21st century, it certainly did not in the 16th century. Inconclusive denouements signalled instead a carefully planned non-ending and, as far as I know, nobody ever thought that Measure for Measure (c.

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1604), with its intriguing denouement leaving us in the dark as to Isabella’s answer to the Duke’s marriage proposal, needed a sequel providing definitive answers. Tensions also exist in All’s Well That Ends Well (c. 1604-1605) where young Helen, infatuated with the disdainful and puffed-up Bertram, eventually gets what she wants. Yet, this pair of lovers seems so utterly mismatched that Shakespeare actually ruins all hopes of long- term happiness in this marriage. And if the play has already been regarded as a likely candidate for Love’s Labour’s Won, it has never been seen as the first part of a dramatic diptych on the simplistic grounds that, in spite of its drive toward marriage, it leaves us with a rather unsatisfactory ending.40

24 In the world of early modern drama, a dramatic continuation was either planned well ahead of time (and, in this case, it was announced and publicized in the first piece), or it was spontaneously written to fit the demands of an excited audience. More often than not, first pieces were originally written as autonomous texts. When they were successful, their authors thought of writing further developments. So, if second parts are explicitly labelled as sequels, first parts are generally devoid of any indication emphasizing seriality.

25 Shakespeare experienced both situations, because contrary to the 18th century which saw literary continuations as low-status writings, the 16th century did not regard sequels as a particularly “trite and easy path” to reader/spectator pleasure.41 The playwright thus wrote both carefully planned sequels and obviously improvised ones. As we know, the character of Falstaff was immensely popular on the page (1Henry IV was reprinted seven times before 1623 and it quickly became Shakespeare’s most popular play in print) and on stage: his appearance in 1Henry IV clearly created a demand for 2Henry IV.42 Having ended 2Henry IV, the playwright still had a type of continuation in mind, since the play’s epilogue announces that “if you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story with Sir John in it” (24-27)—a sentence possibly uttered by the very actor playing Falstaff. Yet, Falstaff never truly reappears in Henry V, where he is an absent presence since we simply hear of his offstage death from Mistress Quickly’s account. It is impossible to know why the playwright changed his mind so suddenly, but it may simply have been because Will Kemp, who probably played the role of Falstaff in the historical sequence, had then left the company.

26 In Love’s Labour’s Lost, on the other hand, there is no hint whatsoever that Ferdinand will live on and reappear in another play. In Shakespeare’s half-serial, half- discontinuous vision of history, a character like Margaret, whose foreignness is already emphasized in 1Henry VI, is sufficiently atypical to be singled out and to make her appearance in several plays. But no character can be excerpted from Love’s Labour’s Lost simply because he or she only exists in and for tit-for-tat games of language: deprive Berowne of his dark Rosaline and he becomes a fairly insignificant, melancholy young man like dozens of other melancholy lords. Couples might be extracted more easily, and that is one of the arguments of those who regard Beatrice and Benedick as alter egos of Berowne and Rosaline; but while Berowne rhymes with great ease in the first play, he becomes strangely incapable of doing so as Benedict in the second. More generally, Shakespeare demonstrates a remarkable devotion to verse in Love’s Labour’s Lost (65% of which is written is verse)43 whereas, on the contrary, nearly 70 % of Much Ado’s lines are written in prose.44

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27 So, if it was indeed Much Ado which was renamed Love’s Labour’s Won by Meres, it was not because it was a sequel. As a man of letters, Meres is likely to have given Much Ado a new title to forcefully suggest its connections with an earlier play. In other words, he saw Much Ado as a kind of echo or response to Love’s Labour’s Lost, and to him, the comedy became a pleasant and witty variation on the theme of unrequited love. Seduced by the cleverness of his own symmetrical finding, he coined the new title of “Love’s Labours Won”, which, in turn, was adopted by some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, were it only because it could be easily remembered.

4. The Reappearance of Love’s Labour’s Won

28 That some scholars adopted the title in the days of Shakespeare is indeed a matter of certainty. They probably approved of the opinions of a man whose credentials were reassuring. A graduate of Pembroke college, Meres was “incorporated MA at Oxford” in 1593 and he became “‘Maister of Arts in both Universities’, as he called himself on the title-pages of several of his books.”45 Subsequently, he was a schoolmaster in Wing, Rutland, which apparently gave him some free time to write.

29 Not only was he learned but he also seemed both renowned and reliable. In his Caroli Fitzgeofridi affaniae (1601), the poet and Church of England clergyman Charles Fitzgeffry called Meres (who, it must be said, had previously complimented him) a “Theolog. et Poetam”, and he devoted an epigram to his skills.46 Years later, the chronicler Edmund Howes still quoted him in an approximate chronological list of “Our modern and present excellent poets, which worthily flourish in their owne works”, which was included in the 1615 continuation of John Stow’s Annales.47 It is worth noting, too, that Meres published other serious works before and after Palladis Tamia,48 and that he was eventually “ordained deacon at Colchester, Essex, on 29 September 1599, and made a priest the following day.”49

30 Why, then, would a writer (and translator) of good repute have forged a new title for an existing play, we may ask at this point? Most critics think that no motive, at least no clear or obvious one, can be invoked here. Yet, we have seen that an intelligent writer such as Meres may have been keen to show his intellectual dexterity by creating what he thought were more appropriate titles to the plays he had read, seen or heard of. As a matter of fact, Meres’s records are not totally flawless. In a tongue-in-cheek remark, Samuel Schoenbaum observes that he “offers homage to 125 English writers, painters, and musicians” and that “the inclusiveness of the listings does not inspire confidence in Meres’s powers of critical discrimination.”50 What is more, D.C. Allen argues that Meres may have imitated the Officina, a 1520 work by Joannes Ravisius Textor and a best-seller which had been re-edited no less than seven times by 1595. So it would seem that, far from issuing personal judgements, Meres was content to plagiarize his source and replace Latin names with English ones.51

31 Despite Palladis Tamia’s high level of deceptiveness, scholars have often taken its contents at face value and, as a consequence, have been in quest for a companion play to Love’s Labour’s Lost. In 1953, a sensational discovery came to the rescue. Solomon Pottesman, a London bookseller, undid the waste paper used as the binding to a 1637 volume and he found two leaves that were a list of books sold by an Exeter stationer in August 1603.52 The inventory lists, among others, the following titles:

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marchant of vennis taming of a shrew knack to know a knave knack to know an honest man loves labor lost loves labor won If the bookseller mentions Love’s Labour’s Won, it is almost certainly because it had previously been printed (which does not imply that it was named as such), and that one copy, at least, was available for sale in August 1603. Two other observations can be made: first, “taming of a shrew” being mentioned in the list, this Shakespearean comedy may then be definitely eliminated as a candidate for Love’s Labour’s Won; second, Love’s Labour’s Won is coupled with Love’s Labour’s Lost, exactly as in Meres’s list.

32 According to William C. Carroll, there is a suspicion “that Meres invented the title for purposes of symmetry, since the two paired ‘knack’ plays certainly exist,”53 an hypothesis which is certainly less glamorous than the one emphasizing the existence of a totally original, yet lost work. However, for all its unglamorous undertones, it takes into account the well-documented Elizabethan passion for order and symmetry not just in drama but, on a broader level, in politics, religion, gardening and so on. In other words, Shakespeare’s contemporaries resorted to symmetry in order to stratify, classify and rationalize a deeply volatile world that may have seemed threatening to them. In this regard, particular attention should be paid to the dedication of Palladis Tamia54 in which the author affirms that “all the source of wit […] may flowe within three channels, and be contrived into three heads; into a sentence, a similitude, & an Example” (my emphasis). A “similitude,” to Meres’s eyes, certainly implied an exacerbated sense of symmetry.55 Besides, the writer must have particularly appreciated serials, to the point of seeing sequels almost everywhere. The full title of his book, which includes the subtitle Wits treasury being the second part of Wits common wealth, suggests indeed that he himself was anxious to define his own work as the companion piece of an already existing volume. This is confirmed by the dedication in which Meres reaffirms that this own literary enterprise should be seen as a sequel to Nicholas Ling’s Politeuphuia, Wits Commonwealth (1597), a book which was reprinted several times.56 Thomas Heywood testifies to its popularity since he eulogizes Ling’s (rather than Meres’s) scholarship in An Apology for Actors (1612). 57 Indeed, as Heywood tries to compare English writers with “the Greeke, French, Italian, & Latine Poets”, he observes that “it was [his] chance to happen on the like learnedly done by an approved good scholler, in a booke called Wits-Comon-wealth, to which treatise [he] wholly referre[s] [his reader]”.58 The fact that Heywood quotes Ling, and not Meres, as a reference, may have sounded quite offensive to Meres, who was still alive and who could bitterly remember that he had previously praised (or overpraised) Heywood’s poetic talent in his Palladis Tamia.59

33 My argument, therefore, is that Meres and the bookseller whose inventory was found in the mid-20th century followed a logic which is highly representative of their time when they wrote their respective lists: verisimilitude, symmetry and beauty then seemed much more important than the new mantras of so-called objectivity and reliability. This contention is all the more plausible as one notices that the titles, in the bookseller’s list, do not always faithfully reproduce the titles of the printed plays. For example, Edward IV, published in 1599 as The First and Second Parts of King Edward the Fourth, is referred to as “Jane Shore”.60 Shakespeare himself had written plays with

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fluctuating titles, to say the least. Not only did he pun on his own titles (one may think of As You Like It, a virtually nameless play), but he also resorted to alternative titles as in Twelfth Night, Or What You Will. The case of Henry VIII is just another example of renaming. According to a letter dated 2 July 1613 and written by the scholar-diplomat Sir Henry Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon, [t]he King’s players had a new play, called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry 8, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the state […].61

34 But while “All is true” was referred to as such in many other writings of the period, the play appeared as The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth in the 1623 Folio. This means that Heminge and Condell, having decided to call all the history plays after the name of a king, simply changed its title. The Folio was indeed an expensive enterprise and represented an important economic risk. Emphasizing chronological sequences and providing fair and square titles was a deliberate means to diminish this by appealing to a learned (and wealthy) readership, eager to discover the smooth underlying logic of heretofore fragmented dramatic works.

35 Each medium could thus appropriate a play and rename it according to its own interests and priorities. As a result, dramatic pieces could then be known under different titles—official ones and more popular ones. It follows that Much Ado, probably produced on stage before Palladis Tamia was entered on 7 September 1598, remains a likely candidate for Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won since it fulfils all the required conditions.

Conclusion

36 For lack of a definite conclusion here, it is certainly noteworthy that Shakespeare, as a young playwright, used to throw a backward glance at earlier pieces when he wrote new plays, this without necessarily intending to write a sequel to one of them. In As You Like It for instance, he relies on Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost, which both have a character named Rosaline, in order to create another variant of his female heroine (interestingly, Rosalind in As You Like It is sometimes spelled “Rosaline” in the Folio). 62 Likewise, in Hamlet, the playwright disseminates a number of significant references to Julius Caesar,63 and there are myriad examples like this. So, if the playwright, guided by the reaction of an enthusiastic audience, wrote sequels and prequels at the time when he was writing histories, he more often tended to revisit earlier plays when he dabbled in the comic genre. Yet, the word “sequel” has almost systematically been used to describe Love’s Labour’s Won, and in his DNB entry for Shakespeare, Peter Holland mentions Love’s Labour’s Won as “lost sequel”. 64 Similarly, in his 2008 biography of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate in turn confidently states that Love’s Labour’s Lost “was such a success, or such a pleasure to write, that [Shakespeare] wrote a sequel (alas, lost) called Love’s Labour’s Won.”65 This, of course, remains pure literary speculation or reconstruction.

37 Regarding somewhat arbitrarily Love’s Labour’s Won as a sequel necessarily disqualifies Much Ado as a comedy with a different background, different characters, and a different structure. But why should we consider Love’s Labour’s Won as a sequel when we know that actual sequels were rare, and that, in the list uncovered in 1953, one immediately notices the presence of A Knack to Know a Knave and A Knack to Know an Honest Man, two

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plays merely linked by their matching titles?66 Set in England, the 1592 anonymous, anti-Puritan play called A Knack to Know a Knave is modelled on medieval moralities and exposes corruption through a character named Old Honesty. Lord Strange’s Men performed it several times in June 1593 and in December-January 1593-1594. By contrast, the 1594 play A Knack to Know an Honest Man is set in contemporary Venice. It has a romantic plot with characters called Charity and Penitent Experience. However, its author sought to capitalize on the success of A Knack to Know a Knave and indeed, the play seems to have been quite popular in the 1590s, since Philip Henslowe notes that twenty-one performances took place at the Rose between 22 October 1594 and 3 November 1596.67 So the title-trick apparently worked.

38 Surely, such an observation should be seen as a warning against defining Love’s Labour’s Won as a dramatic continuation of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Matching titles do not boil down to matching plays in early modern England. In fact, just as 16th-century texts generally “escape the criteria of veracity”,68 their titles, too, escape the criteria of transparency that we are now accustomed to praise.

39 Cleverly, by avoiding an exactly parallel cross-casting, Christopher Luscombe allows the two plays to stand alone as single pieces, even though they are staged together for obvious commercial reasons. My personal feeling is that he is right in doing so.69 Shakespeare might have done exactly the same thing, as the two comedies were obviously performed as autonomous pieces. For example, the 1604/1605 Revels Accounts give precise indications on court performances of plays by “Shaxberd” in December 1604. That year, during the Christmas season, the new court of King James was given the opportunity to see fresh plays such as Othello, but also to rediscover some of Shakespeare’s earlier works, including Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Love’s Labour’s Lost.70 The court, however, was not given the opportunity to catch up on Love’s Labour’s Won/Much Ado About Nothing.

NOTES

1. Michael Dobson, “Lost and Won” in the RSC Brochure, Much Ado About Nothing or Love’s Labour’s Won, William Shakespeare, September 2014 to March 2015. On could add that Cardenio, too, was absent from the First Folio, maybe because John Fletcher, “who was still alive in 1623”, regarded neither Cardenio nor The Two Noble Kinsmen as “a finished product.” See William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter, Walton-on-Thames, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Edition, 1997, p. 13. 2. William Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well, ed. Susan Snyder, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 21. 3. Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, New Edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 117. 4. If one agrees with the idea that A Shrew (1594) was a memorial reconstruction of The Shrew, then The Shrew was performed before 1594. 5. On this, see Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography, Chichester, Wiley- Blackwell, 2012, p. 146. Unless otherwise stated, all references to Shakespeare’s plays are to

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Shakespeare. The Complete Works, eds. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, Oxford, Oxford University Press (1986), 2005 (2nd edition). 6. David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (eds.), Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 4. 7. Peter Holland, “Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Website: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25200 (Date accessed: 6 March 2015). 8. V.S. stands here for Valentine Simmes. 9. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 87. 10. E.A.J. Honigmann, John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associated of Shakespeare and Jonson, Together with a Photographic Facsimile of Weaver’s Epigrammes (1599), Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, p. 26. See also H.R. Woudhuysen, “The Foundations of Shakespeare’s Text” in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 125, 2003 Lectures, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 73 (p. 69-100). 11. Richard Dutton, “The Birth of the Author” in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, eds R.B. Parker and S.P. Zitner, Newark, University of Delaware Press, London, Associated University Presses, 1996, p. 80 (71-92). 12. Lukas Erne, “Shakespeare and the Publication of His Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 53, No. 1, Spring, 2002, 1-20, p. 5. 13. See Norman Council, When Honour’s at the Stake: Ideas of Honour in Shakespeare’s Plays, New York, Barnes & Noble, 1973. The concept of honour seen as “a certain testimony of virtue shining of itself, given of some man by the judgment of good men” is given pride of place in Robert Ashley’s manuscript treatise Of Honour (1596), p. 34. 14. See William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, 1.1.29-30: “BEATRICE. I pray you, is Signor Montanto returned from the wars, or no?” 15. Holly Williams, “Whatever happened to the ‘lost’ work ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’? The Royal Shakespeare Company might have the answer”, The Independent, Sunday 12 October 2014. Website: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/whatever- happened-to-lost-work-loves-labours-won-with-their-new-pairing-of-plays-the-royal- shakespeare-company-might-have-the-answer-9787888.html (Date accessed: 3 May 2015). 16. R.H. Helmholz, Roman Canon Law in Reformation England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 110. Theoretically, sexual relationships before marriage were seen as a “spiritual offence throughout the Middle Ages.” By contrast, in 1600, a woman found guilty of pre-marital sex was “required to do public penance in [her] parish church” (p. 111). 17. Daniel Kornstein, Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare’s Legal Appeal, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 169. 18. Doran’s statement can also be accessed online. See “The Shakespeare Blog”: http:// theshakespeareblog.com/2014/02/loves-labours-won/ (Date accessed: 3 May 2015). 19. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury, London, Imprinted by Cuthbert Burbie, 1598, fol. 281. 20. In 1593 and 1594, Shakespeare published his narrative poems. His first printed play was Titus Andronicus (1594). It was followed by 2Henry VI (1594), 3Henry VI (1595), Richard III (1597), Richard II (1597), and Romeo and Juliet (1597). In 1598, 1Henry IV and Love’s Labour’s Lost were published. 21. Richard Desper, “Much Ado About Oxford – part 2,” Soul of the Age, vol. 9, ed. Paul Hemenway Altrocchi, Bloomington, IN, Universe, 2014, p. 301. 22. Andrew Gurr, “What is Lost of Shakespearean Plays, Besides a Few Titles” in Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, eds David McInnis, Matthew Steggle, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 23. Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters and Certain Sonnets, London, Imprinted by John Wolfe, 1592, p. 29.

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24. This hypothesis, however, has been contested, not least because “it depends on arithmetic that does not add up”. See Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 93. 25. In the same diary, The Devil and His Dame actually referred to Grim the Collier of Croyden. 26. Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, op. cit., p. 102. 27. Accounts register dated 20 May 1613 refer to payments made to John Heminge by James I’s Treasurer of the Chamber. Fourteen plays, including Much Ado, were performed at the Court during the previous weeks. Heminge received forty pounds in all for this. 28. Tamburlaine was something of an exception because its two parts were printed together, whereas paired plays were generally printed separately. However, in performance, Tamburlaine followed the fragmentary logic of its time. Emma Smith observes that Henslowe’s diary shows “numerous entries, separated by days or weeks, for each part of Tamburlaine […].” This means that explicitly paired plays “were also seen as autonomous and self-standing.” See Emma Smith, “Shakespeare Serialized: An Age of Kings” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 146 (p. 134-149). 29. R.A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, Second Edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 18. 30. Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama 7, 1995, 145-205, p. 152. 31. Richard Knowles, “The First Tetralogy in Performance” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Histories, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003, p. 267 (263-86). 32. Instance quoted by the OED. See Henry V, 5.2.327-329: “The King hath granted every article: / His daughter first, and so in sequel all, / According to their firm proposèd natures.” 33. Claire McEachern, “Henry V and the Paradox of the Body Politic” in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps, New York, Verso, 1995, p. 314 (292-320). The tradition according to which Shakespeare wrote the Merry Wives to please the Queen dates back to Nicholas Rowe (William Shakespeare, Works, 1709, ed. N. Rowe, 1.viii–ix). For Peter Holland, if that is “unlikely to be true, it is far more probable that the play was performed for the celebrations in May 1597 linked to the installation into the Order of the Garter of Sir George Carey, now Lord Hunsdon, the son of the founder of the Chamberlain’s Men and himself now in the same office after Cobham’s death.” See Holland, art. cit. 34. See “sequel”, OED 7: “The ensuing narrative, discourse, etc.; the following or remaining part of a narrative, etc.; that which follows as a continuation; esp. a literary work that, although complete in itself, forms a continuation of a preceding one.” 35. William H. Hinrichs, The Invention of the Sequel. Expanding Prose Fiction in Early Modern Spain, Woodbridge, Tamesis, 2011, Preface, ix. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Virginia Krause, “Toward a Poetics of Adventure: Amadis de Gaule” in Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France, eds John D. Lyons and Kathleen Wine, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009, p. 76 (65-80). 40. On “Shakespeare’s unwillingness or inability to imagine a married couple in a relationship of sustained intimacy” in his comedies, see Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World. How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, New York, W.W. Norton, 2004, p. 136-137 (136). 41. Natasha Simonova, Early Modern Authorship and Prose Continuation: Adaptation and Ownership from Sidney to Richardson, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. 193.

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42. Leonard Digges’s commendatory contribution to the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems testifies to this enduring popularity. Digges indeed mentions full playhouses in connection with Falstaff’s presence on stage. See Stephen Longstaffe, 1Henry IV, A Critical Guide, London, Continuum International Publishing Group, Bloomsbury, 2011, p. 12. 43. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, eds Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, Basingstoke, Macmillan, The RSC Shakespeare, 2008, p. 18. 44. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Claire McEachern, London, Thomson Learning, 2006, The Arden Shakespeare, p. 63. 45. David Kathman, “Meres, Francis (1565/1566–1647)” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Website: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18581 (Date accessed: 26 February 2015). 46. Charles Fitz-Geffry, Caroli Fitzgeofridi affaniae: sive epigrammatum libri tres ejusdem cenotaphia, Oxford, Imprinted by Joseph Barnes, 1601, STC (2nd ed.) 10934, p. 62 (“Ad Franciscum Meresium”). 47. John Stow, The annales, or a generall chronicle of England, begun first by maister Iohn Stow, and after him continued and augmented with matters forreyne, and domestique, auncient and moderne, vnto the ende of this present yeere 1614. by Edmond Howes, gentleman, London, Imprinted by Thomas Adams, 1615, STC (2nd ed.) 23338. See Kathman, “Meres, Francis”, op. cit. 48. Before Palladis Tamia, he wrote Gods Arithmeticke (1597). Immediately after, he translated a work from Luis de Granada and entitled his translation Granados Spirituall and Heavenlie Exercises (1598). 49. Kathman, art. cit. 50. Schoenbaum, op. cit., p. 26. 51. Don Cameron Allen, Francis Meres’s Treatise ‘Of Poetrie’, Urbana, IL., The University of Illinois, 1933, p. 31-50. 52. T.W. Baldwin examined the manuscript and found out that it had been the property of Christopher Hunt, who had just finished his apprenticeship to London and had moved to Exeter. See T.W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s Love’s Labor’s Won, Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1957. The inventory can be seen on the following website: http://lostplays.org/images/e/ e4/LLW_full.jpg (Date accessed: 30 April 2015). 53. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. William C. Carroll, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 40. Similarly, according to Harold James Oliver, Meres was probably “listing [the plays] that he could neatly pair, and balance against Plautus and Seneca […].” See, William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Harold James Oliver, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 33. 54. Thomas Eliot of the Middle Temple was the dedicatee of Meres’s Palladis Tamia. 55. Kathman, art. cit. 56. However, and somewhat significantly, “the compilers of the later England’s Helicon (1600) apparently did not consider Meres’s book an official part of the series. In addition to the dedication, Meres wrote a Latin address to the reader in which he apologizes for the book’s limitations and blames the publisher Cuthbert Burby’s stinginess with paper. This address was torn out of most copies of the first edition, no doubt by Burby, but one full copy survives.” See Kathman, art. cit. 57. Sophie Chiari, “Thomas Heywood’s Allusion to Wits Commonwealth”, Notes and Queries, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 593-594.

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58. Thomas Heywood, An apology for actors Containing three briefe treatises. 1 Their antiquity. 2 Their ancient dignity. 3 The true vse of their quality, London, Printed by Nicholas Okes, 1612, STC (2nd edition) 13309, E3r-v. 59. Meres, op. cit., 283-283v: “[…] the best [Poets] for Comedy amongst us bee, Edward Earle of Oxforde, Doctor Gager of Oxforde, Maister Rowley once a rare Scholler of learned Pembrooke Hall in Cambridge, Maister Edwardes one of her Majesties Chappell, eloquent and wittie John Lilly, Lodge, Gascoyne, Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Mundye our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle” (my emphasis). 60. Erne, “Shakespeare and the Publication of His Plays,” art. cit., p. 9. Erne notes, incidentally, that Edward IV is also “referred to as ‘Jane Shore’ in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607).” 61. William Shakespeare, Henry VIII: or All is True, ed. Jay L. Halio, Oxford, Oxford University Press, The Oxford Shakespeare, 1999. 62. James Shapiro, 1599. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, London, Faber and Faber, 2005, p. 240. 63. See Lisa Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008, chapter 2, p. 35-54. 64. Holland, art. cit. 65. Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age. The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, London, Penguin Books, 2009, p. 194. The book was first published by Viking in 2008. 66. Dobson, “Lost and Won”, art. cit. 67. Tom Rutter, “Merchants of Venice in A Knack to Know an Honest Man” in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Volume 19, ed. S.P. Cerasano, Cranbury, NJ, Associated University Presses, 2010, p. 194 (194-209). 68. Roger Chartier, The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Cambridge, Polity, 2014, p. 66. 69. “I have encouraged [the actors] to think of them as separate. It’s for the audience to enjoy the arc, more than the actors” (quoted in Holly Williams, art. cit.). 70. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare. Scenes from his Life, London, Thomson Learning, The Arden Shakespeare, 2011, p. 170.

ABSTRACTS

In his Palladis Tamia published in 1598, Francis Meres gave a list of popular plays, already a fairly long one, written by a young playwright aged 34, William Shakespeare. In Meres’s inventory, an intriguing, unknown play called Love’s Labour’s Won is paired with Love’s Labour’s Lost, a mention which has so far remained a complete mystery. This paper aims at reconsidering the hypothesis according to which Much Ado About Nothing might be the comedy designated under the title of Love’s Labour’s Won and at examining the two-part work then formed by these two pieces which, in many respects, seem to match perfectly. Can Much Ado About Nothing be seriously regarded as a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, and, if so, what about the notion of dramatic seriality in Shakespeare’s time? In other words, what may have been the playwright’s intentions in writing a comic rather than a historical sequel or sequence?

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Dans son Palladis Tamia publié en 1598, Francis Meres dressait la liste déjà longue des pièces à succès écrites par un dramaturge tout juste âgé de 34 ans, William Shakespeare. À Peines d’amour perdues répondait Peines d’amour récompensées, pièce fantôme dont le mystère reste aujourd’hui entier. Cet article entend tout d’abord réexaminer l’hypothèse selon laquelle Beaucoup de bruit pour rien pourrait être la comédie désignée sous le titre de Peines d’amour récompensées et étudier l’ensemble que constituent ces deux pièces mises bout à bout et qui, en effet, semblent par bien des aspects s’emboîter parfaitement l’une dans l’autre. Mais est-il sérieusement possible de voir dans Beaucoup de bruit pour rien la suite de Peines d’amour perdues ? Peut-on parler de sérialité sans tomber dans l’anachronisme ? Et si tel est le cas, que Shakespeare pouvait-il bien entendre par « suite » en écrivant ce qui serait une suite ou une séquence de type non plus historique mais comique?

INDEX

Mots-clés: changement de titre, continuation littéraire, Meres Francis, Peines d’amour récompensées, pièce perdue, sérialité, suite, symétrie Keywords: literary continuation, lost play, Love’s Labour’s Won, Meres Francis, renaming, sequel, seriality, symmetry

AUTHOR

SOPHIE CHIARI Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, IHRIM-Clermont-Ferrand, UMR 5317 (CNRS)

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Young Shakespeare/Late Shakespeare: The Case of Pericles

Lucy Munro

1 I begin with lines from an epilogue by John Dryden,1 first printed in his Miscellany Poems in 1684: Shakespeare’s own Muse her Pericles first bore: The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moor. ’Tis miracle to see a first good play, All hawthorns do not bloom on Christmas Day.2 Dryden appears to have considered Pericles a youthful work, Shakespeare’s first play. He contrasts its modest achievement with that of Othello, here positioned as a work of the dramatist’s maturity, and aligns its perceived deficiencies with its chronological position within the canon of Shakespeare’s works. “A slender poet must have time to grow”, he comments, “no man can be Falstaff-fat at first” (l. 20, 23). As I explain below, although it was viewed as an early play for much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by the late nineteenth century Pericles had been re-dated to around 1608, and had instead become the first of Shakespeare’s “late” plays. The play thus provides an intriguing index of changing ideas about the nature of Shakespeare’s activities and achievement at each end of his career; it is part of a process during which new ideas about the writing life appeared, and the chronology and limits of the Shakespearean canon were established. Moreover, while the boundaries between what is early and what is late may appear fixed, Pericles’s reception at the hands of critics, editors and producers also exhibits a series of seemingly contradictory moments at which binary oppositions between early and late, young and old, are put under strain.

2 This essay examines the responses of critics, editors and theatre-makers to Pericles, tracing the processes through which the play moved from “early” to “late” and exploring the impact on page and stage of the idea that Pericles is a late play. The first section, “Early Pericles/Late Pericles”, draws on the work of Nicholas Rowe, Edmond Malone, Hermann Ulrici, F.G. Fleay, Edward Dowden and others, exploring the positioning of Pericles at or near the start of Shakespeare’s writing career, the processes through which it became a late play, and the ways in which critics have characterised

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“early” and “late” writing. The second section, “Late Marina”, examines recent editorial and theatrical responses to Marina’s encounter with Lysimachus in the brothel in Act 4, Scene 5, in the context of widespread acceptance of the play’s late date and collaborative authorship.3 It explores in detail two theatrical revivals and two editions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Terry Hands’s 1969 Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre; Gary Taylor’s edition of Pericles in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1986); David Thacker’s 1989 RSC production at the Swan; and Roger Warren’s single-volume edition for the Oxford Shakespeare (2003). All of these versions of Pericles have sought to conflate the text of the play printed in quarto in 1609 as The Late, and Much Admired Play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with another version of the story, George Wilkins’s The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, published in 1608. I argue that through the interventions of these directors and editors, Pericles has become more securely “late” than at any other point in its history, and thus an inextricable part of the Shakespearean canon despite its status as a co-written play.

Early Pericles/Late Pericles

3 For Dryden in the 1680s, an early play was characterised by aesthetic deficiencies that should be indulged because of the author’s youth; the composition of early, unsatisfactory work, he thought, was inevitable even for giants such as Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare. His remarks on Pericles were one of two shaping influences on the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reception of the play, alongside Nicholas Rowe’s unsupported assertion in his 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s works that “there is good Reason to believe that the greatest part of that Play was not written by him; tho’ it is own’d, some part of it certainly was, particularly the last Act”.4 Although he was one of the first to comment on the chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays,5 Rowe was ambivalent about the very idea of an “early” Shakespeare. It would, he writes, be “without doubt a pleasure to any Man […] to see and know what was the first Essay of a Fancy like Shakespear’s”, but he appears reluctant to grant Shakespeare a literary apprenticeship: Perhaps we are not to look for his Beginnings, like those of other Authors, among their least perfect Writings; Art had so little, and Nature so large a Share in what he did, that, for ought I know, the Performances of his Youth, as they were the most vigorous, and had the most fire and strength of Imagination in ’em, were the best.6 In an implicit rebuke to Dryden, who appears to see Pericles as an early play at least in part because it is imperfect, Rowe suggests that a “natural” and untaught genius such as Shakespeare may not have had the career pattern of a normal writer.

4 Rowe’s doubts about the authorship of Pericles were to prove more enduring than his ideas about the start of Shakespeare’s writing career, and – along with Dryden’s conviction that the play was a juvenile work – they left their mark on most of the earliest attempts to date and put in order all of Shakespeare’s plays.7 In Edmond Malone’s influential chronology, published in 1778, Pericles appears in the italics used to distinguish plays of doubtful authorship: 1. Titus Andronicus, 1589. 2. LOVE’S LABOUR LOST, 1591. 3. FIRST PART OF KING HENRY VI, 1591. 4. SECOND PART OF KING HENRY VI, 1592.

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5. THIRD PART OF KING HENRY VI, 1592. 6. Pericles, 1592. 7. Locrine, 1593. 8. THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, 1593. 9. THE WINTER’S TALE, 1594. 10. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, 1595.8 Malone placed Pericles in the early years of Shakespeare’s career, in part because he thought that the use of a chorus and dumbshows was characteristic of drama of the early 1590s, and in part because – as he wrote in 1780 – “[t]he wildness and irregularity of the fable, the artless conduct of the piece, and the inequalities of the poetry, may, I think, be all accounted for, by supposing it either his first or one of his earliest essays in dramatick composition”.9 Moreover, the fact that the plays now grouped together as the “late” plays were not yet conceived of as a unit is clear: Malone dates Pericles to 1592, The Winter’s Tale to 1594, Henry VIII (treated as a play of single authorship) to 1601, Cymbeline to 1604 and The Tempest to 1612; The Two Noble Kinsmen does not feature.10

5 Pericles does not appear in Edward Capell’s “SCHEME of their Succession”, a chronology probably drawn up in the 1760s but not published until his Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare were issued posthumously in 1783.11 However, the play is described in suggestive terms in two attempts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to put the plays in order, the first perhaps drawn up in 1802 and the other in 1819. The earlier list places Pericles at the end of a “First Epoch” consisting mainly of plays added to a second issue of the third folio edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies and Tragedies in 1664, such as The London Prodigal, but also including Henry VI and ‘The old Taming of the Shrew’ (i.e. The Taming of a Shrew). These plays are described as “transition-works, Uebergangswerke; not his, yet of him”.12 The later list attaches to Pericles an alternative loan-word, taken from Italian rather than German: I think Shakspeare’s earliest dramatic attempt – perhaps even prior in conception to the Venus and Adonis, and planned before he left Stratford – was Love’s Labour’s Lost. Shortly afterwards I suppose Pericles and certain scenes in Jeronymo [The Spanish Tragedy] to have been produced; and in the same epoch, I place the Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, differing from the Pericles by the entire rifacimento [recasting or adaptation] of it, when Shakespeare’s celebrity as poet, and his interest, no less than his influence as manager, enabled him to bring forward the laid by labours of his youth.13 Pericles thus moves from being übergangswerk – a term registering Coleridge’s apparent belief that these were revisions or collaborative works – to being a rifacimento, a work that Shakespeare himself revised from his own earlier draft.

6 By the early nineteenth century, Pericles appeared to have reached a relatively secure position on the margins of the Shakespearean canon, characterized as early, immature, childish and, often, as either a revision or a collaboration. But in 1839, John Payne Collier permanently unsettled its status when he produced new evidence that the play had been current on the stage around 1608. First, he demonstrated that Malone had been mistaken in thinking that the poem Pimlyco, or Run Red-Cap (1609), which mentions Pericles as an example of the crowds that swarm “at a new play”, had received an earlier edition in 1596. Second, he introduced readers to George Wilkins’s The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608), which he describes as “a prose novel, founded upon Shakespeare’s Pericles, in consequence, in all likelihood, of the great run it was experiencing”, demonstrating its clear relationship with the version of the play published in quarto in 1609.14

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7 Faced with such evidence, scholars who favoured an early date for Pericles began to argue that the extant text was adapted from an earlier play, written either by Shakespeare himself or another dramatist.15 An especially potent example of this belief can be seen in the work of Collier himself, who succumbed to temptation and added the forged words “for Pericles” to an entry for “spangled hoes” (hose) in a clothing list drawn up by Edward Alleyn around 1601-1602.16 An important theorist of late Shakespeare, Hermann Ulrici, continued to think that Pericles was “a youthful production, which, however, Shakspeare partially remodelled in 1608,” and he offers a useful summary of the characteristics he perceives in Shakespeare’s “first period”, in which he includes Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry VI and Pericles: I consider that such plays […] still exhibit a certain youthful awkwardness, harshness, and immoderation; at one time an inclination to Marlowe’s bombast, at another to Greene’s diffuseness and superficiality, a certain ruggedness and abruptness, not only of language, but in the whole way in which the subject is treated. […] In his comedies […] puns still predominate too much; the situations are still frequently somewhat unnatural; the characters still appear without any marked individuality, now and then still without solidity, wavering, and uncertain. […] [T]he young poet has not yet succeeded in gathering the multifarious threads into one centre, and in fusing the different parts internally into one harmonious whole; the composition is still more like a mechanical arrangement than a united organisation.17 While his account is more detailed than Malone’s, it shares its essential characteristics and concerns: the characteristics of “early” style are imitativeness, formal and linguistic irregularity, roughness and excess, unnaturalness of characterisation and situation, and a general lack of harmony.

8 Other scholars, in contrast, began to take seriously the idea that Pericles may have been written around 1608, and that it might be a collaboration with Wilkins himself. Alongside these developments, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline were also increasingly being viewed as products of the final years of Shakespeare’s career, and new patterns thus began to emerge. As early as 1847, Gulian C. Verplanck could contend that if one were to place before a reader unfamiliar with Pericles “a prose abstract of the plot, interspersed with large extracts from the finer passages, he would surely wonder why there could have been a moment’s hesitation in placing PERICLES by the side of CYMBELINE and the WINTER’S TALE”.18 These developments are reflected in the work of Edward Dowden, whose ideas have had probably the most lasting influence on conceptions of “late” Shakespeare.19 In 1875, Dowden included in Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art a “Trial Table of the Order of Shakspere’s Plays” devised by F.J. Furnivall. “Pericles, part” is placed as the first work of the “Fourth Period” – alongside The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Tempest, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and “Henry VIII., part” – and is discussed within the chapter on “Shakspere’s Last Plays”.20

9 Yet the place of Pericles within the Shakespearean canon remained uncertain. Dowden clearly felt emboldened to treat it as a “last play” by F.G. Fleay’s 1874 essay “On the Play of Pericles”. Fleay argued that Acts 3-5, with the exception of the brothel scenes, had been composed and abandoned by Shakespeare, who then reworked aspects of his Pericles in writing The Winter’s Tale; he ascribed the rest of the extant play to Wilkins and William Rowley.21 Alongside his essay, he prints a version of the eight-scene “Shakespearean” version of Pericles under the title “The Birth and Life of Marina, Daughter of Pericles Prince of Tyre”.22 Dowden refers to the “lovely little romance which Mr Fleay

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has separated from the coarse work of Rowley and Wilkins”, and it is this Marina that he views as the first of the “last” plays. Nonetheless, Pericles remains marginal in his conception of the final years of Shakesepeare’s career. For example, when he summarises the main characteristics of the plays of this period, Pericles is relegated to a footnote: Characteristics of versification and style, and the enlarged place given to scenic spectacle, indicate that these plays were produced much about the same time. But the ties of deepest kinship between them are spiritual. There is a certain romantic element in each.† They receive contributions from every portion of Shakspere’s genius, but all are mellowed, refined, made exquisite; they avoid the extremes of broad humor and of tragic intensity; they were written with less of passionate concentration than the plays which immediately precede them, but with more of a spirit of deep or exquisite recreation. †The same remark applies to Shakspere’s part of Pericles, which belongs to this same period.23

10 As Dowden explicitly argues and Verplanck implicitly acknowledges, by the mid-late nineteenth century the grouping of the “last” plays together was not merely a point of chronology but one of style, genre and aesthetic purpose. Only two years later, in 1877, Dowden’s thinking had developed further. His popular primer for students, Shakspere, includes a revised version of the chronology grouping Pericles, Cymbeline, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale together under the heading “ROMANCES”.24 Although he describes Pericles as a “sketch”, Dowden also integrates it fully within this group, noting that it is “in some respects like a slighter and earlier Tempest” and also comparing its representation of the lost daughter and her recovery with those of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline.25 Dowden’s treatment of Pericles thus suggests some of the violence that was done to Pericles in order to cast it as a late play or romance. While its re-dating to 1608 placed it in close chronological proximity to The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, it could only be read with them as a “romantic” work, “mellowed, refined, [and] made exquisite” if certain scenes were expelled as non-Shakespearean.

11 Malone’s description of Pericles, Ulrici’s account of early style and Dowden’s description of the romances may seem to have little in common – there appears to be considerable distance between “wildness and irregularity” on one hand, and mellow, “exquisite” refinement on the other. However, the characteristics attributed to early and late writing are more slippery than this might suggest, and the categories often appear prone to collapse into one another. In Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing, Gordon McMullan outlines a series of binaries that have structured ideas about late style: personal/impersonal individual/epochal involuntary/knowing serene/irascible childlike/difficult archaic/proleptic old age/proximity to death completion/supplement26

12 These binaries might be set alongside a similar set of simultaneously helpful and confusing categories for early, juvenile or apprentice writing:

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Late Early personal/impersonal original/imitative individual/epochal individual/epochal involuntary/knowing naive/precocious serene/irascible placid/impatient childlike/difficult simple/obscure archaic/proleptic primitive/proleptic old age/proximity to death youth/immaturity completion/supplement initiation/transition

13 Moreover, we might add two further categories for both early and late writing (I retain McMullan’s italics to maintain visually the distinction between the categories):

Late Early integration/disintegration formal/formless individual/collaborative individual/collaborative

14 As these lists suggest, the attributes of these stages of a writer’s career are liable to collapse into each other, and one work might easily fulfil the requirements of both late and early style. The aesthetic disjunctions and generic uncertainties of Pericles – what Malone viewed as the “irregularity of the fable, the artless conduct of the piece, and the inequalities of the poetry” – might be viewed as the products of both immaturity and age, of primitive incompetence and artfully designed archaism, of a proleptic reaching forward to both artistic maturity and impeding death. This conceptual and practical slippage is not created purely by age itself, or even by the idea that old age is a second childhood; Shakespeare (born 1564) was only in his mid forties when Pericles was written and Wilkins (born around 1576) was even younger. Moreover, although we know that early modern dramatists were likely to collaborate with other writers at all stages of their careers, theoretical models of the writing life are nonetheless likely to attribute it mainly to beginners and veterans.

15 As they moved into the twentieth century, scholars and editors of Shakespeare thus had a new set of working theories about Pericles. No longer an “early” work, or Shakespeare’s first play, for the majority of commentators it had become the first of the “late” plays. The idea that the play was the product of collaboration, probably between Shakespeare and Wilkins, was becoming increasingly accepted, and the quarto’s deficiencies began to be attributed to the idea that it was a reported text or a memorial reconstruction.27 Yet its position was still in some respects liminal. As the first of the late plays it remained a transition-work, or übergangswerk, as Coleridge termed it. As a collaboration, it was only partially a “late” play, and distaste for the overt sexuality of the incest plot and the brothel scenes continued to limit its exploration by critics. In addition, its performance around 1608 meant that it had been composed before the King’s Men took over the Blackfriars playhouse and – unlike the The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline – it could not possibly have been composed with that playhouse in mind.28 Moreover, its general absence from the stage meant that it spent the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as part of a print canon but not a performance one.29 When Pericles finally returned to prominence on the stage from the 1940s onwards, its new presence within the theatrical tradition put new pressures

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on its status as a late play, and – as I will argue – editorial and theatrical revision became increasingly intertwined.

Late Marina

16 The final two acts of Pericles are structured around a series of transformations and revelations: Marina “converts” Lysimachus, who comes to her as a customer in the brothel (Act 4, Scene 5); she encounters the still-grieving Pericles, the circumstances of her birth are revealed, and father and daughter are reunited (Act 5, Scene 1); Pericles and Marina are reunited with the reborn Thaisa (Act 5, Scene 2). While the third and, especially, the second of these moments have been central to readings of Pericles as a “late” play, the first has proved more problematic. The quarto’s version of the climax of the exchange between Marina and Lysimachus is brief, poorly printed, and poses various textual problems; in addition, it presents versions of the two characters that have unsettled some readers: Ma[rina]. If you were borne to honour, shew it now, if put vpon you, make the iudgement good, that thought you worthie of it. Li[simachus]. How’s this? how’s this? some more, be sage. Ma. For me that am a maide, though most vngentle Fortune haue plac’t mee in this Stie, where since I came, diseases haue beene solde deerer then phisicke, that the gods would set me free from this vnhalowed place, though they did chaunge mee to the meanest byrd that flyes i’th purer ayre. Li. I did not thinke thou couldst haue spoke so well, nere dremp’t thou could’st, had I brought hither a corrupted minde, thy speeche had altered it, holde, heeres golde for thee, perseuer in that cleare way thou goest and the gods strengthen thee. Ma. The good Gods preserue you. Li. For me be you thoughten, that I came with no ill intent, for to me the very dores and windows sauor vilely, fare thee well, thou art a peece of vertue, & I doubt not thy training hath bene noble, hold, heeres more golde for thee, a curse vpon him, die he like a theefe that robs thee of thy goodnes, if thou doest heare from me it shalbe for thy good.30

17 The punctuation and lineation of the quarto text both appear to be defective, and the majority of editors have made at least minor amendments to the dialogue. For example, in her Arden Shakespeare Third Series edition, Suzanne Gossett amends “For me be you thoughten, that” to “For me, be you bethoughten that” (l. 113); she also adds a direction for Lysimachus to give Marina gold, which is clearly signalled in the text (l. 111).

18 In the version of the scene presented in the quarto, and editions such as Gossett’s that are based on it, Lysimachus comes to the brothel – at which he is clearly a long- standing customer – intending to have sex with Marina, but he is quickly, perhaps shockingly quickly, converted by her. There is something sardonic or potentially even savage about the exchange, in which he shiftily attempts to convince Marina that he never intended to pursue a sexual liaison; he repeatedly gives her money, as if embarrassed or ashamed, but the gold itself reminds us of the kinds of sexual transactions that would usually take place in the brothel. In addition, as Gossett notes, his ambiguous response to Marina is emphasised when “he curses the person, his own double, who will attempt to rob ‘thee of thy goodness’”.31 In his sudden recognition of Marina’s high status Lysimachus is rather like Frederick in Aphra Behn’s Restoration play The Rover (1677), who complains that he does not want “to be trussed up for a rape

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upon a maid of quality, when we only believe we ruffle a harlot”.32 Lysimachus’s newly discovered self-disgust can be very funny in performance, and the scene echoes the little exchange between the two gentlemen previously converted by Marina, in which one declares “I am for no more bawdy houses,” asking “Shall’s go hear the vestals sing?” and his companion replies “I’ll do anything now that is virtuous, but I am out of the road of rutting for ever” (4.5.6-9). The suddenness of conversion is perhaps part of the point: it is not the product of reasoned argument, but of an overwhelming urge to reject one’s former behaviour.

19 Interpretations along these lines have not, however, convinced some editors and directors; if Pericles is to convince as a late play something has to be done about the brothel scenes. Many scholars have refused to admit them as Shakespeare’s work. Fleay is typical of many nineteenth-century commentators when he argues that Shakespeare would not have indulged in the morbid anatomy of such loathsome characters; he would have covered the ulcerous sores with a film of humour, if it were a necessary part of his moral surgery to treat them at all – and, above all, he would not have married Marina to a man whose acquaintance she had first made in a public brothel, to which his motives of resort were not recommendatory, however involuntary her sojourn there may have been.33 Marina, Fleay’s eight-scene version of Pericles, excises the brothel scenes altogether, and it is not surprising that Dowden gratefully accepted Fleay’s assessment of the authorship of the play given that the scenes are difficult to reconcile with his model of the late play as “mellowed, refined, made exquisite”. Later scholars have been less squeamish, and more willing to countenance the idea that Shakespeare might have “indulged in […] morbid anatomy”, but they have often continued to harbour doubts about the scenes’ authorship and textual integrity. With the re-dating of Pericles to 1608, supposed deficiencies in the writing of these scenes could no longer be attributed to the playwright’s youth and inexperience, but the discovery of Wilkins’s Painful Adventures and the general acceptance among scholars that the play is a collaboration have offered alternative solutions. These include “Wilkins’s involvement, at some stage of the play’s development, in the writing of portions of these largely Shakespearian scenes” and the suggestion that the Painful Adventures may provide material belonging to an original version of the play as it was staged by the King’s Men.34

20 Although these developments have rarely been linked, it is unsurprising that the brothel scenes have been subjected to substantial revision in both theatrical productions and editions of Pericles. The idea of the Shakespearean “late play” took a decisive hold on Pericles at precisely the point at which the play began to make an impact on the stage: C.L. Barber’s influential essay “‘Thou that Beget’st Him that Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale” was published in 1969, the same year as the play was staged at Stratford-on-Avon by Terry Hands in a version that drew on Painful Adventures at crucial moments.35 Barber’s essay stresses reconciliation, renewal and visionary revelation, and Hands described Pericles to his cast in strikingly similar terms: “[t]he play’s subject is love. Its mechanism is birth and resurrection, its techniques revelation and miracle”.36 With their frank treatment of sexual and economic exchange, their assertive and inscrutable Marina, and their evasive and ambiguous Lysimachus, the brothel scenes run contrary to these readings of the play. In a not untypical response, Roger Warren describes “Lysimachus’ behaviour and personality” as “a principal (perhaps the principal) puzzle of the play.” He suggests that the governor’s responses to Marina in the quarto can only be made “theatrically

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convincing by ingenious playing”, and remarks that Marina’s two brief speeches in the quarto “hardly seem enough to arouse such amazement and admiration in the sexual predator that we have seen in the early part of the scene.”37 Critics such as Warren thus see in the quarto text of Pericles one of the features identified by Ulrici in early Shakespeare: its characters appear “now and then still without solidity, wavering, and uncertain”, and they make it unfit for the status of a late Shakespearean work.

21 Paradoxically, therefore, editors and directors have looked outside the Shakespearean text to solve the puzzle of Pericles’s uneasy status as Shakespearean late work, incorporating material from the Painful Adventures into the brothel scenes in order to smooth out their problems of tone and characterisation. Wilkins’s version of the events of Act 4, Scene 5 lacks many of the disjunctions of the quarto: Marina makes a far more extended and emotive appeal, more is said about the physical interactions between the characters, and Lysimachus’s responses are significantly different. The exchange comes to a climax as Marina says: O my good Lord, kill me, but not deflower me, punish me how you please, so you spare my chastitie, and since it is all the dowry that both the Gods haue giuen, and men haue left to me, do not you take it from me; make me your seruant, I will willingly obey you; make mée your bond woman, I will accompt it fréedome; let me be the worst that is called vile, so I may still liue honest, I am content: or if you thinke it is too blessed a happinesse to haue me so, let me euen now, now in this minute die, and Ile accompt my death more happy than my birth. With which wordes (being spoken vpon her knées) while her eyes were the glasses that carried the water of her mis-hap, the good Gentlewoman being mooued, hee lift her vp with his hands, and euen then imbraced her in his hart, saying aside Now surely this is Uirtues image, or rather, Uertues selfe, sent downe from heauen, a while to raigne on earth, to teach vs what we should be. So in steede of willing her to drie her eyes, he wiped the wet himselfe off, and could haue found in his heart, with modest thoughts to haue kissed her, but that hée feared the offer would offend her.38 In addition to its apparently more satisfactory narrative and characterisation, this version includes some elements that seem to relate to stage presentation, such as the submerged iambic pentameter of much of the dialogue, the speech described as an “aside”, and physical movements that might be reproduced on stage: she kneels and weeps; he lifts her up, and wipes her eyes. Its appeal to a director wishing to supplement Marina’s part and regularise her interaction with Lysimachus is clear.

22 Directors preceded editors in drawing on Painful Adventures. Douglas Seale’s 1954 Birmingham Repertory Theatre appears to have been the first, its adaptations including Lysimachus’s admission “that he had come to the brothel ‘with ill intent’”, 39 but the most influential production to make use of Wilkins was Terry Hands’s 1969 Royal Shakespeare Company revival. The programme comments explicitly on the textual adaptation: “[t]he present version leans more heavily on the First Quarto than is usual, and where the text is excessively corrupt or actually missing, includes some blank verse passages from Wilkins’s The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre”.40 Its version of Act 4, Scene 5 draws heavily on Painful Adventures, and the surviving promptbook indicates both the additions from Wilkins and the later deletions that were made as the director and cast strove to make the adaptation ready for the stage. I have introduced bold text here and throughout this section to indicate what has been taken or adapted from Wilkins. Hands’s text reads: LYS: How’s this? how’s this? be sage. MAR: What reasons in Your justice which has power o’er all

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To undo one. If now you take from me Mine honour, you are like to him that makes A gap into forbidden ground – whereto With licensed hand the many come to prove The evil of your own base industry. Why stain your justice and abuse your name But to impoverish me? LYS: Why yet this house Wherein thyou livest is but a sty, a sink Of all men’s sins, a nurse of wickedness; How canst thou then be otherwise than nought That dealeth here dear physic of disease? MAR: How canst thou then be otherwise than nought That knowst there’s such a house, yet comest within’t? Is there a need, my yet good lord, if I Set fire before me, that I straight must fly And burn myself? O my good lord, yet spare my innocence; ’Tis all the dowry that the gods have given; ’Tis all remains of her by all forsa’en; Make me your servant, I will joy t’obey you, Make me your bondmaid, I’ll account it freedom; If I may be the worst that’s called vile, So I may live in honour, I’m content Or if you think it too much happiness To have me stay so, prithee let me now Now in this minute die, and I’ll account My death more happy than my birth. O that the gods Would set me free from this unhallowed place, Though they did change me to the meanest bird That flies in the purer air! LYS: I did not think Thou couldst have spoke so well, ne’er dreamt thou couldst. Had I brought hither a corrupted mind, Thy speech had altered it.41

23 Hands retains the line “Had I brought hither a corrupted mind”, but even once the lines marked for deletion are excluded he more than doubles the length of Marina’s appeal to Lysimachus; in the process, he removes her frank criticism of the “Stie” in which “diseases haue beene solde deerer then phisicke”, but he relocates the word “sty” into one of Lysimachus’s speeches. In addition, he adapts some of Wilkins’s directions for movement in the scene. In the promptbook, Marina is directed to kneel as she says “O my good lord,” and when Lysimachus speaks for the second time a direction indicates the required movement: “M. prostrate. L. kneels beside her”. Yet Hands’s adaptation does not entirely jettison the quarto’s sardonic edge. When Lysimachus entered he shiftily placed a hat on the statue of Priapus that featured prominently in the staging, and a note in the promptbook on the lines “If thou dost / Hear from me it shall be for thy good” (4.5.120-121) reads “Takes hat off priapus, looks at it, replaces hat. (RUDE!)”. Reviewing the production in The Spectator, Hilary Spurling noted that “Marina, for all her stainless, miracle-working chastity, has a rough tongue and a shrewd knowledge of the world”.42 The production thus attempted to correct the incomplete or problematic characterisation often associated with early modern writing, but resisted moving too far into the “romantic” mode of the late play in these scenes.

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24 Nearly twenty years later, editorial practice caught up with the stage, and these two venues for adaptation began to work together to produce a Pericles that was more of a late play than it had been hitherto.43 In his 1976 New Penguin edition, Philip Edwards drew on Painful Adventures to make sense of some difficult and probably corrupt passages in the quarto, though, interestingly, he did not amend Act 4, Scene 5 in this manner.44 The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, published in 1986, went much further, presenting what was billed as a “A Reconstructed Text”.45 With the assistance of MacDonald P. Jackson, Gary Taylor edited the play according to the hypothesis that The Painful Adventures is likely to have reported parts of the play as performed “both more accurately and more fully than the quarto” and his edition drew freely on both texts.46 These changes affect in particular the exchange between Lysimachus and Marina: MARINA. Let not authority, which teaches you To govern others, be the means to make you Misgovern much yourself. If you were born to honour, show it now; If put upon you, make the judgement good That thought you worthy of it. What reason’s in Your justice, who hath power over all, To undo any? If you take from me Mine honour, you’re like him that makes a gap Into forbidden ground, whom after Too many enter, and of all their evils Yourself are guilty. My life is yet unspotted; My chastity unstainèd ev’n in thought. Then if your violence deface this building, The workmanship of heav’n, you do kill your honour, Abuse your justice, and impoverish me. My yet good lord, if there be fire before me, Must I straight fly and burn myself? Suppose this house – Which too too many feel such houses are – Should be the doctor’s patrimony, and The surgeon’s feeding; follows it, that I Must needs infect myself to give them maint’nance? LYSIMACHUS. How’s this? How’s this? Some more, be sage. MARINA. [kneeling] For me That am a maid, though most ungentle fortune Have franked me in this sty, where since I came Diseases have been sold dearer than physic – That the gods would set me free from this unhallowed place, Though they did change me to the meanest bird That flies i’th’ purer air! LYSIMACHUS. [moved] I did not think Thou couldst have spoke so well, ne’er dreamt thou couldst. [He lifts her up with his hands] Though I brought hither a corrupted mind, Thy speech had altered it, [He wipes the wet from her eyes] and my foul thoughts Thy tears so well hath laved that they’re now white. I came here meaning but to pay the price, A piece of gold for thy virginity; Here’s twenty to relieve thine honesty.

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Persever still in that clear way thou goest, And the gods strengthen thee. (19.86-135) Like Hands in his 1969 production, Taylor increases Marina’s spoken role in the scene considerably, and he also uses material from Painful Adventures to rework Lysimachus’s lines. Here, the governor freely repents his former corruption, and the additional lines and some cuts and rearrangements in his final speech make him more measured and less shifty than his counterpart in the quarto. Together with the revisions to Marina’s role that had already been established on stage, these changes to Lysimachus helped to make the scene as a whole more sentimental, revelatory and “late”.

25 Intriguingly, as Pericles became more like a “late play” and thus a more integral part of the Shakespearean canon, it also seems to have started to shape conceptions of the late play itself. Reviewing Phyllida Lloyd’s 1994 production at the National Theatre, and comparing it unfavourably with Thacker’s, John Gross commented that the play “has an imaginative coherence, and its governing themes – loss and restoration, innocence surviving in a world of corruption – pervade it just as thoroughly as they do Shakespeare’s other late plays”.47 The theme of “innocence surviving in a world of corruption” clearly derives from Pericles, and it alerts us to the impact that revisions to the brothel scenes were beginning to have on broader understandings of Marina as her rough edges were smoothed off. These shifts were also registered elsewhere. Taylor’s edition is praised by Valerie Wayne for presenting “a more articulate Marina” who “becomes an important agent in the play’s critique of those in power”, but she criticizes the inclusion of stage directions based on Wilkins’s narration, asking “[i]s it possible to adopt Marina’s resistance in Wilkins without also importing her tears and abjection?”48 When Marina’s conversion of Lysimachus becomes less a miracle and more a piece of emotive rhetoric, she becomes more purely a late play heroine.

26 These problems have become yet more acute in later productions and editions of Pericles. The text for David Thacker’s RSC production, staged at the Swan in 1989, was based on Taylor’s edition, but departed from it in this scene in some important ways, softening the presentation of Lysimachus even further and making Marina’s appeal more sentimental. In Wilkins’s account, Lysimachus sees Marina from his window and pities her, resolving “that since shée must fall, it were farre more fitter, into his owne armes, whose authoritie could stretch to doe her good, than into the hote imbracements of many, to her vtter ruine” (sig. H2r), and when he arrives at the brothel he asks for “that same fresh péece of stuffe, which by their proclamation they tolde, they had now to make sale of” (sig. H2v). Although the Bawd says that he is a “fauourer of our calling” (sig. H2r) there is little to suggest that Lysimachus is a regular customer. Thacker therefore modified the lines, “Wholesome iniquity have you, that a man may deal withal and defy the surgeon?” (4.5.33-34), to read “have you that wholesome iniquity which by your proclamation you have now to make sale of, that a man may deal withal and defy the surgeon”.49 In this version, after Lysimachus asks Marina to take him to “some private place”, she makes an emotional appeal, using some of the lines also adopted by Hands, but omitting all of the political critique of that version and Taylor’s: MARINA My yet good lord, oh spare my innocence, Tis all the dowry that the gods have given. LYSIMACHUS How’s this, how’s this? MARINA Make me your servant and I will obey; Make me your slave, I will account it freedom.

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Or let me be the worst that’s callèd vile, So I may live in honour, I’m content. Or if this be too blessed a happiness, Let me this minute die My death will be more happy welcome than my birth. Here, only Lysimachus’s “How’s this, how’s this?” remains from the quarto. According to Roger Warren, who attended rehearsals, the new speech was devised because Suzan Sylvester, playing Marina, wanted her to make a different kind of appeal from that provided in the Oxford edition. “Instead of boldly taking on Lysimachus and accusing him of abusing his authority”, he comments, “Marina now made a purely personal appeal”; this “made Marina a much simpler character, less eloquent, less miracle- working, in short less distinguished”.50 As this background suggests, uses of Wilkins by editors, directors and actors are conditioned by their own interpretations of the scene, and by the assumptions that they bring to it.

27 Although Warren was clearly made uneasy by the effects of Thacker’s adaptation of Act 4, Scene 5 – preferring Richard Ouzounian’s 1986 production at Stratford, Ontario, in which Kim Horsman’s Marina had to work hard to convert Joseph Ziegler’s physically violent Lysimachus51 – his own single-volume edition for the Oxford Shakespeare, published in 2003, draws on some of the same material. Although he retains her attack on Lysimachus’s abuse of his office, Warren removes her attack on the brothel as a “sty”, and substitutes an extended version of the lines used by Thacker: O my good lord, kill me but not deflower me Punish me how you please but spare my chastity, And since ’tis all the dowry that the gods have given And men have left me, do not take it from me. Make me your servant, I willingly obey you, Make me your bondmaid, I’ll account it freedom. Let me be the worst that is called vile; So I may still live honest, I am content. Or if you think’t too blest a happiness To have me stay so, let me even now, [She kneels] Now in this minute die, and I’ll account My death more happy far than was my birth. (19.134-45)

28 As his notes and introduction stress, Warren’s changes aim to make Marina’s appeal to Lysimachus yet more “personal” and “passionate”,52 and he also tries to make Lysimachus’s behaviour more straightforward, adding lines to his response to her plea: LYSIMACHUS. [lifting her up] Now surely this is virtue’s image, nay, Virtue herself sent down from heaven a while To reign on earth and teach us what we should be! – I did not think thou couldst have spoke so well, Ne’er dreamt thou couldst. I hither came with thoughts intemperate, Foul and deformed, the which thy pains So well have laved that they are now white. I came here meaning but to pay the price, A piece of gold for thy virginity; Here’s twenty to relieve thine honesty. Persever still in that clear way thou goest, And the gods strengthen thee. (19.146-58)

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29 These versions of the exchange between Marina and Lysimachus have less of the awkwardness and embarrassment of the quarto’s dialogue, especially for Lysimachus. The scene also becomes more straightforwardly emotional and credible; Lysimachus’s additional lines underline the wondrous impact of Marina’s words, but the general expansion of the scene also makes that impact less mysterious. Tonally, the scene also becomes more of a piece with the later encounters between Marina and Pericles, and Thaisa and Pericles. For Warren, the emotional appeals made by his version of Marina “come from Wilkins’s account of the scene, but they are absolutely characteristic of Shakespeare’s juxtaposition of such extreme contrasts in his late plays”.53 What is elided here is the critical work that has gone into the creation of the “late play” itself.

30 Editorial and theatrical reworkings of Pericles thus bring the play closer to the model of the Shakespearean late play offered by Dowden and later scholars: tonally consistent, wondrous, reconciliatory and sentimental, avoiding what Dowden calls “the extremes of broad humour and tragic intensity”. They write out some of the “wildness and irregularity” of both the narrative and its characters, and move the brothel scene away from the quarto’s more unsettling version, with its shifty Lysimachus and assertive Marina. Where Fleay excised the brothel scenes as incompatible with his Marina, editors and directors have civilised even those elements that he thought irreconcilable with Shakespearean authorship.

31 Yet problems remain. Incorporating material from The Painful Adventures gives Marina more to say in each of these adaptations. However, her greater articulacy is not uncomplicated, nor is the greater attention that is consequently thrown onto the play’s youngest character; one does not have to be as hostile to conflation as Anthony Hammond and Doreen DelVecchio, who describe such productions as “Wilkinsised”,54 to be uneasy with some of its effects. As Lori Humphrey Newcomb comments, “[t]o bring material from Wilkins’s novella into the play cannot merely be a pragmatic solution to an intertextual puzzle if it celebrates gendered violence in either the artists’ or the editors’ choices”.55 Adaptations risk making Marina more abject – especially when they include her plea that the governor enslave or kill her rather than taking her chastity, or draw on the implied stage directions in Painful Adventures – even as they make her and the play in which she appears more emotionally coherent and less “rough-tongued”.

32 As we have seen, the re-dating of Pericles and the emergence of the idea of the “late play” have had far-reaching consequences for the play on both stage and page. In a somewhat paradoxical process, acknowledgement that the play is a collaboration and editorial processes that have aimed to restore something of the original version of Act 4 as it was staged by the King’s Men have produced a unified effect. That is, the fact that the play is only partially Shakespearean has enabled it to become gradually more “Shakespearean” in terms of both its text and its place within the canon. Happy as they were to amend Shakespeare’s text, it would not have occurred to late eighteenth- century editors that Pericles should be more like a late play, partly because that model had not yet fully emerged, partly because they were convinced that it was early, and partly because some of them did not believe that it was even partly Shakespearean. Yet by paying attention to the old tradition that Pericles was written by a young Shakespeare at the outset of his career, we can see some of the manoeuvres that are required to make it fully “late.”

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NOTES

1. I am very grateful to the Société Française Shakespeare for inviting me to speak at their 2015 conference, and to Laetitia Sansonetti and two anonymous readers for their feedback and guidance. I would also like to thank Gordon McMullan and students on the King’s College London module “Late Shakespeare” for discussions about Pericles. 2. John Dryden, The Poems of John Dryden: Volume One: 1649-1681, ed. Paul Hammond, 1995, repr. Abingdon, Routledge, 2014, p. 339 (l. 16-19). 3. Act, scene and line numbers in this essay follow Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London, Thomson Learning, 2004, from which all quotations are taken unless indicated otherwise. 4. William Shakespeare, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; In Six Volumes, ed. Nicholas Rowe, London, 1709, 1: vii. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 1: vi-vii. 7. For recent studies of the chronologies and their versions of Shakespeare’s career, see Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 128-159; Peter Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Dramatic Canon, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 36-47. 8. Edmond Malone, “Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to William Shakespeare Were Written”, in William Shakespeare, The Plays of William Shakespeare in Ten Volumes […] To Which Are Added Notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, ed. Edmond Malone, second edition, 10 volumes, London, 1778, 1: 269-346, p. 274. 9. Ibid., p. 284; idem, Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare’s Plays Published in 1778 by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 2 volumes, London, C. Bathurst et al., 1780, 2: 186. 10. See Malone, “Attempt”, p. 274-275. 11. Edward Capell, Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, 3 volumes, London, printed 1779-1780 and published 1783, Vol. 2, Part 4, p. 185. The title-page of each volume of Capell’s edition of Mr William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 volumes, London: Dryden Leach for J. and R. Tonson, 1767-8, advertises the Notes as forthcoming: “Whereunto will be added, in some other Volumes, NOTES, critical and explanatory, and a Body of VARIOUS READINGS entire”. Capell’s views on the late plays were idiosyncratic for his time but now appear in some respects far-sighted: he places as the final plays Othello (1611), Cymbeline (1612), Henry VIII (1613), The Winter’s Tale (1613) and The Tempest (1614). 12. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4 volumes, London, William Pickering, 1836-1839, 2: 86-87. For slightly different versions of these lists, see Coleridge’s Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 volumes, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1930, 1: 237-242. 13. Coleridge, op. cit. 2: 89-90. 14. John Payne Collier, Farther Particulars Regarding Shakespeare, London, Thomas Rodd, 1839, p. 31, 33. On Collier and the Painful Adventures see Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 312-313. 15. The most vocal recent proponent of this theory was Eric Sams. See “The Painful Misadventures of Pericles Acts I and II”, Notes and Queries, n.s. 38, 1991, 67-90; The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 171-172, 187-190.

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For commentary see also MacDonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 32-37. 16. Dulwich College MSS 1, Article 30, Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, http://www.henslowe- alleyn.org.uk/images/MSS-1/Article-030/01r.html (accessed 15 March 2015); S.P. Cerasano, “An Inventory of Theatrical Apparel (c. 1601/2)”, http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/essays/ costumelist.html (accessed 15 March 2015). See also Collier’s Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, Founder of Dulwich College: Including Some New Particulars Respecting Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Massinger, Marston, Dekker, &c., London, Shakespeare Society, 1841, p. 21-22; Freeman and Freeman, op. cit., p. 346-347. 17. Hermann Ulrici, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art: History and Character of Shakspeare’s Plays, trans. L. Dora Schmitz, 2 volumes, London, George Bell and Sons, 1876, 1: 222n, 222-223. The German third edition on which this is based appeared in 1869. 18. Pericles, in The Illustrated Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Plays, with his Life, 3 volumes, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1847, 3: 7 (each play has separate pagination). 19. McMullan, op. cit., p. 22, describes him as “the first critic fully to delineate a Shakespearean late style and the starting point for all work on the subject”. 20. Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, London, Henry S. King, 1875, p. ix. 21. F.G. Fleay, “On the Play of Pericles”, Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, Series 1, Part 1, 1874, 195-209. 22. Ibid., p. 211-241. 23. Dowden, op. cit., p. 403. 24. Idem, Shakspere, Literature Primers, London, Macmillan, 1877, p. 56-57. 25. Ibid., p. 55, 144-146. 26. Op. cit., p. 45. 27. For a history of these developments, and a convincing case for the play as a collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins, see Jackson, op. cit. 28. G.E. Bentley’s thesis in “Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre”, Shakespeare Survey 1, 1948, 38-50, that from 1609 Shakespeare wrote “with the Blackfriars in mind and not the Globe” (p. 46), has been much debated. See McMullan, op. cit., p. 96-99. Andrew Gurr argues that only The Tempest shows definite signs of Blackfriars composition: see “The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars”, Shakespeare Survey 41, 1989, 91-102. 29. There was only one nineteenth-century production, that of Samuel Phelps in 1854. For detailed accounts of the play’s performance history see Michael Mullin, “Pericles”, in Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals, ed. Samuel L. Leiter, New York and London, Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 555-567; Roger Warren, Staging Shakespeare’s Late Plays, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 208-237; Anthony Hammond and Doreen DelVecchio, ed., Pericles, Prince of Tyre New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 15-26; David Skeele, Thwarting the Wayward Seas: A Critical and Theatrical History of Shakespeare’s Pericles in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Newark, NJ, University of Delaware Press, 1998; Skeele, ed., Pericles: Critical Essays, New York, Routledge, 2000, Part III; Gossett, Pericles, p. 2-8, 86-106. 30. William Shakespeare, The Late, and Much Admired Play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, London, 1609, sigs. G4v-H1r. STC 22334. 31. Gossett, op. cit., p. 356; see also Pericles, ed. Hammond and DelVecchio, p. 170. 32. Aphra Behn, The Rover and Other Plays, ed. Jane Spencer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, 4.5.122-123. Although the plays have little in common otherwise, they suggest some continuities in the ways in which social class and sexual exploitation might be related. 33. Fleay, op. cit., 196. 34. See Jackson, op. cit., p. 230-232 (quotation from p. 232). 35. C.L. Barber, “‘Thou that Beget’st Him that Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale”, Shakespeare Survey 22, 1969, 59-67.

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36. Note “From the director’s first talk to the cast” in the programme for Pericles (1969). 37. Warren, op. cit., p. 225; idem, ed., Pericles, Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 49. 38. The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, London, 1608, sig. H3v. STC 25638.5. 39. J.C. Maxwell, ed., Pericles, Cambridge Shakespeare, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. xxxix. 40. RSC programme for Pericles (1969). 41. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, RSC/SM/1/1969/PER2. 42. Hilary Spurling, “Stranger Things at Stratford”, Spectator, 11 April 1969, p. 481. 43. For helpful summaries of editorial approaches, see Jackson, op. cit., p. 218-221; Suzanne Gossett, “‘To Foster is not Always to Preserve’: Feminist Inflections in Editing Pericles’, in In Arden: Editing Shakespeare, ed. Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan, London, Thomson Learning, 2003, p. 65-80. 44. See Philip Edwards, ed., Pericles, New Penguin Shakespeare, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, p. 204. 45. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery, ed., The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 1037. 46. Ibid. For background on the edition see Jackson, op. cit., 218-20. 47. John Gross, review of Pericles, Daily Telegraph, quoted in Melissa Gibson, “Pericles at the Royal National Theatre [1994]”, in Skeele, Pericles, p. 332-338 (p. 336). 48. “Political and Textual Corruption in Pericles”, unpublished paper for Pericles seminar, Shakespeare Association of America, 1999, quoted in Gossett, ed., Pericles, p. 53-54. See also Gossett, op. cit.; Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “The Sources of Romance, the Generation of Story, and the Patterns of the Pericles Tales”, in Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne, Abingdon, Routledge, 2009, p. 21-47. 49. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, RSC/SM/1/1989/PER1. For a detailed account of the adaptation of this scene see Warren, Staging, p. 226-228. 50. Warren, Staging, p. 227. 51. Ibid., p. 223-228. 52. Idem, Pericles, p. 51. 53. Ibid., p. 52. 54. Hammond and DelVecchio, op. cit., p. 20. 55. Newcomb, op. cit., p. 36.

ABSTRACTS

Once viewed as the first play composed by a young Shakespeare, since the late nineteenth century Pericles has instead been viewed as the first of the ‘late’ plays. This essay explores the processes through which this occurred, and their implications for our understanding of recent editorial and theatrical interventions. By paying attention to the old tradition that Pericles is an early work, we can perceive some of the manoeuvres that are required to make it fully ‘late’.

Autrefois considérée comme la première pièce composée par un jeune Shakespeare, depuis la fin du XIXe siècle Périclès est plutôt perçue comme la première des « pièces tardives ». Cet article explore les mécanismes de cette évolution et leurs implications pour notre compréhension de

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pratiques éditoriales et théâtrales récentes. En prêtant attention à la vieille tradition selon laquelle Périclès est une œuvre de jeunesse, nous pouvons nous faire une idée des opérations nécessaires afin d’assurer sa place parmi les pièces « tardives ».

INDEX

Mots-clés: adaptation, canon, carrière, édition du texte, pièces tardives, Shakespeare William, Wilkins George Keywords: adaptation, canon, career, late plays, Shakespeare William, textual editing, Wilkins George

AUTHOR

LUCY MUNRO King’s College London

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Jeunesse des personnages Young Characters

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Enter Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet, 1589

Terri Bourus

1 How old is Hamlet?

2 That question may seem desperately old-fashioned. The question presumes that Shakespeare had an intention about Hamlet’s age, that Shakespeare’s intention matters, and that Shakespeare’s intention is recoverable. By even asking the question, I may seem to be ignoring Barthes’ announcement of the death of the author and Foucault’s analysis of the author-function.1 But as a theatre historian and theatre practitioner I am well aware that Shakespeare has been dead since 1616, and that since then his functions in casting and rehearsing his plays have been limited (and always mediated by someone else’s agenda). The age of Shakespeare’s characters changes regularly in performance. Every performer is, and must be, a presentist. We succeed, or fail, in the moment. A 2014 Irish production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was set in a nursing home, with all the lovers, fairies and mechanicals as aged patients. A 2013 production of Much Ado about Nothing at the Old Vic cast Vanessa Redgrave (then 76 years old) as Beatrice and James Earl Jones (then 82) as Benedick. Whether or not those interpretations worked in performance, they certainly did not reflect Shakespeare’s historical intentions. Likewise, the great Restoration actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton was still performing the role of Hamlet when he was seventy. But in a North Carolina production in February 2015 Hamlet was played by a twenty-two-year- old, pretending to be nineteen. The text of that production, and the age of its protagonist, were based on the first quarto of Hamlet, published in 1603. Christopher Marino, the director, takes it “[a]s a testament to Q1” that “a five, seven and eight-year- old sat through the entire thing, and still talk about it”, and he recommended that Q1 Hamlet should be “the go-to text” for all college productions of Shakespeare’s play.2 But in another 2015 production, textually even more faithful to Q1 Hamlet, the Prince was played by a thirty-three year old professional actor, Marcus Kyd, who was also the artistic director and co-founder of the acting company that produced the play.3

3 How old is Hamlet?

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4 However old a producer, a director, or an actor with sufficient clout, wants him to be.

5 Readers and performers can imagine whatever Hamlet suits the times or their own experience. But we, as scholars and critics, or as theatre artists interested in original performance practices, should legitimately investigate the age of Hamlet in our earliest texts of the play. In fact, if we are paying attention to textual variants in the earliest editions of Hamlet, we cannot avoid the question of Hamlet’s age.

6 Imagine that you, reader, are already convinced that there is nothing suspicious about the printing or publication of the first quarto;4 and that you are convinced that the first quarto cannot possibly be a memorial reconstruction; and you are convinced that the first quarto cannot possibly be the result of note-takers in the audience. Imagine you already know that Edmond Malone was wrong to assume that Shakespeare only began writing plays in 1591, and that Malone was also wrong to assert that Thomas Nashe’s 1589 reference to Hamlet refers to a lost play by someone other than Shakespeare. You realize instead that Nashe was referring to an early version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, a version preserved in the first quarto edition. Imagine that I have already shown you how perfectly the style and dramaturgy of Q1 fit the literary and theatrical circumstances of the late 1580s. Above all, imagine that you are already convinced that Shakespeare himself was the first person to transform the story of Amleth in François Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques into an English play.

7 Let me on your imaginary forces continue to work: think now that when I speak of the first quarto of Hamlet, you see before you the proof that it is closer to Belleforest than either the second quarto or the folio texts. Imagine that this sentence can hold the vasty fields of France, and that you see that Shakespeare, like himself, like a typical educated Tudor Englishman, was particularly interested in sixteenth-century French literature, from the very beginning of his career.5 Shakespeare did not need Thomas Kyd to pre-digest Belleforest’s histoire of Amleth and spoon-feed it to him.

8 Zachary Lesser’s book on Q1 Hamlet, published just a couple months after my own, takes a radically different approach to the problem, and we disagree on one or two minor details, but the two books complement each other so perfectly that, if I did not know better, it would be easy to imagine that they are the result of a carefully planned conspiracy à deux. Lesser devotes whole chapters to issues that I barely mention: the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, for instance, or the textual variant “country/contrary” in the Mousetrap scene.6 On the other hand, Lesser spends only a few pages on the publisher Nicholas Ling, whose career in the early modern book trade is the subject of my entire first chapter. Lesser says almost nothing, and nothing new, about Malone’s chronology or Nashe’s 1589 allusion to Hamlet. Nevertheless, Lesser’s history of Hamlet criticism in the wake of the 1823 re-discovery of the first quarto demonstrates that the orthodoxies of twentieth-century textual criticism are profoundly unsatisfactory, and that the New Textualism of our own time is equally bankrupt. In his conclusion, Lesser criticizes what he calls the twenty-first century’s “constitutive refusal to ask questions about [the] historical origins” of Q1, and he urges scholars to “find new methods for producing a stemma of the three early texts of Hamlet”.7 His final chapter could well serve as the introduction to my book, which does, indeed, construct a new stemma for the relationship of those three texts.

9 The 2015 Norton Shakespeare includes in its printed textbook not only the canonical expanded Hamlet but also the Q1 version—giving Q1 Hamlet the kind of special status that the 1986 Oxford Shakespeare gave to Q1 Lear.8 But the 1986 revolution in attitudes

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to King Lear was very much the product of a single publisher—the revolution in attitudes toward Q1 Hamlet is much more broadly based. My book was published in Palgrave’s “History of Text Technologies” series, Lesser’s book was published in Penn’s “Material Texts” series, and Lesser himself has recently been named one of the General Editors of the next incarnation of the Arden Shakespeare. In Emma Smith’s 2012 Penguin paperback anthology of revenge tragedies, Q1 Hamlet is the only Shakespeare text.9

10 In what follows I will assume that you have already read my book and Lesser’s book, and found both of them convincing. That may seem a lot to ask, but I have learned, from previous experience, that it is impossible, in a short essay, to answer all the questions raised by the texts of Hamlet. In the past, when I addressed some aspect of Q1 at various conferences and seminars, I was inevitably criticized for not answering simultaneously all the other questions about all three texts of Hamlet. It is as if my audiences consisted entirely of clones of Rosalind: Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose? What did he when thou saw’st him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes him here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again?—Answer me in one word. To which I can only respond, like Celia, “You must borrow me Gargantua’s mouth first.”10

11 Lacking Gargantua’s mouth or Rabelais’ stamina and imaginative fertility, I cannot in this essay answer every question about Q1 Hamlet, but I will try here to answer the question about Hamlet’s age.

12 “No arithmetic is necessary”, Harold Jenkins declared in 1982, “to determine that Hamlet must be thirty.” Jenkins made that announcement in a long note appended to his monumental Arden edition of Hamlet—or rather, his monumental Arden edition of the traditional conflated Hamlet that began life in Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s plays. In that canonical Hamlet, and in the second quarto published in 1604, Hamlet is undoubtedly thirty, but if no arithmetic is necessary to answer this question, why did Jenkins write three and a half pages on Hamlet’s age?11 His long- windedness is particularly surprising because Jenkins followed this proclamation of the utter obviousness of the answer by dismissing the significance of the question: he doubts “Whether the number of Hamlet’s years was of concern to Shakespeare, or should be to us.”

13 This is a strange claim. Why would a playwright, or any writer, not care whether his protagonist was thirty, or sixteen? Is there no difference in psychology, or social identity, between an adolescent and a thirty-year-old? In particular, is such an age difference irrelevant to the Prince of Denmark, whose claim to the throne is central to every version of his story? Like any prince, Hamlet’s political status, his political power, his political options, depend in part upon his age. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz emphasized the importance of Hamlet’s age when he summarized the Prince’s situation: “Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king.”12 All of this is indisputably true in all versions of the play—except for the sentence “You are of age”. That is indisputably true in the canonical Hamlet, but not in Q1.

14 Jenkins’ doubts were not evidence of his enthusiasm for Barthes, Foucault, or any variety of postmodernist French critical theory. Jenkins was the perfect English fusion

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of modernist New Bibliography and modernist New Criticism. But why would a scholar who devoted 574 pages to identifying Shakespeare’s intentions in respect to every word and punctuation mark in Hamlet cast doubt on whether Shakespeare cared about Hamlet’s age? Jenkins admitted that Hamlet’s age has caused problems for many readers: “a thirty-year-old Hamlet goes against the impression the play conveys of the hero’s youth”, and “[a]ttempts to deny a certain discrepancy are futile.” Nevertheless, Jenkins warned readers that it was a mistake to “consider it too curiously”, and declared that the “numbers are less important than the pattern of a life which they evoke.” But if the numbers are not important, why did Shakespeare supply them?

15 And why am I beginning with Jenkins, whose edition is now more than thirty years old? Its replacement in the Arden series, the 2006 edition by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, acknowledges that Hamlet is thirty years old in the canonical texts of Q2 and F—but also recognizes that, in the first quarto, Hamlet is only “about 18” years old.13 Of course, if Hamlet is less than eighteen years old, he would not be “of age”, and the play’s politics would be significantly different. Nevertheless, the 2006 edition does not address those political implications. It is still haunted by the ghost of Jenkins, and so at times is Lesser’s book. The 2006 Arden edition, while refusing to fully endorse theories about bad quartos, nevertheless often speaks of readings in Q1 as “deletions” or “additions” or “alterations” from the canonical version. Such language implies that the larger, traditional version somehow preceded the shorter one that was published first. The editors’ language implies an editorial theory, even when their introduction refuses to do so explicitly. The same happens very occasionally with Lesser. He has a brilliant chapter on the Q1 stage direction that specifies the Ghost’s final entrance “in his nightgown” (114-156). Nevertheless, Lesser writes more than once about how the Q1 version “becomes” something different, as though Q1 were an evolution from the longer, later, canonical Q2. Even if we ignore entirely the 1589 Hamlet, even if we restrict ourselves (as book historians like Lesser normally do) to the perspective of early readers, it was Q2’s printed version that “became” something different from the earlier Q1’s printed version. And whoever wrote the 1589 Hamlet, the canonical Hamlet of the early seventeenth century “became” something different from the version written and performed in the late 1580s—which was also being performed by the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594.

16 Jenkins casts a long shadow. In particular, his long note on Hamlet’s age is the foundation for the conviction, among some textual scholars, that Hamlet’s age is a “pseudo-problem”. Even Thompson and Taylor, who recognize the significant difference in age between Q1 and Q2, do not discuss its theatrical, psychological, or political importance. The age of Hamlet becomes simply a hanging factoid, an entirely meaningless mathematical curiosity.

17 Jenkins himself blames the pseudo-problem on A. C. Bradley.14 Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, published in 1904, is arguably the most influential academic monograph ever written on Shakespeare; Bradley’s book contains a famous, or infamous, appendix of 32 long notes, including one on “Hamlet’s Age”.15 But Bradley begins that note by referring readers to the “chief arguments” on this subject in “Furness’s Variorum Hamlet”. Dr. Henry Howard Furness, in 1877, had devoted four pages to the debate about Hamlet’s age--including remarks by Furnivall on the “startling inconsistencies” in the early texts, claims by Minto and Marshall that Hamlet was only seventeen or eighteen, and Furness’s own editorial comment that “Eduard and Otto Devrient […]

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contend, and with much force, for Hamlet’s extreme youth”.16 The Devrient edition, Deutscher Bühnen Und Familien Shakespeare, published in Leipzig in 1873, used the authority of the Q1 text to argue for “Hamlet to be in his minority”, that is, younger than the legal age of adulthood.17

18 Jenkins did not acknowledge this longer history of the debate. Instead, he simply targeted Bradley. And Bradley, of course, was not a textual scholar or an editor. Nevertheless, Bradley’s book demonstrates that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, even for a literary critic primarily interested in the philosophy of tragedy, Hamlet’s age seemed self-evidently important. Bradley recognized, that the first quarto treats Hamlet’s age differently than the longer canonical texts found in the second quarto, the folio, and modern editions that conflate those two later texts. Even if the general impression I received from the play were that Hamlet was a youth of eighteen or twenty, I should feel quite unable to set it against the evidence of the statements in [the canonical text of] V.i which show him to be exactly thirty, unless these statements seemed to be casual. But they have to my mind, on the contrary, the appearance of being expressly inserted in order to fix Hamlet’s age; and the fact that they differ decidedly from the statements in Q1 confirms that idea. So does the fact that the Player King speaks of having been married thirty years (III.ii.165), where again the number differs from that in Q1. Bradley does not, anywhere in the Note, attempt to establish the stemmatic relationship between Q1 and the canonical texts, though he does recognize that the canonical texts specifically and pointedly insist upon a Hamlet who is thirty years old, in a way that Q1 does not.

19 And, although Bradley recognizes this difference between the two versions, he cannot satisfactorily explain it. He cannot explain it because, like almost everyone else in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he accepts Malone’s theories about Shakespeare’s chronology, and therefore he dismisses the possibility that Shakespeare wrote the 1589 Hamlet mentioned by Nashe. “It has been suggested”, Bradley notes, “that in the old play Hamlet was a mere lad.” Here, Bradley assumes that “the old play” is lost, and that we can only conjecture about its contents. Bradley is forced back onto similar conjectures when he discusses the relationship between Hamlet and Wittenberg: “The only solution I can suggest is that, in the story or play which Shakespeare used, Hamlet and the others were all at the time of the murder young students at Wittenberg.” Here, Bradley not only refers to the conjectural contents of a lost play, but also conjures up the possibility of a lost “story”. The problems here seem insoluble, because the answers depend upon lost documents.

20 Fortunately, “the story” behind Hamlet is not lost: it is Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques. In Belleforest, Amleth is indeed what Bradley calls “a mere lad”: he is called not only “jeune”, but also “adolescent” and “enfant”; explicitly, he had not yet reached “perfection d’age”, or the legal age of majority.18 About Belleforest as the primary source of any English “Tragical History of Hamlet” there can be no reasonable doubt. But most scholars still believe, as Bradley did, that the “play” mentioned by Nashe in 1589 actually is lost. I argue in my recent monograph that Shakespeare is the author of that 1589 play, and that the text of that 1589 play is preserved in Q1; the case for Shakespeare’s authorship of the 1589 play is, for four reasons, even stronger than I realized when I wrote that book.

21 First, I think that most Shakespeare scholars, since Malone, have been reluctant to believe that anyone could have criticized so flippantly any version of Hamlet written by

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the great and immortal Bard of Avon. We have reconciled ourselves to the fact that the first mention of Shakespeare in print—in 1592, in Greenes Groatsworth of Wit—is mocking and negative; however, we can accept mockery of Henry the Sixth, Part Three much more easily than we can accept mockery of Hamlet. But the play Nashe was mocking in 1589 (and that Thomas Lodge mocked in 1596) was not the world-famous play written by Shakespeare in the early seventeenth century, at the height of his powers. It was perhaps the first full-length play Shakespeare had written; a play that conservative literary critics continue to mock. You need only think of Brian Vickers’ description of the text of the first quarto: “Hamlet by Dogberry”.19

22 Second, Nashe puns on the proper name of the protagonist and the common noun “hamlet”: he describes an anonymous author who “will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speaches.” Italicized, and with an upper-case initial “H”, that odd word “Hamlets” undoubtedly refers to a proper name. But in the 1599 reprint of Nashe’s text, “Hamlets” was emended by a compositor to the commonplace plural noun “hamlets” (with no italics and no upper case “H”).20 In 1778, Malone had seen only the 1599 edition, and he denied that Nashe was alluding to a proper name; in 1790, having finally seen a copy of the 1589 original, Malone changed his mind, and recognized that Nashe must be alluding to a play.21 This error in the reprint is proof that at least one early reader gave the pun priority over the literary allusion, and Malone demonstrates that such an interpretation was also possible for an astute reader in the late eighteenth century. But what was the purpose of this pun in Nashe’s original 1589 text? Unlike the other alleged puns in this paragraph, this one must explicitly refer to a Hamlet play. But it has nothing to do with the story told by Belleforest, or with any known version of the English play. However, it may have something to do with the unnamed author. Other documentary evidence establishes that the 1580s Hamlet cannot have been written by Lyly, Daniel, Drayton, Nashe, Peele, Greene, or any university-educated playwright; the only remaining candidates would be Thomas Kyd, Anthony Munday, or William Shakespeare, and of those three Shakespeare is the most likely for a variety of reasons.22 This pun decisively eliminates Munday and Kyd: both were born in London, so the pun makes no sense if either of them was the author of the 1589 play. Shakespeare, by contrast, came from a small market town in the English Midlands that might easily be mocked as a “hamlet”. The derisive pun on “hamlets” resembles Robert Greene’s jibe at Shakespeare as a country bumpkin (“the only Shakes- scene in a countrey”).23

23 Third, Nashe’s plural proper name (“Hamlets”) is itself odd. Neither Saxo Grammaticus nor Francois Belleforest names Hamlet’s father. But Shakespeare’s play, in all versions, contains two men named Hamlet. Shakespeare does this elsewhere: The Comedy of Errors contains two men named Dromio and two named Antipholus, and Henry IV contains a father and son both named Henry (“Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, But Harry Harry”). This kind of name-doubling does not occur in Thomas Kyd’s work.

24 Fourth, the “he” whom Nashe associates with Hamlets (and hamlets) is described in a specific, peculiar way: “if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will affoord you whole […] handfulls of tragical speaches.” The “he” may be the aforementioned “English Seneca” (the translations of Seneca’s plays into English), but those were the work of multiple translators, and one can “intreat” a person but not a book. Nashe more particularly imagines a dialogue between “you” and “him” on “a frostie morning”. It is hard to imagine a playwright, on a morning walk, carrying around

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handwritten pages consisting only of separated sample speeches, which he would hand over to anyone who asked him nicely. The sentence makes much more sense if Nashe were imagining someone who would, if asked, immediately declaim tragical speeches, anywhere, like an actor giving an impromptu audition. The verb “afford” has the common meaning “provide, supply”, and the word “speeches” here clearly refers to a formal oral utterance.24 OED does not recognize theatrical speeches as a distinct category, but the word was often used in that sense, by Nashe among others.25 But undoubtedly the most famous early example of an actor giving a tragical speech outside of a theatre comes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the Prince encounters the players. This episode does not occur in the Hamlet narratives of Grammaticus or Belleforest, but it does occur in all texts of Shakespeare’s play. I will quote it here from the Q1 version. Soon after the players enter, Hamlet demands of them, Come on, masters, we’ll even to’t—like French falconers, fly at anything we see. Come, a taste of your quality—a speech, a passionate speech. PLAYERS. What speech, my good lord? HAMLET. I heard thee speak a speech once […] Come, a speech in it I chiefly remember was Aeneas’ tale to Dido […] (7.324-737)

25 After one of the players delivers the tragical speech, Hamlet asks, “couldst not thou for a need study me some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert?” (7.394-396); later, in rehearsal, presumably referring to those inserted lines, Hamlet advises the player to “Pronounce me this speech trippingly o’ the tongue as I taught thee” (9.1-2). Shakespeare’s Hamlet departs from Belleforest by having a player speak a tragical speech on demand soon after he encounters someone; Shakespeare’s Hamlet also treats a speech as a distinct unit of theatrical performance, which can be scripted separately.26 Shakespeare in Q1 Hamlet combines an actor giving a speech, when politely entreated to do so, outside of a theatre, with the writing of speeches for players —and that is exactly the scenario that Nashe mocks in his sentence about someone who will “affoord you whole Hamlets […] of tragical speeches.” Nashe is not just alluding to a play about Hamlet; he seems to be alluding to a specific incident unique to Shakespeare’s versions of Hamlet. Moreover, although Nashe’s words are printed in a book registered in August, he associates “whole Hamlets […] of tragical speaches” with an encounter “in a frostie morning”. Unlike Grammaticus and Belleforest, all texts of Shakespeare’s play contain a dialogue between Hamlet and his father’s ghost, also named Hamlet; the ghost would not speak to Horatio and the soldiers, who “offer it the show of violence” (1.100); but the Senecan ghost of Hamlet does afford tragical speaches to another Hamlet (Sc. 5), who entreats him fair in the pre-dawn hours, when “the air bites shrewd” with “a nipping wind” (4.1-2).

26 The man that Nashe associated with Hamlet, and with famous scenes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is characterized as though he were an actor as well as an author. Neither Kyd nor Munday was an actor. Nashe’s gibe conflates actor and author in the same way that Greene would do when he mocked Shakespeare’s “tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide”. Nashe also, in 1589, described the author of Hamlet in the same way that John Aubrey described Shakespeare “when he was a boy”: “when he kill’d a Calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a Speech.”27 Aubrey recorded an oral anecdote about Shakespeare in his youth, so enthusiastic about his own tragic speeches that he recited them outside the theatre. That is also how Nashe describes the author of Hamlet in 1589: as an actor-playwright who came from a small town, lacked a university education, and

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performed theatrical speeches outside of theatres. Who else but Shakespeare, in 1589, could possibly fit those criteria?

27 Bradley’s approach to the problem of Hamlet’s age was confused by the prevailing scholarly confusion over the relationship of the traditional text to Q1. But nevertheless, Bradley did recognize that Hamlet’s age is a real problem, and he did take the problem of Hamlet’s age seriously. So what happened between Bradley, in 1904, and Jenkins, in 1982?

28 One thing that happened was the rise of the New Bibliography, which banished altogether the fruitful confusion of earlier discussions of the relationship between Q1 and Q2. In the ancien regime of Pollard and Greg and Bowers, Q1 was simply and obviously a bad quarto, which could and should be confidently ignored. But the particular question about Hamlet’s age was also influenced by twentieth-century changes in literary theory, and above all by an essay by L. C. Knights: “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”

29 This essay was first published in 1933 in Scrutiny, the influential Leavisite journal that Knights edited, and it was reprinted as the first chapter in his 1946 book Explorations, one of the foundational textbooks of New Criticism. This essay is still described, on Wikipedia, as “a classic of modern criticism.”28 Its title invoked, and implicitly mocked, the Notes to Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, and Bradley was explicitly and repeatedly targeted in the essay. But in one significant way the title misrepresented Bradley. Most of Bradley’s “Notes” are, of course, about men. Bradley never asks “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” Bradley does discuss children in his analysis of Macbeth, but the subheading of Bradley’s Note on that subject is “He has no children” (my italics). Knights turned Bradley’s discussion of whether Macbeth had a male heir into a self- evidently absurd gynecological enquiry.

30 Knights began by asking “why so few of the many books that have been written are relevant to our study of Shakespeare as a poet”. His answer involved “an examination of certain critical presuppositions, and of these the most fruitful of irrelevancies is the assumption that Shakespeare was pre-eminently a great ‘creator of characters’”.29 As examples of this absurd assumption Knight cited two books that had recently been published. The first was Ranjee Shahani’s Shakespeare Through Eastern Eyes, but the fallacy was even better illustrated by Ellen Terry’s recently published Lectures on Shakespeare. “To her the characters are all flesh and blood.”30 Obviously, any theory espoused by colonial natives and women (let alone actresses) must be wrong. However, these easy preliminary targets are simply ways of discrediting by association, in advance, the real object of New Critical disdain: The most illustrious example is, of course, Dr. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy. The book is too well known to require much descriptive comment, but it should be observed that the Notes, in which the detective interest supersedes the critical, form a logical corollary to the main portions of the book […] It is assumed throughout [Bradley’s] book that the most profitable discussion of Shakespeare’s tragedies is in terms of the characters of which they are composed.31 Among the specific examples that Knights mocked are Bradley’s “conjecture upon Hamlet’s whereabouts at the time of his father’s death”,32 something that Bradley discussed in relation to the issue of Hamlet’s age.

31 In place of such misguided notions about the importance of character, Knights famously declared that “a Shakespeare play is a dramatic poem.” He then immediately quoted G. Wilson Knight’s dictum that “the persons, ultimately, are not human at all,

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but purely symbols of a poetic vision,” and if “the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration of his plays as dramatic poems”,33 then we need not concern ourselves with such mundane irrelevancies as the age of a character. Bradley’s interest in such matters was, for Knights, a natural corollary of nineteenth-century assumptions. “There is no need,” Knights declared, “to discuss nineteenth-century Shakespeare criticism in detail.” Knights would have had no use for Lesser’s book on Q1 Hamlet, which traces the genealogy of our own assumptions about the play to the great variety of nineteenth-century scholarly, critical, and theatrical responses to the belated rediscovery of Q1. But for L. C. Knights, the whole century was epitomized “by Mrs. Jameson’s Shakespeare’s Heroines and Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”,34 and by the pernicious “growth of the popular novel, from Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë to our own Best Sellers”.35 According to Knights, this lamentable history of attention to Shakespeare’s characters “accounts for Dr. Bradley’s Notes”. All these critical illnesses can be cured, Knights assured us, “by treating Shakespeare primarily as a poet.” If we do that, we will be rewarded with the extraordinarily original and specific insight that, “Macbeth is a statement of evil.” Shakespeare’s entire magnificent play is here reduced to a six-word undergraduate thesis. “I use the word ‘statement’”, Knights explained, “in order to stress those qualities that are ‘non- dramatic,’ if drama is defined according to the canons of […] Dr. Bradley.”

32 I want to stress that there is an important difference between the L.C. Knights claim that Shakespeare is “primarily a poet”, and the Lukas Erne claim that Shakespeare is “a literary dramatist”.36 Erne provides important and undeniable evidence about Shakespeare’s prominence in the early modern book trade. Although Erne has been accused of anti-theatricalism, his evidence can be interpreted more generously as proof that, from the mid-1590s, Shakespeare was a cross-over artist, capable of appealing to both readers and audiences. Unlike Erne, Knights was clearly historically mistaken when he claimed that an interest in Shakespeare’s characters is anachronistic. What is most remarkable about the many early references to Shakespeare, by both readers and spectators, is their consistent focus on his characters.37 But Knights was also mistaken, in a more significant way, about what makes literature valuable. People who read a lot of literature score higher on empathy tests than people who do not.38 Literature makes it possible for us to imagine what it would be like to be someone else; literature, like acting, is an exercise in imaginative identification. It is religious fanatics, like the anti- theatrical Puritans satirized by Shakespeare and other early dramatists, who are more likely to reduce a complex work of art to “a statement of evil,” or to believe that “The persons, ultimately, are not human at all, but purely symbols”.

33 Of course, L.C. Knights was right to insist that it does not matter how many children Lady Macbeth had. All that matters, for the play or the poem, is that she had at least one: I have given suck, and know How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me.39 Any woman who has nursed a child will understand something important about Lady Macbeth when she says this. In the seventeenth century, with its appallingly high infant mortality rates, no early spectator or reader would have needed an explanation of why the child that Lady Macbeth nursed does not appear in the play. They would all have understood. It’s not something that needed to be said. Shakespeare’s own wife, after all, had lost a child. His mother had lost several.

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34 Lady Macbeth is, or at least was, a mother, who becomes a Queen. There is also a mother who is a Queen in Hamlet, but there is a fundamental difference between Lady Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s play, and the mother in all versions of the story of Hamlet. In Hamlet, the mother’s child is alive; indeed, the child outlives his mother. Lady Macbeth’s offspring never appear on stage, and their number and age are therefore irrelevant to that play. But Hamlet, is an only child, and he does appear on stage, and therefore an audience cannot help but notice how old he is, and the visible age of the son will, in turn, tell us something crucial about the age of his mother. Both Bradley and Jenkins discussed Hamlet’s age in relation to the ages of other characters in the play: Laertes, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Horatio, and the Gravedigger. Neither Bradley nor Jenkins, in discussing Hamlet’s age, ever mentions his mother.

35 If Hamlet is thirty—as he is in the canonical texts—then his mother must be at least forty-three years old (if we allow for the early marriages and early pregnancies of some women, and especially aristocratic women, in medieval and early modern Europe). But if Hamlet is only seventeen—as he probably is in Q1—then his mother might be only thirty. If he is only seventeen, and thus just months short of the age of majority when he would naturally and properly ascend the throne, then the “wicked, wicked speed” with which his uncle married his mother (2.69) would make political sense—and would be particularly galling to the prince. Moreover, Hamlet’s age determines whether or not his mother is still young enough to bear additional children, by her new husband. Thus, Hamlet’s age determines whether his mother’s promise to stop sleeping with her new husband is also, in effect, a decision to insure that Hamlet’s murderous usurping uncle will not have a son, and will not have an heir, who could displace Hamlet. Hamlet’s age determines whether his mother’s sexuality has any political significance.40 Zachary Lesser demonstrates that, in Q1, the appearance of the Ghost “in his nightgown” insures that we will assume that the scene is taking place in the Queen’s bedroom, or at the very least that the Queen’s bedroom is just offstage, but still in the thoughts of the characters onstage and in the thoughts of every member of the audience. Q1’s unique stage direction is closer to Belleforest, and it insists on the sexual significance of the scene. By contrast, the canonical texts not only remove the nightgown, but they also insist that the scene takes place in the Queen’s “closet”—a more ambiguous space, not necessarily or even primarily sexual.41 However, Lesser does not notice that this uniquely sexualized version of the scene also includes a uniquely young, and fertile, Queen. Hamlet’s age cannot be separated from the Queen’s age, and neither can be separated from Hamlet’s sexual and political narrative.

36 How old was Hamlet? As young as Shakespeare and Burbage wanted him (and his mother) to be in the late 1580s—and then again, as old as Shakespeare and Burbage wanted him (and his mother) to be in the early seventeenth century.

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NOTES

1. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York, Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 142-148, and Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” (1969), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 113-38. 2. Christopher Marino, private communication, 26 February 2015. The play was performed at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington from 19 February to 1 March 2015. 3. Hamlet: The First Quarto, dir. Joel David Santner, Taffety Punk Theatre Company, Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, Washington D.C., 30 April – 23 May 2015. I saw the final performance. For a justifiably enthusiastic review of this dynamic, inventive production, see Alan Katz, “Shakespeare’s ‘Bad’ Quarto by Taffety Punk hailed the best Hamlet”, DC Theatre Scene.com, 6 May 2015 (http://dctheatrescene.com/2015/05/06/shakespeares-bad-quarto-by-taffety-punk- hailed-the-best-hamlet-review/, last accessed 24 January 2016); also see Sophia Howes, “‘Hamlet, The First Quarto’ at Taffety Punk Theatre Company”, DC MetroHearts.com, 3 May 2015 (http:// dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2015/05/03/hamlet-the-first-quarto-at-taffety-punk-theatre-co/, last accessed 24 January 2016). Biographical details for Marcus Kyd are available at the International Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/?ref_=nv_home. 4. Terri Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 11-34. 5. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 169 (“Shakespeare’s library certainly contained books in French and Italian, as well as those in Latin”). More generally, see Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. The major source of Two Gentlemen of Verona, often regarded as Shakespeare’s first play, was Montemayor’s Diana; Shakespeare did not read Spanish, and no English translation was available in print, but Shakespeare could have read the French translation by Nicole Colin, first published in 1578, and often reprinted over the next two decades. 6. Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, p. 157-206, 72-133. 7. Lesser, op. cit., p. 220. 8. The Norton Shakespeare 3E, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., New York, W. W. Norton, 2015; William Shakespeare, Complete Works, gen. ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986. Quotations from Shakespeare cite the 1986 edition. 9. Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle, Middleton, Five Revenge Tragedies, ed. Emma Smith, London, Penguin, 2012, p. 97-167. 10. As You Like It, 3.2.214-220. 11. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare, London, Methuen, 1982, p. 551-554 (long note on 5.1.139-157). All subsequent references to Jenkins refer to that note. 12. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, New York, Grove, 1967, p. 48. 13. Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, London, Arden Shakespeare, 2006, p. 141; Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Thompson and Taylor, London, Arden Shakespeare, 2006, p. 43. Quotations from Q1 cite their text. 14. Jenkins, op. cit., p. 552, quoting Bradley, op. cit., p. 407 (“the appearance of being expressly inserted in order to fix Hamlet’s age”). 15. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, London, Macmillan, 1904, Note C.

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16. Hamlet, ed. Horace Howard Furness, A New Variorum Edition, 2 vol., Philadelphia, 1877, 1:391-394. 17. Their arguments are summarized and translated in Furness, op. cit., 2:346-347. 18. Bourus, op. cit., p. 108. 19. Brian Vickers, “Hamlet by Dogberry: A Perverse Reading of the Bad Quarto”, TLS, 14 December 1993. 20. I have confirmed by a first-hand examination that the misprint “hamlets” occurs in the British Library copy of the 1599 edition (STC 12273). Nashe himself uses the singular “hamlet” to mean “village” in Lenten Stuff (iii.160.36). 21. Malone, “An Attempt to ascertain the Order in which the Plays attributed to Shakspeare were Written,” in The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vol., 1778, 295-296, and “An Attempt to ascertain the Order in which The Plays of Shakspeare were written,” in The Plays of Poems of William Shakspeare, ed. Malone, 10 vol., 1790, I:305. 22. For a full account of the evidence, see Bourus, op. cit., p. 148, 159-166. 23. Greenes Groatsworth of witte, 1592, sig. F1v. 24. OED afford v.3, and OED speech n.1 8.a, 8.d. The combination of transitive verb “afford” with direct object “speeches” was not uncommon in the 1580s: EEBO records additional examples in Greene, Kyd, and Munday. 25. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless, 1592, p. 55: “Our Players are not as the players beyond sea’, who ‘forbeare no immodest speach or vnchast action that may procure laughter, but our Sceane is more stately furnisht than euer it was in the time of Roscius […] not consisting like theirs of a Pantaloun, a Whore, and a Zanie, but of Emperours, Kings and Princes: whose true Tragedies (Sophocleo cothurno) they doo vaunt.” Nashe specifically uses “speech” in relation to ‘players’ and performances of English tragedies. 26. On individual speeches as distinct units of composition for early modern playwrights, see Gary Taylor and John V. Nance, “Imitation or Collaboration? Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare Canon”, Shakespeare Survey 68, 2015, 32-47. Stephen Gosson, in Playes confuted in fiue actions (1582), refers to “Tragicall speaches” written for the players (D4v). 27. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. John Buchanan-Brown, London, Penguin, 2000, p. 289. Aubrey’s anecdote may also be associating Shakespeare’s reciting of speeches with Hamlet: in all versions of the play, killing a calf is associated with tragedy and acting. In Q1, Corambis (a.k.a. Polonius) reports “My lord, I did act Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol. Brutus killed me”, and Hamlet responds “It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf” (9.72-74). 28. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Charles_Knights (last accessed 24 January 2016). 29. L.C. Knights, Explorations, London, Chatto and Windus, 1946, p. 15. 30. Ibid., p. 16. 31. Ibid., p. 17. 32. Ibid., p. 18. 33. Ibid., p. 20. 34. Ibid., p. 28. 35. Ibid., p. 29. 36. For a response to the charge of anti-theatricalism, see the “Preface” in Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, second edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 1-4. 37. This point was made by G. E. Bentley in Shakespeare and Jonson: their reputations in the seventeenth century compared, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1965.

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38. The most widely cited recent study of the relationship between literature and empathy is probably David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind”, Science, vol. 342, no. 6156, 18 October 2013, 377-380; specifically in relation to Shakespeare, see Max J. van Duijn, Ineke Sluiter, and Argie Verhagen, “When narrative takes over: The representation of embedded mindstates in Shakespeare’s Othello”, Literature and Language, 24.2, May 2015, 148-166. 39. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.7.54-55. 40. For a fuller discussion of the Queen’s age, see Bourus, op. cit., p. 117-126. 41. Lesser, op. cit., p. 144-156.

ABSTRACTS

This essay argues that Q1 Hamlet represents the earliest version of Shakespeare’s play, written in the late 1580s. The argument builds upon, and for the first time combines, evidence in Terri Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy and Performance (2014) and Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1 (2015). It concentrates on differences between Q1 and the later, expanded, canonical texts of the play, specifically in relation to the age of Hamlet and the Queen. It emphasizes that Hamlet’s age crucially affects the age, sexuality, and political importance of his mother (an issue ignored by male critics). Hamlet’s age has been a factor in performances of the play from Burbage and Betterton in the seventeenth century to 2015 productions of Q1. Why then did Harold Jenkins in 1982 dismiss the importance of Hamlet’s age? To contextualize Jenkins’ dismissal (founded on the principles of both New Criticism and New Bibliography), this essay traces scholarship on the age difference back to the 1870s. It focuses particularly on the conflict between two influential texts: A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) and L.C. Knight’s “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (1933). It also calls attention to neglected details of Thomas Nashe’s 1589 allusion to “whole Hamlets of tragical speaches”: these point to Shakespeare as the author of the 1580s play, and also to specific details found in Q1 but not present in Belleforest’s story of Amleth in Histoires Tragiques.

Le présent essai soutient que le premier in-quarto (Q1) d’Hamlet représente la plus ancienne version de la pièce de Shakespeare, écrite vers la fin des années 1580. L’argument se base sur les travaux de Terri Bourus (Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy and Performance [2014]) et de Zachary Lesser (Hamlet After Q1 [2015]) et les combine pour la première fois. Il se concentre sur les différences entre Q1 et la version ultérieure et amplifiée, sur les textes canoniques de la pièce, en particulier en ce qui concerne l’âge d’Hamlet et de la reine. Il met l’accent sur le fait que l’âge d’Hamlet affecte de manière décisive l’âge, la sexualité, et l’importance politique de sa mère (un problème que les commentateurs masculins ne prennent pas en compte). Or, l’âge d’Hamlet est un facteur déterminant dans les représentations de la pièce depuis Burbage et Betterton au dix- septième siècle, jusqu’aux mises en scène de Q1 en 2015. Par conséquent, pourquoi Harnold Jenkins a-t-il écarté l’importance de l’âge d’Hamlet en 1982? Afin de replacer le rejet de Jenkins dans son contexte—fondé sur les principes à la fois de la Nouvelle Critique et de la Nouvelle Bibliographie—le présent essai retrace les études sur cette question de la différence d’âge depuis les années 1870 et se concentre tout particulièrement sur le conflit entre deux textes influents Shakespearean Tragedy d’A.C. Bradley (1904) et « How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? » de L.C. Knight (1933). En outre, cette étude attire l’attention sur des détails négligés auxquels Thomas

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Nashe a fait allusion en 1589 en parlant de « whole Hamlets of tragical speaches » ; ces détails portent à croire que Shakespeare est bien l’auteur de la pièce des années 1580, et indiquent aussi certains détails spécifiques que l’on trouve dans Q1 mais pas dans l’histoire d’Amleth proposée par Belleforest dans ses Histoires Tragiques. [résumé traduit par Didier G. Bertrand (Indiana University), que l’auteur remercie chaleureusement de sa contribution]

INDEX

Mots-clés: Burbage Richard, Gertrude, histoire du livre, mauvais in-quartos, Lesser Zachary, Nashe Thomas, Nouvelle Bibliographie, pièces de jeunesse, Q1 Hamlet, représentation Keywords: authorship, bad quartos, Burbage Richard, early Shakespeare, Nashe Thomas, performance, Q1 Hamlet, Queen Gertrude

AUTHOR

TERRI BOURUS Indiana University/Purdue University Indianapolis

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Learning to be Boys: Reading the Lessons of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Marston’s What You Will

Edel Lamb

1 Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost can be read as a “youthful” play on multiple levels.1 As an early work, most likely written and performed c. 1594/1595, it potentially offers an insight into “young” or “early” Shakespeare.2 It is also preoccupied with ideas pertinent to youth. From the recurrent images of the childish god of love, Cupid, to the play’s pageboy character, Moth, to the youthful lords who dedicate themselves to a prolonged period of learning and the “wise girls” who school their suitors in their acts of courtship, youth is at the centre of this play.3 The play’s recent critical history attests to the extent to which contemporary cultures of learning and pedagogy, from book learning and the institution of the schoolroom to formative childish games, inform its themes and wordplay.4 This essay will suggest that the comic depictions of diverse modes of education are part of the play’s wider examination of the ways in which age and learning might produce early modern identities. It will focus on one of the play’s boys – the pageboy, schoolboy and boy actor, Moth. It will compare him to another early modern dramatic schoolboy, Holofernes Pippo of John Marston’s What You Will, performed by the Children of Paul’s c. 1601, to argue that theatrical depictions of schoolboy lessons are a means of producing boyhood, a term that was used from the 1570s to refer to the state of being a boy.5

2 When Armado asks Moth in Act 3, Scene 1 of Love’s Labour’s Lost “What wilt thou prove?”, the boy offers the witty response of “A man, if I live; and this, ‘by’, ‘in’, and ‘without’, upon the instant” (3.1.37-39). In offering to prove his master’s love through this linguistic exercise, Moth occupies the role of schoolteacher instructing his “negligent student” (3.1.33) and schoolboy performing his learning. The grammar lesson delivered here suggests that manhood is something that must be proven or achieved. It comically juxtaposes the slow process of becoming a man through aging

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(“if I live”) with the mastery of language and of love. Moth posits apparently conflicting modes of “proving” a man: age, courtship and the display of learning. Manhood in this construction is not only a gendered state but depends on temporality or age and on the display of learning – in this case, a command of prepositions and the proof of an argument. The ways in which early modern humanist educational programmes aimed to instill gendered identities have been widely examined.6 Yet the extent to which these gendered states are also inflected by age categories has not yet been fully explored. The connections between age and learning in constituting masculine identity are evident in this staging of the grammar lesson. They are manifest in Moth’s liminal state as a boy: a state that encompasses his gender, age, social status and his witty use of learning. The ways in which learning produces a range of masculine states (boyhood, youth, manhood, and old age) are further explored throughout the play.

3 In “Theorizing Age with Gender: Bly’s Boys, Feminism, and Maturity Masculinity”, Judith Gardiner persuasively argues that age categories should perform a more prominent role in gender theory. Age, she proposes, enables us to conceptualize gender developmentally and “allows for the possibility of more adequate models”.7 The gendering of the boy in early modern culture offers an interesting case study for this approach. The aging of the early modern boy was marked by a number of social rituals that frequently functioned as indicators of the boy’s emerging masculine identity. For example, rituals at the end of infancy, often perceived to be the first stage of childhood and ending around the age of seven, included the breeching of the boy and the movement from the domestic space to the space of work or the all-male institution of the grammar school.8 These social practices interpreted and attempted to control the developing physiological status of the boy during his transition from a feminised childhood to adult manhood in middle age or “the strongest age”, when, according to early seventeenth-century tracts on age, “a man is come to the highest degree of perfection”.9 In contrast to the ideals underlying these social rituals, early modern boys did not experience a single and definitive shift from childhood to manhood. The gaps between ideology and experience signal the unstable nature of early modern concepts of masculinity and expose the fundamental intersections between age and gender that need to be considered.

4 Theorizing early modern gender developmentally, as Gardiner suggests, offers a fresh understanding of the complexities of early modern masculinities. Reassessing pedagogical practices through an analysis of the concepts of boyhood and manhood put forward by books produced to train boys in languages, verbal skill and logic, this essay will raise questions about the “manhood” that these all-male institutions aimed to produce. It will then examine the comic representations of these practices in Love’s Labour’s Lost and What You Will to explore the multiple concepts of early modern masculinity, defined by age and learning, offered on the stage. It will suggest that although the educational system aimed to produce manhood at a certain age, early modern masculine identities exist not only as boyhood and manhood but as a variety of categories on a developmental scale. Moth and Pippo are particularly productive points of focus for this analysis. Both occupy positions as pageboys and schoolboys. As Katie Knowles proposes in her recent monograph, Shakespeare’s Boys, Moth, although technically a witty page, is in essence “the precocious sixteenth-century schoolboy” whose function is to “highlight the educational strengths and weaknesses of the other characters”.10 Pippo moves from the schoolroom to apprenticeship during the course of What You Will. Moreover, they are young boy actors both within the narratives of the

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plays (Moth takes part in rehearsals and in the court performance; Pippo participates in an act of disguise) and in the theatre. Love’s Labour’s Lost is written for a company that seems to include many young actors and attends, Evelyn Tribble suggests, to training its young boy actors.11 What You Will is performed by the young players of the children’s company at Paul’s.12 By examining the multiple dimensions of boyhood in the dramatic fictions and on the stages of the companies that likely performed these plays, it is possible to consider the extent to which performing these roles not only teaches the characters to be boys but forms a crucial part of the young boy actor’s theatrical training.

Schoolboy Lessons: Training boys to be men

5 The training of the boy in various levels of literacy from the basic recital of ABC texts in English to the Latin-language lesson had a significant role in producing gendered subjects in early modern culture. Education in grammar schools, for example, functioned as one method of producing men as schoolboys were instructed in the memorization, pronunciation and imitation of exempla; encouraged to recite their learning “without book” with the appropriate gesture, vocals and audacity; and to draw on their learning to invent logical arguments.13 John Brinsley’s Children’s Dialogues (1617), a series of dialogues to be studied alone, translated and performed in the classroom, indicates the ways in which school lessons attempted to inculcate masculine traits. These dialogues repeatedly depict the movement from the home to school and the appropriate display of school learning in terms of a straightforward transition from childhood to manhood. One dialogue, for instance, presents two schoolboys having a physical argument over a chair – a row that is quickly ended by one’s mastery of language which leads the other to conclude “Now I judge thee [to be] a man”. 14 A number of dialogues also depict well-versed schoolboys who have learned to construct an argument to provide “prettily cunning” excuses for lateness or bad behaviour.15 Answering all the questions posed to them by schoolmasters correctly and wittily, these boys escape the violent punishment of beating that pervades this text. While this outwitting of the schoolmaster threatens to disrupt hierarchies of authority and age, this is contained within the context of the schoolroom. It is set up as the adept deployment of lessons learned.

6 The large quantity of books produced to provide dialogues, questions and answers and classical examples for schoolboys meant that this material was not confined to the schoolroom. Similar material and formats were imitated in a range of books, such as handbooks, instruction manuals and even the oft-printed The Booke of Merrie Riddles. The title page for the 1617 edition of this book declared that it was a collection of riddles, “proper questions and witty proverbs” for “pleasant pastime” and “usefull” and “behovefull” “for any young man or childe to knowe whether he be quicke-witted or no”.16 The material provided to schoolboys to “prove” men thus circulated beyond the schoolroom, available for use without instruction in how and when it should be used. Consequently, as the scholar Lampatho complains in Marston’s What You Will, you could “make a parrot now / As good a man as he in fourteen nights”.17 Lampatho’s objection is against Simplicius, the play’s fool, who has not been schooled, and is directed specifically at his tendency to recite set pieces but not to “vent a syllable / Of his own creating” (2.1.835-6). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the princess and her ladies are

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similarly disapproving of the men’s imitative love poetry, causing Berowne to claim that he will no longer “trust to speeches penned, / Nor to the motion of a schoolboy’s tongue” (5.2.402-403). Yet good schoolboys were encouraged to move beyond repetition, to master their learning and transform it to construct arguments. As Richard Halpern points out, humanist theory encouraged the self-fashioning of autonomous subjects.18

7 The early modern theatre frequently parodies school lessons. Plays such as Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor comically represent the failure of the pedagogical approach through schoolboy characters who cannot recite their lessons. The schoolmaster’s testing of William Page’s grammar lesson on play day at the request of his mother in act four scene one undermines the ideals of the humanist education system.19 While Mistress Page seeks to disprove her husband’s contention that “my son profits nothing in the world at his book”, the errors made by William, who does not even recognise that this is a translation lesson when he answers that a stone is a “pebble” (echoing Mistress Quickly’s bawdy puns that result from her misinterpretations of the schoolmaster’s Latin), question what “profit” might be had from such schooling.20 Yet, while the master dismisses William to play when he finally admits that has forgotten his lesson (4.1.65), suggesting a return to childish activities, Mistress Page concludes “He is a better scholar than I thought he was” (4.1.69). It may be, as Elizabeth Pittenger suggests, that Mistress Page believes the “investment in school has paid off” and although William does not profit directly from his book he profits “indirectly from his going to school, from his privilege as a male subject”.21 Even if schooling offers this advantage, it nonetheless falls far from achieving its scholarly aims in this dramatic representation.

8 The depiction of school lessons on the early modern stage undermines humanist aims but as Lynn Enterline has argued “Shakespeare’s engagement with the humanist grammar school goes well beyond explicit political and moral critique”.22 The staging of lessons offers a more complex engagement with processes of subject formation via schooling. Like The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labour’s Lost and What You Will expose a series of failings but they also explore the unexpected effects of successful schooling. What happens when the autonomous boys produced by this school system draw on their learning beyond the controlled context of the classroom? Or when boys like Moth, who, as Knowles suggests, is representative of the schoolboy but who has accessed his knowledge through “observation” (3.1.25), draw on widely circulated lessons? These plays suggest that boys do not always learn how to be men from the lessons of the schoolroom. Their critical treatment of early modern schooling often considers learning in relation to age categories. While the example with which I opened sets aging alongside learning in the proving of manhood, these plays simultaneously depict the negative effects of prolonged education in terms of a rapid progression through the stages of the life cycle. Berowne, for instance, speaks out against the “little academe” (1.1.13) of Love’s Labour’s Lost as “Flat treason ’gainst the kingly state of youth” (4.3.289). Attending to age complicates manhood, conceptualizing it developmentally. In the early modern period, manhood was associated with youthful prime or middle age (generally seen to occur between 25 and 50). It is described in Henry Cuffe’s The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life, for instance, as “flourishing man age” and “the strongest age” in which “a man is come to the highest degree of perfection”.23 Other stages of the life cycle, whether infancy, childhood or boyhood, young age, youth or

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adolescentia that precede ‘manhood’ or old age and ‘decrepit’ old age that follow it, are determined by varying degrees in relation to this ideal stage.

9 What You Will’s scholar Lampatho is associated with the latter stages of old age, described as “a fusty cask, / Devoted to mouldy customs of hoar’d eld” (2.1.450-451). His association with the characteristics of old age does not result from his chronological age, but instead has been produced by his seven years study which “wasted lamp-oil, bated my flesh, / Shrunk up my veins” (2.2.855-856). He complains that his lessons or the “company of old frenetici / Did eat my youth” (2.2.880-881), extending the metaphors of consuming knowledge that pervade both plays to suggest that instead of the appropriate consumption, or to use Erasmus’ term, “digestion” of learning, his lessons consume his manhood.24 In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the pedant, Holofernes, is also depicted as having passed the quick-witted stage of life in the imagery of old age deployed by Moth, when he claims that he has “true wit” (5.1.53) which is “Offered by a child to an old man, which is wit-old” (5.1.54). Although grammar school texts posit education as a crucial means of producing an ideal version of masculine identity, prolonged book-learning, the theatre suggests, instead produces this stereotype of “soft and slow” (2.2.883) old men “finding numbness” in what should be their “nimble age” (2.2.882). Study and schooling are thus common experiences for boys, something to be undertaken during youth, yet they are simultaneously depicted as potentially destructive to youth.

10 The intersections between early modern schooling, age and masculinity are further interrogated through the plays’ child characters. What You Will contains a schoolroom scene in which four boys are asked to “repeat your lesson without a book” (2.2.707) in response to the schoolmaster’s questions, based on the standard Latin grammar book of the time, William Lily’s Short Introduction to Grammar. The depiction of the Latin- language lesson draws attention to many of the pedagogical methods used in the all- male grammar school and implies the inadequacy of these techniques. Despite some successful efforts, the boys fail to recite their lesson and instead offer comical and bawdy puns on the translation of “lapides” as stone (2.2.726), similar in tone to William’s errors in the lesson staged in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. When the schoolmaster insists that one of the boys, Nathaniel, repeat his lesson “faster, faster” (2.2.744), he mimics the pupil’s rapid list of Latin words with a stream of nonsense: “Rup, tup, snup, slup, bor, hor, cor, mor – holla, holla, holla!” (2.2.748-749). In showing that Nathaniel’s response is inaccurate, the master’s deliberately incoherent recital hints that the lesson itself is nonsense and gestures towards the potential social irrelevance of the acquisition of Latin literacy for boys. A common outcome of this schooling was the production of young men unable to make a living in any technical or humbler trades.25 Another schoolboy, Holofernes Pippo, offers a stumbling attempt at reciting the lesson and is quickly removed from the schoolroom to receive training as a page for Simplicius – a plot development that signals the transmission of knowledge between the grammar school and other social contexts. In this position of service, Pippo immediately demonstrates an increasing command over his lessons. Constructing his sentences erroneously in relaying his master’s message to Lampatho enables mockery of his master as he puns on his name, stating “My Simplicias master” (2.2.903) – an act of ridicule that is not recognized by Lampatho, but which Pippo gleefully follows up with “Ha, ha! ’Has bought me a fine dagger, and a hat and a feather; I can say as in praesenti now” (2.2.907-908). Perhaps inspired by this

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material reward, Pippo deploys the grammar school lesson beyond the structures of the schoolroom to get one up on his new master – presenting himself as the witty pageboy.

11 Pippo is further inducted into this role during a gathering of his new peers: a group of pages. This scene parallels the classroom scene, but in contrast masters are absent and the pages construct their own modes of authority. One boy, Bidet, adopts the role of “Emperor of Cracks, Prince of Pages” (3.3.1269-1270) and presides over this mock court in which the masters’ actions are put on trial. He mocks his role as leader and insists upon his own status as a youth, claiming “Now let me stroke my beard and I had it, and speak wisely if I knew how” (3.3.1273-1274). He thus exposes the disparity between his youthful status and that of the seemingly wise adult men usually in authority, mocking the complacent wisdom of authority figures and celebrating his own juvenile state. As the pages offer their accounts of abusive service, this functions as a space in which they can critique their masters and share their singular experiences as boys. Pippo, however, is not automatically part of this community. When asked “is he of our brotherhood yet?”, he responds “Not yet […] but as little an infant as I am I will, and with the grace of wit I will deserve it” (3.3.1346-1348). This emphasis on his littleness and infancy is significant. Infancy is variously described as the period preceding childhood or as the first part of childhood in early modern accounts of the stages of life. For Cuffe, it marks the beginning of childhood, from birth to the age of three or four, and is characterised by the fact that ‘children in their infancie have no actuall evident use of their reason’.26 In The Office of Christian Parents, it is a distinct stage of life “from the birth till seaven yeeres of age, because till that time he is not so perfect in speech”.27 It is a state preceding command of speech and reason. In the earlier classroom scene Pippo is described as not yet being at the “years of discretion”. Lacking in knowledge in the classroom and in wit among the pages, he is thus described as “infant” rather than a boy. In order to become one of the “brotherhood”, he must demonstrate that he is deserving of it by the “grace of his wit” and cozen his master, by disguising himself as a merchant’s wife in a strange reversal of the breeching process. The play implies that where the Latin lesson failed at instilling masculine traits, performance and trickery succeed. However, these traits are dependent upon Pippo’s aged and social status and on the subversive nature of this act. The act of outwitting the master does not make Pippo a man. It paves the way for his integration into the community of boys and their challenging of the aged, gendered and social hierarchies of service. In other words, it produces his boyhood. In a final plot twist, however, Pippo is expelled from the brotherhood in spite of this act as he breaks another of their rules (in having a dice). He is thus forced back to where he started, claiming: “I’ll to school again, that I will: I left as in praesenti, and I’ll begin in as in praesenti” (5.1.1910-1911). The trickery of the pages has enabled him to become a boy, but perhaps the gender and class-inflected training of the grammar schools promises a more attractive adulthood.

12 School lessons also pervade Love’s Labour’s Lost, in the various characters’ experiments in language, displays of logic, grammar, rhetoric, acts of reading, writing and versifying. As Ursula Potter has pointed out, the play directs attention specifically to classroom culture through the staging of the schoolmaster and the use of terminology reminiscent of the schoolroom, such as Moth’s act of proving.28 Moth, of course, is well versed in the lessons of the schoolroom. He demonstrates the knowledge of classical literature expected of the grammar school boy as he adopts the position of scholar and teacher in advising Armado on the examples he might use in his love letter. He displays his command of grammar and his ability to utilize logic in his exercise on the use of

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prepositions to express love. He further demonstrates his ability to appropriate lessons in act five scene one when he offers Holofernes the lesson from the hornbook, asking “What is ‘a’ ‘b’ spelled backwards, with the horn on his head?” (5.1.42-43). Moth adapts the questions from this common text to pose the bawdy riddle that Holofernes does not understand as he naively answers “Ba, pueritia, with a horn added” (5.1.44). While Moth continues to mock Holofernes, who can only offer nonsensical answers, the schoolmaster attempts to reduce this page to a lesser status. As well as calling him a child, or “pueritia”, he attempts to dismiss the page to children’s games, claiming “Thou disputes like an infant. Go whip thy gig” (5.1.57).

13 Holofernes’ repeated efforts to designate Moth a child or infant, and hence inferior, indicate the extent to which Moth has challenged the hierarchies of teacher-pupil and adult-child through this witty exchange. The autonomous manipulation of lessons beyond the schoolroom by this character who is young and in a status of service clearly challenge the authority of this “old” schoolmaster. In doing so, they form part of the play’s ridicule of the figure of the pedagogue and of what Patricia Parker calls the series of “preposterous reversals”.29 Moth’s state as a boy is emphasized as he sets his knowledge against that of his master, “the tender juvenal” against the “tough senor”, and against the schoolmaster, “child” against the “old wit”. As H. R. Woudhuysen points out, Moth is exclusively referred to throughout the play as the “boy” or “child”, terms that associate him with Cupid in the play but which set him apart from all other characters, even those who temporarily adopt the positions of schoolboys or scholars.30 Whether or not we read him as schoolboy, Moth is repeatedly constructed as a boy in terms of his youth, his social status and his deployment of learning. He is the “well- educated infant” (1.2.85), “a most acute juvenal” (3.1.57) and “pretty and apt” (1.2.17), that is “‘pretty’, because little […] “apt” because quick” (1.2.20-22). It is this apt or quick wit that is his dominant characteristic and is representative of his boyhood. It is often described in aged-terms in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Unlike the school text books which imagine the display of wit as part of the construction of manhood, this play assesses most of the characters in terms of their wit: it is appropriate to the eloquence of the courtly ladies, it defines the men of the court, and the rustic characters are marked by their lack of it. Different forms of wit are also associated with particular aged and gendered states in What You Will. When one pageboy defers to Pippo as “men of wit such as thyself” (3.3.1352-3), Pippo claims that he only has “wit I think for my age or so” (3.3.1354-5).

14 Wit was recognized more widely as an integral part of boyhood in the period. Richard Mulcaster, for example, noted “three naturall powers in children, Witte to conceive by, Memorie to retaine by, Discretion to discern by”.31 Yet it is primarily how and when wit is used that makes it representative of the plays’ young characters’ boyhoods. “Boyhood”, Henry Cuffe writes in 1607, inclines “us to sportfulness, talke and learning”.32 Moth, the youthful boy, is characterised by his playful adaptation of the lessons of the hornbook and the grammar school to assert an aged and gendered status, distinct from manhood, but also distinct from the infant games with which Holofernes attempts to associate him, from the youth imagined by Berowne, or from the old age of the pedant. It is the witty and subversive deployment of learning from his position of service that characterises Moth as the child, boy or juvenal.

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Learning to be Boys

15 The ideals of a humanist programme of education map a straightforward development from feminised childhood to adult masculinity characterised by logic, reason and wit. This representation of gender in relation to age has a clear ideological purpose as it offers a concept of manhood that is idealistic, achievable and stable. However, as the representations of these educational processes in the theatre demonstrate, the intersections between age and gender result in more complex understandings of gender identity in the period. Early modern masculinity cannot just be seen in terms of manhood, or of boyhood versus manhood; instead childhood, youth, manhood and old age are categories on a continuum of aged masculinity. Moreover, the learning intended to facilitate the progression of these young male characters to manhood in fact equips these characters with the material to produce their boyhoods. Yet these boyhoods are not formed solely through knowledge of school lessons but through the youthful characters’ disruptive uses of them. They draw out their knowledge to assert their identities as boys. Of course, this definition of boyhood means that while it is associated with a particular age category, it is not restricted to characters of a particular age. The courtiers of Navarre display behaviour that is in many ways “boyish”. Berowne’s reference to youthful games in his cry of “All hid, all hid, an old infant play” (4.3.75) and his description of the “scene of foolery” in which he sees the king transformed to a gnat, Hercules whipping a gig, Nestor playing at “push-pin with the boys” and Timon laughing at idle toys (4.3.160-167) depicts the games of courtship as inherently childish. Moreover, the play’s boys, Moth and Cupid, are characterised by their metaphorical doubling in terms of aged identities. The “wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy” Cupid, who is paradoxically known as the oldest of the gods and a child, is described by Berowne in terms of this duality as “Signor Junior, giant dwarf” (3.1.175).33 Moth is further aligned with the play’s absent god when he takes on the role of Hercules “in his minority” (5.2.586). Yet in spite of the fluidity of aged states and behaviours manifest in these ‘Signor Junior’ figures, Love’s Labour’s Lost and What You Will repeatedly insist upon Moth’s and Pippo’s states as boys through their associations with the schoolroom and through the various terms used to emphasise their youth.

16 These characters receive another lesson that highlights their status as boys: that is, as playboys when they are instructed in performance skills. Moth is the herald for the disguised courtiers. This “bold wag” (5.2.108) is instructed by the King and his companions in how to deliver his introductory speech. Once he has “conned” his part, they teach him “action and accent”, how to bear his body, and to “speak audaciously” (5.2.98-104). These lessons, which would also have been offered in the schoolroom, are seen as unnecessary during this rehearsal as “A better speech was never spoke before” (5.2.123).34 Yet, although Moth has learned the skills common to the schoolboy and player, he is less talented in those required specifically of the theatrical player. He has not yet learned how to react to his audience and in delivering the speech he alters his lines to suit the ladies’ actions – saying “backs” instead of “eyes” when the ladies “turn their backs to him” (5.2.161-163). Boyet’s mockery further “put[s] Armado’s page out of his part” (5.2.335), forcing Berowne to interrupt with new cues, reminding this boy of his lines. Moth is presented through this theatrical terminology as a player, and within the fiction of the play he appears inexperienced in this respect.35 This is emphasised

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further when he performs the part of Hercules silently and in his “minority” as he is not, according to Armado, “quantity enough for that Worthy’s thumb” (5.1.126-127). The boy of the theatre is similarly emphasised in Marston’s What You Will. Pippo, who is originally described by his schoolmaster as having a voice “too small” and stature “too low” to be given leave to “play the lady in comedies presented by children” (2.2.797-799) and who worries that “I am too little, speak too small, go too gingerly” (3.3.1379-1380) to act as the merchant’s wife, successfully plays this part to fool his master. He, however, is also largely silent in this role and he follows the lead of an experienced pageboy, who devises the trickery and temporarily “put[s] off [his] greatness” (3.3.1381) to accompany Pippo on his act of gulling.

17 By offering these boy characters the opportunity to try alternative roles, the plays may themselves function as lessons for the boy actors in the roles of Moth and Pippo. The theatrical training of the boy and the novice’s errors comically depicted in Act 5, Scene 2 of Love’s Labour’s Lost foreground the apprentice boy actor who performed Moth in the 1590s. In performing this play, he is offered the opportunity to test a range of smaller parts, the herald and Hercules, in addition to demonstrating his talents in the substantial part of the pageboy. The comic references to Moth’s size, which suggest that Moth is simply not physically big enough to play Hercules, renowned for his physical stature and prowess, hint that the boy actor taking on this role was likely amongst the smaller and younger in the company. As T. J. King has demonstrated, it is probable that the performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost required six boy actors.36 Young boys, therefore, are also at the heart of the playing company, perhaps taking advantage of the recent dissolution of the children’s playing companies in the late 1580s.37 The boy player of the Children of Paul’s who performed Pippo in 1601 similarly begins his training in performing the woman’s part. This particular boy actor, it seems, has little experience in the theatre. Comic references to his exceptional “littleness” and the suggestive comments on his inability to even perform in “comedies presented by children” (2.2.798) (of which What You Will is one) are reinforced by the limitations on the role of Pippo. When the actor playing this part is on stage, he says little; his speeches often echo the cue lines given to him (for instance, in Act 2, Scene 2); and, there is evidence of “shepherding”, in which he is accompanied on stage and directed by more experienced actors. In act two scene two, for example, Simplicius instructs him in his posture (2.2.811) and Lampatho corrects his lines (2.2.902-906); and in Act 5, Scene 1 Bidet accompanies this less experienced page and player in his act of gulling. This role might be interpreted as what Evelyn Tribble terms a “scaffolded role”, one structured for the novice player in order to constrain and prompt his activity.38 These theatrical training practices are metatheatrically reproduced in both plays and serve to reinforce Moth’s and Pippo’s status as novice players and ultimately as boys in training.

18 Playing Moth and playing Pippo, therefore, prepares boy actors for more substantial parts, providing them with the opportunity to practise and refine the basic skills required of the player and allowing them to test a range of roles in terms of gender, age and status. For the young apprentice of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the early 1590s, it is likely that this on-the-job training was a significant part of his professional experience. For the “too little” boy of the Children of Paul’s it is possible that the performance of What You Will may to some extent have functioned as an initiatory act into a community of boy players. The comic roles of schoolboy and page that they

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successfully perform in these plays, suggests that these young players, at the very least, have already learned how to be boys in the early modern theatre.

NOTES

1. This research was supported by the Irish Research Council and by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project ID: DP0988452). 2. On the dating of the play, see H. R. Woudhuysen, “Introduction”, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare, London, A & C Black Publishers, 1998, p. 59-61. Work on “early” Shakespeare includes Alfred Harbage, “Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Early Shakespeare”, Philological Quarterly 41, 1962, 18-36; Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, Yale, Yale University Press, 1997. 3. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.58, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare, London, A & C Black Publishers, 1998. Further references are given in the text. 4. See, for example, Katie Knowles, Shakespeare’s Boys: A Cultural History, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 90-120; Kathryn Moncrief, “‘Teach us, sweet madam’: Masculinity, Femininity and Gendered Instruction in Love’s Labour’s Lost”, in Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction and Performance, ed. Kathryn McPherson and Kathryn Moncrief, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2013, p. 113-127; Ursula Potter, “The Naming of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost”, English Language Notes 37, 2000, 13-26; Eve Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 49-56. 5. On the dating of this play, see W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553-1608, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 39. 6. Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996; Lynn Enterline, “Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Grammar Schools”, in Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 173-190; Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991; Walter Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite”, Studies in Philology 61.2, 1959, 103-124; Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 1-15; Sanders, op. cit. 7. Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Theorizing Age with Gender: Bly’s Boys, Feminism, and Maturity Masculinity”, in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner, New York, Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 90-118 (p. 113). 8. See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, London, Routledge, 1992, p. 7; Edel Lamb, Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children’s Playing Companies (1599-1613), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 29-31; Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 15. 9. John Reading, The Old Man’s Staffe, London, Bernard Alsop,1621, STC 20792, p.1; Henry Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life, London, Arnold Hatfield, 1607, STC 6103, p. 118. 10. Knowles, op. cit., p. 104. 11. Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 111-150.

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12. On the ages of the players of the Children of Paul’s, see Shen Lin, “How Old Were the Children of Paul’s?”, Theatre Notebook 45, 1991, 121-131; Shehzana Mamujee, “‘To serve us in that behalf when our pleasure is to call for them’: Performing Boys in Renaissance England”, Renaissance Studies, 28.5, 2014, 714-730, p. 715-716. 13. On early modern education, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1944; Bushnell, op. cit.; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe, London, Duckworth, 1986; Halpern, op. cit.; Helen Jewell, Education in Early Modern England, London, Macmillan, 1998; Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society, 1500-1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain, London, Longman, 1982. 14. John Brinsley, Pueriles Confabulatiunculae, or, Children’s Dialogues, Little Conferences, or Talkings Together, or Little Speeches Together, or Dialogues Fit for Children, London, Thomas Mann, 1617, STC 3773, p. 8. 15. Ibid., p. 17. 16. The Booke o[f] Merrie Riddles, London, Roger Jackson, 1617, STC 3322.5, title page. 17. John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead, Nottingham, Nottingham Drama Texts, 1980, 2.2.833-834. Further references are in the text. 18. Halpern, op. cit., p. 37. 19. See readings of this scene in Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender and Property, London, Methuen, 1987, p. 27-9; Elizabeth Pittenger, “Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages”, Shakespeare Quarterly 42.4, 1991, 389-408. 20. William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.1.11-12, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et alii, New York, W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Further references are given in the text. 21. Pittenger, op. cit., p. 397 22. Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, p. 26. 23. Cuffe, op. cit., p. 118. Cuffe follows Aristotle’s understanding of the life cycle as being divided into three main stages: childhood, man age and old age. He then divides each of these into sub- stages: infancy, boyhood youth followed by youthful prime and manhood and finally old age and decrepit old age. For a useful overview of early modern understanding of the stages of the life cycle see Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 1-16. 24. See Halpern, op. cit., p. 36. 25. Ibid., p. 23. Carla Mazzio goes further in suggesting Love’s Labour’s Lost depicts education as producing men, such as the pedant, who are not fit for social interaction. See “The Melancholy of Print: Love’s Labour’s Lost”, in Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 186-227 (p. 206). 26. Cuffe, op. cit., p. 118, 127 27. Anon, The Office of Christian Parents, London, Cantrell Legge, 1616, STC 5180, p. 43. 28. Ursula Potter, Pedagogy and Parenting in English Drama, 1560-1610, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2001, p. 65. 29. Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Reversals: Love’s Labour’s Lost”, Modern Language Quarterly 54.4, 1993, 435-482. 30. Woudhuysen, op. cit., p. 51. 31. Richard Mulcaster, Positions Wherein Those Primitive Circumstances Be Examined, Which Are Necessarie for the Training Up of Children (1581), New York, Da Capo Press, 1971, p. 25. 32. Cuffe, op. cit., p. 121. 33. See Jane Kingsley Smith, “Love’s Labour’s Scorned: The Absence of Cupid on the Shakespearean Stage”, Cahiers Elisabethains 73, 2008, 9-21 (p. 15-16).

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34. On the training of the schoolboy in acting skills, Ursula Potter, “Performing Arts in the Tudor Classroom”, in Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare 1485-1590, ed. Lloyd Kermode, Jason Scott-Warren and Martine Van Elk, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 143-165. 35. Tribble notes that the skill and versatility of the actor playing Moth underpin this comic representation of failure (op. cit., p. 120). 36. T. J. King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and their Roles, 1590-1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 82, 171. 37. See Andrea Crow, “Mediating Boys: Two Angry Women and the Boy Actor’s Shaping of 1590s Theatrical Culture”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 65.2, 2014, 180-198 (p. 181). 38. Tribble, op. cit., p. 137-138.

ABSTRACTS

This essay focuses on the lessons of Love’s Labour’s Lost’s pageboy-schoolboy-boy actor, Moth, to examine the production of boyhood in early modern culture. It reads Shakespeare’s boy character alongside John Marston’s schoolboy, Holofernes Pippo, in What You Will to investigate the ways in which school lessons might be deployed to produce aged and gendered identities that complicate traditional understandings of early modern masculinity. Reading the comic staging of lessons in these plays, it will suggest that while the educational system aimed to produce gendered subjects, early modern masculine identities exist as a range of categories on a developmental scale. It will propose that although Moth and Pippo comically expose the limits of many pedagogical methods to produce ‘men’, they demonstrate the ways in which these characters learn to be boys. Finally, it will consider the extent to which this production of early modern age and gender identity in the plays is paralleled by the historical boy actors performing these roles.

Cet essai s’intéresse aux leçons de Moth, le page-écolier-jeune acteur de Peines d’amour perdues, afin d’étudier la façon dont était générée l’identité des jeunes garçons dans la culture de la première modernité. On confrontera le personnage créé par Shakespeare à l’écolier imaginé par John Marston dans What You Will, Holofernes Pippo, pour se demander comment les leçons des écoliers pouvaient produire des identités marquées par l’âge et le genre plus complexes que les interprétations que l’on donne habituellement de la masculinité à cette époque. Grâce à une lecture des leçons comiques mises en scène dans ces pièces, on suggérera que si le système éducatif avait pour ambition de façonner des sujets identifiés par leur genre, l’identité masculine se présente à la Renaissance comme une gradation de catégories sur une échelle de développement. Bien que Moth et Pippo mettent en lumière de façon comique les limites de nombreuses méthodes pédagogiques destinées à produire des « hommes », ils apprennent aussi à être des garçons. On complétera l’analyse par une étude du statut et des modalités de construction de l’identité chez les jeunes acteurs qui jouaient ces rôles sur scène à l’époque.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: éducation, enfance, garçons, jeunes acteurs, Marston John, Peines d’amour perdues, What You Will Keywords: boyhood, boy actors, early modern schooling, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Marston John, What You Will

AUTHOR

EDEL LAMB Queen’s University Belfast

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« So young, and so untender? » : le don du père à la jeune génération dans Le Roi Lear

Anne-Kathrin Marquardt

1 Quelles sont les obligations des jeunes face aux plus âgés ? C’est la question qui est au cœur du Roi Lear, pièce qui met en scène un conflit intergénérationnel. Ce différend se nourrit notamment du problème de l’héritage, posé dès la scène d’exposition avec le don du royaume du père aux enfants. La façon dont les personnages interprètent leur rapport aux choses, notamment aux choses données, échangées ou refusées, offre une perspective sur les rapports qu’ils entretiennent entre eux. Quelle est la légitimité d’une jeunesse qui s’en tient souvent à une vision matérialiste des rapports humains, face à une vieillesse qui impose des obligations absolues ?

« I gave you all » : Lear ou l’obligation absolue

2 Le « don » de Lear (I.i.35-140) pose plusieurs problèmes. Premièrement, la nature de l’opération n’est pas clairement définie : don, contrat ou héritage anticipé ? Si nous nous penchons d’abord sur la question de l’héritage, il s’agit d’une forme de don particulier, survenant après le décès du donateur, et qui consiste à abandonner tous ses biens à un autre. Cela peut d’ailleurs susciter un sentiment de culpabilité et d’endettement pour le donataire, qui ne saurait rendre cet immense don au défunt1, car par définition l’héritage ne peut être remboursé. Mais comme Lear lègue justement ses biens de son vivant, un remboursement est tout à fait possible. Si nous interprétons le geste de Lear comme un legs2, alors il combine la force de l’héritage, qui endette totalement, avec la possibilité pour le roi d’exiger un retour. C’est peut-être ce qui explique que Lear lui-même ne présente pas la cession comme un legs ; il la décrit tantôt comme un contrat, tantôt comme un don, c’est-à-dire deux formes de passation de la propriété qui lui permettent d’exiger un remboursement.

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3 Le geste ressemble à un contrat en ce que Lear stipule clairement sa part de l’accord, les choses qu’il cède. Cela comporte la « gestion » quotidienne du royaume, le pouvoir et les ressources financières, la pompe royale, et bien sûr les terres elles-mêmes. En échange, Lear s’attend à recevoir des contreparties, définies tout aussi clairement : la déférence due au roi, les cent chevaliers que les enfants devront nourrir et loger, avec le vieux roi, à tour de rôle. C’est ainsi dès le premier acte que Lear inaugure l’obsession de la quantité qui traversera toute la pièce en émaillant son discours de comparatifs et de superlatifs : « love us most » (I.i.51), « our largest bounty » (I.i.523). Amour, sens de l’obligation filiale et biens matériels sont mis sur le même plan ; tous peuvent être comparés et par là quantifiés.

4 Pourtant, Lear utilise également le langage du don pour décrire son geste. La terminologie est assez explicite quand Kent demande à son souverain : « Revoke thy gift » (I.i.165). Lear souligne sa propre générosité : « so kind a father! » (I.v.31). Il mentionne souvent l’ingratitude qu’il croit observer chez ses filles aînées, insistant sur un lien d’affection entre les générations plutôt caractéristique du don : « this tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else, / Save what beats there, filial ingratitude » (III.iv.12-14). Les registres de l’échange de contreparties et celui du don gratuit sont ainsi mélangés dans le discours du roi.

5 Le second problème dans le geste de Lear, c’est que le récipiendaire n’est pas clairement désigné. Lear s’adresse à ses filles lorsqu’il demande une preuve d’amour, mais il semble que ce soient ses gendres qui héritent véritablement des terres et du pouvoir. Lear s’adresse d’abord à ses deux gendres (I.i.40-41) puisque les parts du royaume font office de dot. C’est donc l’ambiguïté du statut juridique d’une dot qui introduit le doute sur le véritable récipiendaire de la cession : c’est une somme attribuée à une fille, mais destinée à devenir la propriété de son mari4. Ce flottement continue lorsque Lear s’adresse à ses filles pour lancer le test d’amour (I.i.48). Il s’agit bien, pour elles, de participer activement à la distribution de biens qui va avoir lieu, et il est donc suggéré qu’elles en sont les récipiendaires. Le langage est toujours hésitant quand Lear prononce le transfert lui-même, une fois que Goneril a réussi l’épreuve : « Of all these bounds […] / We make thee lady. To thine and Albany’s issues / Be this perpetual » (I.i.63-67). La formule suggère que c’est Goneril qui reçoit ces terres, et que les générations suivantes pourront en hériter par leur mère. De même pour Regan : « To thee and thine hereditary ever / Remain this ample third of our fair kingdom » (I.i. 79-80). Le placement de « to thee » en première position suggère ici encore que c’est avant tout Regan qui hérite, et par elle ses enfants ; le mari n’est même pas mentionné.

6 Mais plus loin, après le rejet de sa cadette, Lear s’adresse une fois de plus à ses gendres et leur demande de se partager la part de Cordelia et de prendre les rênes du royaume : Cornwall and Albany, With my two daughters’ dowers, digest this third. […] I do invest you jointly with my power, Pre-eminence and all the large effects That troop with majesty. Ourself by monthly course, With reservation of an hundred knights By you to be sustained, shall our abode Make with you by due turn; only we shall retain The name, and all th’addition to a king: the sway, Revenue, execution of the rest,

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Beloved sons, be yours; which to confirm, This coronet part between you. I.i.128-139 La tirade est encadrée par des adresses aux gendres, elle leur est donc probablement destinée en totalité. La dot n’est plus transmise aux femmes, mais aux hommes, car la formule « with my two daughters’ dowers, digest » suggère que les dots sont comprises dans la quantité de biens que les gendres doivent absorber. Ce sont eux qui ont l’obligation d’héberger Lear, ce qui est d’autant plus étonnant que, par la suite, il reprochera surtout à ses filles de ne pas subvenir à ses besoins. Lear termine sur un transfert de pouvoir et de revenus aux ducs, symbolisé par la transmission de la couronne aux gendres.

7 Comment expliquer cette double ambiguïté concernant le transfert de la scène d’exposition : la nature de la cession n’est pas claire (échange ou don) ; il y a un flou sur le récipiendaire (les filles ou les gendres) ? Les travaux de l’anthropologue Alain Testart permettent d’éclairer le premier problème. Il propose la définition suivante : « le don est la cession d’un bien qui implique la renonciation à tout droit sur ce bien ainsi qu’à tout droit qui pourrait émaner de cette cession, en particulier celui d’exiger quoi que ce soit en contrepartie5 ». C’est ce dernier point qui lui permet d’établir une différence entre le don et toutes les autres formes d’échange. En effet, s’il y a parfois une contrepartie dans le don (le « contre-don »), son obtention est affaire de codes moraux et sociaux6, et donc non garantie. En revanche, dans le cas de l’échange, l’obtention de la contrepartie est assurée par la loi. Vu dans cette perspective, le transfert opéré par Lear n’est manifestement pas un don, car la contrepartie est clairement exigée et attendue ; il s’agit plutôt d’un échange.

8 Si l’échange est fondé sur une obligation juridique de rendre une contrepartie, le transfert que cherche à effectuer Lear pose néanmoins problème. Dans une monarchie, la source de la loi est le monarque. Lear ne peut garantir l’exécution d’un échange convenu avec d’autres que s’il est roi. Or, l’échange consiste justement à abandonner ce rôle. Le transfert de propriété est à la fois un acte exprimant la souveraineté, où le roi dispose de son royaume à sa guise, et un geste qui annonce son impuissance et sa fragilité. Lear ne semble pas se fier à l’obligation légale de rendre contenue dans ce contrat oral qu’il passe avec la génération suivante au moment où il renonce au pouvoir. C’est ainsi que Lear se tourne vers un autre registre : l’obligation morale, ou sociale, de rendre, contenue dans le don. Katharine Eisaman Maus relève cette différence entre les domaines du don et de l’échange : « Rather like the unstrained mercy or the honorable liberality of The Merchant of Venice, gratitude cannot, apparently, be enjoined by force of positive law but only by the internalized dictates of duty, honor, and filial affection7 ».

9 Le flottement constaté entre les registres de l’échange et du don est ainsi volontairement cultivé par Lear, qui veut s’assurer sa contrepartie par l’obligation sociale du don, en lieu et place de l’exigibilité juridique de l’échange à laquelle il renonce par l’abdication même. Or, ce type d’obligation sociale et morale contenue dans le don est d’autant plus forte qu’elle s’applique à des parents du sang : les filles, et non les gendres. Dès lors que les courtisans ont cessé d’être ses sujets, Lear ne peut exiger un contre-don que de ses enfants biologiques. Leur loyauté lui est garantie non par leur statut de sujet, mais par leur statut de filles. Le lien de parenté apparaît donc comme identique à un lien d’obligation : en tant que père, Lear a tout donné à ses filles, et réclame maintenant son dû.

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10 Lear exagère d’ailleurs volontairement le poids de cette double obligation, née à la fois du lien de parenté et du don. La cession très clairement décrite et cernée de la scène d’exposition se transforme, au fil de la pièce, en une dette généralisée que les filles auraient contractée envers leur père, marquée par « all » : « O, Regan, Goneril, / Your old, kind father, whose frank heart gave you all » (III.iv.19-20)8. Quel est donc ce « tout » ? Cela comprend, bien sûr, le royaume, mais cela semble aussi englober une totalité mal définie : une vie aisée, une éducation peut-être ; en un mot, toute une vie de dévotion paternelle. Dès lors, à la totalité de ce « all » que Lear a donnée à ses filles, un contre-don total doit répondre. En créant une dette, une obligation totale, Lear crée le devoir de « tout » rendre, une obéissance absolue qu’il ne peut demander qu’à ses filles. Après avoir essuyé plusieurs refus de la part de Goneril au deuxième acte, Lear se tourne vers Regan pour obtenir son contre-don : Thou [Regan] better knowst The offices of nature, bond of childhood, Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude. Thy half o’the kingdom hast thou not forgot, Wherein I thee endowed. II.ii.366-370 Lear n’hésite pas à rappeler à sa fille toutes les choses qu’il lui a cédées pendant la cérémonie du premier acte. Mais il ajoute un autre registre : Regan serait obligée de rendre, non seulement à cause de la dette objective, matérielle, qui résulte de la cession du royaume, mais aussi à cause d’une obligation bien plus vague. « Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude » fait référence à cette obligation sociale et morale de rendre un don donné. Une fois de plus, Lear se place sur le terrain du don, espérant que Regan s’acquittera de son obligation par simples bonnes mœurs. Enfin, Lear ajoute une troisième obligation : celle que les enfants doivent à leur père (« bond of childhood »). Le terme « bond », qui revient si souvent dans la pièce9, exprime parfaitement ce lien entre parents et enfants qui serait créé par le don de ce « tout » que les premiers font aux derniers. Lear ne pouvant s’appuyer sur l’exigibilité juridique d’un « bond » au sens financier du terme après son abdication, il tente de faire appel à l’obligation de rendre contenue dans le « bond », au sens d’obligation sociale, qui l’unit à ses filles10.

« Beyond what can be valued » : Goneril et Regan ou la liberté moderne

11 Comment, dans ce contexte, la jeune génération définit-elles ses devoirs face au père ? La réaction est évidemment différente pour Goneril et Regan d’un côté, et Cordelia de l’autre. Pendant la cérémonie du premier acte, Goneril et Regan, ayant bien compris que la simple rhétorique suffit à marquer l’obligation et la dette que Lear souhaite voir reconnues, cultivent elles aussi l’ambiguïté entre registres du don et de l’échange déjà mise en place par leur père. Voici comment s’exprime Goneril : Sir, I do love you more than word can wield the matter; Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty, Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour. As much as child e’er loved, or father found, A love that makes breath poor and speech unable, Beyond all manner of so much I love you. I.i.55-61

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12 Goneril reprend le discours de son père par son emploi de comparatifs. L’amour (ou, pour rester dans la logique de la pièce, le sens de l’obligation) – exprimé par Goneril est comparable, donc mesurable et quantifiable. La tirade peut ainsi se lire comme une allusion indirecte à l’échange qui est au centre du premier acte. Néanmoins, les allusions métatextuelles de Goneril à sa propre rhétorique révèlent le mode de fonctionnement qui caractérise son discours. D’après ce qu’elle dit, son amour est plus grand que les mots mêmes qui l’expriment. Cela peut paraître étonnant dans un discours si bien construit ; il semble que les mots soient parfaitement à même d’exprimer son amour. Ces phrases sont plutôt à prendre sur un mode proche de la prétérition : Goneril annonce qu’elle ne pourra pas s’exprimer convenablement pour, en fin de compte, réussir à très bien s’exprimer. Ce mode de fonctionnement s’étend à l’ensemble de son discours. Si on lit les nombreux comparatifs, non pas d’un point de vue grammatical (où ils indiquent évidemment une comparaison, donc une quantification), mais d’un point de vue sémantique, ils signifient tous que cet amour dépasse tous les points de comparaison qu’on pourrait lui appliquer – il est incommensurable (« beyond »).

13 La négation de la quantification fait basculer le discours de Goneril dans le registre de l’incommensurable, du don infini. Puisque le père ne réclame que des mots, les filles peuvent lui rembourser son dû en mots ; que la monnaie d’échange n’ait pas de valeur n’empêche pas pour l’instant l’échange d’être validé et permet à Goneril de fournir un contre-don inépuisable, car indénombrable. Il s’agit précisément de cette dette totale, absolue, que Lear invoquait face à ses filles : Goneril semble la reconnaître, et rendre une contrepartie (pour l’instant purement rhétorique) elle aussi infinie. Nous sommes tombés dans le registre du don, avec son obligation sociale et morale de rendre. Nous sommes donc face à une rhétorique à la fois de la quantification et de l’incommensurable qui dissimule et révèle l’échange que Lear propose. La prétérition apparaît alors comme l’embrayeur rhétorique qui permet de dire une chose et son contraire à la fois, de maintenir présents dans la scène les registres de l’échange et du don en même temps.

14 Les mêmes ambiguïtés se retrouvent dans le discours de Regan (I.i.69-76). Une fois de plus, nous trouvons l’idée de comparaison qui rend l’amour mesurable et attire l’attention sur les marques de quantité. Mais, dans la même tirade, Regan professe qu’elle dépasse encore sa sœur, rendant la comparaison caduque et entrant elle aussi dans le domaine de l’incommensurable. La stratégie rhétorique est donc la même que celle de Goneril.

15 L’emploi de ces deux registres permet aux sœurs aînées de rassurer leur père : il aura son dû, quel que soit le plan sur lequel on se place, celui de l’échange quantifiable (un certain nombre d’hectares contre un certain nombre de mots) ou celui du don illimité (l’amour illimité de leur père contre des mots indénombrables). Mais cette ambiguïté construit également une ironie dramatique. Si le langage de l’échange est présent dans cette scène, c’est qu’il annonce déjà que les sœurs refuseront, par la suite, la mécanique du don établie par Lear en refusant de reconnaître leur obligation sociale et morale envers lui, la remplaçant par un échange de biens clairement dénombrés. La logique de Lear repose sur un échange de tout (« all ») contre tout ; le choc sera celui du « nothing » en retour du « all ».

16 Les aînées ayant rempli leur part du contrat en participant au test d’amour, après n’avoir « donné » que des mots à leur père, elles reçoivent leur part du royaume en

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retour. Mais, comme le fait remarquer Testart, « un paiement acquitte une dette ; il engendre un droit, ou annule celui (l’obligation) que d’autres avaient sur vous11 ». Selon la logique de l’échange adoptée par les filles, les obligations mutuelles que se doivent père et filles sont ainsi annulées, la dette payée, les liens personnels rompus. Au crescendo de la rhétorique dans la scène d’exposition se substitue plus tard un decrescendo dans le nombre de chevaliers que les filles veulent bien accorder à leur père (II.ii.377-475). Une fois la mascarade d’un amour prétendument incommensurable et gratuit terminée, il devient possible de nommer les quantités, et, partant, de les réduire. Cette diminution progressive jusqu’à zéro, possible dans le cadre de la logique de l’échange, va donc jusqu’à annuler le don même et les obligations qu’il implique.

17 Les aînées déploient ainsi une stratégie qui vise à les faire sortir de la mécanique établie par leur père, et qui les mettrait pour toujours dans l’obligation de rembourser éternellement leur dette. Le don met en effet le récipiendaire dans une position d’« obligé », l’endette, voire l’humilie et le domine. Ainsi émerge ce que les anthropologues nomment la « tyrannie du don12 » : le sentiment douloureux d’être endetté et de ne pouvoir rendre, une obligation morale et sociale impossible à observer. La réaction des aînées consistant à réduire leur relation avec leur père à un contrat annulable à tout instant apparaît alors comme un moyen de se libérer de cette tyrannie. Comme le résume si bien l’anthropologue Jacques Godbout : « la liberté moderne est essentiellement l’absence de dette13 ». Si l’obligation du don est étouffante, la volonté d’en sortir conduit ici à rompre entièrement la relation, avec toute la violence que cela suppose. Cette coercition du père face à ses filles doit se lire dans le contexte d’une pièce où Lear apparaît de façon générale comme un père possessif. La critique féministe a souvent souligné le fait que Lear ne semble pas pouvoir laisser Cordelia partir ; sa soif de contrôle s’apparenterait même, selon certaines lectures, à des tendances incestueuses14.

« Love my father all » : Cordelia ou l’aporie du don

18 C’est Cordelia qui tente d’attirer l’attention de son père sur le problème d’une obligation excessive face au père, plaidant pour un équilibre entre l’amour dû au père et celui dû au mari. Dès la scène d’ouverture, elle défend une juste mesure dans son amour pour Lear : Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters To love my father all. I.i.95-10415 L’expression « return back » suggère que Cordelia reconnaît à la fois le don qu’elle a reçu de son père et son obligation de rendre quelque chose. Mais ici encore, on constate une équivalence parfaite entre les obligations des uns et des autres, notamment marquée par le parallélisme des deux rythmes ternaires (vers 95 et 97). La logique de Lear fondée sur un don total est explicitement rejetée grâce au mécanisme de la

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question rhétorique et de la réponse. L’expression « love you all » apparaît d’abord dans un contexte interrogatif, puis une seconde fois dans la réponse que Cordelia fournit à sa propre question, mais accompagnée du négatif « never ». À ce double « all » du père, désormais écarté, elle substitue un double « half ». Le dédoublement apporté par l’anaphore permet de souligner l’équilibre entre une obligation scindée en deux : moitié pour le père, moitié pour le mari. Contrairement à ce que demande Lear, Cordelia n’envisage pas d’obligation morale totale envers son père qui engagerait la personne de manière absolue. Le « I » placé en fin de vers, sous l’accent, atteste cette volonté de ne pas laisser s’effacer l’individu dans les liens qui l’unissent à d’autres.

19 Mais, comme l’a souvent souligné la critique, le contraste entre la Cordelia assez indépendante du premier acte et la Cordelia qui revient au quatrième acte est saisissant. Son mari est totalement absent ; il n’est plus question d’un partage équilibré des obligations entre père et époux ; elle mourra en prison. La mécanique du don est donc abolie, mais pas de la même manière que chez Goneril et Regan. Peu importe que Lear n’ait rien donné à sa fille au moment de la distribution des parts du royaume, elle lui donnera tout en retour : c’est « all » en retour de « nothing16 ». Finalement, le contre-don total que Cordelia rendra à son père, ce sera à la fois le don de sa personne, puisqu’elle mourra pour lui, et son « par-don » : LEAR. I know you do not love me, for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong. You have some cause, they have not. CORDELIA. No cause, no cause. IV.vii.73-75 Lear suggère que Cordelia aurait toutes les raisons de ne plus aimer son père, mais elle répond « no cause ». La multiplication des structures négatives dans ces répliques n’est pas sans rappeler la réduction à zéro des obligations mutuelles entre parents et enfants qu’avaient envisagée les sœurs aînées. Mais la réduction à « nothing » n’a pas ici le même sens : elle prépare le contre-don total que Cordelia rendra à son père en échange de ce rien qu’elle a reçu, soulignant le caractère réellement infini du don de Cordelia.

20 La réponse en « no cause » peut également se lire comme un nouveau silence, en écho au silence de Cordelia pendant le test d’amour au début de la pièce. Jacques Derrida souligne en effet le paradoxe du pardon. Pour qu’il puisse y avoir pardon, la faute doit d’abord être nommée et reconnue. Mais par là même, la culpabilité est mise en avant : « pardonner, c’est consacrer le mal qu’on absout comme un mal inoubliable et impardonnable. […] Le pardon accordé est aussi fautif que le pardon demandé, il avoue la faute17 ». D’où l’importance du silence, aussi bien dans le pardon que dans le don. Le don doit être tu, nié « car un don, pourrait-on dire, s’il se faisait reconnaître comme tel au grand jour, un don destiné à la reconnaissance s’annulerait aussitôt. Le don est le secret lui-même18 ». L’expression « no cause », prise au pied de la lettre, n’exprime pas le pardon (même si, d’un point de vue pragmatique, c’est évidemment là son sens) ; elle nie en fait que Lear ait commis la moindre faute, et nie donc aussi la nécessité d’un pardon. C’est une manière de taire à la fois la faute et le « par-don » lui-même.

21 Quelle est donc la nature exacte de ce don de soi que fait Cordelia à son père à la fin de la pièce ? Pour Derrida, le don véritablement libre et gratuit n’existe pratiquement pas. Selon le philosophe, il faudrait une absence totale de récompense, il faudrait que le donateur ne s’attende même pas à en recevoir une, car ce serait déjà un calcul, et le geste ne serait plus véritablement désintéressé19 :

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Dès l’instant où le don […] se laisse effleurer par le calcul, dès lors qu’il compte avec la connaissance ou la reconnaissance, il se laisse prendre dans la transaction : il échange, il donne en somme de la fausse monnaie, puisqu’il donne contre un salaire. […] D’où la double « suppression de l’objet » […] : dès qu’il calcule (à partir de la simple intention de donner comme telle, à partir du sens, de la connaissance et de la reconnaissance escomptée), le don supprime l’objet (du don). Il le nie en tant que tel. Pour éviter à tout prix cette négation ou cette destruction, il faudrait procéder à une autre suppression de l’objet : ne garder du don que le donner, l’acte et l’intention de donner, non le donné, qui au fond ne compte pas. Il faudrait donner sans savoir, sans connaissance et sans reconnaissance, sans remerciement : sans rien, en tout cas sans objet20.

22 Pourtant, le don de Cordelia à son père ressemble assez aux critères mis en place par Derrida pour définir un véritable don. Elle ne peut raisonnablement espérer une contrepartie, car son père n’est pas en mesure de lui donner quoi que ce soit. La véritable générosité, pour Derrida, se définit comme suit : À quelle condition peut-il y avoir responsabilité ? À la condition que le Bien soit […] le rapport à l’autre, une réponse à l’autre : expérience de la bonté personnelle et mouvement intentionnel. […] À quelle condition y a-t-il bonté, au-delà du calcul ? À la condition que la bonté s’oublie elle-même, que le mouvement soit un mouvement de don qui renonce à soi, donc un mouvement d’amour infini21.

23 Le pardon de Cordelia est bien une renonciation à soi ; il est ce « mouvement d’amour infini » qui tend vers l’autre. La notion de responsabilité est essentielle dans la pensée de Derrida sur le don, car elle exige « qu’on réponde, en tant que soi-même et en tant que singularité irremplaçable, de ce qu’on fait, dit, donne22 ». Ainsi, la responsabilité ne peut être que personnelle. Or, « faire l’expérience de la responsabilité, depuis la loi donnée, faire l’expérience de sa singularité absolue et appréhender sa propre mort, c’est la même expérience : la mort est bien ce que personne ne peut ni endurer ni affronter à ma place23 ». L’expérience de la responsabilité comme réponse à l’autre, comme mouvement vers l’autre, est donc aussi une expérience de la mort du moi : Que veut dire en français donner la mort ? Comment se donne-t-on la mort ? Comment se la donne-t-on au sens où se donner la mort, c’est mourir en assumant la responsabilité de sa mort, se suicider mais aussi bien se sacrifier pour autrui, mourir pour l’autre, donc peut-être donner sa vie en se donnant la mort, en acceptant la mort donnée […]24 ?

24 Mais en même temps, la responsabilité suppose également une forme d’autonomie, celle du choix de ses actes, de ses paroles, car « ce souci de la mort, cet éveil qui veille sur la mort, cette conscience qui regarde la mort en face, est un autre nom de la liberté25 ». Ainsi Cordelia assume-t-elle sa responsabilité envers son père en lui venant en aide, en répondant à l’autre. Il s’agit bien d’un choix parfaitement libre, puisque rien ne l’y obligeait. Mais la responsabilité choisie librement, et qui consiste à faire ce don d’amour infini à son père, se terminera pour elle dans une mort réelle. Derrida envisage peut-être une mort dans un sens plus métaphorique – je prends conscience du fait que je suis prêt à donner, donner de moi, me sacrifier pour l’autre. Or, c’est bien ce risque ultime que prend Cordelia lorsqu’elle lance son armée contre ses sœurs, celui d’une défaite si totale qu’elle pourrait lui coûter la vie. Sa mort réelle, au cinquième acte, ne vient alors que dédoubler le sens qu’avait déjà son geste au quatrième acte : elle était prête à donner de soi, se donner pour son père. C’est un don marqué à la fois par une liberté et une responsabilité totales, un don de soi-même dans lequel le sujet accepte la possibilité de sa propre annihilation ; le seul don de « all » dans une pièce où chacun cherche à donner le moins possible.

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25 Mais c’est un don qui débouche sur une aporie : dans cette tragédie, le seul don véritablement désintéressé mène nécessairement à la mort. C’est ainsi que le décès de Cordelia peut aussi être lu dans une lumière moins positive, comme le fait notamment la critique féministe, car son sacrifice est ce qui permet à Lear de réaliser tous ses désirs les plus discutables. Il peut enfin garder sa fille, dont le mari a disparu. La perspective de passer le reste de ses jours en prison avec elle est source de bonheur, puisque désormais ils seront unis pour toujours (V.iii.8-19). Lear semble enfin réaliser son rêve : « I […] thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery » (I.i.124-125). Cette fusion s’accompagne du silence de Cordelia, qui n’apparaîtra plus sur scène. Lear remarquera après sa mort : « Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman » (V.iii.270-271). Cordelia devient définitivement l’objet du fantasme de son père, et non plus un sujet autonome. La fille idéale semble être la fille qui ne parle que lorsque son père l’exige d’elle. Lynda Boose remarque : « the father who imagined that he “gave his daughters all” extracts from his daughter at the end of the play the same price he demanded in the opening scene – that she love her father all26 ».

26 Si Derrida voit dans le silence l’une des conditions de possibilité du don, c’est justement le silence qui souligne également l’immensité de ce don qui tait la faute du père et coûte la vie à Cordelia. Goneril et Regan, qui manient si bien les mots, savent au contraire manipuler les liens d’obligation à leur avantage pour sauvegarder leur liberté. Mais cette absence de dette qu’elles arrachent de force annule tous les liens, notamment les liens de parenté, et finit par les annihiler elles-mêmes. Si la pièce montre une méconnaissance tragique du don et de son incroyable force chez les aînées, elle ne permet donc pas à la jeunesse d’entrevoir une existence autonome en dehors des liens du don.

NOTES

1. Cette idée est liée au concept de « tyrannie du don » en anthropologie, sur lequel nous reviendrons. 2. William Scott nous rappelle que le procédé est de toute façon illégal, puisque le royaume est inaliénable, notamment selon le droit médiéval (William Scott, « Contracts of Love and Affection: Lear, Old Age, and Kingship », Shakespeare Survey 55, 2002, 36-42, note 2 page 36) – s’agit-il d’un indice suggérant que la cession du royaume est plutôt affaire de don en famille qu’une affaire d’État pour Lear ? En revanche, il existe un procédé juridique à la Renaissance, à la disposition des roturiers, qui ressemble fortement à ce que Lear met en place ici : le « maintenance agreement ». Coppélia Kahn explique de quoi il s’agit : « In such contracts, children to whom parents deeded farm or workshop were legally bound to supply food, clothing, and shelter to their parents, even to the precise number of bushels of grain or yards of cloth. Thus the law put teeth into what was supposed to be natural kindness. Lear’s contest of love in the first scene functions as a maintenance agreement in that he tries to bind his daughters, by giving them their inheritance while he is still alive, into caring for him » (Coppélia Kahn, « The Absent Mother in King Lear », in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, dir. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan et Nancy J. Vickers, Chicago, University of Chicago

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Press, 1986, 33-49, p. 44-45). William Scott donne par ailleurs des exemples détaillés de ce genre de contrat, qui éclairent des passages de la pièce tels que celui où Lear réclame à ses filles : « I beg / That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food » (II.ii.344-345). Scott conclut : « [Lear] is making a sort of contract to buy future love » (Scott, op. cit., p. 38). 3. Toutes les citations du Roi Lear sont tirées de : William Shakespeare, King Lear, éd. R.A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, Londres, 1997. 4. Lear établit un lien entre la cession de ses biens et les dots de ses filles, ce qui n’est pas totalement incongru à l’époque, puisque les « marriage settlements » contenaient souvent des clauses s’apparentant à un « maintenance agreement » pour les parents des mariés. Katharine Eisaman Maus relève elle aussi le problème du véritable récipiendaire des biens, puisqu’une dot, bien qu’attribuée à une fille (ici dans le cadre du test d’amour), devient la propriété de son mari selon la doctrine de « coverture » : « In Lear’s particular family circumstances, the fact that two of his daughters are already married raises a further problem: the question of to whom the segmented realm is actually being conveyed. Lear begins the love-test by addressing Albany and Cornwall, and calling the kingdom he means to divide “our daughters’ several dowers”. In other words, he apparently assumes that the daughters’ entitlement will pass to their husbands “under coverture”, as property normally would in marriage, and therefore invests the husbands, not his daughters, with “my power, / Preeminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty” (130-132). […] Kent and Gloucester […] assume that the husbands of Goneril and Regan will be the de facto recipients of any territories granted to their wives » (Katharine Eisaman Maus, « Vagabond Kings: Entitlement and Distribution in 2 Henry VI and King Lear », in Being and Having in Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, 99-132, p. 114). Mais le contexte juridique n’est pas si simple, car les exceptions à la « coverture » sont nombreuses. La première, analysée par Maus, concerne la famille royale : « it is still unclear if a regnant queen’s husband – a son-in- law rather than a “son of the blood” – is really a king in every respect » (p. 115). La question était bien connue des contemporains car le statut de Philippe d’Espagne, époux de la reine Marie, était pour le moins flou. Voici les conséquences pour la famille de Lear selon Maus : « Confronted by Albany with proof of her adultery with Edmund, Goneril informs her husband that he has no authority over her: “The laws are mine, not thine” (V.iii.157-158). […] Goneril, her monstrousness aside, is possibly correct. […] via her performance of the love test she has received sovereignty in her own person, not as a conduit to her husband » (p. 115). Par ailleurs, l’historienne Amy Louise Erickson analyse la pratique des « marriage settlements » de façon plus générale, concluant : « A marriage settlement was a legal evasion of the law of coverture and dower […]. One made a marriage settlement in order to avoid the property law incidents which accompanied marriage. Both wills and marriage settlements have been described as deviations from custom, but especially in some segments of the population the deviation was so common as to have become custom itself » (Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England, Londres, Routledge, 1993, p. 100-101). Ainsi, la pratique du « separate estate » (aussi connue sous le nom de « pin-money ») était-elle déjà bien établie à la Renaissance. Erickson précise : « Conveyancing manuals throughout the early modern period demonstrate that the primary purpose of a marriage settlement was to preserve the wife’s property rights. The sample forms of settlement presented incorporated any one or more of the following features: setting the amount of the wife’s jointure; allowing her to make a will under coverture; obliging her husband to leave her worth so much money at his death; or binding him to pay portions to her children by a previous husband » (p. 104). Elle cite notamment le cas de Lady Anne Clifford sous le règne de Jacques Ier, qui refusa de se séparer de ses terres dans le Westmorland au profit de son mari (p. 111-112). Concluons donc que les ambiguïtés juridiques autour de la dot et de la « coverture » reflètent l’ambiguïté de Lear lui-même qui s’adresse tantôt à ses filles tantôt à ses gendres lors de la cession de biens.

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5. Alain Testart, Critique du don : études sur la circulation non marchande, Paris, Syllepse, 2007, p. 19. La définition de Testart est issue d’une critique de l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss, l’un des premiers anthropologues à se pencher sur la question du don. Il constate un flou dans les termes utilisés par Mauss et il se propose d’affiner les catégories implicitement créées par ce dernier. Mauss est en effet ambigu quand il évoque « le caractère volontaire, pour ainsi dire, apparemment libre et gratuit, et cependant contraint et intéressé de ces prestations » (Marcel Mauss, « Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques », L’année sociologique, 1923-1924, 30-186, p. 33). Testart se propose ainsi se séparer plus nettement entre un geste gratuit et désintéressé d’une part, et un geste pour lequel un remboursement, une récompense, une contrepartie ou un contre-don, seraient exigibles, d’autre part. Cela l’amène d’ailleurs à qualifier d’« échange » certains des phénomènes que Mauss analyse sous le titre de « don ». 6. La question de la nature exacte de l’obligation dans le don a fait débat en anthropologie. Nous nous en tiendrons à la perspective de Testart, pour qui l’obligation de rendre naît du simple fait qu’une chose a été donnée et que le donataire, transformé en obligé, se sent lui-même dans l’obligation de rendre. L’obligation naît du sentiment d’une dette – peu importe, d’ailleurs, si le premier don avait été sollicité ou même voulu – dont on cherche à s’acquitter. Testart résume : « La force qui pousse à rendre est celle de l’obligation, quelle que soit sa nature, sociale, juridique ou seulement morale. Et obligare, faut-il rappeler, c’est se lier : la force qui pousse à rendre est celle du lien social » (Testart, op. cit., p. 195). C’est donc tout simplement la force du lien – aussi fugace soit-il, mais forcément « social » – unissant deux personnes qui échangent un objet qui donne toute sa puissance à cette obligation. 7. Maus, op. cit., p. 124. 8. Le mot « all » revient souvent dans la bouche de Lear, par exemple dans les questions que Lear adresse à Edgar déguisé en mendiant, dont la pauvreté s’expliquerait par le fait qu’il aurait tout donné à ses filles (III.iv). Le Fou répète également cette idée. 9. Dans tous les contextes où le mot « bond » apparaît dans la pièce, il exprime le lien qui unit un père à ses enfants, même s’il n’a pas le même sens pour chaque génération. C’est particulièrement évident dans la relation entre Gloucester et ses fils. Edmond manie ce concept avec brio, l’employant toujours pour créer l’ironie dramatique. Il prétend avoir rappelé à l’ordre son frère soi-disant déloyal : « Spoke with how manifold and strong a bond / The child was bound to the father » (II.i.47-48). Dans la fausse lettre censée avoir été écrite par Edgar, Edmond exprime en fait ses propres idées. Ici, « bond » s’est transformé en « bondage », synonyme de « tyranny » : « I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways not as it hath power, but as it is suffered » (I.ii.49-51). Pour cet enfant, le lien entre père et fils est trop fort, au point de rendre une rupture par la force nécessaire. Ajoutons que, dans la langue anglaise, « bond » désigne également l’effet de commerce qui promet le paiement d’une somme d’argent – sens au cœur du Marchand de Venise – et insiste ainsi sur l’idée d’un lien entre deux personnes fondé sur la dette et l’obligation de rembourser. 10. L’expression « offices of nature » pourrait faire référence à la loi naturelle, notion sur laquelle s’appuient plusieurs personnages, notamment Gloucester et Lear, pour insister sur les liens qui les unissent à leurs enfants : le lien entre générations serait « naturel » et donc inévitable ; les enfants qui se rebellent contre ce lien seraient alors « contre-nature ». D’où les reproches aux enfants concernant leur soi-disant manque de gratitude ou d’allégeance, notions fondées elles aussi sur des liens soi-disant naturels. Mais cet appel à la loi naturelle pourrait aussi se lire autrement. Il s’agit pour les pères de présenter comme un fait évident, un « donné » inéluctable, quelque chose qui relève en fait de la convention sociale, à savoir les liens d’obligation (dans tous les sens du terme) qui unissent les générations. Peu importe, donc, sur quel mode cette obligation est déclinée (gratitude, allégeance, affection, amour…), la conséquence est la même : il s’agit de forcer les enfants à obéir à leurs pères. 11. Testart, op. cit., p. 21.

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12. L’anthropologue Jacques Godbout fait remonter l’expression au livre suivant, même si elle s’est désormais établie dans cette discipline : Renée Fox et Judith Swazey, Spare Parts. Organ Replacement in American Society, New York, Oxford University Press, 1992. Voir Jacques Godbout, Le don, la dette et l’identité : homo donator versus homo œconomicus, Paris, Le Bord de l’Eau, 2013, p. 139. Godbout soulève par ailleurs la question suivante : l’obligation de retour a-t-elle une force particulière dans les dons qu’il nomme « intenses », comme l’héritage (Ibid., p. 135) ? Le Roi Lear tendrait à confirmer que c’est bien le cas. 13. Ibid., p. 47 (c’est Godbout qui souligne). 14. Voir notamment les analyses suivantes. Janet Adelman, « Suffocating Mothers in King Lear », Suffocating Mothers. Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, New York, Routledge, 1992, 103-129 ; Lynda Boose, « The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare », PMLA 97.3, 1982, 325-347 ; Kahn, op. cit. 15. Le dernier vers « To love my father all » n’est présent que dans le Quarto publié à Londres en 1608. 16. Lear avait lui-même insisté sur le « nothing » donné à Cordelia au premier acte : « nothing will come of nothing. Speak again » (I.i.90) ; « there she stands / […] with our displeasure pieced / And nothing more » (I.i.198-201) ; et, en réponse à la demande du duc de Bourgogne qui veut savoir si elle aura une dot, « Nothing. I have sworn » (I.i.247). 17. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort, Paris, Galilée, 1999, p. 182. 18. Ibid., p. 50. Derrida explique ainsi, par exemple, l’injonction biblique de donner sans qu’une main sache ce que fait l’autre (Ibid., p. 145). 19. Notons qu’il existe sur ce point un différend marqué entre Derrida et de nombreux anthropologues. Alain Testart par exemple écrit : « le contre-don n’annule pas le don : il rend nul le solde comptable […]. Il a seulement pour effet d’annuler la dette (morale), mais il n’annule pas le geste du don. Ni le fait qu’il y ait eu don. Ni même la reconnaissance que l’on peut avoir vis-à- vis de quelqu’un du fait qu’il vous a donné » (Testart, op. cit., p. 233 [c’est Testart qui souligne]). 20. Derrida, op. cit., p. 152-153 (c’est Derrida qui souligne). D’un point de vue étymologique, « merci » veut dire « prix, salaire, récompense » ; le remerciement apparaît ainsi comme salaire du don, donc comme calcul. 21. Ibid., p. 76-77. 22. Ibid., p. 78. 23. Ibid., p. 64. 24. Ibid., p. 26-27 (c’est Derrida qui souligne). 25. Ibid., p. 33. 26. Boose, op. cit., p. 335.

RÉSUMÉS

Si les liens familiaux, et donc intergénérationnels, sont un thème dominant de l’œuvre shakespearienne, comment la vision de la jeunesse évolue-t-elle dans les pièces de la maturité ? Le Roi Lear met explicitement en scène un affrontement entre générations jeunes et âgées, qui peut se lire comme un conflit autour de la méconnaissance tragique du don. En transmettant son royaume à ses filles, le patriarche met en place un mécanisme selon lequel une obligation absolue de rendre doit répondre à la totalité d’un don absolu (« I gave you all »). Face à cette dette quasi-

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impossible à rembourser, Goneril et Regan ne trouveront d’autre issue que d’annuler le contrat, exposant ainsi la jeunesse à l’accusation d’ingratitude. Ce qui est en jeu, ce sont bien les droits et devoirs réciproques que se doivent les générations. Quelle est la légitimité d’une jeunesse qui refuse le poids de l’obligation imposée par le don des aînés ?

If familial – and therefore intergenerational – bonds are a dominant theme of Shakespeare’s work, how does the representation of youth evolve in the late plays? King Lear explicitly highlights the rivalry between older and younger generations, which can be read as a conflict around a tragic misunderstanding of gift-giving. By bequeathing his kingdom to his daughters, the patriarch creates a mechanism by which an absolute obligation to return the gift must mirror the totality of an absolute gift (« I gave you all »). Faced with a debt that is almost impossible to repay, Goneril and Regan will find no other solution but to annul the contract, introducing the theme of the scandalous ingratitude of youth. The rights and duties the generations owe one another are at stake. How legitimate is a young generation who reject the burdensome obligations imposed by the gifts of the old?

INDEX

Keywords : debt, Derrida Jacques, forgiveness, gift-giving, King Lear, obligation, Testart Alain Mots-clés : Derrida Jacques, dette, don, obligation, pardon, Roi Lear (le), Testart Alain

AUTEUR

ANNE-KATHRIN MARQUARDT Professeur en classes préparatoires littéraires, Lycée Joliot-Curie, Nanterre

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Shakespeare pour la jeunesse, ou l'éternelle jeunesse de Shakespeare Shakespeare For Young People - Shakespeare, Forever Young

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“Appertaining to thy young days”: The End of the Academe in Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Curriculum for the Future

Daniel Bender

Academics and Practical Action: Pracademics

1 The phrase “appertaining to thy young days” occurs in a conversation between the excessively courtly Armado and his boy servant Moth. The phrase just quoted and the amused title of “tender juvenal” he confers on Moth represent Armado’s characteristic language: ornate, bookish, bearing the hallmarks of an “academe” that he pretends to belong to. In favoring ornate diction over plain style, the bookish over the colloquial, Armado is positioned as the satiric version of old-school Tudor humanism, an educational system that promoted copy books—phrases collected from Latin authors— as a resource for memorization and a means to eloquence. By contrast, Moth subjects the ornateness he hears in Armado’s speech to critique. In steady resistance to his superior’s rhetorical performances, Moth habitually breaks through the sweet smoke of Armado’s rhetoric. In a culminating moment of resistance to his master, Moth uses the Pageant of the Nine Worthies to chasten Armado (“Master, let me take you a button hole lower,” 5.2.7001). This is a rare breach of the social code; a servant cannot safely criticize his master’s pretentiously learned stance. Only the ladies of the French court, bothered by the four courtiers and their stylized Petrarchan performance, can demand change. They formulate a year-long probationary period, a de facto curriculum that focuses on personal development and social skills conducive to workable relations between the two groups. In assigning this year-long alternative to the failed academe, the “maiden council” unknowingly enters a discursive present where current educational theory, calling for an end to the “inconsequential ethos of schoolwork”

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favors learning focusing on “how to deal effectively with real-life relationships and responsibilities”.2

2 In this scene of an elder conversing with a youth obliged to listen to him, we have an allegory of the characteristic classroom crisis that shadows Shakespearean studies. A master-servant relation is present whenever one party is economically obliged to hold conversation with another, more powerful party. This aura of compulsion haunts teacher-student relations in American classrooms, I would argue, because the paradigm of intensive reading enshrined in print culture is at odds with a cyber-world where intensive reading is odd, even old-fashioned. Whereas bard-loving scholar-teachers think of their lectures as magisterial exegesis, students are likely to think of the same expert discourse as a painfully dilated version of Armado’s rhetoric-obsessed idiom. Shakespeare, though no Armado, nevertheless draws from the oratorical and rhetorical tradition taught in the Tudor schools. His language was acquired from texts that were daily translated and imitated during his own schooldays.3 Recognizing the historical remoteness of the bardic text and the altered reading patterns of contemporary students, editors ease students into the formal, often Latinate English of Tudor rhetorical culture through copious annotations. As the commercial rise of summaries and condensations attests, however, students who pick up an actual Shakespearean text struggle to comprehend plot and character by piecing together one phrase to its sequent. They move uncertainly from one character’s mystifying speech idiom to another character’s new and equally disconcerting vocabulary and syntax. In effect, the expert in Bardic language is a master, and the student, perplexed, frustrated, and bored, is the servant.

3 The favored modes of young adult literacy are typically text messages, the cryptic communiques of Twitter, and a general avoidance of extended univocal discourse. We might venture to identify Moth as the incipient Tudor embodiment of these youthful communication modes. But a chasm in communication modalities is clear. When the generation raised on video and cryptic texting meets the remote lexical and rhetorical codes of Shakespearean signifying practices, a generation gap widens into a chasm. More precisely, the gap between expert scholar and linguistic novice presents an inequality of competence that parallels a recent, troubling inequality in terms of social class. As the economist Thomas Picketty has recently argued, an era of cross-class prosperity seems to be receding, creating fertile conditions for the reestablishment of patrimonial capitalism.4 The need to align Shakespeare with educational outcomes that enhance student intellectual development is critical. This essay proposes one such reconnection.

4 The curriculum proposed here does not owe its origin solely to recent interest in embodied cognition. Its roots run much deeper. Practical wisdom, Aristotle wrote, is “a first principle of action.” The process that leads to wise decision is deliberation. The object of deliberation, Aristotle explains, centers not on a contemplative res (idea) but on practical action to secure a desired end: “We deliberate not about ends but about means […] about the things that are in our power and can be done”5 Aristotle’s valuation of practical reasoning provides both academic precedence and intellectual prestige, but Aristotelian praxis has received a recent powerful boost from the field of embodied cognition. Reasoning detached from the body and the body’s range of agency tends to be a deracinated, high abstract process. In its place, “[…] embodied cognitive theorists favor a relational analysis that views the organism, the action it performs and

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the environment in which it performs it as inextricably linked.”6 In other words, student learning is activated by a plan that will be put into action. A student in the embodied (or pracademic) classroom unifies the operations of mind with a body of aspirations and desires. This synchronicity of mind and body, perception and practical action-taking, defines what I will call pracademic education.

5 Of all plays in the Shakespeare canon, Love’s Labour’s Lost is most attuned to the acquisition of life skills by adolescents. This claim is supported by Berowne’s famous epiphany: “[…] where we are our learning likewise is” (4.3.314). Learning should focus on prudential choice and action in the face of life’s ongoing existential perplexities, a point that the inept academic students finally embrace. Elaborating Berowne’s cryptic call for situated learning, this essay asks: What issues involving practical skill affect students in their actual social environment (where “they are”)?

6 This essay explores three dramatic situations in Love’s Labour’s Lost that open the door to a new curriculum focused more on life skills development and less on interpretive exactions from the original text. I begin with an ongoing existential crisis that holds the attention of many college students: college loans and the post-graduate consequences of carrying debt. A second area for practical reasoning takes up the vexed question of adolescent and young-adult sexual relations and the possibility of pregnancy. Love’s Labor’s Lost dramatizes unwed pregnancy in the figure of Jaquenetta, but offers no real accounting of its social and psychological costs. A third area for the new pracademic curriculum will consider principles of successful conversation, negatively modeled in the four courtiers’ deployment of conversation-retarding “taffeta phrases” and “silken terms precise” (5.2.407). The young men have glimpsed some practical notion of conversational success in Berowne’s new preference for plain style, “russet yeas” and “kersey noes” (5.2.414), but that moment of insight can be enriched and given actionable form when students stage experimental conversations, both deficient and successful, in the hypothetical classroom of the future.

7 Traditional age college students are adolescents and thus really are the “tender juvenals”, a phrase that Armado uses for his amusement. The condition of inexperience and naiveté implicit in that phrase is the motive for the new curriculum outlined here. Financial competence is a critical life skill; mature decision making in sexual relations determines a young woman or man’s future quality of life; conversational effectiveness and rapport-building are crucial to social cohesiveness in societies structurally impaired by social fragmentation. A classroom which exercises and thus enhances the life skills of actual students in the Shakespearean classroom is the best next step in Shakespeare pedagogy; it is likely to engage interest and win gratitude from students bored by traditional pedagogy.

1. How To Talk To A Princess: A Seminar in Conversational Success

8 Developmental psychology provides some guidance about how the new situated learning would work when applied to the socially remote, aristocratic court culture depicted by Love’s Labour’s Lost. Specifically, the field of embodied cognition as described by developmental psychologist Esther Thelen holds that thought and language would not occur without the presence of the body in space and time. The mind is actively engaged, Thelen argues, by events that have been recently

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experienced. This means that voluntary attention is conditional. Does the subject being studied excite the student’s interest? Is the subject taking a meaningful direction, whereby study will provide the student with a course of action and a desired outcome?7 Translating cognitive abstractions of the body in space and time to new curriculum, we may venture the bumbling overture of Dumaine, Longaville, and Navarre to the Princess and her entourage as an object lesson in conversational failure: DUMAINE. Our letters, madam, show’d much more than jest. LONGAVILLE. So did our looks. ROSALINE. We did not quote them so. KING. Now, at the latest minute of the hour Grant us your loves. (5.2.777-779) The Princess has just received devastating news, so Navarre’s importuning is the epitome of conversational ineptitude. His use of the imperative form “Grant us your loves” reveals his oblivion to the trauma just suffered. He discovers an unresponsive conversational partner: “I understand you not. My griefs are doubled” (5.2.753)

9 As social discourse theorists Brown and Levinson explained in their seminal study, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage: “Positive-politeness utterances are used as a kind of metaphorical extension of intimacy, to imply common ground or sharing of wants to a limited extent.”8 In other words, the speaker is likely to establish relations if the speaker focuses on discerning the other party’s emotional state. Brown and Levinson borrow the metaphor of “saving face” to describe how successful conversation recognizes the interlocutor’s feelings as legitimate. In terms of effective conversational technique, this recognition requires the speaker to suspend her or his own emotional needs. The principle can be applied retrospectively to Love’s Labour’s Lost scene of conversational ineptitude. Navarre would have to defer his own emotional impulses and await a better time for romantic overtures. What students in a traditional classroom learn from this scene is that self-absorption of the impetuous speaker leads to dialogic disconnection. But such a loss in the comedy is a gain for embodied learning. In a twenty-first-century classroom attuned to the student’s personal experience, the teacher is free to invite student deliberation no longer tied to textual interpretation: What rules for conversational success, deduced from individual experience, can students formulate from the failure of conversation in Shakespeare’s court comedy?

10 As I noted in reference to Brown and Levinson, effective conversational exchange is dependent on “face preserving” behaviors. Accordingly, one rule for conversational success that students could try out in real time experiments would center on this principle. What are likely to be the outcomes of a conversation where the speaker has signaled his or her good will at the start of the conversation? A second class session on effective conversation might consider linguistic economy. The number of words spoken by one party – few and precise, many and diffuse – represent a test of the listening party’s receptivity. In an enactment of this principle of length, students might construct asymmetrical conversations, in which one party talks far more frequently than the other. The results would amount to training in conversational success, with empirical demonstrations of what might be called “conversational equality” provided by the classroom experiments.

11 If this comedy is studied in the new historicist approach, with its characteristic theorizations about power and individuality, then students could consider Katherine Larson’s sensible but traditionally academic claim that “conversational games […]

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represented politically significant examples of language use.”9 In this academic approach, however, the anachronism of middle-class students learning about courtly dialogue in the sixteenth century appears to reconstruct the Armado-Moth divide noted earlier in this essay. In a pracademic approach to effective conversation, classroom simulations of failed conversation provide immediate training in an activity that is very much “where students are” as members of a social cohort. Conversational failure, first dramatized in the Shakespearean comedy, would fuel class-devised protocols for conversation in the high-stakes environment of their emerging maturity.

2. Financial Competence: 100,000 Crowns and Student Debt Crisis

12 Navarre’s court finds it proposed academic study plans disrupted by financial controversy. The Princess carries a letter from her father that resurrects a complex history of indebtedness and partially repaid loans. The contending narratives of loans paid or unpaid is further complicated by the fact that these financial transactions took place between the fathers of the two young people, as Navarre reveals in referring to money “Disbursed by my father” (2.1.130). Both characters reflect a transhistorical problem for adolescents seeking financial competence: rules for receiving and repaying loans are not formulated by the adolescents, but by the adults, who undertook the terms of the financial transaction. Like high-school students casting about for ways to finance costly college tuition, Shakespeare’s royal youths are expected to discuss money matters, but without the first-hand experience or training in financial documentation and negotiation. The distant Shakespearean scene provides a keen opportunity for pracademic exploration of financial competence in 2016.

13 The Princess at least understands that her father’s financial advisers have recorded revenues and expenditures and she smartly resorts to the language of receipt: “You do the king my father much wrong, and wrong the reputation of your name / In so unseeming to confess receipt / Of that which so faithfully hath been paid” (2.1.153-154). Navarre protests that the loan due his father remains unpaid. The Princess reveals financial competency born of the argument; she invokes the legal proof of “acquittances,” documents that recorded the repayment: “We arrest your word. Boyet you can produce acquittances / For such a sum from special offers / Of Charles his father” (2.1.159-162).

14 The current academy has recognized similar conditions for financial tension and conflict. The University of South Florida justifies its first-year course on the grounds that anxieties over financial well-being deserve a place in the curriculum: “The pre- course survey allows staff to gauge students’ learning as well as their financial attitudes and behaviors. For example, Financial Literacy 101 revealed that over half of all first- year students were worried about the debt they would incur and how it would affect their choices after college.”10

15 In Shakespeare’s comedy of contending royal entourages, the argument can be resolved by financial professionals (“special officers,” 2.1.160). It is unlikely that current students will find a mimetic reflection of their personal situations in these royals arguing over money. Instead, in ironic contrast to assistance from royal ministers, many students will wonder how to extricate themselves from college-day debts that darken their post-graduation horizon. To understand how the dispute in Love’s Labour’s

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Lost opens a pracademic door to student financial competence in a commercial environment without special officers, let’s consider one American student loan company, Sallie Mae, and its meteoric increase in profits from college loans: Albert Lord, chief executive officer of Sallie Mae, the most dominant student loan company in the United States, reported to stakeholders in 2003 that the company’s record profits were attributable to penalties and fees collected from defaulted loans. Sallie Mae’s fee income increased by 228% (from $280 million to $920 million) between 2000 and 2005, while its managed loan portfolio increased by only 82 percent (from $67 billion to $122 billion) during the same period.11 This brief quotation supplies more than enough material to fashion a life skills workshop on college loans and their unspoken dangers. Consider, for example, that the customary and expected source of revenue − interest collected for outstanding loans − is a secondary source of company profit. Far more lucrative, and therefore concerning, is the fact that “record profits” were made from “penalties and fees collected from defaulted loans.” The questions that students would face in a student debt workshop would certainly consider the disastrous phenomenon of default. Such a workshop might ask students to recreate the material conditions in which the inexperienced and thus insecure student (or parent) signed the promissory papers. Was this contractual signature or consent given in a physical office, with a college loan officer providing guidance? Was the loan formally contracted through the specious convenience of an online account, with little or no scrutiny of the “fine print” that spells out terms and penalties?

16 The workshop might revisit a classroom version of drama by asking students to perform a scene in which the Sallie Mae official greets the prospective borrower, explains some terms of the contract, and then urges a signature. The enactment of this primal financial scene might include some surprises. According to a report by the journal Politico, some private companies in the US offer “unlimited loan amounts to eligible borrowers”.12 But given an interest rate as high as 7%, plus an origination fee of 4%, the loan company representative, congenial in manner, is ominously generous. Unlimited loan amounts may mean that college graduates are burdened with debt even as senior citizens, and that some loan agencies attempt to garnish the income of senior citizens who have yet to pay off their loans. The classroom staging of an interview between adult loan agent and adolescent borrower would dramatize both the necessity for practical knowledge in matters of finance and the pitfalls for those who breeze past contractual language of loans.

17 Other questions would fuel further practical thinking and decision-making. Have students scrutinized the terms of their present and future loans, to determine whether forgiveness and forbearance are part of their contracts? Have students considering applying for further loans examined the default rates of the issuing agency? Have they shopped around, to compare loan offers of the federal government as distinct from private lenders, identifying those private lenders that have a history of complaints?13

3. A Plan for Jaquenetta: Teen Age Pregnancy and Student Problem-Solving

18 The issue of unplanned pregnancy is usually confined to so-called Health classes, the province of high-school guidance programs. These programs are sandwiched between academic studies, the assumption being that academic study involves intellectual rigor,

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whereas life skill training involves a lower order function of information-sharing. This very limited programmatic effort in what may be termed “sexual education” offers teachers of Love’s Labour’s Lost a rich opportunity. Rather than pass over Jaquenetta’s hardly festive situation,14 teachers could explore the intersection of Shakespeare’s comedy and the anxious matter of sexual decision-making that adolescents often face alone.

19 A pracademic classroom session might begin where Love’s Labour’s Lost begins by considering the dynamics of male sexual adventurism. Costard is a proud sexual adventurer, proclaiming that he “suffers for the truth” because he acted according to biological imperatives: “Jaquenetta is a true girl” (1.1.298-299). Costard’s reference to “affliction” represents physical gratification disguised as biblically-inflected suffering. As a double-entendre, it refers to the imprisonment he will briefly endure, but it refers as well to the mechanics of sexual intercourse. The male member enters or afflicts the female body and thus achieves “prosperity.” Costard’s joke echoes the aristocrats’ hope for fame that will carry their name in the future (1.1.1-7), but both dramatizations of male aspiration obscure Jaquenetta’s situation and aspirations.

20 A classroom study of life skills relating to sexual self-management might begin with these sobering statistics offered by the Center for Disease Control: In 2010, teen pregnancy and childbirth accounted for at least $9.4 billion in costs to U.S. taxpayers for increased health care and foster care, increased incarceration rates among children of teen parents, and lost tax revenue because of lower educational attainment and income among teen mothers.15

21 The statistics adumbrate a set of negative consequences that only effective planning and counseling might mitigate. Taxpayers have to pay for medical care of the mother- to-be and child, though this subsidy may not foreclose the birthmother’s wrenching decision to place her child into foster care. As distinct from Costard’s smug statement about a “true girl,” the mother abdicates her role as natural protector of the child. As if these consequences were not bad enough, the teen mother’s future as a wage-earner is compromised, if the equation of education and income holds true. The negative consequences begin with the teen girl’s initial trauma of lost independence, but continue into an indefinite future.

22 What are students sitting in a classroom supposed to do about this perennial crisis? A classroom workshop could explore three linkages between Jaquenetta and current sociological theory. Limited education, vulnerability to male social control, and low- status employment experiences are all conducive to poor decision-making. Before presenting the practical and civic curriculum for this topic, I wish to relate Shakespeare’s representation of the pregnant Jaquenetta to the transhistorical reality of teen pregnancy in order to establish parallels between text and a social crisis in contemporary life.16

23 Jaquenetta’s lack of education is made explicit in Act 4, Scene 3 when she enters the King’s presence bearing a letter that her illiteracy prevents her from reading. Nevertheless, hopeful of reward, she is eager to report possible treason: “I beseech your grace, let the letter be read / Our person misdoubts it; twas treason, he said” (4.3.191-192). Jaquenetta’s low educational attainment places her in the company of many adolescent females in 2016, but the concurrence of illiteracy and her pregnancy deepens the historical parallel.

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24 A clinical study of teen pregnancy in five developed countries, published in 2005, tells Jaquenetta’s story: In Great Britain, differences by level of educational attainment are even larger: Forty-nine percent of 20-24 year olds with low levels of educational attainment used a method at first intercourse, compared with 80% of those with high levels of attainment.17 In a classroom confronting these findings, students could be asked to write civic- oriented interventions, directed not only at the forty-nine percent of peers with “low levels” of education, but at the twenty percent of at-risk peers whose higher education attainment does not absent them from sexual risk.

25 A second opportunity for building awareness of material conditions that lead to unplanned teen pregnancy involves gendered codes of power, as illustrated in Armado’s letter to the King: “For Jaquenetta (so is the weaker vessel called) which I apprehended with the foresaid swain, I keep her as a vessel of thy law’s fury, and shall, at the least of thy sweet notice, bring her to trial” (1.1.267-271). Armado’s eagerness to please the King by persecuting a marginalized female servant brings us into current psychological discourses on master-slave relation. In The Bonds of Love, psychologist and social theorist Jessica Benjamin explains that elegance and charm are key manipulative strategies whereby “the master’s rational calculating, even instrumentalizing attitude […] excites submission”.18 Students alert to the power-play inherent in sexual relations are better prepared to identify this dynamic in their own experiences.

26 A third life skills project relating to unplanned pregnancy would take up the question of low-status employment. Jaquenetta must reside in the royal park, as a kind of servant on call, since she is a “dey-woman” (1.2.125).19 Issues of practical awareness and self-examination come to the fore. Are students who work long hours in low-wage jobs putting themselves more at risk? Does this low-status employment work differentially, so that students working longer part-time jobs are more vulnerable to the false security of casual sexual encounters?

27 Shakespeare scholars have expert training in textual interpretation, not in adolescent counseling. Yet the kind of practical and personal knowledge that students gain from situated study is not beyond the professional competence of scholars who understand Love’s Labour’s Lost and its advocacy of learning “where we are”. The teacher-scholar would relinquish the role of expert for a new role as a “participant” in and “guide” to real-life issues as described in Apprenticeship in Thinking.20

Conclusion

28 This essay has argued that interpretation of a remote literary text has lost its appeal for many college-age students. Since this is a painful perception, it is often expressed in the privacy of personal conversation. But practitioners in the field can also be candid about a faded pedagogy of disembodied interpretation and excited by innovative pedagogy, as in this recent interview with American Shakespeare scholar Alexa Huang: In the twenty-first century, Shakespeare studies is a tent large enough to help transform the humanities, and a great deal of outreach work including digital humanities has come out of the field. There is a lot of positive vibe and intellectual energy. The field is more and more innovative, even though it has the baggage of being one of the most canonical fields of study.21

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Huang identifies an existential movement of individuals (“positive vibe”) as the source of innovation, but this finding leaves out the static force of institutional traditions and methodologies that would constrain such innovation. Holofernes, the schoolmaster in Love’s Labour’s Lost, boasts of his “[…] ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions” (4.2.66), but, as the epitome of the tradition-bound academic, he is rudely dismissed by his would-be students (“Jud-as, away!” [5.2.622]). If teachers of Love’s Labour’s Lost are to be emboldened to innovate, they would need justification from the field of educational theory, particularly if this justification spells out the necessary conditions for student motivation and perseverance in educational tasks.

29 A recent study by Sarah Fine offers such theoretical justification for innovation. Instead of “[…] muscling students toward mastery by tightly controlling the learning process”, Fine asks educators to “imagine classrooms and schools where students were not only doing rigorous work but also being pleasurably engaged.”22 This plea for responsiveness to student interests is not new. Writing in 2009, educational theorist Walter Doyle called for “situated practice” as the basis for devising any curriculum. For Doyle, student interest is the generative center of a successful classroom and the teacher seeks it assiduously; he or she should “recruit, invite, persuade or convince the students” to take part in the learning process.23 The other half of the educational scene is the student, whose psychological disposition to learn or not is determined not only by the teacher’s behavior but by a curriculum which offers some promise of personal fulfillment. Educational psychologist Carol Dwek’s research into student-centered pedagogy suggests a further benefit for translating a Shakespeare play into contemporaneous structures of student experience. Students who believe that their “intelligence is a malleable quality”, Dwek writes, are eager to “take advantage of the skill-improvement opportunities that come their way.”24 Finally, there is Pierre Bourdieu’s historically resonant critique of teacher-centered education. Education is most frequently a form of violence, Bourdieu argued, because an arbitrary subject is imposed by an arbitrary force.25 The solution to curricular imposition of Shakespeare as classroom subject would be an innovative curriculum that provides identifiable social problems in the here and now and stimulates students’ heuristic and deliberative powers.

30 Most Shakespeareans are unfamiliar with a curriculum that gives priority to life skills learning. As constituted by twentieth-century hermeneutics and the professionalization of literary scholarship, Shakespeare studies bear the markings of its origin: expert knowledge, heuristic protocols applied to literary texts, archival research. The entity known as Shakespeare takes one form in the academic institutions where he is studied under the aegis of scholarship. By contrast, the popular dramatist excited his audiences with scenes of deliberation, decision-making, and prognostic assessment, the intellectual equivalent of what philosophy terms embodied cognition. The pracademic approach described in this essay does not do away with the Shakespearean text. According to individual preference, the teacher transfers some or many scenes of deliberation from the print confines of the original text to the classroom’s transhistorical encounter with these issues in the here and now. The three life skills discussed here − financial competence as the learning of a specialized language, sexual behavior guided by critical self-awareness, conversational effectiveness explored in trial and error exercises − all activate in the classroom’s present the prudential reasoning that Shakespeare activated historically in the

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spectacle of royal youth finding their way toward adulthood. Where traditional pedagogy makes the ungainly request that young people read an arcane, Armado-like language from the 1590s, pracademic Shakespeare selects issues for re-embodiment and renegotiation in the present, thereby engaging young learners’ interest and commitment. Pracademic Shakespeare may be the path to a new epoch in humanist education.

NOTES

1. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, John Arthos, ed., New York, Penguin Books, 1965. Future references are to this edition. 2. A. M. Sidorkin, “In the Event of Learning: Alienation and Participative Thinking in Education”, Educational Theory 54.3, 2004, 251-262, p. 263. 3. The standard study of Shakespeare’s school-sponsored reading finds that elite Latin authors such as Virgil and Cicero formed the core of reading and translation exercises. See T.W. Baldwin, Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vol., Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1944. 4. Thomas Picketty, Capital in the 21st Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2014. 5. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 3.3, trans. W.D. Ross. Available online at http://classics.mit.edu/ Aristotle/nicomachaen.html. Accessed 15 November 2015. 6. Robert A. Wilson, and Lucia Foglia, “Embodied Cognition”, The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 2001: http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/embodied-cognition. Accessed 30 November 2015. Another study of embodied cognition that introduces this emerging field is Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain Body and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2012. 7. Esther Thelen, “Time-scale dynamics in the development of an embodied cognition”, in Mind In Motion, ed. R. Port and T. van Gelder, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1987, p. 69-100. 8. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in language usage, Cambridge MA, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 103. 9. Katherine R. Larson, “Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory”, English Literary Renaissance 40, Spring 2010, 165-190, p. 167. For an alternative to the critical premise that conversation was the social preserve of the Tudor official class, see Daniel Bender, “Native Pastoral in the English Renaissance: The 1549 Petition and Kett’s Rebellion” in Conversational Exchanges in Early Modern England, ed. Kristen Abbott Bennett, London, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015, p. 12-30. 10. www.cgsnet.org/project-summary-university-south-florida. Accessed 05 March 2016. 11. Alan Collinge, The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in US History and How We Can Fight Back, Beacon Press, 2009, p. 5. A simple guide written in the self-help genre and useful to the pracademic classroom is Take Control of Your Future: A Guide to Managing Your Student Debt: www.equaljusticeworks.org/ed-debt/ebook. Accessed 25 February 2015. 12. http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/06/the-us-governments-predatory-lending- program-000094. Accessed 30 November 2015. The same report cites the caution of a consumer- oriented banker speaking on behalf of college students: “It’s sinister to see the government throw money at people with no clue if they can pay it back”.

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13. J.P. Hunter & M. Csikszentmihalyi, “The positive psychology of interested adolescents,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 72.1, 2003, 27-35, p. 28. Of the early modern period’s understanding of adolescent learning aptitudes the authors note: “The nasty and brutish existence of most youth left little thought to notions of ‘optimal development’ or even ‘development’ for that matter. For these people, survival was the watchword” (p. 27). 14. Ever since C.L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959, scholars attribute “festive” qualities to this comedy by restricting the dramatis personae to the royals. Jaquenetta, Costard, Moth, and the plebeians Tom and Joan are clearly not included in Barber’s anthropologically-encoded reading of joyous societal restoration. For a recent reading that continues the festive thesis by limiting analysis to the royals, see Delphine Lemonnier- Texier, “‘To teach a teacher ill beseemeth me’ (II.i.107): The Dynamics of Teaching and Learning in Love’s Labour’s Lost”, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [Online], 32 | 2015, http://shakespeare.revues.org/2981. Accessed 30 November 2015. 15. http://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/about/index.htm. Accessed 1 December 2015. 16. An exhilarating exception to the marginalization of actual (transhistorical) social crises in Shakespeare studies is Dorothea Kehler’s “Jaquenetta’s Baby’s Father: Recovering Paternity in Love’s Labour’s Lost”, in Love’s Labour’s Lost: Critical Essays, ed. Felicia Hardison Londre, London, Routledge, 2001, p. 305-312. In one sentence, Kehler describes the pracademic challenge of unplanned pregnancy and the scholarly community’s nervous circumvention of this real life issue: “Disturbing even now, judging from its total absence from the criticism, is the possibility that Jaquenetta herself does not know who the father is – a reminder that paternity may not be recoverable” (p. 311). 17. Susheela Singh, Jacqueline E. Darroch, Jennifer J. Frost, “Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Adolescent Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Behaviour: The Case of Five Developed Countries”, Family Planning Perspectives 33.5, 2005, 251-258, p. 255. 18. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination, New York, Pantheon Books, 1988, p.26. 19. The editor of the Oxford edition glosses “dey-woman” as a domestic servant whose presence on royal premises had to be approved, thus ensuring her lack of employment mobility. See Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. G.R. Hibbard, Oxford, Clarendon Press, p. 27. 20. Barbara Rogoff, Apprenticeship in Thinking, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 8. 21. “An Interview with Alexa Huang”: http://theshakespearestandard.com/blotted-line- interview-alexa-huang. Accessed 15 February 2016. 22. Sarah M. Fine, “‘a slow revolution’: Toward A Theory of Intellectual Playfulness in High School Classrooms”, Harvard Educational Review 84.1, 2014, 1-23, p. 22. 23. Walter Doyle, “Situated Practice: A Reflection on Person-Centered Classroom Management”, Theory Into Practice 48.2, Spring 2009, 156-159, p. 159. The editor’s introduction to this issue adds that a “person-centered” classroom “includes rigorous expectations” but also “pointed efforts to formulate a deeper connection between students and academic content.” Joan T.W. Walker, “This Issue: A Person-Centered Approach to Classroom Management,” Theory into Practice 48.2, Spring 2009, 95-98, p. 95. 24. Carol Dwek, Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development, Philadelphia, PA, Psychology Press, 2000, p. 26. 25. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society, California, Sage Publications, 1990.

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ABSTRACTS

The remoteness of early modern literary language represents a crisis in the educational status of Shakespeare; the crisis calls for innovation. How can teachers present the Shakespearean text, especially an allegedly “festive” comedy, in ways that engage the attention of contemporary students? This essay proposes one such reconnection. Adolescence is said to be a period of intellectual emergence into adulthood because decision making is immature and underdeveloped. For this reason, many college students are still supervised by adults or surrogate adults, such as college teachers. The goal of helping college students to be more independent, capable and in control of their own environment is warmly recognized by child development experts. Shakespeare studies, however, stand aloof from this developmental commitment, imagining that students enjoy reading historically remote texts even if this postpones attention to immediate concerns such as financial competence, emergent sexuality, and social skills that underlie personal and professional success. The life skills examined in this paper are not randomly chosen. The adolescent characters of Love’s Labour’s Lost are explicitly identified as novices in financial transactions, safe sexual relations, and conversational effectiveness. These three life skill areas are the subject of a proposed new curriculum which combines traditional interpretive practices with learning centered on practical competencies that contemporary high school and college students desire to acquire.

La langue littéraire des textes de la première modernité est si éloignée que le statut de Shakespeare dans l’enseignement est en crise, et cette crise doit inciter à innover. Comment les enseignants peuvent-ils présenter le texte shakespearien, en particulier celui d’une comédie décrite comme « festive », de façon à attirer les étudiants de nos jours ? Cet article suggère quelques pistes. On considère l’adolescence comme une période de développement intellectuel préparant à l’âge adulte, période pendant laquelle la capacité de prise de décision est incomplète. C’est pourquoi les étudiants à l’université sont placés sous la supervision d’adultes : leurs professeurs, par exemple. Les experts en développement reconnaissent la nécessité d’aider les jeunes étudiants à gagner en indépendance et en maîtrise de leur environnement. Pourtant les études shakespeariennes n’ont pas suivi cette voie, partant du principe que les étudiants prennent plaisir à lire des textes anciens, même si ces lectures détournent leur attention de problèmes plus immédiats, tels la gestion de l’argent, l’émergence d’une sexualité et les compétences interpersonnelles qui sous-tendent la réussite personnelle et professionnelle. Les personnages adolescents de Peines d’amour perdues sont clairement désignés comme des novices en matière de transactions financières, de relations sexuelles protégées et de talents pour la conversation. Ces trois domaines peuvent servir de base à un nouveau programme, qui combinerait les pratiques d’interprétation traditionnelles à un apprentissage centré sur les compétences pratiques recherchées par les lycéens et jeunes étudiants de nos jours.

INDEX

Mots-clés: compétences de vie, embodiment, Peines d’amour perdues, programmes scolaires, sciences humaines Keywords: curriculum development, embodied cognition, humanities, life skills, Love’s Labour’s Lost

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AUTHOR

DANIEL BENDER Pace University USA

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“A Classic for the Elders”: Marketing Charles and Mary Lamb in the Nineteenth Century

Kate Harvey

1 Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear (1807) has been much discussed in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarship, which has addressed for example their relationship with children’s literature in the Romantic period,1 their fidelity to Shakespeare’s plays and their place in the wider context of adaptations of Shakespeare.2 Critics such as Felicity James and others have also perceived in the Lambs a “desire to control and direct the reading of Shakespeare”3 and discussed the extent to which the Tales subvert or reinforce contemporary gender and racial stereotypes. 4 In this essay, rather than discussing the content of the Tales, I focus on their place in the emerging canon of “children’s Shakespeare” in the century following their initial publication. This essay attempts to track the ways in which the projected audience for the Tales evolved over the course of the nineteenth century through successive repackaging and republication. It also examines how this implied audience is expected to read the Tales in relation to Shakespeare’s plays and discusses the implications of the Lambs’ status for current children’s Shakespeares. Perry Nodelman has observed: The actual purchasers of children’s books are and always have been, overwhelmingly, not children but parents, teachers, librarians: adults. That this is the case seems part of the same cultural phenomenon that leads adults to write and publish the books to begin with—the conviction that children need things done for them by adults. In terms of success in production, what children actually want to read or do end up reading is of less significance than what adult teachers, librarians, and parents will be willing to purchase for them to read. [...] Its producers must make judgments about what to produce based not on what they believe will appeal to children but rather on what they believe adult consumers believe they know will appeal to children (or perhaps, what should appeal to them, or what they need to be taught).5

2 As Nodelman observes, adults, and not children, are the primary target for children’s book marketing. In the case of adaptations of canonical authors for children, especially

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Shakespeare, the editions are usually promoted to adult purchasers in terms of both aspiration and nostalgia. By aspiration I mean the implication that knowledge of Shakespeare’s plots and characters will grant children access to certain forms of cultural capital; by nostalgia I mean they claim to replicate for a new generation the experience of “discovering” Shakespeare’s genius. Indeed, Stanley Wells refers to Tales from Shakespeare as “a classic,” rather than “a children’s classic” because it is clear that the Tales (like Alice) is both read by adults and chosen by adults as a book suitable for children, not necessarily by children as a book that they are anxious to read for themselves. Indeed, its very title—unlike, say, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Five on a Treasure Island—requires knowledge, or information, along with cultural aspirations.6 Whether adaptations are promoted primarily as a means to confer cultural literacy upon children or as a tool which will enable them to develop a genuine love for Shakespeare, the paratextual material that accompanies the adaptations (introductions, cover material, testimonials, etc.) is almost always addressed to adults rather than children, and almost always in a context that is outside traditional education.

3 When Charles and Mary Lamb wrote Tales from Shakespeare in 1807, they had a very clear vision of who their target audience was and what this audience could hope to gain from reading abridged versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The opening lines of the preface plainly state, “The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare.”7 The demographics of this projected young readership are refined later in the preface: For young ladies too it has been my intention chiefly to write, because boys are generally permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently having the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, I must rather beg their kind assistance in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand.8 The Lambs outline a clear progression in which young ladies first read the Lambs’ retold versions of the plays, with a more knowledgeable brother helping them “to get over the difficulties;” after this they might ask this brother to read aloud “some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken,” and this passage “will be much better relished and understood” if they are already familiar with the story from the Lambs’ version.9 Eventually, when the girls are old enough, the Tales can be safely replaced by “the true Plays of Shakespeare.”10

4 While the 1807 preface alludes to the particular use that “young ladies” will have for their stories, the second edition, published in 1809, was explicitly targeted at adolescent girls. Most likely an attempt to attract new readers after the success of the first edition, the 1809 edition opens with a publisher’s “Advertisement” that recommends the Tales not only as stories for “mere children,” but also as “an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood.”11 The “Advertisement” not only targets girls specifically; it is also a clear early example of an adaptation of Shakespeare for children being advertised to adults buying gifts for young people, rather than the young people themselves. This is of course typical for juvenile literature at this time, but nevertheless the Lambs do employ

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direct address to an implied child reader in their 1807 preface. The preface is reproduced in the 1809 edition, but the “Advertisement” that precedes it is explicitly directed at adults looking for gift ideas. Furthermore, later editors of the Tales, in an attempt to recognise Mary Lamb’s contribution, regularly emend the pronouns in the preface from the first person singular to third person plural and from direct address to the more neutral passive voice. For example, the last paragraph of the preface begins, “What these Tales have been to you in childhood, that and much more it is my wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to you in older years.”12 In the 1995 Penguin edition of the Tales, this becomes, “What these Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers’ wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years.”13 The effect again is an implied address to the adult caretakers of these “young readers,” rather than to the readers themselves.

5 Prefatory material that addresses adults rather than children is a notable feature of several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions of the Tales. In a special “Artist’s Preface” to a 1918 edition of the Tales, illustrator Louis Rhead writes, “I know a dear lady who has for many years made it almost a duty at the holiday season to procure one or more copies of ‘Lamb’s Tales’ for presentation to some young reader among her numerous relatives and friends,”14 again a clear indication of the intended purchasers of the volume. Expensive gift editions were produced, sometimes with new illustrations specially commissioned for the purpose, which was fairly uncommon for this period, most famously those by Arthur Rackham in 1908. They also featured notes and introductions by prominent men of letters, including Charles Lamb biographer Alfred Ainger (1875), folklorist Andrew Lang (1899), and Shakespearean F.J. Furnivall (1901). These last two editions (Lang’s and Furnivall’s) are also noteworthy for treating the Tales not only as a gateway to “the true Plays of Shakespeare,” but also as a literary “classic” in and of itself. Unlike other adaptations of Shakespeare from this period, the paratextual material in these editions of the Tales treats the Lambs, and not Shakespeare, as the primary author, providing biographical and contextual information on them alongside or instead of information about Shakespeare. Lang’s edition is notable because he is among the first editors of the Tales to approach the text with anything resembling literary criticism: in his introduction he comments on Lamb’s innovations in style and compares the Tales both to Charles Lamb’s essays on Shakespeare and to contemporary children’s literature. His introduction is addressed not only to adults who might purchase the book for a child, but also to those interested in the Tales as a piece of literary history. He claims, “To whatever extent children of to- day, an incalculable generation, may take pleasure in Lamb’s Tales, they remain a classic for the elders,”15 suggesting that a dual audience is envisioned for this edition. Lang even ventures the opinion that “children at the age of innocence are best introduced to Shakspeare by Shakspeare himself,”16 rather than through an intermediary like the Lambs: It may be impertinent thus to criticise one’s author. But I am arguing, as before, in the interests of children, that while they should certainly have Lamb’s book placed in their hands, they should also have free access to Shakspeare himself. This I assert with the more confidence, as I doubt not that Lamb himself would have abounded in the same opinion.17 Lang offers Tales from Shakespeare as a refreshing antidote to what he sees as the “pedantries” of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship,18 joining the ranks of the

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numerous authors who promote their adaptations as an alternative to the less accessible Shakespeare children may have encountered in the classroom.

6 In the wake of the late nineteenth century British educational reforms, under which Shakespeare enjoyed pride of place on the recommended English curriculum, several new editions of the Lambs’ Tales were promoted as study guides or classroom aides. Furnivall’s is perhaps the most ambitious of these editions; Furnivall himself was of course a prolific editor of Shakespeare’s plays. His edition of the Lambs therefore strongly resembles his editions of Shakespeare, complete with introductions, footnotes, and a biography of Shakespeare. He provides an extensive introduction to each of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies, including those not adapted by the Lambs, as well as historical and biographical details for his young scholars on both Shakespeare and the Lambs.19 He excludes the English history plays, but summarizes the plots of those comedies and tragedies not adapted by the Lambs. In line with contemporary scholarship, he also makes it clear which passages were not considered to have been written by Shakespeare, for example in Timon of Athens and Pericles.20 Here and elsewhere Furnivall makes a point of basing his edition on the most recent scholarship, indicating that the edition is intended to be used as a study guide for young students of Shakespeare. The tales are also rearranged, first according to genre, and then in conjectural order of composition in order to show “the growth of Shakspere’s mind, and the change in the subjects which interested him and in the plots on which he founded his plays.”21 The new arrangement clearly favours schoolchildren preparing for exams, as Edward Dowden’s identification of the four “periods” of Shakespeare’s writing career was part of the standard school curriculum at the time.22 Furnivall’s edition therefore stands in direct contrast to the stated aims of the Lambs in 1807, who assumed that their young readers would appreciate the plays primarily on the level of plot and character.

7 There is little doubt that Furnivall’s edition capitalizes on both the reputation of the Lambs and the growing market for school editions of Shakespeare. However, like Lang Furnivall suggests that children are better off reading Shakespeare’s plays themselves, rather than through an intermediary like Mary or Charles Lamb, particularly when it comes to the comedies: The odd thing is, that two such humourful folk as Mary and Charles Lamb were, two who so enjoyed Shakspere’s fun, made up their minds to keep all that fun (or almost all) out of his plays when they told the stories of them to boys and girls who so like fun too. […] I can’t help thinking that most boys would like the fun put into the Tales, and the stories cut shorter; but they can get it all in the plays themselves, so there’s no harm done.23 This assertion, addressed to adults rather than children and loaded as it is with sweeping generalisations about children’s tastes, brings up several questions, which remain unanswered. For example, we might ask, if the reader can “get it all in the plays themselves,” what purpose does Furnivall’s edition in fact serve? Unlike Lang, who treats the Lambs as a “classic” and an important part of literary history, Furnivall’s edition purports to be an introduction to Shakespeare for the young student. However, Furnivall never explains why he has produced an edition of the Lambs rather than an edition of Shakespeare. This is especially bewildering given his determination to provide the reader with summaries of passages that the Lambs have omitted, as his assumption seems to be that an unabridged text is preferable. The reason for these contradictions within the text seems to lie in Furnivall’s confused sense of his target

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audience. Unlike most contemporary children’s Shakespeares, Furnivall’s introductory material does not address readership (or indeed young people), and the edition itself is somewhat self-contradictory in this respect. In his introduction to “Cymbeline,” he informs the reader that [t]he source of the historical legend in “Cymbeline” is Holinshed’s “Chronicles,” though he uses but little of it. The Iachimo story, with its artifice and intrigue, is, of course, Italian; it comes from Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” the ninth novel of the second day, the tale of Bernabo Lomellini of Genoa. The story is also in an old French romance and mystery-play, and it was afterwards in the English “Westward for Smelts” (1620), but there is no evidence that there was a translation existing earlier for Shakspere to use.24

8 When it comes to the Imogen plot, he writes that it may have come “from the Fairy-tale of Snow-white,”25 and then spends two pages summarising the story of Snow White in detail so that the reader may see the parallels between the two stories.26 This indicates that he is imagining a reader who is more familiar with Boccaccio’s Decameron than with “Snow White,” and yet who is not ready to read Shakespeare’s plays in full. This is symptomatic of the contradictions inherent in an edition like Furnivall’s, in other words an annotated edition of an adaptation of a canonical text for children, promoted and marketed as a study guide for students studying the adapted text. Its underlying assumption is that retellings of Shakespeare’s plays in simple narrative prose with an emphasis on the plot and characters rather than the language will assist young students struggling with the plays themselves. On the other hand, the extent of Furnivall’s annotations and the assumptions he makes about his reader’s existing knowledge suggests that the edition is intended for more advanced students of Shakespeare.

9 Tales from Shakespeare is not only a collection of adaptations of a canonical author; over the last 200+ years it has become a canonical text in its own right. Since its publication in 1807 the names of Charles and Mary Lamb have increasingly been held up alongside that of Shakespeare as markers of cultural legitimacy. Or, more accurately, first Charles’s and later Mary’s name have been used in this way, since Mary’s name did not appear on a title page to the Tales until 1875 even though she wrote fourteen of the twenty Tales.27 This may have been, as suggested by F.J. Furnivall in the introduction to his 1901 edition of the Lambs, “due to the publisher’s belief that Charles Lamb’s name would sell more copies than Mary’s”,28 although the reading public’s knowledge of Mary’s recent matricide was probably also a factor. However, in the century that followed the first publication of Tales from Shakespeare, both Charles’s and Mary’s names became by-words for children’s Shakespeare, to the extent that many subsequent adapters of Shakespeare for young people have been compelled both to acknowledge a debt to them and to justify their own existence by explaining how their adaptation is different. In Rhead’s “Artist’s Preface,” cited above, Rhead observes: Since Lamb wrote these tales from the plays of Shakespeare, as he says—“especially for the young mind”—many efforts have been made by others, only to invariably produce a result inferior in every way, and so, quickly vanish from the reading world while these tales have grown in favor and esteem.29

10 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Harrison S. Morris (1894), Arthur Quiller-Couch (1910), and Thomas Carter (1912) each published collections of retellings of the plays not adapted by the Lambs. Morris adapts all of the remaining plays, published with the Lambs’ Tales over four volumes, while Quiller-Couch and Carter restrict themselves to the history plays. Each of these authors defers to the Lambs in

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the introduction to his edition, observing that no children’s edition could hope to equal theirs and insisting that he is attempting to supplement rather than supersede the Tales. Morris is particularly self-deprecating: While of a necessity these sixteen additional plays, here included, must come into comparison with the inimitable tales of Elia and his gifted sister, yet it has been a source of disquietude for the writer that his purpose may be misapprehended, that he may be thought to invite such a contrast, or that he deems his imperfect continuation as in any wise worthy of a place beside the versions made by the Lambs.30 Likewise, both Carter and Quiller-Couch acknowledge the pre-eminence of the Lambs, apologize lest they be seen as trying to imitate or surpass them, and insist that they are merely filling in the gaps by retelling those plays which the Lambs did not. Carter, after acknowledging the Tales’ status as a “classic”, reminds the reader that the histories “were not included in the Tales, hence there is opportunity for an endeavour to provide a prose version of this attractive section of the great plays.”31 Quiller-Couch similarly asserts, “although I have taken a title very like theirs [the Lambs’], my attempt has not been to round off or tag a conclusion to their inimitable work.”32

11 Other adapters have attempted to make a case for themselves by pointing out the flaws in the Tales or by arguing that they are no longer relevant. E. Nesbit, perhaps the second most well-known adapter of Shakespeare for children after the Lambs, acknowledges the Lambs’ pre-eminence but implies that their language needs to be updated for her late Victorian readers. She writes, “Even with the recollection of Lamb’s tales to help me I found it hard to tell the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in words that these little ones could understand.”33 Sidney Lee, in his introduction to the 1911 edition of Mary Macleod’s Shakespeare Story-book expresses even more explicitly what he sees as the deficiencies of the Lambs’ edition: Frequently in Mary Lamb’s work pertinent intricacies of plot are blurred by a silent omission of details, knowledge of which is essential to a complete understanding of the Shakespearean theme. […] Elsewhere in the comedies, and even in Charles Lamb’s own work on the tragedies, Shakespeare’s text is at times misinterpreted. Consequently, however fascinating in themselves the narratives of the Lambs may prove to young readers, Lamb’s Tales offer them a very fragmentary knowledge of the scope of Shakespeare’s plots.34

12 Nearly 100 years later Marcia Williams, discussing her comic-style picturebooks Mr William Shakespeare’s Tales and Bravo Mr William Shakespeare! claims the Tales “did more to put me off Shakespeare as a child than anything else.”35 She praises the Lambs as a refreshing antidote to “the moral norms of the time” but calls for their removal from modern bookshelves: But why is it still being sold today? Is it what I should have been given to read in the mid-twentieth century? Should we expect a book, published in 1807, that is a retelling, not an original work of literature, still to talk to the twentieth-century child? […] Does there not come a time when books such as the Lambs’ Tales should take their place in academic libraries and make way for new images of Shakespeare that speak directly to the modern child?36 Williams echoes Nesbit in implying that the Lambs’ Tales, though a classic in its time, does not “speak” to the readers to whom her text is addressed. However, whether praising the Tales or highlighting their shortcomings, each of these authors nevertheless uses the names of Charles and Mary Lamb to lend legitimacy to their editions, by commending the Lambs’ intentions and aligning them with the adapter’s own. Morris states this explicitly:

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the aim with which the continuation has been made is the same which inspired the first project,—a wish to provide the means for readers, old and young, to gain a knowledge of Shakspeare while from lack of time or training they are not able to find their way through the “wild poetic garden” for themselves. But coupled with this was a desire to supplement the uncompleted work of Charles and Mary Lamb, not with tales the equal of their own in grace, wisdom, or critical penetration, but with such as at least may be accepted as a help to that part of Shakspeare, and no unimportant part it is, left untouched by the original authors [my emphasis].37

13 The Lambs’ names serve as status markers and signifiers of cultural value. They are now cited as the “original” authors, rather than Shakespeare, and alluding to their work, whether positively or negatively, suggests a noble lineage. Morris’s protestations also reveal what the other authors only hint at: that as far as children’s literature was concerned, by 1894 Tales from Shakespeare had supplanted Shakespeare’s plays as the “original” to which all later adaptations, appropriations, and reversions are inevitably compared. Indeed, Furnivall implies that while it had been acceptable for the Lambs to alter their source material to suit their purposes, altering their adaptation is unacceptable: “Where Mary Lamb has altered Shakspere in small points […] I have let the changes stand. The Lambs’ work has become a classic, and many folk will think any addition to it an impertinence.”38 The integrity of “the Lambs’ work” is here privileged above that of Shakespeare.

14 As noted above, the editions of Furnivall and Lang are significant because they treat Tales from Shakespeare as a work of literature to be read and studied in its own right, and not just as an aide to understanding Shakespeare. With children’s literature increasingly recognised as a legitimate academic discipline in the second half of the twentieth century, a new market has emerged for scholarly editions of the work, such as the 2003 Folio edition edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and the 2007 Penguin edition, edited by Marina Warner. The overwhelming majority of new editions still target adults purchasing books for young people, promising an antidote to the more “lowbrow” fare that is perceived to make up the majority of contemporary children’s literature; unlike their predecessors, these editions compete for the attention of the modern reader with Shakespeare adapted into comics, manga, computer games, flash animations, as well as high-profile films and theatrical productions aimed at young people, and with study aides like No Fear Shakespeare. These twenty-first-century editions of Tales from Shakespeare therefore rarely attempt to appeal directly to an implied child reader in their paratextual material. Instead, they target the older Shakespeare fan with illustrations of recognisable scenes from known illustrators and endorsements and prefaces from Shakespeare celebrities. There is also an emphasis on the Lambs’ literary status in addition to or in place of Shakespeare’s. The 2007 Penguin edition, for example, attempts to strike a balance between presenting Shakespeare and the Lambs as “classics”, describing Tales from Shakespeare as “a captivating work of Romantic storytelling as well as an original literary homage to the Bard.”39 The appeal of the Tales is here assumed to lie in their literary credentials rather than in their appeal to children, an indication that like their Victorian and Edwardian counterparts, new editions of Tales from Shakespeare are marketed as “a classic for the elders.”

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NOTES

1. Joseph Riehl, for example, has praised Charles Lamb for providing “an introduction to Shakespeare which would give his readers some taste of the purely literary delight which he had found in Shakespeare himself. He wished that his readers would join him in the freedom of literary experience, unfettered by those who would subordinate the delight of reading to logic or morality” (Joseph Riehl, Charles Lamb’s Children’s Literature, Salzburg, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1990, p. 72). In this respect Tales from Shakespear resembles other retellings of classic stories which appeared in Godwin’s Juvenile Library Series, such as Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) and Lady Mountcashell’s Stories of Old Daniel (1808), as well as Godwin’s own Bible Stories (1802) and Fables Ancient and Modern (1805). 2. See for example Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present, London, Vintage, 1989; Janet Bottoms, “Of Tales and Tempests”, Children’s Literature in Education 27.2, 1996, 73-86 and “‘To Read Aright’: Representations of Shakespeare for Children”, Children’s Literature 32, 2004, 1-14; Howard Marchitello, “Descending Shakespeare: Toward a Theory of Adaptation for Children”, in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 180-189. 3. Felicity James, “‘Wild Tales’ from Shakespeare: Readings of Charles and Mary Lamb”, Shakespeare 2.2, 2006, 152-167, p. 153. 4. See for example Jean I. Marsden, “Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare”, Children’s Literature 17, 1989, 47-63; Susan J. Wolfson, “Explaining to her Sisters: Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare”, in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1990, 16-40; Darlene Ciraulo, “Fairy Magic and the Female Imagination: Mary Lamb’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Philological Quarterly 78.4, 1999, 439-453; James Andreas, “Canning the Classic: Race and Ethnicity in the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare”, in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller, op. cit., p. 98-106; Erica Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital, London, Routledge, 2009. 5. Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, p. 4-5. 6. Stanley Wells, “Tales from Shakespeare,” in British Academy Shakespeare Lectures: 1980-89, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, 185-212, p. 191. 7. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare, coll. Penguin Classics, London, Penguin, 2007, p. 3. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., p. 5. 11. Anon., “Advertisement”, in Charles [and Mary] Lamb, Tales from Shakespear, 2nd ed., London, [T. Hodgkins], 1809, p. iii. 12. Lamb, Tales, 2007, op. cit., p. 5. This edition retains the 1809 edition’s pronouns and syntax. 13. Lamb, Tales, 1995, op. cit., p. 7. 14. Louis Rhead, “Artist’s Preface”, in Charles [and Mary] Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare, London, Harper Brothers, 1918. 15. Andrew Lang, “Introduction”, in Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakspeare, intr. Andrew Lang, illus. Robert Anning Bell, London, S. T. Freemantle, 1899, vii-xxiv, p. xxi. 16. Idem, p. ix. 17. Ibid., p. xxiii. 18. Ibid., p. xiii.

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19. For example, in addition to describing the early life and later careers of the siblings, Furnivall reprints in full the account in the Morning Chronicle of “the inquest on old Mrs. Lamb” in September 1796 following Mary’s infamous attack on her mother with a pair of sewing shears (F. J. Furnivall, “General Introduction”, in Mary and Charles Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare, ed. F. J. Furnivall, illus. Harold Copping, London, Raphael Tuck & Sons, 1901, vol. 1, vii-xiii, p. viin-viiin). 20. Furnivall omits Titus Andronicus, claiming that it was “only retouched by Shakspere” and that even if he had written it, it “is a story too repulsive to be told in a book for boys and girls” (Ibid., vol. 1, p. xiin). 21. Ibid., vol. 1, p. xi-xii. 22. Edward Dowden, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, London, Henry S. King, 1875. The English Association, while discouraging teaching from highly annotated editions such as Furnivall’s, also states that the teacher of Shakespeare “must map out ‘periods’” in Shakespeare’s career (English Association, The Teaching of Shakespeare in Schools, coll. English Association Pamphlets, vol. 7, London, English Association, 1908, p. 1). 23. Furnivall, op. cit., vol. 1, p. xi. 24. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 236-237. 25. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 237. 26. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 237-238. 27. In a letter to Wordsworth dated 29 January 1807, Charles Lamb confirms that he is responsible for the adaptations of King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello, while Mary adapted the remaining fourteen Tales and wrote most of the preface (The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1976, vol. 2, p. 256). 28. Furnivall, vol. 1, p. ix. By 1901, when Furnivall’s edition was published, Mary Lamb’s recognised status as a children’s author and the higher proportion of her contribution to the Tales meant that her name was now listed first on the title page. 29. Rhead, “Artist’s Preface”, op. cit. 30. Harrison S. Morris, “Preface”, in Charles and Mary Lamb and Harrison S. Morris, Tales from Shakespeare: With a Continuation by Harrison S. Morris, London, J. M. Dent & Co., [1894], vol. 1, 3-5, p. 4. 31. Thomas Carter, “Preface”, in Shakespeare’s Stories of the English Kings, illus. Gertrude Demain Hammond, London, G. G. Harrap & Co., 1912, v-vi, p. v. In spite of these claims, Carter had published just two years previously an edition of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies retold for children, which featured several of the same plays as the Lambs’ Tales (Thomas Carter, Stories from Shakespeare Retold, illus. Gertrude Demain Hammond, London, G. G. Harrap & Co., 1910). 32. Arthur Quiller-Couch, “Preface”, in Historical Tales from Shakespeare, 2nd ed., London, Edward Arnold, 1910, iii-vi, p. iii. 33. E. Nesbit, “Introduction”, in The Children’s Shakespeare, illus. Frances Brundage et al, ed. Edric Vredenburg, 2nd ed., London, Raphael Tuck & Sons, [1897], 5-6, p. 6. 34. Sidney Lee, “Introduction”, in Mary Macleod, The Shakespeare Story-book, 4th ed., London, Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1911, v-xi, pp. vii-viii. 35. Marcia Williams, “Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare!”, in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller, London, Routledge, 2003, 29-38, p. 31. 36. Ibid., p. 30-31. Also see Marcia Williams’s article in this volume (“You Don’t Mess With the Great Bard!”). 37. Morris, op. cit., p. 4. 38. Furnivall, op. cit., vol. 1, p. xiii. 39. Lamb, Tales, 2007, op. cit., back cover.

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ABSTRACTS

Mary and Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear (1807) is generally taken as the starting point for the subgenre of “children’s Shakespeare,” in that it is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays aimed at young children which promises to entertain as well as to educate its young readers. The Tales have never been out of print since 1807 and they continue to exert an influence over other authors who adapt Shakespeare for children, both in their choice of plays to adapt and in their translation of the plays from drama to prose. This essay considers the continuing legacy of the Lambs in the subgenre of children’s Shakespeare by examining the ways in which the Tales were repackaged and reissued for new generations of children in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. To this end, rather than focusing on the content of the Tales themselves, this essay instead considers the paratextual elements of later editions. By examining what has been added by successive publishers in the form of prefatory material, epilogues, footnotes, and cover artwork, this essay assesses how the marketing of Shakespeare to young people has changed during this period: what strategies have authors and publishers used to sell these books, and who is their target audience? How do these authors and publishers envision the relationship between the Lambs’ Tales and Shakespeare’s plays? Finally, what values are evident in these continued attempts to present Shakespeare to young people through Tales from Shakespeare?

On considère généralement Tales from Shakespear (1807) de Charles et Mary Lamb comme le point d’origine du sous-genre littéraire « Shakespeare pour enfants », dans la mesure où il s’agit d’une adaptation des pièces de Shakespeare à destination d’enfants qui promet de divertir ses jeunes lecteurs tout en les instruisant. Ces Tales sont constamment rééditées depuis 1807 et elles continuent d’influencer d’autres auteurs qui adaptent Shakespeare pour un jeune public, à la fois dans la sélection des pièces et dans la traduction en prose du texte théâtral. Cet essai s’intéresse à l’héritage perpétué des Lamb dans le domaine de « Shakespeare pour enfants » en étudiant les éditions remaniées des Tales à destination de nouvelles générations d’enfants à l’époque victorienne et édouardienne. Plutôt que de se concentrer sur le contenu des Tales, on envisagera les éléments paratextuels ajoutés par les différents éditeurs des éditions plus tardives (préfaces, épilogues, notes et images de couverture) afin d’évaluer les changements dans la façon dont Shakespeare était présenté aux enfants pendant cette période : quelles stratégies de vente sont mises en œuvre par les auteurs et les éditeurs, et qui est leur public cible ? Comment conçoivent- ils la relation entre les Tales des Lamb et les pièces de Shakespeare ? Quels valeurs transparaissent dans ces entreprises renouvelées de faire découvrir Shakespeare à un jeune public par l’intermédiaire des Tales from Shakespeare ?

INDEX

Mots-clés: adaptation, compétence culturelle, Furnivall F.J., Lamb Charles, Lamb Mary, Lang Andrew, littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse, Shakespeare pour enfants Keywords: adaptation, children’s literature, children’s Shakespeare, cultural literacy, Furnivall F.J., Lamb Charles, Lamb Mary, Lang Andrew

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AUTHOR

KATE HARVEY National University of Ireland, Galway

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Shakespeare dans Candy : mais est- ce vraiment pour les enfants ?

Sarah Hatchuel et Ronan Ludot-Vlasak

1 Candy, manga japonais en neuf volumes de Yumiko Igarashi (dessinatrice) et Kyoko Mizuki (scénariste), a été adapté en une série télévisée d’animation (ou anime) pour enfants comprenant 115 épisodes de 26 minutes diffusés entre 1976 et 1979 (à partir de septembre 1978 en France)1. Son intrigue suit les épreuves d’une jeune fille orpheline américaine de l’enfance à l’âge adulte. À la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale, Candy est adoptée par une famille de la grande bourgeoisie, stricte et souvent cruelle. Lorsqu’Anthony, son premier amour, meurt des suites d’un accident de cheval, elle est envoyée en pension dans un sévère collège londonien. Elle y tombe sous le charme du ténébreux Terrence (Terry) Grandchester, fils illégitime d’un duc anglais et d’une roturière américaine, grande actrice à Broadway. Pour que Candy ne soit pas renvoyée du collège, Terry repart en Amérique où il tente sa chance comme acteur shakespearien.

2 Alors que les adaptations de Shakespeare à l’écran sont en jachère à cette période et que les Animated Tales2 n’existent pas encore, Candy, anime qui a été d’abord diffusé au Japon puis exporté dans de très nombreux pays (France, Espagne, Italie, Suisse, Grèce, Turquie, mais aussi Suède, Pologne, Yougoslavie, Maroc, Tunisie, Algérie, Chine et dans toute l’Amérique Latine), a fait découvrir Shakespeare à toute une génération d’enfants nés dans les années 1970 en leur donnant l’occasion d’assister à des scènes (certes fragmentées et parfois traduites approximativement) tirées de Macbeth, du Roi Lear et de Roméo et Juliette. Si l’on suit à la lettre le générique français du feuilleton, qui nous rappelle que le monde de l’héroïne est peuplé de « méchants » et de « gentils3 », on serait tenté de voir dans les usages shakespeariens qui s’y manifestent de simples échos mièvres dépourvus de toute ambivalence. Or bien que l’anime n’échappe pas aux clichés et aux facilités mélodramatiques, il est étonnant de voir une fiction non anglophone pour la jeunesse tenir un discours aussi complexe sur les transactions anglo- américaines de Shakespeare. Dans un contexte géopolitique où le Japon est sous influence américaine dans les années 1970, le capital culturel4 de Shakespeare et la figure canonique qu’il représente sont sources d’ambivalences et d’hybridations aussi

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bien idéologiques que génériques ou esthétiques. Il s’agira ainsi d’explorer les lignes de faille d’un feuilleton qui construit une tension entre un Shakespeare « authentiquement » britannique5 et un Shakespeare américain populaire6, met au jour les mécanismes mêmes de la production théâtrale et interroge sa portée au sein de la société.

3 L’intrigue de Candy repose d’emblée sur un jeu de va-et-vient transatlantiques entre les États-Unis et le Royaume-Uni. L’héroïne grandit près du lac Michigan (voir illustration 1) où l’atmosphère bucolique rappelle la vision pastorale d’un Thomas Jefferson qui prône le développement d’une nation agricole libérée des vices urbains et instaure une tradition culturelle solidement ancrée dans l’imaginaire américain du long XIXe siècle7.

Illustration 1 : L’atmosphère bucolique américaine dans Candy, capture d’écran de l’épisode 34.

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4 Candy est par la suite envoyée dans un pensionnat anglais – le Collège Royal de Saint Paul. Après une année passée dans cet établissement des plus traditionnaliste, qui éduque des héritiers et héritières issus de lignées prestigieuses, elle fugue et retourne en Amérique. Les autres personnages qui accompagnent l’existence de l’héroïne – ses ennemis Daniel et Eliza Legrand, ses amis Archibald et Alistair André, ainsi qu’Annie, avec qui elle fut élevée dans l’orphelinat de Mademoiselle Pony – suivent les mêmes trajectoires en étudiant, eux aussi, à Londres avant de rentrer en Amérique lorsque la Première Guerre mondiale éclate. Tandis que les villes américaines sont dépeintes en termes de mouvement et d’énergie, telles un champ des possibles où tout individu est en mesure d’accomplir ce qu’il souhaite à force de volonté et d’effort, les premières images de Londres sont celles d’un monde minéral, vide et figé dont l’austérité est renforcée par les lignes droites du dessin et l’emploi de couleurs froides (voir illustration 2). Le collège de Saint Paul a tout d’une prison dont la façade est aussi sévère que ses couloirs sont lugubres (voir illustration 3). Cette immobilité est à l’image du poids des traditions – et surtout de l’hérédité – qui régit l’Angleterre telle qu’elle est dépeinte dans l’anime.

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Illustration 2 : Londres comme monde minéral dans Candy, captures d’écran de l’épisode 31.

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Illustration 3 : Le collège de Saint Paul comme prison, captures d’écran des épisodes 31 et 32.

Archive personnelle. TOEI Animation Co., Ltd. Tous droits réservés.

5 Dans ce contexte d’opposition entre l’Ancien et le Nouveau Monde, Shakespeare sert de pont entre les cultures mais cristallise aussi leurs différences. Le Nouveau Monde porte les traces de la culture dramatique élisabéthaine. Un premier clin d’œil est le nom des chevaux des Legrand, César et Cléopâtre. Les façades de Broadway sont, quant à elles, couvertes d’affiches faisant la publicité de productions shakespeariennes (voir illustration 4) ; la troupe que Terry rejoint à New York se nomme Strasford et son directeur est un certain Hattaway – noms qui renvoient respectivement à la ville natale de Shakespeare et à celui de son épouse. L’actrice qui doit jouer Juliette aux côtés de Terry s’appelle Suzanne Marlowe: si son prénom rappelle celui de la fille aînée de

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Shakespeare (Susanna), son patronyme évoque une carrière sur le point de s’interrompre aussi soudainement que celle du dramaturge. Cependant, même si ses racines britanniques sont rappelées, Shakespeare se trouve américanisé. Les représentations n’ont, en effet, jamais lieu en Angleterre : c’est à Chicago et à New York que Terry joue et triomphe.

Illustration 4 : Les façades shakespeariennes de Broadway, capture d’écran de l’épisode 97.

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6 Symboliquement, les spectateurs font la connaissance du futur acteur shakespearien, au milieu de l’Atlantique, à mi-chemin entre les deux cultures dont il incarne la rencontre et les tensions (voir illustration 5).

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Illustration 5 : La rencontre de Candy et Terry sur un paquebot transatlantique, capture d’écran de l’épisode 31.

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7 La filiation de Terrence est à l’image des hybridations transatlantiques et des accents mélodramatiques du feuilleton. Le jeune homme est le fruit des amours interdites entre une actrice américaine très populaire – Eléonore Baker – et un aristocrate anglais – le duc de Grandchester – qui avait préféré ne pas épouser une roturière indigne de son rang et avait emmené l’enfant en Angleterre pour le préparer à porter le titre. Terry a essayé de retrouver sa mère et lui a rendu visite à New York (c’est ce que l’on apprend en flashback dans l’épisode 38, « Le secret de Terry »), mais celle-ci ne l’accueille pas comme il l’aurait voulu. Son public ignore qu’elle a eu un fils naturel et elle entend protéger sa carrière. C’est au cours de son voyage de retour vers l’Angleterre que Terry croise le chemin de Candy pour la première fois.

8 S’il insulte volontiers l’Amérique en déclarant par exemple que « ses habitants sont tous des sauvages » (épisode 42), le jeune homme tourne finalement le dos à son héritage aristocratique et s’approprie les valeurs d’indépendance et de mobilité sociale célébrées en terre américaine : après avoir déclaré à son père qu’il ne « veu[t] pas [s]e laisser ligoter par ces règles d’un autre temps » (épisode 46) et qu’il entend désormais ne compter que sur lui-même (épisode 49), il part à la conquête des théâtres de Broadway. Shakespeare apparaît ainsi au carrefour d’une tension entre, d’une part, l’héritage du passé et la filiation aristocratique et, d’autre part, la liberté de choisir son destin et de s’affranchir des diktats sociaux.

9 Refusant désormais de porter le nom prestigieux de la lignée à laquelle il appartient, Terry s’inscrit dans celle d’un Crèvecœur, qui souligne dans un passage célèbre que devenir américain est une renaissance défaisant les identités passées – Crèvecœur décide d’ailleurs de changer de prénom une fois installé en Amérique8. Bien que Terry

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rompe tout lien avec la branche anglaise de sa famille et devienne un modèle d’indépendance, ce renoncement au patronyme fait long feu. C’est bien sous le nom de Terrence Grandchester qu’il fait ses premiers pas sur la scène américaine comme s’il ne pouvait pas renoncer complètement à sa britannicité. Son prénom évoque d’ailleurs Ellen Terry, actrice anglaise à l’origine d’une véritable lignée théâtrale (elle est la mère d’Edward Gordon Craig, la sœur de Fred Terry et la grand-tante de John Gielgud)9.

10 Dès son apparition dans le feuilleton, Terry est un personnage-histrion insaisissable, aux poses romantiques et torturées et aux multiples facettes, ce que le dessin souligne en le représentant souvent de manière kaléidoscopique (voir illustration 6). Il joue la comédie dans la vie (en faisant semblant de rire alors que Candy l’a vu pleurer ou en saluant ses interlocuteurs de manière théâtrale) et dénonce les traditions sociales et religieuses. La messe est ainsi, pour lui, une coutume hypocrite10. Adolescent rebelle, celui qui deviendra acteur lève ainsi le voile sur le théâtre qu’est la vie et parle de lui- même à la troisième personne, de façon distanciée, pour construire un personnage défiant les règles: « Terrence Grandchester, héritier du titre, fume comme un sapeur, boit comme un Irlandais, se bat comme un chiffonnier, et se moque des règlements comme d’une guigne. S’il n’a pas encore été honteusement chassé du collège, c’est grâce aux dons que son père fait à la Supérieure ».

Illustration 6 : L’esthétique kaléidoscopique pour représenter Terry l’histrion, capture d’écran de l’épisode 38.

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11 Malgré son goût prononcé pour la transgression, c’est dans le répertoire canonique shakespearien qu’il va pourtant s’illustrer, fusionnant alors traditions britannique et américaine. Les représentations de Shakespeare dans Candy sont en effet filtrées par un jeu d’hybridations avec différents films shakespeariens ainsi qu’avec des œuvres

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américaines de la culture populaire. Dans ce faisceau d’allusions, se trouvent mêlés la période élisabéthaine, le début du XXe siècle et les années 1970.

12 La production de Macbeth dans laquelle joue Terry présente une affiche qui reprend de manière saisissante les traits, la coiffure et la couronne du roi dans le film de Roman Polanski, sorti en 1971 (voir illustration 7)11. De même, l’affiche de Roméo et Juliette évoque les costumes et les poses de l’adaptation réalisée par Franco Zeffirelli en 1968 (voir illustration 8). Ces allusions cinématographiques viennent troubler la temporalité du feuilleton, qui a pour cadre les deux premières décennies du XXe siècle, et brouillent les lignes de partage entre cultures savante et populaire.

Illustration 7 : L’affiche de Macbeth dans Candy, capture d’écran de l’épisode 73, inspirée du film Macbeth de Roman Polanski (1971), personnages de Macbeth (John Finch) et Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis, de dos) (capture d’écran, DVD, 2002).

Archive personnelle (Candy). TOEI Animation Co., Ltd (Candy) / Columbia Distribution & Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (Macbeth). Tous droits réservés.

Illustration 8 : L’affiche de Roméo et Juliette dans Candy, capture d’écran de l’épisode 93, inspirée par le film Roméo et Juliette de Franco Zeffirelli (1968), personnages de Roméo (Leonard Whiting) et de Juliette (Olivia Hussey) (capture d’écran, DVD, 2003).

Archive personnelle (Candy). TOEI Animation Co., Ltd (Candy) / Paramount Pictures (Romeo and Juliet). Tous droits réservés.

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13 D’autres échos du septième art contribuent, quant à eux, aux effets mélodramatiques qui imprègnent l’ensemble de l’anime. La scène d’adieu entre Terrence et Candy fait écho au célèbre escalier de la demeure de Scarlett O’Hara dans Autant en emporte le vent (réalisé par Victor Fleming en 1939), qui avait connu une nouvelle sortie mondiale en 1967, quelques années seulement avant la conception de Candy12 (voir illustration 9). Il est déjà fait allusion à ce classique du cinéma hollywoodien quelques épisodes plus tôt dans un jeu de références qui, une fois encore, fait se croiser œuvre shakespearienne, mélodrame, cinéma et culture populaire des années 1970. Se sentant écrasé par la notoriété de sa mère, Terry contemple une affiche du nouveau spectacle dans lequel elle triomphe, The Way We Were (épisode 88). Non seulement l’arbre qui occupe la partie gauche de l’affiche est inspiré d’une des premières scènes d’Autant en emporte le vent où Scarlett et son père dialoguent sous un arbre du domaine au coucher du soleil, mais le titre de la pièce renvoie également à un drame sentimental des années 1970 (Nos plus belles années, en français) avec Barbra Streisand et Robert Redford (voir illustration 10).

Illustration 9 : La scène d’adieu, capture d’écran de l’épisode 99, inspirée du film Autant en emporte le vent (réal. Victor Fleming, 1939), Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) et Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) (capture d’écran, DVD, 2000).

Archive personnelle (Candy). TOEI Animation Co., Ltd (Candy) / Warner Bros. (Gone With the Wind). Tous droits réservés.

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Illustration 10 : Affiche du spectacle d’Eléonore Baker, capture d’écran de l’épisode 88, inspirée du film Autant en emporte le vent (réal. Victor Fleming, 1939, capture d’écran, DVD, 2000) et du film Nos plus belles années (réal. Sydney Pollack, 1973), jaquette de DVD.

Archive personnelle (Candy). TOEI Animation Co., Ltd (Candy) / Warner Bros. (Gone With the Wind) / Sony Pictures Entertainment (The Way We Were). Tous droits réservés.

14 Enfin, différents plans de Broadway mêlent des œuvres ouvertement américaines et des productions shakespeariennes. À l’épisode 91, l’affiche de Roméo et Juliette est précédée de celle d’un Western intitulé A Gunman No More. Blazing Western Action (voir illustration 11). Le titre fait directement allusion au volume A Gunman No More de la bande dessinée Rawhide Kid publiée par Marvel Comics en 1978 ; le sous-titre de cette série où super- héros et cow-boys se côtoient (Blazing Western Action As You Like It) associait d’ailleurs l’un des mythes américains les plus solidement ancrés dans l’imaginaire collectif – le grand Ouest – à l’une des comédies les plus célèbres de Shakespeare. On retrouve l’affiche du même spectacle à l’épisode 96, juste avant de découvrir celle de Roméo et Juliette, la devanture d’un restaurant américain venant cette fois-ci s’intercaler entre les deux. Ces différents plans témoignent des tensions que soulève la question d’une culture démocratique dans l’Amérique du long XIXe siècle : si ces affiches donnent à voir un Shakespeare américanisé qui serait partie intégrante d’une culture populaire, le théâtre va aussi être présenté comme un espace de compartimentation sociale contre lequel les visions idéalisées de Terry et de Candy vont se heurter.

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Illustration 11 : Affiche de Roméo et Juliette près de celle de A Gunman No More, captures d’écran de l’épisode 91.

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15 Candy propose un (long) trajet entre un Shakespeare littéraire et un Shakespeare joué sur scène. Il faut attendre pas moins de trente épisodes pour voir l’objet livresque se transformer en une représentation théâtrale, lorsque Terry joue Shakespeare pour la première fois dans l’épisode 73. Le théâtre est d’abord une aspiration merveilleuse avant que le rêve ne se confronte à la réalité.

16 La pièce Roméo et Juliette apparaît pour la première fois sous forme de livre dans l’épisode 44, au cours duquel Terry refuse de se réconcilier avec sa mère qui est venue jusqu’en Écosse pour lui parler. Candy se fait médiatrice entre la mère et le fils et parvient à ouvrir les yeux de Terry sur ce qui l’unit à Eléonore : tous deux sont des admirateurs, lecteurs et disciples de Shakespeare. En désignant le livre ouvert sur les pages de la pièce13, Candy leur lance « Vous avez les mêmes goûts et vous avez le même sang », comme si l’amour de Shakespeare se transmettait dans les gènes (de manière significative, l’épisode s’intitule « La Voix du sang »). Terry avoue finalement que lire la pièce était sa manière à lui de retrouver sa mère : « Toutes les répliques que je voulais souligner avaient déjà été soulignées de ta propre main » (voir extrait 1). La pièce apparaît d’abord comme un texte à lire et à annoter, qui se transmet de parent à enfant, un pont entre les êtres que la vie peut séparer. Parce que Shakespeare est ici un héritage alternatif qu’il appartient à chacun de s’approprier – un capital littéraire et culturel et non pas aristocratique et financier – la transmission de l’œuvre shakespearienne devient une promesse de renouvellement, d’émancipation et de changement de vie.

17 Extrait 1

Extrait 1 : La pièce de Shakespeare comme lien entre les générations, épisode 44.

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18 Lorsque Candy découvre la passion de Terry pour le théâtre, elle s’en étonne (épisode 44, voir extrait 2). Terry, qui n’a alors que seize ans, va alors expliquer pourquoi il rêve de devenir acteur : TERRY. Quand tu seras devenue une vieille dame, tu seras toujours Candy. CANDY. Bien sûr mais où veux-tu en venir ? TERRY. Et moi, quand j’aurai des cheveux blancs, je serai toujours Terry

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Grandchester. CANDY. Oui mais je ne comprends toujours pas. TERRY. Je veux dire par là que dans la vie courante on ne peut être autre chose que ce qu’on est. Mais qu’en jouant une pièce de théâtre, c’est tout à fait différent. On peut être mendiant ou prince, défenseur des opprimés, brasser le fer contre les traîtres, et gagner le cœur de sa belle. Une scène de théâtre, vois-tu, c’est tout un monde en miniature, un univers tout rempli de merveilles et de rêve éternel. Alors que Terry met l’accent sur la fluidité des identités que permet la scène, les images à l’écran matérialisent son rêve.

19 Extrait 2

Extrait 2 : Le rêve de théâtre de Terry, épisode 44.

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20 Le théâtre apparaît pour la première fois dans un fantasme en lien avec la scène très picturale du XIXe et de la première moitié du XX e siècle et ses effets proto- cinématographiques (comme la fermeture en iris, voir illustration 12) où le décor de la scène évoque le film Hamlet de Laurence Olivier (1948) et ses remparts brumeux (voir illustration 13).

Illustration 12 : Effet proto-cinématographique dans le rêve de théâtre de Terry, capture d’écran de l’épisode 44.

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Illustration 13 : Rempart brumeux évoquant le Hamlet de Laurence Olivier (1948), capture d’écran de l’épisode 44.

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21 Le désir de scène se fait aussi désir amoureux puisque la « belle » qu’on conquiert prend les traits de Candy, anticipant les échos entre la vie et le théâtre que tisseront les futurs épisodes. Le rêve de scène apparaît également comme un idéal social, Terry s’imaginant en prince et défenseur des opprimés. Cette vision du théâtre comme lieu idéalisé où la noblesse et la grandeur d’âme ne sont plus conditionnées par la naissance mais par la beauté du cœur s’inscrit dans l’héritage du théâtre américain populaire du XIXe siècle, et notamment des pièces qui virent triompher Edwin Forrest, première icône théâtrale américaine.

22 Soutien indéfectible du Parti Démocrate et ardent défenseur de la mobilité sociale, Forrest est connu aussi bien pour ses interprétations du répertoire shakespearien que pour ses rôles dans des pièces écrites sur mesure qui célèbrent les valeurs de l’Amérique jacksonienne. Il triomphe ainsi en incarnant Spartacus (The Gladiator, de Robert Montgomery Bird, 1828) ou Jack Cade – dans une pièce écrite par Robert Conrad et produite en 1841 qui cherche à réhabiliter la figure du rebelle allègrement malmenée par Shakespeare ; il est par là-même emblématique des tensions au cœur d’une américanité qui se construit dans un fantasme de rupture avec l’Ancien Monde tout en se nourrissant d’une culture européenne qu’elle réinvente. Terry cherche à s’émanciper de la culture anglaise aristocratique et rêve d’incarner, comme Forrest, des héros qui opposent à la légitimé généalogique des puissants une noblesse naturelle remettant en cause les hiérarchies sociales de l’Ancien Monde. Le premier rôle de Terry est tout à fait révélateur à cet égard. C’est en incarnant sur scène le Jeune Siward dans Macbeth qu’il se fait remarquer du public. Si la première et la dernière répliques de Macbeth sont coupées, le reste de la scène est rendu dans une traduction qui en restitue l’essentiel. Le

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texte shakespearien fait ainsi son entrée dans l’anime à travers une scène dénonçant l’exercice d’un pouvoir tyrannique sur le point de s’effondrer. Non seulement la thématique informe la plupart des pièces historiques américaines des années 1780 à la fin du XIXe siècle et constitue un motif sans cesse rejoué sur les planches de la jeune nation, mais le choix de cet extrait témoigne du goût cultivé par les Américains de l’époque pour les pièces shakespeariennes soulevant la question du pouvoir despotique (Richard III, Macbeth et Coriolan sont d’ailleurs des pièces que Forrest affectionne particulièrement14). Ce passage est d’ailleurs précédé d’une vue de la Statue de la Liberté, qui métaphorise cette appropriation de l’idiome shakespearien à travers le prisme américain.

23 La séquence en Écosse où Terry exprime son rêve d’acteur est ensuite remémorée, revisitée et réécrite en palimpseste tout au long du feuilleton. Elle est présentée comme une scène cruciale scellant le destin des protagonistes alors qu’elle-même n’est jamais stabilisée. Candy s’en souvient lorsque, passagère clandestine dans un cargo en partance pour les États-Unis, elle pense à Terry, à « ses rêves et sa vocation » (épisode 55). Alors qu’elle est sur le point de revenir à l’orphelinat où elle a été élevée (épisode 57), elle se remémore la scène où les dialogues se modifient sous l’effet du souvenir (voir extrait 3) : CANDY. Tu voudrais faire du théâtre, n’est-ce pas ? TERRY. Oui, j’en rêve. Parce que le théâtre, vois-tu, c’est de la magie. Dans la vie, on ne peut être que soi-même, mais sur scène on incarne mille personnages, on peut être prince ou mendiant, poète ou paysan. Le métier d’acteur est le plus beau métier du monde, Candy. Je serai acteur et j’écrirai des pièces.

24 Extrait 3

Extrait 3 : Candy se remémorant le rêve de théâtre de Terry, épisode 57.

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25 Si le titre de Roméo et Juliette est évoqué par les personnages dès l’épisode 44, le nom de Shakespeare n’apparaît pas avant l’épisode 73, lorsque Candy lit à haute voix un article dans le journal : « Terrence triomphe dans Shakespeare à Broadway ». Le jeune homme qu’elle a connu semble se superposer parfaitement à la star du journal : « Tu n’as pas changé, Terry. Plus d’assurance dans le regard, peut-être. Broadway ! Tu as enfin réalisé le rêve de ta vie ». La réussite de Terry renvoie Candy, une fois encore, à son souvenir d’Écosse, à cette scène-clé qui ne cesse de ressurgir, d’être adaptée et de hanter l’intrigue (voir extrait 4) : CANDY. Shakespeare ? C’est à toi, ce livre ? Si tu le lis, c’est que tu aimes le théâtre. TERRY. Non. CANDY. Regarde, c’est plein de notes dans la marge et entre les lignes au point qu’on ne peut plus lire le texte. TERRY. Bon, je veux bien l’avouer. J’aime le théâtre. Je devrais au contraire le détester mais je l’aime.

26 Extrait 4

Extrait 4 : Candy se remémorant encore une fois le rêve de théâtre de Terry, épisode 73.

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27 Dans ce nouveau souvenir, le nom de la pièce disparaît au profit de l’auteur dans un discours qui retourne aussi, paradoxalement, à l’importance des annotations et d’une lecture si personnelle qu’elle peut en venir à effacer le texte. Les souvenirs répétés de Candy ancrent toujours le passé dans le présent et invitent les jeunes spectateurs à apprécier les écarts qui se créent entre un but que l’on s’est fixé et sa réalisation. La vision de Terry comme acteur se fond dans un plan sur la Statue de la Liberté (voir illustration 14) : le théâtre est, jusque-là, envisagé comme un rêve d’émancipation. Shakespeare est un jalon dans un parcours initiatique pour devenir soi-même. Cependant, ce rêve d’affranchissement par le théâtre se heurte à des réalités économiques, sociales et matérielles que l’anime met au jour.

Illustration 14 : L’acteur comme homme émancipé dans Candy, captures d’écran de l’épisode 73.

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28 Dès qu’une pièce de Shakespeare est effectivement jouée sur scène (Macbeth dans l’épisode 73), les menaces qui planent sur la troupe sont soulignées. Alors que la Première Guerre mondiale éclate en Europe, les acteurs et techniciens s’interrogent (voir extrait 5) : — Une guerre aura obligatoirement des répercussions très fâcheuses sur le théâtre. — Oui, mais ça ne pourra pas aller jusqu’à la censure ? — Sans doute mais le public sera moins nombreux à nous applaudir. — Je ne suis pas de votre avis. L’Amérique est loin de l’Europe. Ça ne nous concerne pas.

29 Extrait 5

Extrait 5 : Le théâtre et la déclaration de la Première Guerre mondiale, épisode 73.

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30 Le théâtre, dans son économie comme dans ses choix artistiques, est montré en lien avec les événements du monde. Le feuilleton dit clairement aux enfants que les représentations théâtrales n’ont pas lieu dans une « bulle » de fiction mais sont en prise directe avec la société, ses violences et ses injustices. Avant la première du Roi Lear à Chicago (épisode 78), Terry refuse de participer aux dernières répétitions. Suzanne Marlowe, qui joue Cordélia, le retrouve sur les toits du théâtre à jouer de l’harmonica en solitaire. Terry lui expose ses raisons en soulignant le contexte social de la représentation (voir extrait 6) :

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TERRY. Il paraît que nous jouons pour la haute société. SUZANNE. Oui, c’est une soirée de gala pour une œuvre de bienfaisance. TERRY. Une soirée de gala réservée uniquement à un public de privilégiés par leur argent ou leur position sociale. SUZANNE. Bien sûr, mais le prix des places ira aux œuvres de charité. TERRY. C’est ce qu’on dit. Non, je ne jouerai pas. [...] Crois-tu donc vraiment que les pauvres ont seulement besoin d’argent, qu’ils n’ont pas eux aussi soif de culture ? […] La culture n’est pas uniquement réservée à ceux qui ont les moyens de s’offrir une soirée de gala, mais à tous ceux qui ont le goût et le sens du beau.

31 Extrait 6

Extrait 6 : Terry exprimant sa vision du théâtre avant la première du Roi Lear, épisode 78.

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32 La séquence témoigne d’une véritable négociation idéologique. Suzanne se fait l’écho d’un système paternaliste où les riches justifient leurs privilèges à travers des œuvres de charité pour les plus démunis ; Terry, quant à lui, remet en question la hiérarchie sociale et défend une culture démocratisée à l’intérieur même d’un dessin animé qui s’inscrit dans la culture populaire. Selon lui, Shakespeare ne devrait pas être un simple divertissement réservé à certaines catégories sociales qu’il contribue à constituer.

33 Juste avant le lever de rideau, Terry, qui doit jouer le roi de France, reste introuvable. Il s’est réfugié au troisième balcon. Symboliquement, l’acteur qui défend le peuple a non seulement franchi le quatrième mur, brouillant ainsi les frontières entre la scène et la salle, mais il s’est aussi installé là où les places sont les moins chères. Hattaway, le meneur de la troupe qui interprète Lear, va lui parler. Les deux comédiens sont déjà en costume ; la confrontation de Lear et du roi de France se joue ainsi dans la vie avant d’avoir lieu sur scène15 (voir extrait 7).

34 Extrait 7

Extrait 7 : Terry et Hattaway : deux visions opposées du théâtre, épisode 79.

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35 Le jeune acteur s’étonne de ce que le troisième balcon soit entièrement vide. Hattaway lui explique que seuls « les gens de la meilleure société » ont été invités, ce à quoi Terry répond qu’ils auraient pu « distribuer ces places à (de) pauvres gens ». Hattaway prône un théâtre déconnecté de la société dans laquelle il se déploie (« Nous jouons la comédie. Le reste ne nous concerne pas ») et dont l’absence de toute forme d’engagement perpétue et cautionne des inégalités de classe. Terry, au contraire, réaffirme la fiction et la scène comme utopie sociale et agent de transformation. Cependant, cette rébellion de Terry est de courte durée puisqu’il joue finalement le roi de France devant ce public privilégié. L’anime a alors l’occasion de montrer les conséquences de ce « Shakespeare pour les riches ».

36 Candy, qui a renoncé à être un membre de la richissime famille André pour suivre la voie qu'elle s’est choisie – celle d'infirmière –, subit de plein fouet les formes d’exclusion sociale que génère le théâtre. Son parcours au fil des épisodes, des milieux les plus aisés aux plus modestes, son refus de devenir une riche héritière et sa décision d’entreprendre des études afin de gagner sa vie sont emblématiques de son

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américanité. Comme elle le déclare dès l’épisode 21, au cours duquel elle est censée apprendre l’arbre généalogique des André et ne comprend pas pourquoi elle doit se faire aider pour des tâches qu’elle peut accomplir elle-même : « Les gens riches n’ont rien à faire ». Dès le second épisode, elle affirme déjà : « Dans la vie, on ne peut compter que sur soi-même ». Mais cette quête d’indépendance lui joue des tours et l’anime met en avant les enjeux de classes sociales qui conditionnent la « sortie au théâtre » : alors qu’elle cherche à retrouver Terry qu’elle n’a pas revu depuis un an, Candy apprend qu’elle ne pourra pas assister à la représentation du Roi Lear. Eliza, la riche pimbêche, se délecte à lui annoncer que l’unique représentation « n’est pas publique mais pour un gala de charité… Seules les personnes du grand monde y seront invitées » (épisode 78). Même quand elle parvient à obtenir une place grâce à ses amis, son métier d'infirmière s’interpose : elle est de garde ce soir-là.

37 Lorsque Candy parvient difficilement à se faire remplacer à l’hôpital et arrive au théâtre à la dernière minute, c’est pour être ramenée à un statut social qui n’a pas sa place au théâtre, faute d’en maîtriser les codes. Eliza lance : « C’est une tradition très respectable. Arriver à l’heure est la moindre des politesses » (épisode 79) et la grand- tante Elroy lui interdit l’accès à la loge de la famille André. Le théâtre est vu comme un univers clos qui, ce soir-là, rejette les travailleurs et les non-initiés. Candy erre alors dans le théâtre et ses coulisses pour trouver une place. La pièce commence mais les jeunes téléspectateurs n’en voient et n’en entendent que des bribes. La représentation est filtrée à travers celle qui ne peut pas y assister de manière légitime et qui se fait refouler de tous les endroits où elle tente de s’installer (voir extrait 8).

38 Extrait 8

Extrait 8 : Candy tentant d’assister à la représentation du Roi Lear, épisode 79.

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39 La séquence nous offre ainsi des perspectives inédites et fluctuantes sur la scène, révélant que la réception d’un spectacle varie en fonction du point de vue et d’écoute. Candy arrive sous la scène où elle chuchote « J’entends bien mais je ne vois pas grand- chose », et trouve finalement refuge au poulailler, là où Terry s’était assis un peu plus tôt, comme de manière prophétique. Le feuilleton met ainsi en avant la notion de place à « visibilité réduite » (restricted view) et renforce l’idée, très en vogue au XIXe et au début du XXe siècle, qu’une pièce de Shakespeare doit être vue avant d’être entendue.

40 Candy voit finalement Terry sur scène et, à la fois admirative et amoureuse, s’extasie jusqu’à en pleurer (voir illustration 15). L’acteur shakespearien est construit comme un être merveilleux et charismatique qu’on admire et chérit, mais aussi comme une star inaccessible. Peu importe que Candy ait vécu une histoire avec le jeune homme un an auparavant. Elle est maintenant reléguée au rang de simple admiratrice qui ne peut accéder à la loge de l’acteur et qui, à la sortie des artistes, doit jouer des coudes parmi la meute des chasseuses d’autographe (voir illustration 16)16. Terry ne repère pas Candy dans la foule et monte dans le fiacre avec sa partenaire de scène pour rejoindre une fête mondaine où il fait tout pour refuser les invitations à des « garden parties ».

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Illustration 15 : Candy émue devant l’acteur shakespearien, captures d’écran de l’épisode 79

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Illustration 16 : Candy dans la foule d’admiratrices, captures d’écran de l’épisode 79.

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41 Une vingtaine d’épisodes plus tard, le feuilleton rejoue la partition en variation. Terry a remis à Candy une invitation pour assister à la première de Roméo et Juliette, mais Daniel et Eliza déchirent son billet par jalousie (épisode 98). Candy est une nouvelle fois ramenée à sa condition sociale, affronte les rouages administratifs élitistes du théâtre (un employé lui signale que son billet n’est plus valable et que la pièce se joue à guichet fermé) et se heurte à l’intransigeance des procédures qui interdisent l’accès à la loge des acteurs. Là encore, elle est prise pour une admiratrice anonyme que Terry refuse de recevoir. Candy entre finalement par l’arrière du théâtre, symbole de la subversion qu’elle représente pour cette culture théâtrale réservée aux élites. Surprise sans billet, elle est priée de prendre la porte avant d’être sauvée par Karine Kliss, l’une des actrices, qui la reconnaît. Le programme sur lequel Karine appose son autographe devient un laisser-passer. L’actrice acquiert une autorité tandis que la sympathie que

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Candy inspire autour d’elle vient remplacer le capital financier et social qui lui fait défaut.

42 La trajectoire shakespearienne de Terry est, elle aussi, construite comme un parcours du combattant, à la fois cohérent, rapide et semé d’embûches. Ses rôles gagnent progressivement en importance : le jeune Siward dans Macbeth, puis le roi de France dans Le Roi Lear, jusqu'à Roméo. Le feuilleton met l’accent sur le long chemin qui mène de l’audition à la sélection, des nombreuses répétitions jusqu’à la représentation théâtrale. L’audition de Terry pour obtenir le rôle de Roméo (épisode 87) a lieu en même temps que l'examen de Candy pour devenir infirmière (voir extrait 9).

43 Extrait 9

Extrait 9 : L’audition de Terry et l’examen de Candy, épisode 87.

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44 Que les deux événements soient montrés en parallèle souligne d’ailleurs que la mission sociale du comédien est tout aussi essentielle que celle d’infirmière. L’audition met l’accent sur l’attente des acteurs, le trac face au jury, la peur d’oublier son texte, les décisions du metteur en scène de faire auditionner tel acteur avec tel autre. Le feuilleton dévoile aux enfants le processus de production, la notion de casting et de représentation fluctuante. Durant l’audition, la scène du balcon est jouée par un couple d’acteurs puis par un autre (voir illustrations 17 et 18), révélant aux jeunes téléspectateurs le fait qu’un rôle peut être interprété de manière différente en fonction des comédiens.

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Illustrations 17 et 18 : Les deux couples d’acteurs jouant Roméo et Juliette pendant les auditions, captures d’écran de l’épisode 87.

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45 Le feuilleton aborde aussi la question du passe-droit, de la carrière que l’on doit uniquement à son nom. Parce qu’Éléonore Baker assiste en secret à l’audition de son fils, les autres acteurs pensent que Terry a obtenu le rôle par relations et l’appellent ostensiblement « Terry Baker » (épisode 88). Le jeune homme, qui a tenté de se libérer de son patronyme anglais en partant pour les États-Unis, se retrouve à porter le poids du nom maternel. Hattaway, le directeur de la troupe, doit rassurer Terry : « Ni les relations ni les liens de famille n’ont la moindre influence sur mes décisions en ce qui concerne la profession. […] Si tu as obtenu le rôle de Roméo, tu le dois à ton talent et à lui seul [...] Le métier de comédien est l’un de ceux où l’on se fait le moins de cadeaux ». Non seulement la vie d’acteur n'est pas idéalisée, mais elle est présentée comme un sacerdoce. Terry loge dans une petite chambre quasi monacale. Une affiche d’Hamlet au mur en constitue la seule décoration et rappelle une dévotion complète à l’art (voir illustration 19).

Illustration 19 : L’affiche d’Hamlet dans la chambre monacale de Terry, captures d’écran de l’épisode 90.

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46 Dans Candy, les gens du spectacle acquièrent une dimension sacrificielle – qui participe des accents mélodramatiques de l’anime. La matérialité du théâtre brise littéralement les rêves. Le drame arrive, en effet, par le biais d’un objet, un projecteur, qui se détache pendant une répétition de Roméo et Juliette dans l’épisode 95 (voir illustration 20). Suzanne se jette sur Terry pour le sauver, mais elle est blessée par l’objet et doit être amputée d’une jambe. Après l’accident, la pièce trouve des échos à l’hôpital : Terry, encore dans son costume de Roméo, est réconforté par Hattaway, habillé en Frère Laurent (voir illustration 21). Le metteur en scène remplace rapidement Suzanne par Karine Kliss, et les répétitions continuent comme si de rien n’était. Terry est scandalisé de voir que « M. Hattaway [...] n’a qu’un seul souci en tête : le succès de la pièce », alors que Suzanne « est là-bas sur son lit d’hôpital ».

Illustration 20 : L’accident quand le projecteur se détache, captures d’écran de l’épisode 95.

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Illustration 21 : Les comédiens à l’hôpital, encore en costumes de scène, capture d’écran de l’épisode 95.

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47 La tragédie est annoncée à plusieurs reprises dans le feuilleton, particulièrement dans l’épisode 94 où Candy fait la rencontre de Gilles, dont le père s’occupait des projecteurs lors de la représentation du Roi Lear. Nous revoyons alors en flashback la production, mais du point de vue du machiniste, et apprenons, par son fils, que cet homme « souffrait beaucoup en faisant son travail, mais il le faisait avec le plus grand courage sans jamais se plaindre. Personne ne s’est jamais aperçu de rien ». Une fois encore, le récit refuse d’idéaliser le monde du spectacle et montre aux jeunes téléspectateurs les soi-disant « petites mains » dont l’abnégation et le sacrifice préfigurent l’accident.

48 C’est en effet toute une économie, ainsi qu’une sociologie, du théâtre qui est mise au jour dans Candy. Aux travailleurs de l’ombre, s’opposent les riches spectateurs dont les commérages retentissent dans la salle et le foyer, tranchant avec le grand texte de Shakespeare. Le jeu des acteurs fait l’objet de jugements après le spectacle (« Ils ont tous été merveilleux, surtout celui qui jouait le roi de France », « Oh oui, j’en suis toute remuée », épisode 79) et même avant la représentation (« Certains échos laissent espérer que le spectacle sera réussi », « J’ai entendu dire de mon côté que Terrence Grandchester était génial, j’ai hâte de le voir à l’œuvre », épisode 98). Les spectateurs se joignent au chœur de la critique (que Terry dédaigne ouvertement) et contribuent à diffuser les ragots colportés par les journaux à scandales.

49 Les hauts et les bas que connaît la carrière de Terry se reflètent dans la presse (illustration 22). Au plus fort de son succès, Terry fait l’objet de critiques dithyrambiques : « Il a su renouveler un texte figé par des siècles de tradition et apporté un sang nouveau à la tragédie » (épisode 73), « Une nouvelle étoile est née. La

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reprise de Roméo et Juliette à Broadway par la troupe Strasford confirme le talent, disons même le génie, du jeune Terrence Grandchester » (épisode 101). Terry devient aussi l’objet d’un album de coupures de presse regroupées par des admiratrices (épisode 102). Mais lorsque, suite à l’accident de Suzanne, Terry sombre dans l’alcool, quitte la troupe et erre de ville en ville, les magazines à scandales ont tôt fait de descendre en flamme celui qu’ils avaient porté aux nues : « Un prince déchu : le célèbre acteur Terry Grandchester vient de causer à ses admirateurs une immense déception ». De l’étoile montante au prince déchu, Terry incarne ainsi une vraie « roue de la fortune » shakespearienne, en même temps qu’il suit les codes du mélodrame. Les jeux de miroirs – souvent déformants – entre l’œuvre shakespearienne et l’existence des personnages informent, en effet, l’intrigue de l’anime.

Illustration 22 : L’acteur shakespearien dans la presse à scandale, captures d’écran de l’épisode 111.

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50 Candy reprend et diffracte des motifs des pièces shakespeariennes : spectralité, contretemps, lettres non transmises, effets d’annonce tragiques, structurent le récit. La première rencontre entre Terry et Candy est marquée par un brouillard qui fait surgir le fantôme d’Anthony. Leur relation est ainsi hantée par le précédent amour de la jeune fille. À partir du moment où elle prend conscience de ses sentiments pour Terry, les deux jeunes gens sont séparés et ne vont cesser de se croiser et de se manquer de peu. L’intrigue de Candy est un miroir déformant, ainsi qu’une chambre d’échos, où se reflètent et se diffractent les amants maudits de Roméo et Juliette – la dessinatrice, Yumiko Igarashi, a d’ailleurs adapté la pièce en manga en 2013. La missive que le Frère Laurent envoie à Roméo mais qui n’arrive jamais trouve son pendant dans les lettres que Candy envoie à Terry mais que Suzanne Marlowe, jalouse, intercepte. À l’image de Roméo, qui trouve le corps de Juliette inanimé mais encore chaud, Candy court vers le lieu où elle pense revoir Terry et y trouve seulement la tasse de thé « encore chaude » qu’il vient de laisser (épisode 58). La sexualité adolescente est suggérée (« Si j’étais un adulte, je l’aurais enlevée. Nous serions partis ensemble loin d’ici à la recherche d’une autre vie, à la recherche du bonheur », pense Terry), mais l’amour n’est finalement jamais consommé. Le feuilleton entier se construit ainsi autour d’une frustration amoureuse et narrative.

51 À travers les résurgences de Roméo et Juliette, les constructions genrées se manifestent dans un jeu ambivalent où les identités semblent parfois troublées ou fluctuantes, mais où toute forme de transgression n’est que temporaire. Candy contrevient fréquemment aux codes de genre : contrairement à Annie, la jeune fille sage avec qui elle a grandi, Candy grimpe aux arbres, refuse souvent d’obéir aux ordres et n’hésite pas à se battre. Lors du festival de mai organisé au collège de Saint Paul, elle se retrouve consignée et n’a pas le droit de participer au bal masqué. Le grand-oncle William André, qui l’a

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adoptée, lui fait parvenir un colis dans lequel elle découvre deux déguisements, une robe de Juliette et un costume de Roméo. Candy se demande si « c’est pour un garçon ou pour une fille » et doit choisir son genre. Elle décide tout d’abord de se déguiser en garçon. Cette subversion des normes s’accompagne immédiatement d’une transgression de l’espace : Candy s’échappe de sa cellule par la fenêtre et se rend au bal où elle fait quelques pas de valse avec son amie Annie (voir illustration 23) ; Alistair, qui l’a reconnue, l’invite à danser mais Eliza lui rappelle immédiatement que « ça ne se fait pas de danser entre garçons ». Cette dernière est d’ailleurs sous le charme du mystérieux jeune homme dont elle ignore l’identité. Candy quitte ensuite le bal afin de revêtir son costume de Juliette.

Illustration 23 : Candy déguisée en Roméo danse la valse avec son amie Annie, capture d’écran de l’épisode 41.

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Illustration 24 : Candy déguisée en Juliette danse la valse avec Terry, capture d’écran de l’épisode 41.

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52 Cette évocation de Shakespeare engage un double brouillage : entre les genres – Candy est à la fois Roméo et Juliette – mais également entre plusieurs pièces de Shakespeare, l’épisode évoquant aussi bien le bal masqué de Roméo et Juliette que les jeux de travestissement de Comme il vous plaira ou de La Nuit des rois. Cette fluidité des identités genrées est néanmoins de courte durée. Après s’être changée en Juliette derrière un fourré, elle découvre Terry, qui est déguisé en Roméo, perché dans un arbre. Il l’invite à danser la valse dans le parc, loin des regards des autres élèves (voir illustration 24). Chacun retrouve ainsi une apparence genrée qui correspond à son sexe, mais aussi le rôle shakespearien auquel il/elle est censé s’identifier : Roméo pour Terry, Juliette pour Candy. Comme Alistair le signale d’ailleurs à Candy : « J’avoue que tu es mieux avec une robe »17. La subversion des comportements genrés par Candy et sa performativité sont donc de courte durée : les écarts qui se manifestent dans cet épisode entre sexe, genre et désir retrouvent à la fin de l’épisode une cohérence hétéronormée et se manifestent sous la forme d’un « genre intelligible », pour reprendre la terminologie de Judith Butler18.

53 Ces formes transitoires de renversement du genre se retrouvent tout particulièrement autour de la scène du balcon de Roméo et Juliette, dont les multiples avatars disséminés au fil des épisodes constituent un motif récurrent. Candy tient le rôle de Roméo quand elle parvient à pénétrer dans la chambre de Terry au collège de Saint Paul en sautant sur son balcon depuis la branche d’un arbre (épisode 38, voir illustration 25), quand elle se languit sous la fenêtre du jeune homme au cours de l’été passé en Écosse (épisode 43, voir illustration 26) ou quand elle court après le train d’où Terry, accroché à la

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rambarde, l’aperçoit un bref instant (épisode 80, voir illustration 27). La situation est inversée lorsque Terry, qui a invité Candy à la première de Roméo et Juliette, pense à son amour pour la jeune fille sous les fenêtres de l’hôtel où elle séjourne (voir illustration 28).

Illustration 25 : Candy devant le balcon de Terry au collège de Saint Paul, capture d’écran de l’épisode 38.

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Illustration 26 : Candy sous les fenêtres de Terry en Écosse, captures d’écran de l’épisode 43.

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Illustration 27 : Terry se tenant à la rambarde du train après lequel court Candy, captures d’écran de l’épisode 80.

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Illustration 28 : Terry sous les fenêtres de Candy à New York, capture d’écran de l’épisode 98.

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54 La scène est également jouée par Terry en répétition et lors de la première, mais même sur les planches, le brouillage entre le théâtre et la vie demeure, Candy occupant constamment les pensées du jeune homme lorsqu’il déclame ses vers. L’histoire

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d’amour de Candy et Terry semble ne pouvoir dépasser la scène du balcon, qu’ils rejouent sans cesse dans un jeu de variations où l’intrigue ne parvient pas à avancer, fixée dans un fantasme amoureux qui évacue les énergies les plus destructrices de la pièce – notamment la violence mortifère du désir qu’éprouve Juliette pour Roméo. Il est d’ailleurs significatif que Candy, spectatrice de Roméo et Juliette, quitte la représentation à l’entracte – un spectacle avorté à l’image de la relation impossible entre les deux personnages19.

55 L’anime transforme ainsi le couple tragique de Roméo et Juliette en trio maudit – Candy, Terry, Suzanne – et ce bien qu’aucun des trois personnages ne passe de vie à trépas. Cependant, les signes sont trompeurs et l’influence de la scène n’est pas là où on l’attend. Quand Suzanne Marlowe apprend qu’elle jouera Juliette et que Terry lui donnera la réplique, elle s’imagine avec bonheur qu’elle va pouvoir vivre son amour à la ville comme à la scène. De même, lorsque Candy entend le « vieux dicton » selon lequel « l’acteur et l’actrice qui jouent ensemble Roméo et Juliette finissent par se marier » (épisode 95), elle ne peut s’empêcher d’avoir peur mais veut garder confiance en Terry.

56 Or, le feuilleton va contrecarrer le traditionnel « film en miroir » shakespearien20, où les intrigues en coulisses sont censées imiter la scène (comme dans Kiss Me Kate, réalisé par George Sidney en 1953, ou Shakespeare In Love, réalisé par John Madden en 1998). Terry a voulu le rôle de Roméo non pas pour séduire Suzanne mais pour faire venir Candy à New York et la rendre fière de lui. Même si Terry et Suzanne finissent effectivement ensemble, Terry et Candy sont toujours présentés comme les « véritables » Roméo et Juliette, les amoureux que le sort s’acharne à séparer.

57 Cette tangente prise par le feuilleton par rapport aux films en miroir traditionnels se cristallise dans les épisodes 91 et 92. Dans un théâtre encore vide, Terry répète son rôle de Roméo : « Oh, Juliette, tu es mon Orient, mon soleil, l’astre de mes jours. Oh, les mots me manquent pour te dire à quel point tu es chère à mon âme… ». Mécontent de son jeu, il s’interrompt pour penser non pas à celle qui sera sur scène avec lui, mais à celle qui sera dans la salle à le regarder : « Il faudra que je porte la voix pour que Candy sente que c’est à elle que je m’adresse ». Suzanne rejoint alors Terry sur scène, le prie de ne pas inviter Candy à la première et lui avoue qu’elle l’aime. De surprise, le jeune homme lâche le texte qu’il tenait à la main, comme si la vie tentait (vainement) de prendre le relais de la pièce.

58 Suzanne se présente comme un personnage à qui l’on vole le rôle qu’elle rêvait de tenir une fois le rideau tombé et que les fictions lui accordent généralement. Elle l’avoue elle- même : « Et quand tu as obtenu le rôle du roi de France dans Le Roi Lear, j’ai été transportée de joie. Je sentais au fond de moi-même que tes paroles ne s’adressaient pas à l’actrice mais à ma propre personne et j’étais inondée de bonheur ». Or, c’est au moment de cette déclaration d’amour, émise par la « Juliette » officielle, que Terry pense à son amour fou et éternel pour une autre Juliette, plus officieuse, celle qui s’était déguisée lors du festival de mai. C’est d’ailleurs en mentionnant ce moment que Terry invite Candy à le rejoindre à New York : « J’aimerais tellement revoir la petite Juliette du collège Royal de Saint Paul » (épisode 96). Les auteurs du feuilleton ont conscience des codes auxquels ils contreviennent et ce n’est pas un hasard si Candy, en voyant l’affiche de Roméo et Juliette chez Terry, a une idée – remplacer le nom de l’actrice par le sien : « Comme ça, eh bien c’est moi qui serai Juliette – au moins sur l’affiche » (épisode 97). Elle fait écho aux spectateurs de la pièce qui entretiennent le mythe d’une

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adéquation parfaite entre la vie et la scène et regrettent l’absence d’une Suzanne Marlowe blessée car « elle aurait peut-être été une meilleure [Juliette], je veux dire plus authentique, elle y aurait mis toute son âme, puisqu’elle est, dit-on, amoureuse de Terrence » – comme si, pour être excellente, une représentation théâtrale devait toujours refléter ce qui se passe à la ville.

59 Estropiée, sachant qu’elle ne pourra plus remonter sur scène et ne voulant pas être un poids pour Terry, Suzanne fait une tentative de suicide. Elle souhaite se jeter du toit de l’hôpital (ce qui donne lieu à une nouvelle vision détournée d’une Juliette à son balcon dans une tonalité fortement mélodramatique) pendant qu’au théâtre se joue la scène finale où les deux amants se suicident l’un après l’autre. Le montage alterne entre le toit de l’hôpital sous une tempête de neige, le théâtre où résonne la dernière scène de Roméo et Juliette (avec Terry et Karine Kliss dans les rôles-titres) et une version rêvée de cette même scène où Suzanne s’imagine jouer Juliette, rôle qu’elle aurait dû interpréter et qu’elle s’apprête à imiter en se tuant (voir extrait 10).

60 Extrait 10

Extrait 10 : Tentative de suicide de Suzanne, épisode 99.

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61 Candy arrive juste à temps pour arrêter le geste de Suzanne. Elle interrompt le cours de la tragédie mais, devant la force des sentiments de sa rivale, choisit de sacrifier son propre amour et de se retirer. Terry reste, par devoir, auprès de Suzanne. L’excès émotionnel du mélodrame se reflète dans la tempête de neige comme si les intempéries du Roi Lear, que l’on n’avait pas vues lors de la représentation de l’épisode 79, resurgissaient ici avec force (voir illustration 29).

Illustration 29 : Tempête et mélodrame dans Candy, capture d’écran de l’épisode 99.

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62 Désespéré d’avoir dû renoncer à Candy, Terry part à la dérive. Il finit ivre dans un bar où il déclame à la cantonade la dernière tirade que Roméo adresse au corps inerte de Juliette (épisode 112, voir extrait 11). Ce n’est qu’après avoir vu en catimini Candy travailler comme infirmière auprès d’enfants défavorisés qu’il décide de retourner à New York et de remonter sur les planches. À nouveau, les métiers d’infirmière et de comédien sont mis en parallèle : si l’un soigne le corps, l’autre soigne l’âme. À travers

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un nouvel article intitulé « Le retour du jeune espoir de la compagnie Strasford, Terrence Grandchester », Candy apprend que Shakespeare a finalement sauvé Terry.

63 Extrait 11

Extrait 11 : Terry, d’abord à la dérive, est sauvé par son rêve d’acteur, épisode 112.

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64 Dans l’épisode 90, Terry est montré devant l’affiche de la production théâtrale dans laquelle il joue, mettant en abyme le médium du dessin animé. À la fin de l’épisode 93, Candy regarde l’une de ces affiches, que son amie Patty lui a rapportée de Pittsburgh. En l’absence de l’homme qu’elle aime, l’image agit comme un substitut du corps de Terry (extrait 12).

65 Extrait 12

Extrait 12 : L’affiche de Terry qui s’anime, épisode 93.

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66 Cette scène est emblématique de l’ambivalence des transactions shakespeariennes à l’œuvre dans le feuilleton. De manière métafictionnelle, l’image de Terry se distingue du cadre, semble se détacher du mur et prendre vie, reflétant la manière dont le dessin anime littéralement les pièces de Shakespeare. Cette image qui s’émancipe du médium annonce les nombreuses créations transfictionnelles que les fans réaliseront autour de Candy et Shakespeare. Ils ont imaginé des posters d’autres productions théâtrales comme Hamlet et posté des vidéos sur YouTube où les images de l’anime ou du manga original sont irriguées par la musique du Roméo et Juliette de Franco Zeffirelli (1968)21 ou de celle du film Romeo + Juliette de Baz Luhrmann (1996) 22 ; d’autres ont également détourné l’affiche de Shakespeare In Love où Terry et Candy prennent symboliquement la place des deux héros du film (voir illustration 30)23.

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Illustration 30 : Affiche détournée du film Shakespeare In Love (réal. John Madden, 1998).

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67 Dans ce dernier exemple, le désir des fans d’unir le couple à la fois sur scène et dans la vie rejoint le rêve de Candy devant l’affiche de Terry. L’acteur acquiert une présence spectrale et déréalisée tandis que l’imagination de Candy fait disparaître Suzanne dans l’espoir de la remplacer. Cette vision brouille une fois de plus le théâtre et la vie à travers l’identification aux personnages de la pièce. Mais cette identification est problématique. Candy se rêve en Juliette parce qu’elle pense que la pièce peut avoir une heureuse conclusion, mais également parce qu’elle sur-imprime un roman personnel, non tragique, sur l’œuvre de Shakespeare. Or, depuis la triste fin de Sybil dans Le Portrait de Dorian Gray, on sait les dangers d’une telle lecture de la tragédie. Dans Candy, le théâtre shakespearien est source à la fois de souffrance et de résilience. Même si l’histoire de Candy et Terry reste celle d’un amour impossible, personne ne se suicide. Contrairement à Roméo et Juliette, l’anime affirme que l’amour, même malheureux, ne doit pas mener à la mort. Après avoir assisté à la chute de cheval mortelle d’Anthony, Candy est d’abord inconsolable mais ne le rejoint pas dans la mort24. Pour lui faire oublier Anthony, Terry l’oblige à remonter à cheval pour une course enivrante (voir extrait 13).

68 Extrait 13

Extrait 13 : Terry et son discours sur l’élan vital, épisode 44.

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69 C’est précisément dans le premier épisode de l’anime où Shakespeare est cité (épisode 44) que le jeune homme livre un discours rappelant qu’il faut profiter du moment présent : « Nous, nous sommes là, Candy. [...] La vie est la plus forte et les souvenirs doivent toujours laisser la place à la réalité, et la réalité, c’est toi et moi25 ». Face à la disparition des êtres chers, Terry, l’enfant terrible du théâtre shakespearien, affirme, devant les jeunes spectateurs, la puissance de l’élan vital et sa beauté. Si les tragédies existent, elles doivent être surmontées. C’est toujours la survie qui prend le pas – survie à travers le don de soi ou un autre amour.

NOTES

1. Les analyses de cet article porteront sur la version française doublée par Amélie Morin (Candy) et Thierry Bourdon (Terry). 2. Shakespeare: The Animated Tales est une série de téléfilms animés (d’une demi-heure chacun) adaptant douze pièces de Shakespeare (BBC, 1992-1994). 3. Pour écouter le générique de Candy en français : https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=wVcXDbRJ79w (consulté le 2 février 2016). 4. Voir, sur ce point, Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations, Philadelphie, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998 ; Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992. 5. Comme le rappelle Douglas M. Lanier, la culture populaire peut associer Shakespeare à une certaine britannicité pour apporter un vernis culturel et artistique à une production : « quality craftsmanship, gravitas, trustworthiness, Britishness, antiquity, cultural sophistication, intellectuality, and artsiness » (Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 112). 6. Sur l’américanisation (et le décentrement) de Shakespeare par la culture populaire, voir Richard Burt, Unspeakable ShaXXXespeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture, New York, St. Martin’s, 1998 ; Denise Albanese, Extramural Shakespeare, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 7. Les paysages dans lesquels Candy grandit ainsi que les tableaux qui ornent les demeures – notamment celle de la mère de Terry – entretiennent une ressemblance indéniable avec l’esthétique de la Hudson River School, et plus particulièrement l’œuvre de Thomas Cole et d’Edwin Church (il est significatif que les paysages écossais évoquent eux aussi ces œuvres américaines ou la peinture romantique européenne). Ces espaces idéalisés, où les personnages vivent en parfaite harmonie avec un environnement pourtant menacé par la domestication progressive du territoire américain, sont associés aux valeurs qui fondent l’ethos américain dominant du XIXe du siècle contre une tradition aristocrate étroitement assimilée par les Démocrates de l’époque à la culture de l’Ancien Monde : indépendance (self-reliance), mobilité sociale, ruralité, effort individuel (industry), vertu et piété. 8. John Hector St John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, éd. Susan Manning, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, Letter 3, p. 40-82. 9. Voir Roger Manvell, Ellen Terry, Londres, Heron Books, 1968, p. 129; Sheridan Morley, John Gielgud: The Authorized Biography, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2002, p. 30. 10. Bravant la mère supérieure du collège, Terry lui déclare ainsi : « À les voir vous leur donneriez le Bon Dieu sans confession, mais si vous pouviez lire dans leurs pensées, vous

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deviendriez toute rouge [...]. Toi, viens me prévenir quand la représentation sera terminée. Et maintenant salut les enfants de chœur, amusez-vous bien ». 11. Le décor de la scène où le jeune Siward est tué évoque, quant à lui, l’adaptation filmique de Macbeth par Orson Welles (1948). 12. Nous remercions Pierre Berthomieu pour ce précieux détail. 13. Le livre s’ouvre d’ailleurs à la japonaise et se lit de droite à gauche, trahissant ainsi l’origine de l’anime. 14. William Rounseville Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian, 2 vol., Londres, Philadelphie, J. B. Lippincott & Co, 1877, p. 739-790. 15. La voix de l’acteur qui double Hattaway/Lear est celle de Daniel Gall qui était connue par les jeunes spectateurs de l’époque comme celle qui doublait aussi le vaillant Actarus, prince d’Euphor, dans l’anime Goldorak. Lear bénéficie donc d’un intertexte qui lui confère une autorité bienveillante. 16. L’anime reprend, dans cet épisode, les codes des contes de fée : Candy perd sa chaussure telle une nouvelle Cendrillon et laisse derrière elle un mouchoir que Terry finira par récupérer. 17. À la fin de l’épisode, c’est au tour de Terry de transgresser les frontières du genre : afin d’éviter que l’escapade de Candy ne soit découverte par les sœurs du collège, il entre par la fenêtre dans la chambre que Candy n’aurait pas dû quitter et se glisse sous les draps de la jeune fille. Il devient « Candy » l’espace d’un instant, mais en recouvrant intégralement son corps et son visage. 18. Judith Butler, Trouble dans le genre. Le féminisme et la subversion de l’identité, trad. Cynthia Kraux, Paris, La Découverte, 2006 (1990), p. 84. 19. Les fabricants japonais de jouets et poupées autour de Candy n’auraient pas été sans influence sur l’éloignement de Terry afin de préserver la pureté de la jeune fille. Voir http:// www.candyneige.com/encyclopedie/curiosites/curiosites/ curiosites.htm#Le%20merchandising%20a-t- il%20influenc%C3%A9%20la%20disparition%20de%20Terry%20apr%C3%A8s%20le%20coll%C3%A8ge%20Saint- Paul%20? (consulté le 2 février 2016). 20. Voir Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 219 ; Cary M. Mazer, Cary M., « Sense/Memory/ Sense-memory: Reading Narratives of Shakespearian Rehearsals », Shakespeare Survey n°62, 2009, 328-348. 21. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZL8PSGC_2o ou http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=WgX_X92WOB8 (vidéos consultées le 2 février 2016). 22. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IF_iTarp4w (consulté le 2 février 2016). 23. Voir les nombreux exemples de détournement d’affiches ici : http://candyterry.com/ TGgallery/tgromancecredits3.html (consulté le 2 février 2016). 24. Il est à noter que le doublage français édulcore l’anime japonais : pour protéger la sensibilité des jeunes spectateurs français, les dialogues laissent entendre qu’Anthony n’est pas mort mais est grièvement blessé, ce qui crée bien sûr des problèmes de continuité et de logique narratives. 25. Entendue de manière rétrospective, cette réplique est aussi porteuse d’une ironie cruelle puisque le couple de Terry et Candy restera toujours de l’ordre de la fiction.

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RÉSUMÉS

Candy, manga japonais en neuf volumes de Yumiko Igarashi (dessinatrice) et Kyoko Mizuki (scénariste), a été adapté en une série télévisée d’animation (ou anime) pour enfants comprenant 115 épisodes de 26 minutes diffusés entre 1976 et 1979 (à partir de septembre 1978 en France). Alors que les adaptations de Shakespeare à l’écran sont en jachère à cette période, Candy a fait découvrir son œuvre à toute une génération d’enfants nés dans les années 70 en leur donnant l’occasion d’assister à des scènes tirées de Macbeth, du Roi Lear et de Roméo et Juliette. Bien que l’anime n’échappe pas aux clichés et aux facilités mélodramatiques, cette fiction non anglophone pour la jeunesse tient néanmoins un discours complexe sur les transactions anglo-américaines de Shakespeare. Il s’agira d’explorer les lignes de faille d’un feuilleton qui construit une tension entre un Shakespeare « authentiquement » britannique et un Shakespeare américain populaire, met au jour les mécanismes mêmes de la production théâtrale et interroge sa portée au sein de la société.

Candy Candy, a Japanese nine-volume manga created by Yumiko Igarashi and Kyoko Mizuki, was adapted into a children’s anime television series comprising 115 26-minute episodes which were broadcast between 1976 and 1979 (and from September 1978 in France). Whereas hardly any screen adaptations of Shakespeare were released at the time, Candy Candy gave an opportunity to a whole generation of children born in the 1970s to discover the playwright’s works through scenes taken from Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. If the anime does not avoid melodramatic clichés, this non-Anglophone work offers nonetheless a complex vision of Anglo- American Shakespearean transactions. This article aims at exploring the faultlines of a serial fiction which dramatizes a tension between a “truly” British Shakespeare and a popular American Shakespeare, unveiling the mechanisms of theatrical production and questioning its social impact.

INDEX

Keywords : appropriation, Candy, cultural transactions, England, manga, United States of America Mots-clés : Angleterre, appropriation, Candy, États-Unis, manga, transactions culturelles

AUTEURS

SARAH HATCHUEL Université du Havre, EA 4314, GRIC

RONAN LUDOT-VLASAK Université de Lille, EA 4074, CECILLE – Centre d’Études en Civilisations Langues et Lettres Étrangères, F-59000 Lille, France

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Hamlet dans la culture populaire : le cas du Stick Figure Hamlet de Dan Carroll

Pierre Kapitaniak

1 Lorsqu’en 2006 parut Shakespeare and Youth Culture, Kevin J. Wetmore, qui y consacrait un chapitre à la bande dessinée et au roman graphique1, esquissait un panorama des adaptations shakespeariennes en bande dessinée où dominaient plusieurs générations de « Shakespeare Illustré », s’adressant ouvertement au jeune public, mais n’offrant que des réductions drastiques des intrigues et seulement quelques dialogues originaux. En 2006, ce constat validait de façon convaincante la tendance à ce que les auteurs appelaient dans l’introduction « la réduction, la traduction et les mentions » de Shakespeare (« Reducing, Translating, and Referencing Shakespeare »). Il est tentant d’établir un parallèle entre cette « réduction » pour la jeunesse, et la tendance réductrice qu’affiche la culture populaire lorsqu’elle s’attaque à l’icône culturelle qu’est Shakespeare. Bien que Macbeth soit sa pièce la plus adaptée de nos jours, tant au cinéma qu’au théâtre, c’est pourtant Hamlet qui représente la quintessence de l’œuvre de cette icône de la littérature mondiale. Dans la culture populaire, la pièce se retrouve réduite à des formules ou slogans, des expressions ou citations célèbres qui, par métonymie, se substituent à la pièce. Deux d’entre elles semblent s’être imposées sans conteste : le premier vers du monologue de Hamlet (« To be or not to be », III.i.642), le seul à fonctionner dans la langue originale quelle que soit la langue de la culture populaire et, quoique moins référencé, le commentaire de Marcellus, « Something is rotten in the state of Denmark » (I.iv.100), qui convoque lui aussi immédiatement la tragédie. En plus de ces réductions textuelles, la fameuse tragédie est également et fréquemment réduite à une représentation graphique, qui emprunte à la scène des fossoyeurs l’image du prince contemplant le crâne de Yorick (V.i.190-191). Avec le temps, les deux types de réduction – l’icône et le slogan – ont fusionné en un agrégat synthétique immédiatement reconnaissable et identifiable, « To be or not to be » venant à remplacer « Alas poor Yorick ».

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2 Lorsque l’on souhaite évoquer Hamlet, ce sont ces trois éléments qu’on retrouve immanquablement, et ils sont souvent associés. Pour ne citer qu’un exemple, on les retrouve tous trois dans la façon dont Albert Uderzo et René Goscinny évoquent Hamlet dans le 22e volume des aventures d’Astérix et Obélix (La Grande traversée, 1975). Dans les deux allusions à Hamlet situées sur deux planches peu éloignées l’une de l’autre, les auteurs combinent ces trois réductions qui accompagnent inévitablement la visite de nos héros au Danemark3. On pourrait consacrer d’épais ouvrages aux exemples de telles iconisations de Hamlet, dans la bande dessinée, au cinéma ou dans d’autres médias, tant ce type d’appropriation extrême du capital culturel représenté par Shakespeare est fréquent dans une culture de la fragmentation exacerbée par la télévision et internet. Cette appropriation a été souvent perçue de façon négative, décrite en termes moralisateurs comme un appauvrissement ou une trahison. La bande dessinée a tout autant souffert de tels jugements, en partie sans doute parce que ce mode d’expression artistique est censé s’adresser traditionnellement à un public jeune. Or, dans les pages qui suivent, je voudrais me pencher sur le cas de Stick Figure Hamlet de Dan Carroll4 que l’on pourrait situer aux antipodes de la réduction iconique ou de la simplification pédagogique, témoignant peut-être d’une évolution de la bande dessinée.

Shakespeare et la bande dessinée : des classiques illustrés à Stick Figure Hamlet

3 Tout au long du XXe siècle, les rapports entre la bande dessinée et Hamlet semblaient surtout didactiques. Les jeunes lecteurs de l’après-guerre pouvaient découvrir la fameuse tragédie dans des adaptations illustrées, qui combinaient des passages du texte shakespearien avec des résumés et paraphrases pour offrir une publication d’une cinquantaine de pages. Dans les années 1950, deux éditeurs publièrent des versions concurrentes : une première en 1950 dans la série Famous Authors Illustrated, illustrée par Henry Kiefer5 et une seconde illustrée par Alex A. Blum en 1952 dans la série Classics Illustrated6. Cette dernière série eut d’ailleurs une seconde vie dans les années 1990 et la nouvelle version de Hamlet fut illustrée par Tom Mandrake en 19917. À la suite de cette seconde série, d’autres éditeurs se sont engouffrés dans la brèche comme le Saddleback’s Illustrated Classics (2003), Picture This! Shakespeare (2006), ou encore la série Graffex (2009), auxquels on peut ajouter des projets individuels comme le Hamlet illustré par Leonid Gore et réécrit par Bruce Coville (20048). Entre-temps, c’est dans l’Europe des années soixante-dix que l’on rencontre davantage d’originalité. En 1975, Gotlib fait paraître une adaptation très brève de Hamlet, plus sur le mode de la plaisanterie et de l’allusion que d’une véritable adaptation de l’histoire, puisque l’ensemble se réduit à neuf pages9. Et, l’année suivante en Italie, Gianni De Luca offre une adaptation graphiquement très innovante10, mais dont le texte a dû subir une forte censure du Vatican.

4 Dan Carroll n’est donc pas le premier à adapter la tragédie de Hamlet au média de la bande dessinée. Cela dit, lorsqu’il a commencé à travailler sur Stick Figure Hamlet en 2005, il n’en existait aux États-Unis que des versions très réduites et souvent très pédagogiques, accompagnées d’un dossier sur l’auteur et son contexte. En 2005, son idée d’illustrer l’intégralité de Hamlet apparaît donc comme un projet à la fois ambitieux et original11. Avant même que le Stick Figure Hamlet ne soit terminé (Dan Carroll mettra 4 ans à terminer son projet), d’autres adaptations ambitieuses relevant

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notamment du genre manga voient le jour : une adaptation futuriste par la britannique Emma Vieceli (2007) et une autre tournée vers le genre médiéval-fantastique par Tintin Pantoja et Adam Sexton (200812). Cette fois le format est plus étendu, avoisinant deux centaines de pages, et leurs auteurs mêlent texte original, réécritures modernisées et descriptions ajoutées. C’est probablement en raison de ce développement que l’adaptation graphique de Hamlet dans la série No Fear Shakespeare qui paraît en 2008 adopte un format également étendu de deux centaines de pages13. On remarquera d’ailleurs que l’évolution des couvertures de ces adaptations reflète mes remarques préliminaires sur la réduction de Hamlet au crâne de Yorick. À partir du tournant du siècle, les couvertures déclinent presque invariablement le motif graphique du prince tenant le crâne, alors que les premières préféraient l’apparition du fantôme (Illustrations 1 à 3). Et notre auteur n’échappe pas à cette tendance.

Illustration 1 : Classics Illustrated: Hamlet, illustré par Alex A. Blum, Gilberton, 1952.

Couverture. URL : http://www.amazon.fr/Classics-Illustrated-39-William-Shakespeare/dp/190681466X/ ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1455038339&sr=8-4&keywords=Classics+Illustrated%3A+Hamlet+Alex+A. +Blum

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Illustration 2 : Classics Illustrated: Hamlet, illustré par Tom Mandrake, First Classics Inc., 1991.

Couverture. URL : http://www.amazon.com/Classics-Illustrated-First-comic-book/dp/B01AV1MLGS/ ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1455038840&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=hamlet+mandrake

Illustration 3 : Hamlet, illustré par Emma Vieceli, Amulet Books, 2007.

Couverture. URL : http://www.amazon.com/Manga-Shakespeare-Hamlet-William/dp/0810993244

5 Pour mener à bien son projet, Dan Carroll opte pour un type très particulier de bande dessinée, qui s’est développé avec l’avènement d’internet. Il commence la publication de Stick Figure Hamlet dans un blog sous forme de webcomic avec une page ajoutée

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chaque lundi, mercredi et vendredi, entre 2005 et 2008. Le terme de webcomic apparaît vers 1995, mais correspond à un média qui a fait son apparition au milieu des années 1980. L’avantage de ce mode d’expression est qu’il permet de publier périodiquement les pages de l’histoire sur un blog, comme le faisaient les auteurs des générations précédentes dans la presse hebdomadaire ou mensuelle, mais sans contrat ni investissement, en conservant une totale liberté d’expression ainsi que le contrôle du flux, de la forme et du contenu. Les premiers webcomics ont exploité prioritairement la veine parodique, comme Witches and Stitches d’Eric Milikin qui offrait une variation décalée sur Le Magicien d’Oz.

6 Comme son titre l’indique, en plus du format de webcomic, Carroll choisit une approche minimaliste qui réduit ses personnages à des bonshommes-allumettes ou « stick figures », procédé graphique développé surtout par les spécialistes de la communication et de la signalétique, mais très vite adopté par les auteurs de webcomics, en raison du caractère facilement accessible de cette charte graphique très simple, ce qui la rend également adaptable au dessin assisté par ordinateur. Le premier webcomic en bonhomme-allumette – NetBoy de Stafford Huyler – démarra à l’été 1994 sous forme de blog, et continue encore, le dernier post datant du 10 juin 201414.

Adaptation et motivation

7 Si d’autres auteurs de bande dessinée ont déjà illustré le texte intégral d’autres pièces de Shakespeare, Dan Carroll est le premier à le faire pour Hamlet. Mais contrairement aux divers exemples que j’ai évoqués plus haut, faut-il encore parler d’adaptation ? Pour reprendre la définition de Linda Hutcheon dans A Theory of Adaptation, l’adaptation correspond à trois aspects : An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work15. Un peu plus loin, Linda Hutcheon étend ce concept déjà très inclusif à tout passage d’un mode narratif (qu’elle appelle « telling ») à un mode scopique (« showing ») : « In a very real sense, every live staging of a printed play could theoretically be considered an adaptation in its performance16. » En soi, ce postulat se complique pour le théâtre élisabéthain. Même si un texte manuscrit précède nécessairement toute représentation, on ne peut en dire autant du texte imprimé et publié, puisque pour les pièces de l’époque ce dernier ne précédait jamais les représentations. Mais c’est un autre débat.

8 Dans le cas qui m’intéresse ici, Dan Carroll choisit d’illustrer le texte modernisé de la version longue du second in-quarto de 1604/1605, et à quelques variantes textuelles près le texte se rapproche de celui qui est mis en ligne par la Folger Library. Dans la mesure où Carroll n’opère que des modifications très minimes sur le texte fourni (quelques rares mots de liaison qui sont supprimés), Stick Figure Hamlet est bien plus proche d’une mise en scène que d’une adaptation, ou du moins d’une adaptation cinématographique qui conserverait le texte « intégral », comme a pu le faire par exemple Kenneth Branagh pour son Hamlet de 199617. Comme au cinéma et au théâtre, les didascalies sont traduites visuellement. Comme au cinéma, la bande dessinée propose au lecteur une vision cadrée, dirigée, limitant la liberté que le spectateur de théâtre conserve pour se focaliser sur tel ou tel point dans l’espace offert par la mise en scène. À la différence du cinéma, cependant, qui conserve la dimension cinétique du spectacle vivant, le média

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de la bande dessinée contraint l’auteur à figer l’image sur une planche et donc à sélectionner un nombre limité d’images qui distillent en résumé l’action fluide du film ou de la pièce. Ainsi, la bande dessinée peut être vue comme existant à mi-chemin entre le texte théâtral imprimé et sa mise en scène vivante.

9 Dans son examen des différents modes d’adaptation, Hutcheon met l’accent sur les motivations qui conduisent l’adaptateur à s’emparer d’une œuvre. En général, la première motivation est de profiter d’une manne financière, le succès de l’œuvre source garantissant par capillarité une certaine notoriété de l’adaptation. Or, dans le cas de Dan Carroll, cette motivation semble secondaire, puisque pendant les quatre années de création le projet ne générait aucune recette. À titre de comparaison on peut évoquer le récent projet d’un autre auteur de webcomics, Ryan North, dont la gestion a été à l’opposé de celle de Carroll. Renouant avec un genre qui fit son apparition dans les années 1980, North a lancé en 2012 le projet d’adapter Hamlet au format de « Choose Your Own Adventure » (en français les « livres dont vous êtes le héros »), en choisissant la plate-forme Kickstarter qui permet de faire appel aux dons des internautes, en échange desquels le travail de mise en ligne progresse. En très peu de temps, ce Hamlet dont le lecteur est le héros devint l’une des aventures les plus lucratives de la plate- forme en totalisant plus de 500 000 dollars de promesses de dons18.

10 L’argent n’était donc pas la motivation principale de Carroll et, de plus, Hamlet était son premier projet de webcomic (il en a publié deux autres depuis). Hutcheon recense d’autres types de motivation, parmi lesquels l’« ascension sociale » (« adaptation upwardly mobile ») et l’« élan pédagogique » (« pedagogical impulse »)19. Pour la première, elle cite l’exemple des débuts du cinéma, qui en adaptant des classiques de la littérature cherchait à se forger une légitimité culturelle. Pour le second, surtout lorsqu’il s’agit de réduction, la motivation est de rendre accessible une œuvre au plus grand nombre. On retrouve ces deux types de motivation dans le contraste entre les deux pages de titre qui ouvrent le webcomic sur le site. L’hyperbole de la première (« The greatest work in human history… now with pictures »), digne des blockbusters hollywoodiens, reflète clairement la volonté de rendre ce chef-d’œuvre plus accessible à l’aide d’images. L’euphémisme et l’oralité de la langue dans la seconde (« As adapted by Dan Carroll from this play he read one time ») suggèrent le désir de reléguer Shakespeare au second plan, là encore de manière ironique, un peu comme Gus Van Sant l’avait fait pour son adaptation libre des Henry IV intitulée My own Private Idaho, où le nom de Shakespeare n’apparaît qu’au générique de fin, discrètement glissé au milieu de tant d’autres collaborateurs : « Additional dialogue by William Shakespeare ». En effet, reprenant Marjorie Garber, Hutcheon rappelle que Shakespeare est la cible rêvée pour ce type d’adaptation : Adaptations of Shakespeare, in particular, may be intended as tributes or as a way to supplant canonical cultural authority. As Marjorie Garber has remarked, Shakespeare is for many adapters “a monument to be toppled”20. Si l’on peut se fier à l’interview de Carroll sur la genèse de Stick Figure Hamlet, c’est le capital culturel incarné par Shakespeare qui en a été la motivation première : A few years ago, as a brainstorming activity, I was having friends throw one-liner titles at me, so I could draw them a funny picture. One of my friends suggested The Winter of Our Discontent, and I drew him a goofy stick figure for Richard III, standing in the snow. In order to make him a hunchback, I gave him a weird oval body, and I liked the look of it. It was a dopey little drawing, but I just liked how it looked... and decided that Stick Figure Shakespeare would be a hilariously insane project, just devoting a 300-page comic to one single joke, over and over again. I decided on

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Hamlet very quickly – it wouldn’t be as funny to do an irreverent, cartoony version of a comedy. I wanted to go with the most overwrought, emotional tragedy I could find, and that was Hamlet21. Carroll met en avant l’essence ludique de son adaptation depuis la description romancée de sa genèse, avec la multiplication d’épithètes comme « funny », « goofy », « weird », et « dopey », jusqu’au projet lui-même, décrit comme « hilariously insane », « cartoony » et « irreverent ». C’est seulement par la suite que la préoccupation pédagogique ou éducative s’est comme greffée sur le projet de façon interactive : The biggest thing that ended up influencing it was that around halfway through the first act, I started getting e-mails from teachers telling me that they loved it, and they wanted to use it to teach their students22.

Stratégies d’adaptation

11 C’est donc en fonction de ces motivations qu’il faut analyser les choix et les stratégies mis en place dans Stick Figure Hamlet comme autant de gestes de mise en scène. Certains choix sont dictés par le média adopté et les conventions graphiques retenues ; d’autres peuvent s’expliquer par le désir didactique d’expliciter un texte difficile ; d’autres, enfin, permettent de déduire une lecture et interprétation personnelle de la pièce. Or, comme nous allons le voir, ces trois catégories se recoupent la plupart du temps, fruit de négociations entre contraintes techniques et interprétation personnelle.

12 Contrairement à la plupart des adaptations graphiques de Hamlet, Dan Carroll choisit d’effacer le plus possible tout marqueur temporel qui dénoterait une époque particulière. Même si ce choix n’est pas inévitablement dicté par la convention graphique du « bonhomme-allumette », il reste en parfaite adéquation avec la nature minimaliste du procédé, fournissant à des personnages réduits à quelques traits distinctifs, un cadre tout aussi dépouillé. De fait, l’univers de ce Hamlet essaie d’introduire le moins d’anachronismes possible. C’est ce que confie l’auteur dans une interview : It was a decision I made early on – whenever possible, avoid anachronisms. I didn’t want to flagrantly insert anything that would break the time period... thought I still cheat about that, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are blatantly done as Bert and Ernie, the ghost in the first scene is a Pacman ghost23.

13 Le spectre a effectivement la forme des fantômes dans le fameux jeu d’arcade, à laquelle Carroll ajoute une couronne ainsi que des bras et des jambes. Le traitement de Rosencrantz et Guildenstern est plus complexe que l’inspiration avouée de Sesame Street, car la première fois qu’ils apparaissent à l’acte II, scène i, leur mise en situation renvoie au début du film que Tom Stoppard a adapté de sa propre pièce, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990), et qui montre les deux protagonistes aux prises avec l’impossible série de probabilités qui survient dans leur partie de « pile ou face » (Illustration 4). À ces deux concessions, il faut ajouter deux clins d’œil tout aussi flagrants et empruntés surtout à la culture cinématographique : l’un à l’univers de Disney, lors de la scène du verger contée par le spectre à l’acte I, scène v, qui utilise un cliché de Bambi en guise de décor idyllique (Illustration 5) ; l’autre à l’affiche du Hamlet de Franco Zeffirelli (1990), qui reproduit le même agencement des personnages autour de Hamlet à l’exception du fantôme (Illustrations 6 et 7).

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Illustration 4 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte II, scène i.

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Illustration 5 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte I, scène v.

Illustration 6 : Franco Zeffirelli, Hamlet, 1990.

Affiche. Production : Nelson Entertainment, Icon Productions, Carolco Pictures. Distribution : Time Warner, StudioCanal / Universal Pictures.

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Illustration 7 : Stick Figure Hamlet, page de titre.

14 Parmi les choix qui découlent plus ouvertement des conventions graphiques retenues, le plus important est de loin celui de la caractérisation des personnages. L’adaptation minimaliste en bonhomme-allumette oblige Carroll à trouver dans cette économie de moyens des astuces pour différencier les protagonistes de façon très claire. La simplification graphique de la silhouette laisse relativement peu de marge de manœuvre. Carroll joue sur la rondeur du tronc ou de la tête, s’interdit les vêtements et limite les accessoires « intégrés » à un couvre-chef (couronne pour le couple royal ou les monarques défunts) et des cheveux dont la présence devient, avec la poitrine, le trait caractéristique de la féminité (la blonde Gertrude et la brune Ophélie)24. Pour différencier les personnages masculins, il adopte un tronc entièrement noir pour Hamlet, et les autres hommes se distinguent par leur système pileux : moustache et barbichette pour Claudius, barbe plus fournie pour Hamlet père et une moustache seule pour Polonius. Les liens de sang semblent être suggérés par la forme de la tête : ovale pour Claudius, Gertrude et Hamlet, ronde pour Polonius, Laërte, et Horatio, mais pas Ophélie. Un autre trait distinctif oppose deux groupes de personnages. La plupart ont les yeux ronds, tandis que d’autres ont les yeux en amande. En fait, en raison de la caractérisation des démons évoqués par les flammes infernales, cette division semble opposer des personnages « bons » ou « neutres » aux « méchants », parmi lesquels il faut alors compter Claudius, bien sûr, mais également Laërte, Hamlet père, et Fortinbras père et fils. Cela induit une lecture de la pièce à première vue assez manichéenne car on ne peut s’empêcher d’être influencé par les dessins qui enferment ces personnages dans des rôles types. Mais en même temps, une telle lecture ouvre des possibilités d’interprétation en décalage avec le texte de la pièce. Même le spectre, qui pourtant est représenté en fantôme de Pacman, rendant impossible la ressemblance avec ce qu’il était de son vivant, participe de cette logique manichéenne puisque ses yeux sont ronds (y compris quand le fantôme est représenté comme démon potentiel) contrairement à ceux de Hamlet père de son vivant. La forme de la tête d’Ophélie et celle des yeux de Hamlet père permettent d’envisager pour la caractérisation des personnages une logique équivalente à une focalisation externe dont le foyer serait Hamlet : la tête ovale d’Ophélie dénoterait alors sa proximité affective avec le prince, tandis que les yeux « méchants » du père joueraient sur le complexe d’Œdipe.

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Illustration 8 : personnages de Stick Figure Hamlet.

15 Une autre conséquence de la convention du bonhomme-allumette est l’absence de signes visibles du manteau de la folie (« antic disposition »), puisque Hamlet n’a ni vêtements ni cheveux. Hamlet est le même à l’acte I qu’à l’acte II. En revanche, il est le seul à évoluer au cours de l’histoire. Parfaitement glabre jusqu’à son départ pour l’Angleterre, il apparaît avec une barbe de trois jours lorsqu’il se rend au bateau à l’acte IV, scène iv, et après son périple en mer il revient, à l’acte V, scène i, avec un bouc qui n’est pas sans rappeler la barbe plus fournie de son père défunt. Cette évolution unique fait ressortir Hamlet non seulement en tant que centre de la pièce mais, par rapport aux autres, fait de lui un personnage « plus en chair », ayant une « vie » à lui. À ce propos, il est intéressant de voir que les comédiens qui viennent à Elseneur sont les seuls autres personnages à avoir un tronc noir, ce qui suggère que Carroll a souhaité conférer à Hamlet une dimension métathéâtrale, sans doute inspirée par la lecture de Stoppard. L’importance de cette dimension est reflétée davantage encore par la représentation de la folie sous forme de marionnette animée par Hamlet lorsqu’il fait ses excuses à Laërte avant le duel de l’acte V, scène ii, ainsi que par le tableau final qui referme la bande dessinée comme une pièce de théâtre.

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Illustration 9 : évolution de Hamlet et les comédiens de Stick Figure Hamlet.

16 Parmi d’autres choix qui peuvent se justifier par la nature du média dans lequel s’exprime l’adaptateur, on relève une tendance générale à doubler les hypotyposes et autres passages narratifs qui s’y prêtent par des visualisations, tendance sans doute héritée des codes cinématographiques. Les plus mémorables d’entre eux sont la description des dangers d’un spectre maléfique par les amis de Hamlet à l’acte I, scène iv, et la mort d’Ophélie à l’acte IV, scène vii.

17 Ce qui frappe le plus dans Stick Figure Hamlet, c’est la mise en page du texte qui abandonne délibérément toute trace de versification, y compris dans l’entretien avec les comédiens ou la pièce dans la pièce, où le pentamètre iambique rimé est délibérément déconstruit et réarrangé en phrases. On peut supposer derrière cette décision une volonté de rendre le texte moins « décourageant » pour un jeune public qui pourrait rechigner à lire de la poésie. Mais c’est surtout par l’humour, par une forme de contrepoint comique graphique, que Carroll entend exorciser toute appréhension devant la difficulté du texte. Le jeu de mots visuel ou la plaisanterie jouent effectivement un rôle central et constituent même un point de convergence de ses diverses motivations. Nous avons vu que son projet était parti d’une plaisanterie, et que Carroll l’envisageait comme « follement hilarant ». Par la suite, en avançant dans l’illustration du premier acte, il s’est rendu compte du fort potentiel comique que renferme la tragédie : Very little work was needed for me to make it funny, and I started looking at the play with an eye towards what’s already funny in here, that I can bring out25. Dès lors, outre la mise en images de l’intrigue, le travail de Carroll a consisté soit à ajouter des effets comiques soit à souligner ceux qui existaient déjà.

18 L’essence ludique du projet de Carroll est effectivement servie par deux procédés assez proches : l’ajout et l’emphase graphiques. Puisque l’adaptateur a décidé de rester fidèle au texte original, l’illustration est le seul espace de liberté dont il dispose pour agir sur sa source. L’un des objectifs de ces procédés est d’expliciter le contenu du texte. C’est clairement le cas de l’élaboration d’un gag autour du passage sur le « hobby horse » (III.ii.143) où Hamlet bouscule Ophélie et la fait tomber de sa chaise. Quelques vers auparavant dans la même scène, c’est l’expression « Vulcan’s stithy » (III.ii.89), dont le sens est sans doute peu transparent pour un jeune lecteur du XXIe siècle, qui reçoit l’illustration d’un Hamlet enragé poursuivant Claudius une hache à la main. Ou encore l’illustration d’un Hamlet lubrique pour expliciter le sens des « unholy suits » (I.iii.138). L’exemple le plus réussi à mes yeux est l’explicitation de l’expression « edified by the margent » (V.ii.168) pour laquelle Carroll ajoute une note marginale en abyme (Illustration 10).

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Illustration 10 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte V, scène ii.

19 Dans la même lignée, on peut mentionner l’effet de pause que Carroll insère après la première tirade un peu longue et pleine de formulations métaphoriques de la pièce (« Who is’t that can inform me? / That can I », I.i.90-91), suggérant que Barnardo est lui-même surpris de ce qu’il vient de dire à Horatio. C’est une façon d’anticiper la difficulté du lecteur et de le préparer aux tirades et monologues encore plus longs qui vont suivre. D’autres ajouts puisent dans le fonds des situations codifiées propres à la bande dessinée ou au dessin animé. Ainsi, les protestations de Polonius de n’utiliser aucun art à l’acte II scène ii sont visuellement traduites par un gag rendu populaire par Tex Avery dans ses dessins animés, référence qui reparaît dans l’interview de l’auteur à travers le terme « cartoony » (Illustration 11). À la fin de la première apparition du spectre acte I, scène i, Carroll ajoute une mini-réapparition à peine perceptible en haut à gauche de

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l’image dans la lumière de l’aube naissante, qui rappelle un autre gag du même

répertoire (Illustration 12).

Illustration 11 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte II, scène ii.

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Illustration 12 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte I, scène i.

20 Les plus élaborés de ces procédés sont ceux qui opèrent un effet de contrepoint graphique, lorsque l’image cesse d’être en adéquation avec le texte pour proposer une polyphonie qui génère non seulement du comique, mais parfois une prise de position critique par rapport au texte.

21 Avant que Hamlet n’aille rejoindre le spectre de son père à l’acte I, scène v, les tentatives des gardes de l’en empêcher sont transformées en bagarre agrémentée des nuages remplis d’éclairs et de signes symbolisant les coups, ainsi que de bulles rédigées en majuscules pour représenter les hurlements, deux conventions typiques de la bande dessinée (Illustration 13). Ce contrepoint entre en résonnance avec la scène de « comic relief » que Shakespeare aménage au moment du triple serment et cette résonnance s’étend également à la fin de l’entretien entre Hamlet et le spectre, lorsque Hamlet inscrit son devoir de mémoire dans ses tablettes et que Carroll nous en montre le contenu, en donnant ainsi un autre sens au vers « So, uncle, there you are » qui renvoie ici à une caricature de Claudius trépassé (Illustration 14).

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Illustration 13 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte I, scène iv.

Illustration 14 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte I, scène v.

22 Il est impossible dans l’espace d’un article d’offrir un examen exhaustif de tels ornements ou détournements dont l’étendue peut varier de la simple plaisanterie, comme le marquage de l’épée empoisonnée lors du duel à l’acte V, scène ii avec une étiquette « not poison, honest », à une référence plus savante, comme l’arrivée des comédiens à l’acte II, scène ii, dont le déguisement renvoie à des pièces ayant précédé Hamlet, parmi lesquelles on reconnaît A Midsummer Night’s Dream et Julius Caesar (voir Illustration 9 ci-dessus), voire la combinaison d’une référence historique avec un clin d’œil à la dimension pédagogique du projet, lorsqu’à l’acte V scène ii, Carroll donne au roi d’Angleterre les traits d’Élisabeth Ire lisant un QCM illustrant l’amitié entre le Danemark et l’Angleterre (Illustration 15).

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Illustration 15 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte V, scène ii.

23 Je terminerai cette analyse par un choix de mise en scène qui ne me semble tributaire d’aucune des motivations que je viens de décrire. Il concerne la pièce de résistance de toute adaptation de Hamlet, le troisième monologue du prince. Alors que Carroll choisit une façon parfaitement conventionnelle de représenter les autres monologues, tantôt laissant Hamlet seul au milieu des cases, tantôt ayant recours à la visualisation de l’hypotypose, pour « To be or not to be », il choisit de transformer le monologue en dialogue à une voix, Hamlet s’adressant à Ophélie du début à la fin de la tirade, sous la surveillance de Polonius et Claudius, laquelle est appuyée par le changement de cadrage au milieu du monologue (Illustration 16).

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Illustration 16 : Stick Figure Hamlet, Acte III, scène i.

24 Le cœur du monologue est traité, comme d’autres monologues, par une hypotypose déclenchée par l’expression de « mer de douleurs », plaçant Hamlet et Ophélie au bord d’une falaise surplombant la mer. Mais ce qui est plus original c’est le changement de perspective qui lui succède immédiatement et qui permet à Carroll de joindre aux réactions d’Ophélie celles de Claudius et de Polonius, au moment où Hamlet évoque la crainte de l’au-delà. On ne peut s’empêcher d’établir un parallèle avec la façon dont ce monologue avait été porté à l’écran par Branagh, où, exactement au même passage du monologue, Branagh insère un contre-champ de Claudius en train d’espionner Hamlet derrière le miroir. Le fait que Carroll transforme le monologue en dialogue rend plus logique l’idée que Hamlet s’exprime à voix haute devant Ophélie et, par conséquent, que Claudius et Polonius puissent l’entendre. De plus, les deux espions affichent leur totale incompréhension de ce qu’ils entendent, renversant ainsi le rapport de pouvoir entre dominant et dominé, en phase avec les détournements ludiques de la pièce. La complexité de la mise en image du monologue « To be or not to be » montre bien que l’auteur impose ici une vision personnelle de la scène, au même titre que le ferait un metteur en scène.

25 De prime abord, par ses choix minimalistes, Stick Figure Hamlet pourrait paraître conforter une vision réductrice de l’œuvre de Shakespeare, mais en analysant l’ensemble de plus près, j’espère avoir montré que l’audace et la complexité de son traitement vont bien au-delà d’une œuvre pour la jeunesse, à laquelle on assimile habituellement les adaptations en bande dessinée de Shakespeare. Ainsi, ce n’est pas parce qu’on s’adresse à un public plus ou moins jeune que l’adaptation de Hamlet est nécessairement superficielle. À cet égard, Stick Figure Hamlet fait preuve non seulement d’inventivité dans le détournement des clichés et icônes, mais également d’une

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connaissance approfondie de la pièce et témoigne de l’importance de Hamlet quel que soit le type de culture envisagé.

26 En cela, Carroll est parfaitement représentatif et tributaire de l’évolution de la bande dessinée dans les dernières décennies du XXe siècle, où le public recherché s’est peu à peu déplacé des enfants vers les adolescents, puis vers des jeunes adultes, glissement reflété à partir de la fin des années 1980 par la préférence des auteurs de bande dessinée pour le terme de « roman graphique ». Cette transformation du public a également renversé les rapports de la bande dessinée à l’œuvre de Shakespeare. Il n’est désormais plus uniquement question de faire découvrir des œuvres à un public qui ne peut encore les lire, mais d’offrir un regard neuf et légitime sur une œuvre connue au même titre que tout autre media.

27 D’ailleurs, il est intéressant d’observer chez Carroll le décalage entre la façon dont la pièce est traitée et la manière dont il en fait la publicité. Sur le site de Stick Figure Hamlet, comme sur la couverture, c’est sans surprise le crâne et la scène du cimetière qui symbolisent la pièce, mais sur le site dédié à l’ensemble du travail de Carroll26, ce même motif est détourné vers une plaisanterie : le crâne de Yorick se retrouve à l’intérieur d’une boule à neige où tantôt il sourit et tantôt fait triste mine.

28 Déjà en 2006, Wetmore défendait l’idée selon laquelle la bande dessinée recourt à des procédés d’adaptation et de mise en scène plus proches du théâtre que n’importe quel autre type de support, car comme le théâtre elle allie le verbe à l’image27. C’est exactement ce que l’on constate dans le travail de Dan Carroll qui, sans avoir besoin d’ajouter de commentaire textuel, se contente de traiter l’image comme le metteur en scène le fait avec le décor et la mise en scène. Et il ne semble pas être le seul. Même si, en réalité, c’est avec le cinéma (plutôt que le théâtre) que le rapprochement s’avère plus pertinent, du fait d’un point de vue unique et dirigé qu’offrent ces deux médias, c’est néanmoins le parallèle avec le théâtre que revendique une autre adaptation du texte intégral de Hamlet en bande dessinée par l’Australienne Nicki Greenberg parue en 2010, où dès la couverture, l’illustratrice entend rapprocher sa démarche de celle du metteur en scène : « William Shakespeare’s Hamlet staged on the page. »

NOTES

1. Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., « ‘The Amazing Adventures of Superbard’: Shakespeare in Comics and Graphic Novels », in Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., et Robert York (éds.), Shakespeare and Youth Culture, 2006, p. 171-198. En français comme en anglais, il existe plusieurs termes pour désigner ce mode d’expression artistique classé comme le « neuvième art ». En anglais, comic correspondait à l’origine à des historiettes de quelques cases qui pouvaient ensuite être réunies en volume, tandis qu’à partir des années 1970 le terme de graphic novel s’est progressivement imposé pour désigner une forme plus « sérieuse » d’ouvrages qui développaient une intrigue complexe. Ce terme fut à son tour repris en français et le « roman graphique » y a la même connotation de légitimation d’un art qui ne soit plus uniquement destiné à un public jeune. Dans le présent article, j’utilise systématiquement le terme de bande dessinée, évitant celui de roman

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graphique dans la mesure où celui-ci insiste sur une forme hybride (à la fois roman et œuvre graphique) ce qui a tendance à le faire paraître plus éloigné d’un texte théâtral. 2. Toutes les références à Hamlet renvoient à l’édition en ligne de la Folger Library : http:// www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&play=Ham&loc=p7 (consulté le 23 avril 2015). 3. Albert Uderzo et René Goscinny, La Grande traversée, Paris, Dargaud, 1975, p. 41 et 43. 4. Toutes les références renvoient au site : http://www.stickfigurehamlet.com/ (consulté le 23 avril 2015). 5. Famous Authors Illustrated: Hamlet, illustré par Henry Kiefer, adapté par Dana E. Dutch, n°8, Seaboard, 1950, 36p. 6. Classics Illustrated : Hamlet, illustré par Alex A. Blum, adapté par Samuel Willinsky, First Series, n°99, Gilberton, 1952, 48p. 7. Classics Illustrated: Hamlet, illustré par Tom Mandrake, adapté par Steven Grant, Second Series, n°5, First Classics Inc., 1991, 56p. 8. Respectivement, Saddleback’s Illustrated Classics: Hamlet, Saddleback Edu. Pub., 2003, 61p. ; Picture This! Shakespeare, illustré par Christina Lacie, Hauppauge, NY, Barron's Educational Series, 2006, 80p. ; Graffex Hamlet, illustré par Penko Gele, adapté par Kathy McEvoy, Hauppauge, NY, Barrons Educational Series, 2009, 48p. ; Hamlet, illustré par Leonid Gore, adapté par Bruce Coville, New York, Dial Books, 2004, 40p. 9. Alexis et Marcel Gotlib, Hamlet, in Pilote n°640 du 6 février 1972, 9p. 10. Hamlet (1976), illustré par Gianni De Luca, adapté par Barbare Graille, Les Humanoïdes associés, coll. « Noire », 1980. Parmi les innovations graphiques de De Luca, citons les planches sur lesquelles le mouvement décomposé de Hamlet reflète son état intérieur et accompagne ses soliloques. Voir Paul Gravett, « De Luca and Hamlet: Thinking Outside the Box », in European Comic Art n°1, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press vol. 1:1, printemps 2008, p. 20-35. 11. D’autres pièces de Shakespeare avaient déjà été adaptées dans leur intégralité, comme Othello qu’Oscar Zarate avait illustré dès 1983. 12. Respectivement, Hamlet, illustré par Emma Vieceli, New York, Amulet Books, 2007, 195p. ; Hamlet, illustré par Tintin Pantoja, adapté par Adam Sexton, Indianapolis, IN, Wiley Pub., 2008, 185p. 13. No fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels : Hamlet, illustré par Neil Babra, New York, Sparknotes, 2008, 208p. 14. http://netboy.com/blog/ (consulté le 23 avril 2015). 15. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, Londres, Routledge, 2006, p. 8. 16. Ibid., p. 39. 17. Pour son film, Branagh s’était servi du texte établi par G.R. Hibbard pour « The Oxford Shakespeare » et basé sur la version de l’in-folio de 1623. Je remercie Sarah Hatchuel pour cette précision. 18. Voir la documentation sur le site de Kickstarter : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ breadpig/to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-adventure (consulté le 23 avril 2015). 19. Hutcheon, op. cit., p. 91. 20. Ibid., p. 93. Hucheon cite Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost-Writers, Londres, Methuen, 1987, p. 7. 21. http://gapersblock.com/bookclub/2010/07/06/one-shots_dan_carroll/ (consulté le 23 avril 2015). 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Carroll s’autorise toutefois une exception pour l’Ambassadeur qui accompagne Fortinbras dans la scène finale. 25. Carroll, op. cit. 26. http://www.herecomesyourdan.com/portal.html (consulté le 23 avril 2015).

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27. « Comics have their own aesthetic and their own methods of narrative that, like theatre, combines word with image. » (Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., op. cit., p. 172).

RÉSUMÉS

Partant d’une charte graphique minimaliste, Stick Figure Hamlet de Dan Carroll entreprend d’illustrer le texte « intégral » de Hamlet. Pour en rendre la lecture plus attractive, l’auteur introduit de nombreux « décalages » graphiques. Tantôt ceux-ci prennent la forme de références et allusions contemporaines qui établissent un contraste avec le texte classique d’Hamlet et tantôt ils offrent des situations graphiques qui, en prenant le contre-pied du texte, ajoutent une dimension humoristique à la tragédie. Ils peuvent être vus à la fois comme des choix de mise en scène (ou mise en image) et comme des stratégies et astuces dont le but est d’accompagner le lecteur dans des passages plus narratifs. Stick Figure Hamlet se distingue des autres adaptations graphiques de Hamlet conçues sur un mode plus « sérieux », car Carroll cultive une ambivalence par rapport à son modèle : la tension entre fidélité absolue au texte original et détournements visuels fréquents constitue le cœur même de cette adaptation.

Using a minimalistic graphic style, Dan Carroll’s Stick Figure Hamlet sets about illustrating the unabridged text of Hamlet. To make its reading more attractive, the author introduces graphic discrepancies. Sometimes those take the form of contemporary references or allusions, producing an anachronistic contrast with Hamlet’s text and sometimes they offer graphic situations which wrong-foot the text, adding a comic dimension to the tragedy. They can be seen both as staging (or layout) choices and as strategies and devices meant to accompany the reader in longer narrative passages of the play. Stick Figure Hamlet stands out against other graphic adaptations of Hamlet created in a “serious” mode, because Carroll cultivates ambivalence towards his model: the tension between total fidelity to the original text and regular visual wrong-footing is at the very heart of this adaptation.

INDEX

Mots-clés : adaptation, bande dessinée, Hamlet, webcomic Keywords : adaptation, graphic novel, Hamlet, webcomic

AUTEUR

PIERRE KAPITANIAK Université Paris 8

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YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE GREAT BARD! You never expected it to be easy did you, Marcia?

Marcia Williams

1 It seems to me that for too long, in Britain, there has been a conspiracy to keep Shakespeare from young people. We may have gone beyond the days when only well- educated boys were permitted a peak at Shakespeare but there is still a feeling among many that he is too difficult and only suitable for exam syllabuses. When I first went to see a Shakespeare play, my teacher made it such a big deal that I was literally sick on the theatre floor from nerves. After that it was years before I wanted to let Shakespeare into my life again – what a waste!

2 There is also a belief that when you retell Shakespeare’s plays for the young you diminish the plays or dumb them down. Perhaps particularly when you retell them in comic-strip form. My aim has never been to replace a Shakespeare play, or even to recreate it in its entirety, but to kindle a young person’s interest in Shakespeare and to act as a stepping stone to the Bard. It is inevitable that when you retell any story, it will lose much from its original language and some of its magic. However, I don’t think this should be seen as a deterrent. Retellings can give a new life to writings for and of another era. I see retelling the plays of Shakespeare much like the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe sees drawing a caricature. Asked how he creates a caricature and yet retains a likeness to the person, he says you should imagine the face to be a piece of chewing gum: you can stretch it this way and that, but there is always a breaking point; if you don’t respect that and break the chewing gum, you will lose the likeness. This is much how I see retelling classic tales. If I stretch the gum too far from its original and it breaks, then I have lost contact with Shakespeare and his plays. I am no longer a stepping stone to the Bard, but a boulder in the way. On the other hand, if I do not create my own vision of the play, and bring with it my knowledge of writing and creating comic strips for a younger audience, then I do Shakespeare a disservice by not

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giving it fresh life and vigour. So, that’s the theory, but of course the path of creativity never runs smoothly!

3 Working on Shakespeare turned out to be very, very different from working on other classics. My initial attempts to recreate the plays were not auspicious. For a start, my editor was firmly against me retelling Shakespeare’s plays. “You don’t mess with the Great Bard,” was her first reaction to my suggestion. When that failed to dissuade me and I put in another request, it was: “You do know that not everyone likes comic strips?”

4 In retrospect I should perhaps have listened to her more or at least road-tested the idea of creating comic-strip versions of the plays before persuading her to agree. But road- testing just tends to confirm the doubts that I inevitably have about my ability to create any book. So when it came to retelling Shakespeare’s plays I did what I always do and flung myself in at the deep end and prayed. I soon learned that my editor was right, but only in part... I am sure we should be meddling with the Bard, but maybe not quite as lightly as we meddle with other writers. This, I think, is not only because there are far more devotees of Shakespeare than any other author – and you sense that they all have their beady eyes on you – but also because he can be so very slippery! His plots, his characterization, his humour, his language and even his stage directions all demand detailed attention.

5 I started by trying to recreate Romeo and Juliet, a play I thought I knew quite well. I quickly discovered that there is a huge difference between ‘knowing’ for your own enjoyment and ‘knowing’ to give enjoyment to others. I was brought up on Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.1 There is much to admire in these retellings and I am loath to criticize them as they were of their time, but for me they always failed in what should be their most important task: to leave me, and I suspect other young readers, feeling excited about Shakespeare. It also has an amazingly sexist introduction by Charles Lamb, who doesn’t consider that a girl might read Shakespeare for herself, but suggests to the “young male reader” that he might like to share the more suitable passages with his sister!

6 Anyway, I feel that Lamb’s Tales tends to follow Shakespeare down some of his more confusing plot lines, losing the reader on the way. There is something very flat and humourless about them and they give no sense of theatre, magic, language or of Shakespeare’s wonderfully crafted characters. They also fail to make the connections between Shakespeare and young people, and there are so many of these: his incredibly visual language, his bawdy, often over-the-top humour, the universal and timeless arguments between parents and children, his witches, magic, cross-dressing and general madness.

7 However, my first retelling of Romeo and Juliet, if not similar to Lamb’s, was equally hopeless, although it was at least addressed to both boys and girls. I tried to recreate the play as a whole and it became a confusion of little pictures with my own text telling the story and my own text in the speech bubbles. I remember doing this even now, as it felt so wrong: it was as though I was putting words into Shakespeare’s mouth ˗ quite hopeless! Yet knowing something is wrong does not mean that you automatically know how to put it right.

8 I foolishly turned to my editor for help. Not surprisingly, she was unsympathetic. “Well,” she said, “you never expected it to be easy did you, Marcia?”

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9 I think I might have given up at that point but for a stroke of luck: the rebuilding of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames was underway. Although it wasn’t open for performances, you could have a guided tour with an actor whose enthusiasm for the Tudor theatre and ability to recreate its atmosphere in the mind’s eye was infectious.

10 Even though the original Globe was a theatre of professionals, it had its roots in medieval pageants and in the religious dramas that Shakespeare would have seen on the streets as a boy. The Globe was still partly open to the elements and still borrowed many ideas from these travelling players – many performances, for instance, ended with a jig, accompanied by a piper and a hobby-horse or with a short farce on some topical theme.

11 The audiences at the early Globe probably behaved much as though they were still watching a street performance. A trumpeter would blow the First Sounding, warning the audience that the players were ready. At the Third Sounding the play would begin, but the audience was not hushed! They joined in the actors’ lines, heckled, bought, ate, threw things, courted, pickpocketed and generally engaged in street activities. It seemed to me that in this small circular space the audience became a part of the performance.2

12 Of course some of this was already known to me, as I am sure it is to you, but actually seeing the venue and hearing about it on site made all the difference. It gave me that spark of inspiration that I needed to get the project off the ground. Standing in the space and imagining Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performing there was an eye-opener to me: the hustle and bustle of Tudor street life encapsulated in this tiny area! At last I had found the door through which I could enter and create my own retellings. I had been right to hesitate over my first attempts, because this was not about recreating stories but recreating plays. I now had a structure from which to build the ‘performances’ that I was determined to try and create on the page.

13 First of all, the cover of the book becomes the theatre itself with the musicians at the bottom calling you in to the performance (Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Marcia Williams, Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare! (cover)

Walker Books Ltd, 2009. Author’s own book reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

14 Then, you open the book and find a flag is flying and the first trumpet has sounded: you’d better hurry, the famous Globe Theatre is putting on a play! You look around to see if the boss will notice you leaving work. But you shouldn’t have worried, because when you join the throng of people processing to the theatre your boss is already there – and isn’t that our good Queen Bess? Sensible move her taking her ferret for there is bound to be an abundance of fleas amongst the audience! (Figure 2)

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Figure 2: Marcia Williams, Bravo, Mr. Shakespeare! (title page)

Walker Books Ltd, 2009. Author’s own book reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

15 You turn the page and you have passed through the door and into the Globe. Here a new world awaits you. You pay your penny if you’re a groundling, or your tuppence if you’re a toff, and get handed a playbill. Hurrah, a new season of plays is being presented and you are delighted to see the first play is As You Like It, set in the magical forest of Arden. You prepare yourself for an afternoon of fun and laughter. Then you notice that at the bottom of the playbill you are requested not to throw hard objects at the actors, so you discard your turnips and nuts and buy some over-ripe plums from a vendor, plus a pie for yourself and yet another beer. Perfect, you’re ready to turn the page, to where the performance is about to begin. (Figure 3)

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Figure 3: Marcia Williams, Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare! (As You Like It)

Walker Books Ltd, 2009. Author’s own book reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

16 As the play starts, you look around. If you’re a toff, you look down into the courtyard and wish the wind would change because those stinkards down there do truly stink! Ugh, and is that a rat you see scuttling between those filthy knaves? But you swill your wine and soon you are lost in Shakespeare’s world. If you’re a groundling, you jostle for position, whack a passing pickpocket and hurl your rotten plum at Frederick when he banishes Rosalind from the court. Then you spot Mr Shakespeare himself in the audience, cheering on the performers and refining their speeches for the next performance. Has he a quill on him? Might you get his autograph?

17 For this performance of As You Like It the players are mostly in tones of yellow and green and the audience are all in reds and pinks. This is to make a clear distinction between the two for the sake of my readers. The play is the thing – so visually it should appear to stand out. The audience act as a frame for the most important central content.

18 The tradition of comic strip is not as strong in England as it is in France. I was not allowed to read comics as a child because my mother considered them an abomination, full of American slang, bad English and inappropriate violence. Ironically, this is probably why I create comic strips now. Anyway, in my experience young people in England are far more adept at reading comic strips than adults are. It seems to be a skill and passion you put to one side in adulthood. Many adults are inclined to dismiss the comic strip as simplistic, yet when they try to read it, they are unable to move between its different and often complex layers. Children, from a very young age, seem to have little trouble with this, but even so it is important that the layout is clear and consistent so that readers always know where they are in the conceit. My aim is to make things accessible and not to confuse – I leave confusion to Shakespeare!

19 Yet, to answer those who feel that by making Shakespeare accessible to young people you are dumbing him down, I would say that there are some retellings which might do

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that, but there are also others which are rich and multi-layered. I believe that comic strip is an ideal way to retell a play, as it works on many levels and its dramatic content is closely aligned to the theatre; the comic strips are scenes on a page. Every theatrical performance is a collaboration between the director, the actors, the set and costume designers and, of course, the audience. In much the same way, the different layers a comic strip contains collaborate with each other to produce a dramatic performance. A sense of drama is created by the interaction between the audience, who sit in the borders of the page, the story text, the speech bubbles, and the pictures.

20 They also offer a variety of options for the child, just as the theatre does. The less confident readers will find a space that suits them and the more confident readers will weave their way through the multiple layers: the visual information in the main picture boxes; the story plot in the text boxes; Shakespeare’s own words in the bubble text. Or the reader can imagine him- or herself as part of the audience. Make his/her own bawdy comments or react to theirs. Though the audience’s comments are mostly designed to amuse and reflect the noisy behaviour of Elizabethan audiences, I do also use them to explain complex words or ideas. And if there is a particularly dark or violent act, I may get one of the audience to crack a joke to lighten the moment. Most importantly, the reader brings his or her own imagination to the performance. Just as in any performance you find your own space and your own meaning.

21 When I visit schools I find a huge variety of responses to the book. There are those who are immediately attracted to using it as a basis for their own dramatic performances. There are those who become obsessed with the audience and their comments, and others who lose themselves in the visual detail. Perhaps one of the most rewarding reactions was that of a young boy with dyslexia. I knew he couldn’t read, yet he put up his hand and asked if he could read the play, which was Julius Caesar, to the rest of his class. My heart missed a beat as I imagined a long, agonizing process of him stumbling over words and his classmates losing all interest in Shakespeare’s plays, now and forever. However, I didn’t want to puncture his enthusiasm so I had to let him stand up and give it a go. That boy was about nine years old and could hardly read a word, but was he visually literate! He read the pictures with such dramatic effect that the whole class was mesmerized and spontaneously applauded at the end.

22 As Cassius says in the play: How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er, In states unborn and accents yet unknown!3

23 In the next play in the book, Antony and Cleopatra, there is a totally new set of colours (Figure 4) and in Richard III, which follows, another palette still (Figure 5).

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Figure 4: Marcia Williams, Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare! (Antony and Cleopatra)

Walker Books Ltd, 2009. Author’s own book reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

Figure 5: Marcia Williams, Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare! (Richard III)

Walker Books Ltd, 2009. Author’s own book reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

24 This is for several reasons: the colours were chosen to reflect the setting, atmosphere and style of the play and so give the reader yet another layer of information. But perhaps more importantly, I also saw this as a way of achieving a pause, an imaginary curtain before the playgoer watches the next play. Few adults, let alone children would want to sit through two of Shakespeare’s plays back to back, so I wanted the colours to

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work as a visual check. Stop, pause, think: you are now entering a new world, are you ready? Maybe you want to go back and visit the one you’ve just left or spend time absorbing the last play before moving on to the next. I didn’t want the different performances to feel like different chapters of the same story. There is no denying that every play is massively condensed, but the book is still not designed to be raced through as a whole. Each play is so different, it is more than a new chapter – it is a new world.

25 When I was at school, I desperately wanted to become an actor. One of my worst childhood memories is of being cast as Peter Quince and not Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Once I left school I never pursued a career in the theatre but, through recreating these plays, I feel I have lived out my dream, for in a way I was actor, director, set and costume designer.

26 So, in the end, whether my audience is watching Richard III, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, or Twelfth Night, it is up to them to decide whether the performance works. I would like the readers to feel as though they are members of the audience, toff or stinkard! That having paid their entrance fee they can engage in heckling, cheering and generally participate in each performance. Perhaps then, when they get the chance to see a Shakespeare play on stage, they will be full of anticipation and think, like Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, “Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears” (5.1.55˗56).

27 Or, at the very least, throw a ripe plum or two!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marcia Williams, Tales from Shakespeare – The Bard’s Greatest Plays, Walker Books, 2015.

---, Tales from Shakespeare, Walker Books, 2014.

---, The Marvellous Plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, Walker Books, 2014.

---, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, Walker Books, 2014.

---, Lizzy Bennet’s Diary – Inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Walker Books, 2013.

---, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Walker Books, 2007.

---, Oliver Twist and Other Great Dickens Stories, Walker Books, 2002.

---, Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare!, Walker Books, 2000.

---, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Plays, Walker Books, 1999.

NOTES

1. Charles et Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare, London & New York, JM Dent, 1975.

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2. On how to depict the original Globe and Elizabethan theatre, see for instance the illustrated book by Aliki, William Shakespeare & the Globe, London, Harper Collins, 1999; also see C.W. Hodges, Enter the Whole Army. A Pictorial Study of Shakespearean Staging 1576-1616, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. 3. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.1.111˗113, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Glasgow & New York, Oxford University Press, 1945. Further references will be to this edition.

ABSTRACTS

In the past, Shakespeare has not been made accessible to young people in Britain. Retellings should be seen as an introduction to the original, a reanimation, not as a desecration. It is not easy to retell the plays. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre showed Marcia Williams how the audience interacted with the plays and therefore how to recreate them by involving the reader in a similar way. The many layers of a comic strip mirror the elements of a theatrical production. The reader is the audience and participates in the performance. The comic strip allows each child to respond in a way that suits him or her and get the most from their involvement.

Pendant longtemps les jeunes Britanniques n’ont pas vraiment eu accès à Shakespeare. Une réécriture, une adaptation, devrait se concevoir comme une introduction à l’original, une réanimation, et non pas une profanation. Il n’est pas facile d’adapter les pièces de Shakespeare. Grâce au Théâtre du Globe à Londres, Marcia Williams a pu découvrir comment le public réagissait aux pièces, ce qui lui a permis de les recréer en impliquant le lecteur de la même façon. Les différents niveaux d’une bande dessinée correspondent aux éléments d’une représentation théâtrale. Le lecteur fait partie du public et participe à la représentation. La bande dessinée invite chaque enfant à réagir à sa façon et à profiter au maximum de son expérience de lecture.

INDEX

Keywords: Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, comic strips, Globe Theatre, Lamb Charles and Mary, retelling the classics, retelling Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare and young people, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet Mots-clés: adaptation, Antoine et Cléopâtre, Comme il vous plaira, classiques littéraires, Lamb Charles et Mary, réécritures de Shakespeare, Richard III, Roméo et Juliette, Shakespeare pour la jeunesse, Théâtre du Globe

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