1 Bloody Poetry

Bloody Poetry: Measure for Measure in the Hands of Howard Brenton In 1973, playwright Howard Brenton’s political drama, Magnificence, was produced at the Royal Court theatre, bringing the Marxist playwright to the fore of national consciousness. Since then, plays such as Pravda, Bloody Poetry, and Christie in Love have cemented Brenton’s reputation as a political provocateur. Although the most infamous response to Brenton’s work is the crusade that Mary Whitehouse launched against the “immorality” of his 1980 play, The Romans in Britain, which resulted in the attempted prosecution of the play’s director, Michael Bognadov, by 1972, Brenton had already incurred the ire of the British government, being forced to amend a play that depicted the influential British politician Enoch Powell as a racist, tyrannical, hypocritical sexual predator. That play was Measure for Measure. During the 1970s in England, the fluctuation between economic orthodoxy that resulted from the exchange of governments, combined with the rising dissatisfaction of Labour’s ongoing adherence to its executive council effectively spelled the death of the post-war hopes for a socialist Britain and paved the way for Thatcher’s brand of free- market politics. The untenably high rates of inflation, ever-increasing unemployment, and widespread union action that characterized the 1970s created a civil dissatisfaction that cut to the heart of British identity, producing a Conservative political rhetoric that identified economic prosperity as part of a class system that was meritoriously reflective of national character. The theatre community responded to these shifts in the socio- economic environment with a body of work that interrogated class politics, using Britain’s canonical cultural history to advance a subversive political agenda. Playwrights and directors of the era, including Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Snoo Wilson, Bill 1 Gaskill, and Max Stafford-Clark, reconceptualized the uses to be made of early modern theatre, adapting Shakespeare’s plays as part of a new movement that exchanged conceptions of realism for a semiotic exploration of theatre’s obligation to its world. This work tailored epic theatre, eschewing Brecht’s “tendency towards the dogmatization” (Lehmann 33) in favor of an aesthetic that demanded more critical engagement of its audience. Rejecting direct historical verisimilitude, the adaptive playwrights used literature to approximate a sense of historicity that was more encompassing of the artist’s position as the mediator of cultural heritage. Such drama positioned itself within the fault lines of class-based socio-economics and emphasized language as the key to cultural intervention, using the nationalist cultural iconography of Shakespeare to radically rethink the purpose of such literature. Howard Brenton has repeatedly defined himself as a Marxist playwright,, asserting that his plays “are written unreservedly in the cause of socialism (Hay and Roberts 135). Brenton also repeatedly described himself as “left of Brecht” during the early 1970s, insisting that Brecht’s works were archaically unperformanable (Reinelt 46). Brenton’s choice to begin his career with treatments of Shakespearean drama – Shakespeare directly influences several of his early plays, including Measure for Measure, Greenland, The Churchill Play, Revenge, and A Fart for Europe – is a tacit acknowledgment of the role of the artist as curator of history, and insists that Shakespeare, under aggressive critical interpretation, can stand for cultural intervention, and command discourse in a way that Brecht could no longer do. Brenton’s choice to adapt Shakespeare’s plays to reflect contemporary concerns enacts the critical inquiry that presentism seeks to achieve when it examines the 2 convergence of then and now in support of its articulation of literature as “a present experience of historical difference” (Fernie 175). This project has grown as a response to last year’s SAA plenary in which Jonathan Dollimore sought to reaffirm cultural materialism as an “evolving critical practice” (Dollimore, “Then,” 40) that will continue to challenge the academe, seeking ways in which our discipline can negotiate cultural and political orthodoxy. Recent theatrical stagings, such as the National Theatre of Wales’ 2012 Welsh-language staging of Coriolanus, and the Donmar Warehouse’s 2013-4 all- female productions of Julius Caesar and Henry IV, continue to reflect the political immediacy of Shakespearean drama, and yet, similar insistence on the contemporary relevance of Shakespeare’s work is conspicuously lacking in modern critical studies, resulting in a discipline that seems increasingly disengaged with the twenty-first century. The questions that the playwrights of the 1970s and 1980s raised, when faced with the increasingly apparent failure of a socialist dream, are questions that have an immedte relevance to post-Occupy, twenty-first century culture, when the politics of art are increasingly marginalized by humanities departments and theatre companies struggling for their financial lives in a market-oriented world. To ask critics to engage in an examination of the contemporary authority of Shakespeare is to examine our own complicity in “prolonging that malaise” (Ryan, “Troilus and Cressida,” 180) that isolates academic criticism, from those who have the capacity to transform the future. The recent rice in criticism, however, that conflates performance practice and literary criticism, found in work that considers appropriations, globalized Shakespeares, and Shakespeare’s place wtihin new media, are making a strong case for the modern 3 relevance of Shakespeare.1 Moreover, recent definitions of contemporary theatre as “postdramatic” allows a analogous entry into the “open ended series of presences” (Fernie 176) that must converge if the Shakespearean critic is to bring Marxism back to the foreground as part of an “improvisatory and interactive” (Fernie 177) critical practice. Postdramatic theatre is predicated on the principle of exceeding the limits of Brecht’s vision, recognizing that the parallaxical dramatic text (whatever form that my be) “engages the political realities of our ‘mediatized and globalized’ world by refusing to ‘represent’ a reality which is no longer really representable as drama” (Woolf 43-49). This resistance to the conceptual logic of the predetermined text is manifest in not only the adaptive culture of Shakespeare that new media engenders, but the commerce of theory that has built up around the texts. The Shakespearean archive has endured for four hundred years because of its capacity to represent and reflect the cultural and political philosophies of every era that produces it, whether that be in a performative or critical mode. 2 Moreover, the unique nature of the Shakespearean text across critical and performance history, with its capacity to accrue meaning like a snowball rolling down a mountain, resists the limits of the synthesis of dramatic, or critical consolidation, insisting on its own status of a work-in-progress, even as it affirms the value of the representational text. 1 The work of such critics as Christy Desmet, W.B. Worthen, Michael Dobson, Sujata Iyengar (to merely tap the tip of the iceberg) is leading the way in recognizing the Shakespearean text as a process constantly in flux. 2 My argument is indebted to Kidnie’s recognition of adaptive practices that recognizes the appropriation as a process in which “one constructs a provisional definition of the ‘truth’ of the work through ongoing debate” (Kidnie 30), an argument that expands beyond the adaptive methodology, into the act of critical study itself. This is a point that Kidnie herself tacitly acknowledges when she notes that, “by marking where a failure of consensus occurs and considering the terms in which the conflict is represented, one can discern something like the present and evolving limits of a particular dramatic work” (31). 4 In Measure for Measure, Brenton repurposes Shakespeare’s lower classes to capitalize on “the possibility of recovering the history of the excluded” (Dollimore, “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism,” 476). His appropriation of early modern drama is two-fold: firstly, it reclaims the Jacobean aesthetic, recognizing a discontinuity between past and present that can be utilized in the service of his Marxist theme - that is to say, he fractures the familiarity of Jacobean literature by drawing our attention to the similarity of the past, and asks the audience to recognize the real distinction between the two; secondly, it implicates the place of Shakespeare in a contemporary elitist hierarchy that it attempts to upend by unleashing Shakespeare’s radical potential in order to use it in service of his own dramaturgy. Brenton’s adaptive processes make literal the presentist critic’s aim of embracing the text’s “true historicity as a changing being in time” (Fernie 179) and foregrounds the texts’ Marxist critique by commodifying the sex that activates the plot of Shakespeare’s play. Brenton not only recognizes that “subversive knowledge emerges under pressure of contradictions in the dominant ideology which also fissure subjectivity” (Dollimore “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism,” 482), but through radical adaptations of Shakespeare, enacts such pressure. Shakespearean verse, in Brenton’s Measure for Measure, becomes the language of coercion and self-delusion, implicating the place of Shakespeare as an icon of a culture that has become a tool of what the doxa.

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