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11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

ISSN 1554-6985 V O L U M E X I · N U M B E R (/current) 1

F A L L 2 0 1 7 (/previous) G l o b a l S h a k e s p e a r e s i n (/about) W o r l d M a r k e t s a n d A r c h i v e s (/archive) E D I T E D B Y

A l e x a A l i c e J o u b i n

C O N T E N T S

Global Shakespeares in World Markets and Archives: An Alexa Alice Introduction to the Special Issue (/783688/show) (pdf) Joubin (/783688/pdf)

The Past is a Foreign Country: World Musics Signifying Kendra Preston History in/and Elizabethan Drama (/783573/show) (pdf) Leonard (/783573/pdf)

Race, Post-Race, Shakespeare, and South Africa Adele Seeff (/783544/show) (pdf) (/783544/pdf)

Beds, Handkerchiefs, and Moving Objects in Othello Sujata Iyengar (/783651/show) (pdf) (/783651/pdf)

Comrade Fortinbras and Bourgeois Hamlet: Global Leftist Jeffrey Butcher Hamletism (/783633/show) (pdf) (/783633/pdf)

Reading Madness in the Archive: Shakespeare's Unread Richard Burt "Letters" (/783684/show) (pdf) (/783684/pdf)

The Art of Curation: Searching for Global Shakespeares in the Christy Desmet Digital Archives (/783934/show) (pdf) (/783934/pdf)

A P P R O P R I A T I O N S I N P E R F O R M A N C E www.borrowers.uga.edu/7167/toc 1/2 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Jennifer Drouin Five Kings: Adapting Welles Adapting Shakespeare in Québec and Fiona (/783936/show) (pdf) (/783936/pdf) Ritchie

"Thou Art Translated": Peter Sellars's Midsummer Chamber Carol Mejia Play (/783685/show) (pdf) (/783685/pdf) LaPerle

B O O K R E V I E W

Review of Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Alexa Alice Possibility of Politics, by Emily Sun (/783689/show) (pdf) Joubin (/783689/pdf)

C O N T R I B U T O R S

Contributors (/783635/show) (pdf) (/783635/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

www.borrowers.uga.edu/7167/toc 2/2 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Global Shakespeares in World Markets and Archives:

(/current) An Introduction to the Special Issue

ALEXA ALICE JOUBIN, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT

Shakespeare is a local force to be reckoned with in the global marketplace and in digital and analog archives of collective memory. With the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in 2014 and quatercentenary in 2016, there are several high-profile instances of global Shakespeare being tapped for its market value. The exchange value of Shakespeare is reflected in uses of Shakespearean themes and artifacts in appropriations, cultural diplomacy, and venues where nation states project soft power. There are no world markets without the proliferation of archives built on collective cultural memory. Conversely, there would be no archives without the cultural marketplace to validate that Shakespearean artifacts are archive-worthy in the first place.

IS SHAKESPEARE A UNIVERSAL CURRENCY? Shakespeare is a local force to be reckoned with in the global marketplace. Is Shakespeare a universal currency in world markets? A wide range of moral, political, and aesthetic values — profitable or threatening, as the case may be — have been associated with Shakespeare, and the values fluctuate and change over time. Value is subject to context, market demand, and ideological needs (Haines 2017, 1). The history plays seem to uphold monarchy even as they reveal its limits, and the gender politics in comedies are simultaneously liberating and oppressive. Shakespeare is far from a tabula rasa. As critics have recognized, Shakespeare's enduring appeal does not rest solely on "his linguistic virtuosity . . . nor on the power of the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." Jonathan Bate has argued that a www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 1/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation combination of "permanent truths and historical contingencies" has contributed to Shakespeare's status today (2007, 40).

What criticism has not examined in depth is the factor of the world cultural marketplace. Shakespeare remains alive today in large part because the canon has become a self-validating, self-regenerating commodity in the global cultural marketplace. Shakespeare is alive not because of the canon's fixed value as determined by any one single factor. No single entity has enough clout to influence global market volatility or the trading value of a cultural commodity. The tantalizing, dramaturgical gap between declared values and inferred intentions in the performance space generated by Shakespeare's plays keep them afloat in varying historical moments and in the ecosystem of world literature.

Shakespeare is our contemporary because the actions and objects from the worlds of Shakespeare overlap with and affect those from our worlds. Two of the most iconic props, Othello's handkerchief and bed, are transformed into an eroticized red patta or scarf that doubles as ceremonial wedding sheets in the South Indian film Kaliyattam (dir. Jayaraaj, 1997) to signify fertility and life and, in turn, to highlight the lack thereof. Tracing the journeys of such tokens sheds new light on the role of the handkerchief in Othello and Shakespeare's place in the cultural marketplace.1

Not only do props have an afterlife, but Shakespearean venues too have a life of their own. Multiple festivals have centered their entire branding effort on Shakespearean sites, including David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. In modern times, Elsinore in Denmark has been marketed as "Hamlet's castle" since the twentieth century. The annual Hamlet Sommer festival and its site-specific performances of Hamlet at Elsinore make the castle a self-fulfilling myth and product that comes full circle. As part of their effort to tap into the Shakespearean currency, the castle management actively encouraged use of the Elizabethan English spelling used by Shakespeare, Elsinore, rather than the Danish name Helsingör.

Contrary to expectations, imaginations of Shakespearean universality do not beget monotonic, repetitive, fossilized performances. Each culture and generation rebrand Shakespeare as their own, just as Shakespeare uses existing words in new contexts (such as "manager of mirth" in the entertainment business in A Midsummer Night's Dream [5.1.38]). Shakespeare as a brand and an "archive-worthy" collectible is driving the growth in diversity in the entertainment industry while simultaneously sustaining traditional aesthetic values associated with classical literature. Jonathan Hope's research reveals that the notion that Shakespeare invents large numbers of new English words is itself a myth sustained simultaneously by a tautology about the Bard's "greatness" and by a form of intellectual, archival laziness (2012, 83). The OED regularly traces the origin of a word to Shakespeare and not further back simply because the name Shakespeare is taken as a mythical point of origin for all things English.

In the modern context, Indian music in British director Tim Supple's production of Twelfth Night (2003) helps to construct the aural landscape of a British Illyria while signifying the different origins of Viola and Sebastian in the adaptation. Meanwhile, Hamlet as a figure of thought keeps turning up in unlikely places, ranging from a filial, patriotic prince in a Confucius temple in mid-twentieth century China to a www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 2/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation procrastinating politician in Germany and the USA (often without Yorick's skull). Taken out of context, Ophelia has become a commercialized commodity associated with joy and modern life, as shown in high-thread count cotton beddings sold in Taiwan (Huang 2012).

SHAKESPEARE'S EXCHANGE VALUE Karl Marx sees a commodity's exchange value — something defined relationally — as independent of its use value, the value of utility (1990, 126-27). The exchange value of Shakespeare is reflected in its uses in cultural diplomacy and venues where nation states project soft power. In October 2015, during Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Britain, he quoted The Tempest, "what's past is prologue" (2.1.289), to British Prime Minister David Cameron, and urged the two countries to "join hands and move forward" despite the antagonistic history between them, including the Opium Wars. Significantly, Xi received a collection of the sonnets from Queen Elizabeth II as a gift during the state banquet. The sonnets in printed form consolidate Shakespeare's cultural capital and diplomatic value.

Often when Shakespeare is referenced or quoted in the global marketplace, the passages are given an ethical burden and curative quality which contributes to the Shakespearean myth. For example, Al Pacino not only quotes Shakespeare in his film Looking for Richard (1996) but also cites, in a larger context, the American admiration of Shakespeare and anxiety of not being qualified enough, whether by birth or upbringing, to "get it right." The citational quality of Shakespearean adaptations hinges on the mystified idea that the plays offer a moral high ground across time and culture.

The multiple transtemporal and transhistorical worlds of Shakespeare are the subject of this special issue, which draws upon the papers presented at the conference on Global Shakespeares: Mapping World Markets and Archives (George Washington University, January 24-25, 2014). There are no world markets without archives built on collective cultural memory. Conversely, there would be no archives without the cultural marketplace to validate that Shakespearean artifacts are archive-worthy in the first place. These two concerns are considered together in this special issue.

ARCHIVES AND THE MARKETPLACE In digital and analog archives of cultural globalization, Shakespearean memorabilia and performances play an important part as well. The archives reflect and inform marketing strategies that keep Shakespeare relevant, compelling, and profitable. As Jonathan Arac theorizes, globalization as a cultural process "opens up every local, national or regional culture to others" and produces 'many worlds'" (2012, 35). While there are several vetted, curated visual and textual archives, YouTube has become an "accidental archive" without centrally controlled curatorship (O'Neill 2014, 11). A system of user-generated videos that are buoyed by an ad-hoc tag cloud, YouTube both reflects and influences the ebbs and tides of global Shakespeare. Shakespeare in world markets is buoyed by the large number of professional and amateur digital videos circulating on various platforms. Digital videos, in contrast to analog videos, are non-linear. As a non-sequential medium, digital video allows instant access to any scene in a performance and encourages a non-curatorial approach to the archive. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 3/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation While videos are only partial witness to live performance events — recording only what the camera operator chooses to see — they are performance events in their own right when viewed and re-played online. Collocations and collections of digital videos thus form their own ecosystem — a marketplace of ideas and an archive of possibilities.

With this in mind, the contributors map the itineraries of Shakespeare films, productions, objects, and interpretations in world markets in South Africa, Bollywood, and world music (including music from former British colonies). We also map the movement of various motifs and agendas in cinematic soundtracks, music in stage productions, and images of Hamlet constructed by the American Communist Party, and how the histories of these motifs intersect within such ad hoc archives as YouTube, and within curated and vetted archives such as Bardbox and the MIT Global Shakespeares open-access digital performance archive.

MARKETING AND COMMEMORATING SHAKESPEARE IN 2016 There were several high-profile instances of global Shakespeare being tapped for its market value in 2014, the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, and in 2016, the quatercentenary of Shakespeare. Worldwide festive activities in 2016 surpass in number, scale, and enthusiasm of those in 2014. Sujata Iyengar has coined the term "deathiversary" in reference to the cultural phenomena surrounding Shakespeare's 400th anniversary, a term that highlights the commemorative obsession with Shakespeare's death.2 Tang Xianzu, Miguel de Cervantes, Francis Beaumont, and Philip Henslowe all passed away in 1616, and 2016 marks the 500th anniversary of the publication of Utopia, but for numerous reasons Shakespeare alone took the spotlight, which is an indication of the current value of Shakespeare in world cultural markets.

Theater companies, festivals, publishers, academic institutions, and even restaurants seize the opportunity to increase their cultural capital, profit (as the case may be), and visibility by offering public events around Shakespeare, and particularly Shakespeare branded as a global author. In 2014, China's National Center for the Performing Arts hosted the "Salute to Shakespeare" series in Beijing, suggesting a new interest in site- specific commemorative events and a new Chinese "assertiveness." What makes Shakespeare commercially viable and attractive, it seems, isn't Shakespeare at all. What matters are the themes and innovations that artists bring to the texts (Li and Sanders, 124-25). An international Shakespeare festival took place in Shanghai in fall 2016.

Meanwhile, quantifiable impact on society is a particularly coveted criterion for assessment in the UK. Site-specific performances and events add to the market value of "Shakespeare." In 2016 as well, the Folger Shakespeare Library sent its First Folios to all fifty U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. King's College London headed a consortium called Shakespeare400 for a year of programs, performances, and exhibitions. In addition to "1616: A Momentous Year" — a series of readings, family events, exhibitions, conferences, productions, and lectures — the London Globe showed thirty-seven new ten-minute films on thirty-seven outdoor screens to mark the occasion along a 2.5-mile route from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge ("The Complete Walk" 2016). These films, such as "Cleopatra beside the Pyramids," www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 4/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "Shylock in Venice's Jewish ghetto," and "Hamlet on the rocks of Elsinore," were shot on locations perceived as aligning with the settings in the plays. For example, the Globe's publicity material emphasizes that the series aims to capture "the astonishing breadth of Shakespeare's global imagination," as the Globe's in-house magazine phrased it ("The Complete Walk" 2016, 29).

Shakespeare's plays are apparently not only food for thought but also culinary delights. The Shakespeare 400 Chicago festival offered, among other events, the year- long Culinary Complete Works, a "complete culinary tour of the . . . plays through the vibrant and diverse restaurant scene." Examples include fare that "channel[s]" A Midsummer Night's Dream at Topolobampo and Tony Mantuano's interpretation of Romeo and Juliet in Cafe Spiaggia.

Many of these festivals share similar approaches to marketing global Shakespeare. The 2016 festival in Chicago echoes the international spirit of the ambitious World Shakespeare Festival during the 2012 London Olympics. They even feature some of the same touring productions. For instance, Chicago-based Q Brothers' Othello: The Remix, The Company Theatre of Mumbai's Twelfth Night and Belarus Free Theatre's King Lear were featured both in London in 2012 and in Chicago in 2016. Other international foreign-language productions touring to Chicago include Cheek by Jowl's Russian Measure for Measure, Shanghai Peking Opera's The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan (Hamlet), Mexico Foro Shakespeare's Enamorarse de un Incendio, and Poland's Song of the Goat's Songs of Lear. Commodified commemoration is a paradoxical genre, because these festivals "remember Shakespeare best when [they] make him new" (Calvo and Kahn, 14).

Everywhere we look, there are signs that Shakespeare is taken as a spokesperson for the human in many parts of the world and has acquired a high value in world markets of cultural goods. In 2016, the London Globe toured Dominic Dromgoole's production of Hamlet to 197 countries and territories. In his book Hamlet Globe-to- Globe, Dromgoole recounts the reason why they chose Hamlet. The enterprise is built on the assumption that while interpretations of Hamlet may vary, the play has the unique potential to interest audiences across cultures: Hamlet is ram-packed with iconic moments which translate across cultures, a necessity, but most important of all it is mysterious, the greatest necessity. The protean nature of the text was as important as its elusiveness. There is something about the kaleidoscope of possible responses to Hamlet which suited a journey of such rapid and extensive change . . . We need to travel with a story that could talk to people in all these ways. It also needed to talk with purpose. Not with a message. (14-15) Writing for The Economist, journalist Jasper Rees observes that global Shakespeare shows us that while "cultures may find reasons to be at one another's throats, there is something primordial that binds all of us: the human need to stand up and tell stories of love and death." When Dromgoogle's twelve-actor Hamlet toured through Africa, Annastacia, a sixteen-year old girl, traveled sixty kilometers to Kasane, Botswana, with her school group to see the show. The message she took was this: "In our culture when somebody marries his brother's wife this is dangerous because children end up doing mistakes in life" (Rees 2015). The Botswana reception of Hamlet brings www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 5/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation to mind renowned anthropologist Laura Bohannan's account of her experience telling the plot of the play to the Tiv. Everything that the Western critical tradition deemed morally problematic in Hamlet, the Tiv considered natural and logical (28- 33). The "tribal" reaction to what Bohannan assumed to be universal in her own world at Oxford University made her realize that "one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular." There may be a universal human capacity for morality, but each culture fills in the particulars.

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON SHAKESPEARE'S CURRENCY Presented here are six case studies with six distinct but interconnected methodologies to Shakespeare's currency in world markets and archives. Despite their differences, the performances and marketing strategies we have observed share one common underlying principle: innovation. They do not present a frozen Shakespeare from four hundred years ago, fit for consumption today after reheating in the microwave. Rather, they embrace innovation and freely acknowledge that, as Robert Musil observes, anything permanent will inevitability lose "its ability to impress" (1986, 320-322).

To map the itineraries of Shakespeare in world markets we have to first listen to the sounds and sweet airs of the plays in global contexts. Research on global Shakespeare has not paid due attention to the musical dialogues on stage and on screen. Kendra Leonard's article rectifies this situation by analyzing the musical landscapes of several productions and films that create musical dialogues between Elizabethan drama and the cultures of Britain's (former) colonies. Tim Supple, for example, uses Indian music to signify the divide between a "British Illyria" and Viola and Sebastian's origins in his 2003 Twelfth Night. Viola and Sebastian "travel" from East (cued by music of India) to the West (which is represented through Western music) which has long appropriated concepts of the East. Viola and Sebastian, however, remain firmly rooted in the East. Music signifies multilayered localities: fictional and historical. Indian music again is used to frame a colonial past in the BBC's Virgin Queen (2005) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007). Music from former British colonies and a faux- medieval score are used in Eugenio Barba's Ur-Hamlet (2006) to mark up cultural differences. Barba juxtaposes Saxo Grammaticus' Latin narrative against more modern Asian music in Ur-Hamlet in the multicultural production which features multiple performance traditions. World cultures that may appear to be "harmonious" on stage begin to appear contentious once the audience pays attention to the musical landscape. Leonard points out that the world music here reframes race and character in disturbing ways.

In contrast to Leonard's musicological investigation, Adele Seeff takes a dramaturgical approach to analyze the politics of race in South African Broadcasting Company's adaptations of Macbeth, examples of local programming that tapped into a global entertainment market. Shakespeare, a formerly imperial icon, is now a "point of access" for global audiences. With a broader representation of black South African artists, these made-for-television appropriations were conceived to be "reclamation projects" that could help "heal a nation's trauma." These self-conscious "reclamation projects" remain, however, hostage to the historical baggage of apartheid. Indigenous African identity is a moving target, and the post-racial worlds portrayed www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 6/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation by the two films do not counter the effect of ethnic and cultural hierarchies in the newly democratic Africa. Seeff argues that "Shakespeare is decidedly neither Africa's contemporary nor Africa's kinsman."

One of the most frequently encountered questions in the study of global Shakespeare is the cultural and language barrier. Can one engage productively with global Shakespeare when one does not understand the foreign language? Echoing Leonard's and Seeff's analytical methods, Sujata Iyengar demonstrates another productive approach to understanding otherwise inscrutable global Shakespeare. In her study of two Indian and one Italian film versions of Othello, Iyengar suggests that when one does not understand the foreign languages (Malayalam, Khariboli, and Italian), one could be more attentive to the local roles of objects and props in global circulation and in creating and attributing agency — or what she calls, following Jane Bennett, "the life of things." The films both indigenize and transform the most iconic object, the handkerchief, along with the bed of Othello and Desdemona, into a rhizomatic network connecting multiple sources of agency, characters, and meanings.

Another important issue in the study of global Shakespeare is how to understand local and worldwide political histories. Jeffrey Butcher's study of the Leftists' appropriation of the character and discourses of Hamlet shows that they used "Hamletism" (the act of applying Hamlet to national identities) to advocate international proletarian solidarity rather than to promote war. Butcher argues that the Leftist citations of Hamlet out of context helped to develop a global proletarian identity at the intersection of art and politics.

The next two articles turn to the question of archive in the study of Shakespeare. Richard Burt asks what is a global archive? Can letters in the play form a unique archive of their own? His study focuses on the letters that go unread in Shakespeare's plays, such as Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Henry V. Burt argues that these moments when letters go unread are associated with madness (for example, Olivia refuses to allow Feste to "read madness" (Twelfth Night 5.1.308) — that is, to read Malvolio's letter). Burt's article suggests that unread letters have a "multi-media archival effect" because they are not "open and shut letters" but rather "open and cut letters" that blur the line between "alphabetic letters and the so-called material supports of letters as text messages."

Complementing Burt's theoretical take on the acts of collecting and interpreting letters as an archive, Christy Desmet takes a close look at various genres of digital archives. Specifically, she makes a case for the concept of curation as a central issue that distinguishes crowd-sourced archives from vetted, scholarly ones. Shakespeare has gone global thanks in large part to digital media. In "The Art of Curation: Searching for Global Shakespeares in the Digital Archives," Desmet theorizes YouTube as a crowd-sourced "wild archive" that resists the imperative for curation, and, by contrast, scholarly digital archives that are vetted, editorialized, and curated. The YouTube environment may seem free of the tyranny of the academic establishment, but it turns out to be somewhat monolithic. A basic search on Romeo and Juliet in 2013 brought up mostly mainstream and Anglophone professional and amateur videos. Desmet reports as well that there are "surprisingly few examples of global Shakespeare." Archives with intellectual backing such as the MIT Global www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 7/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Shakespeares and Canadian Appropriations of Shakespeare may have more vetted contents in a more global context, but they are not immune from the impulse of collecting, which is an act of self-enclosure. Desmet moves on to theorize digital interfaces across all of these genres of digital archives as a boundary space that organizes a user's experience, rather than representing their experience. The interface has an important curatorial function with ideological effects that are sometimes overlooked. "Interface constitutes us as subjects," cautions Desmet. Therefore, curation constitutes the archive.

A currency may work or be converted across borders, but the concept of "global" Shakespeares reveals just how intensely local all performances are, whether digital or analog. The ideological encodings of all performances in all forms, including Anglo- American ones, should be studied within, rather than in isolation from, this broader context.

NOTES 1. References to the works of Shakespeare come from the Folger Digital Texts unless otherwise specified. 2. See also Iyengar's comment on a Facebook post on 19 February 2016; quoted with permission.

REFERENCES Arac, Jonathan. 2012. "Anglo-Globalism?" New Left Review 16 (July-August): 35-45. Bate, Jonathan. 2007. "The Mirror of Life: How Shakespeare Conquered the World," Harper's Magazine 314. 1883 (April): 37-46. Bohanna, Laura. 1966. "Shakespeare in the Bush. An American anthropologist set out to study the Tiv of West Africa and was taught the true meaning of Hamlet." Natural History 75: 28-33. Calvo, Clara, and Coppélia Kahn. 2015. "Introduction." Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory. Edited by Clara Calvo and Coppelia Kahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-14. "The Complete Walk." 2016. Around the Globe 62: 29. The Complete Walk. 2016. Promenade Performance. Shakespeare's Globe. April 23-24. The Culinary Complete Works. 2016. Shakespeare 400 Chicago. http://www.shakespeare400chicago.com/culinaryworks.html (http://www.shakespeare400chicago.com/culinaryworks.html) [accessed 13 October 2017]. Dromgoole, Dominic. 2017. Hamlet Globe-to-Globe: Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play. New York: Grove Press.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 8/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Haines, Simon. Forthcoming. "Shakespeare and Value: Introduction." The Shakespearean International Yearbook 17. Edited by Alexa Alice Joubin, Tom Bishop, and Simon Haines. New York: Routledge. Hope, Jonathan. 2012. "Shakespeare and the English Language." In English in the World: History, Diversity, Change. Edited by Philip Seargeant and Joan Swann. Abingdon: Routledge. 83-92. Huang, Alexa. 2012. "The Paradox of Female Agency: Ophelia and East Asian Sensibilities." MIT Global Shakespeares, http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/blog/2012/05/07/the-paradox-of-female-agency- ophelia-and-east-asian-sensibilities-excerpt/ (http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/blog/2012/05/07/the-paradox-of-female- agency-ophelia-and-east-asian-sensibilities-excerpt/) [accessed 9 October 2017]. Iyengar, Sujata. 2015. Personal correspondence with Lainie Pomerleau and Sarah Mayo, May 6. See also Iyengar's comment on a Facebook post on 19 February 2016; quoted with permission. Kaliyattam. 1997. Directed by Rajasekharan Nair Jayaraaj. Surya Cine Arts. Li, Jun, and Julie Sanders. 2016. "Shakespeare going out here and now: Travels in China on the 450th anniversary." Shakespeare International Yearbook 16. Edited by Tom Bishop, Alexa Alice Joubin, and Susan Bennet. London: Routledge. 109-28. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. Musil, Robert. 1986. "Monuments." In Selected Writings. Translated and edited by Burton Pike. New York: Continuum. 320-22. O'Neill, Stephen. 2014. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard. London: Bloomsbury. Pacino, Al, dir. 1996. Looking for Richard. USA. Twentieth-Century Fox. Rees, Jasper. 2015. "All the world's a stage." The Economist. November/December, https://www.1843magazine.com/features/all-the-worlds-a-stage [accessed 13 October 2017]. (https://www.1843magazine.com/features/all-the-worlds-a-stage) Shakespeare, William. 2017. Shakespeare's Plays. Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles, Folger Shakespeare Library, www.folgerdigitaltexts.org (www.folgerdigitaltexts.org) [accessed 6 October 2017]. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. 2003. Directed by Tim Supple. Home Vision Entertainment. DVD.

ONLINE RESOURCES Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP). http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/. (http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/) MIT Global Shakespeares. http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/ (http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/)]. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show 9/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

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The Past is a Foreign Country: World Musics Signifying History

(/current) in/and Elizabethan Drama

KENDRA PRESTON LEONARD, SILENT FILM SOUND AND MUSIC ARCHIVE (/previous)

(/archive) ABSTRACT

Research on global Shakespeare has focused on the ways in which the plays have been adapted for indigenous languages and customs. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which non-British directors have treated the Elizabethan drama. Yet there are a number of works that create direct musical dialogues between Elizabethan drama, history, and the cultures of England's colonies. In Tim Supple's 2003 Twelfth Night, Indian music signifies the divide between Viola and Sebastian's origins and a British Illyria; a 2006 Danish Ur-Hamlet uses music from former British colonies and a faux-medieval score that serve as "an exchange of cultural manifestations." And both the BBC's Virgin Queen (2005) and Kapur's 2007 Elizabeth: the Golden Age use Indian music to represent the empire's colonial enterprises. I examine how these musics function in the context of screen works, and what their use might signify in Elizabethan drama and historical pieces overall.

As my title suggests, filmmakers trying to capture the past have often treated it — or perhaps found it — to be as challenging as representing a place that is exotic and new to them. In re-creating the past in cinema or on stage, directors and music directors construct what Umberto Eco terms a doxastic world. This is a fictional world created not whole cloth, but rather as "parasitic on the real world. A fictional possible world is one in which everything is similar to our so-called real world, except for the variations explicitly introduced by the text" (Eco 2001, 81, emphasis in original). The creation of an equally rich musical world, both within and outside of a work's diegesis, plays a large part in identifying and representing a particular fictional world. As much as a director might want to create an "authentic" aural environment, doing so is impossible; the closest re-creation will owe some of its details to speculation, albeit by experts, and be affected by the interference of modern sensibilities and technologies. Thus, music scores for cinematic Shakespearean adaptations and works set in the early modern period can and do include meaningful musical materials from a wide variety of times and places. Although music, using a common language of modern signifiers, is most often used in film to establish the chrono- and geo- locations of the settings, it can also function as a means for understanding the interpretations of the www.borrowers.uga.edu/783573/show 1/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation events being depicted and viewpoints of the work's creative agents. The use of musics from outside the period and place depicted — especially "world music," that which is not from a Western art tradition — are frequently used to emphasize difference: the general differences between the present and past as well as the differences of class, gender, and religious practices, both between the present and the past and within varying groups in the past. Here I present four cases in which the musical traditions, materials, or sounds of British colonies or other "exotic" locales are used to signify the past and difference in adaptations of early modern dramatic works or biopics set in the Elizabethan period.

AN ALTERNATE-WORLD TWELFTH NIGHT In director Tim Supple's 2003 Twelfth Night the action is set in a Britain in which Elizabethan beliefs, behaviors, and codes for gender performance and representation are still in effect, but in which small cultural and material artifacts of a more modern world are also present. Supple and musical director Nitin Sawhney use music to create what Katherine Rowe and Thomas Cartelli call a "citational environment": a "habitation" for adaptations that references "cultural and generic fields that incorporate specific stances towards source materials and rules for handling them" (Cartelli and Rowe 2007, 28-29). In this case, those references are to two particular doxastic habitations. The first is the music and culture of a very generalized twentieth-century India, from which Sebastian and Viola escape after their parents are assassinated in a political coup, which, in the adaptation, still apparently owes some allegiance to Britain. Sebastian's bilingualism in Hindi and English, the use of multicultural music, design, and class hierarchies, and the interaction of Shakespearean text with Indian musical styles and instruments all contribute to what Dennis Bartholomeusz calls "distinctive mutuality," a historical condition between India and Britain that Supple and Sawhney exploit in creating their own world for this film (Trivedi and Bartholomeusz 2005, 22). The second is that of a post-World War II Britain, signified visually through Sebastian's print copy of London A-Z, Toby's use of turntables in music-making, and the costuming of Illyrian characters.

Sawhney, whose other works include the soundtrack for Mira Nair's film The Namesake and the Cirque du Soleil show Varekai, is known for pieces that mix Indian classical music with jazz, dance beats, and electronica. Over the course of Twelfth Night, Sawhney develops four distinct musical cultures: an Indian- influenced music for Viola's transformation into Cesario and for her appearances with Orsino; Western art music, often Mozart, associated with the aristocrats Orsino and Olivia; rock, played by the hard- living Toby; and a variety of early art music/folk music played by Feste that both stands on its own and later bridges all four musical worlds. These delineations and their combinations and overlaps serve as markers of class, gender, and space throughout the film. Music with obvious Indian influences connects the film's imaginary Britain with an equally imaginary India; despite their fictitiousness, though, the two have a relationship obviously similar to that of our own world. The use of Indian musical elements at once frames the twins' positions as refugees and Others in relation to those with whom they interact in the play.

Supple begins his adaptation of Twelfth Night by rapidly establishing the film's ethnicities and classes, focusing on Viola after an introduction that compares her status and location prior to her landing in Illyria with Orsino's home, identified as the height of urbanity and sophistication, in contrast to the chaos of Viola's initial geographic locality. The film opens with a view of Viola and Sebastian at sea and the sounds of an Indian melody played on a bansuri, or flute, accompanied by traditional drums. The scene then cuts away to Orsino, commanding a singer and pianist in his home, "If music be the food of love, play on." The film cuts several times between these characters in rapid succession; the soundtrack likewise also moves abruptly from Viola's non-diegetic Indian soundscape to the musical diegesis in Orsino's home, where the musicians perform an aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute. Immediately, the www.borrowers.uga.edu/783573/show 2/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation audience has two disparate soundscapes and environments to absorb: a clearly Eastern one, marked by indigenous instruments playing in a recognizably Eastern style, and a Western one, signified by a composer whose music has come to be what Melanie Lowe calls one of the most ubiquitous codes for "affluence, superior intelligence, and especially 'civilized' behavior" on screen (Lowe 2002, 103). The diegesis of Orsino's private concert begins to cover the bansuri and drums, becoming non-diegetic for the scenes of Viola and Sebastian in hiding.

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Shifting musics in Twelfth Night As the music shifts, so does the location, and the audience is clearly meant to understand that it is from the music of India and to the music of the West — in particular, a West that has long colonized and usurped the art of the East — that Viola and Sebastian travel, and that despite their geographical shift, they remain associated with the East (Leonard 2014a).

THE FANTASY PAST OF THE UR-HAMLET The 2006 Ur-Hamlet created by the Danish Nordic Theatre Laboratory/Odin Teatret uses the music of former British colonies and a score of faux-Northern European medieval sounds, intended as "an exchange of cultural manifestations" that suggests a view of Shakespeare from outside of the Anglophone world. The production was designed to bring together different acting traditions from across the world; in doing so, it also incorporated music from these cultures. The Ur-Hamlet uses Asian musics to suggest the complexities of the story and the Latin narrative of Saxo Grammaticus to emphasize its age and history. However, despite claims from director Eugenio Barba that the cultures of this production are not in tension with one another, the music suggests otherwise, signifying race and character in disturbing ways.

Erik Exe Christofferson notes that much of the group's work deals with "'foreignness' as a fundamental condition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries" (Christofferson 2008, 107). In their Ur-Hamlet, foreignness is present both in the plot and metadiegetically in the production. The program for the www.borrowers.uga.edu/783573/show 3/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation production notes that, "Diversity is the basic matter of theatre," and the citational environment created for the Ur-Hamlet includes music influenced by Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Balinese Gambuh theater, Indian theater and dance, Noh theater, Nankuan opera, and popular American music forms. Christofferson writes that the multicultural approach "creates a reflexivity in the 'form of otherness,' since anyone can be 'foreign' in the social context" (122). But the citational environment is a confused and confusing one. Although the creators' desire seems to have been a cultural and class-based switch of the too-often historic reality of white European hegemony and its oppression of non-whites, instead the play offers audiences an Indonesian upper class that is corrupt beneath its layers of gold; an Amleth who is played by one of the only black actors to appear and who is dehumanized through his forced play- acting as a dog and the removal of his voice and its replacement with animalistic bird noises; and a presentation of the medieval East and West as, respectively, the epitome of louche savagery and the height of sophistication for their times (Leonard 2016, 85). In trying to discard the hegemonies of the past, as described in literature, the creators nonetheless have re-inscribed inequality and bias in an unwritten form. Saxo Grammaticus, played in bald pate by a white woman, is backgrounded by faux- European Medieval music; Hamlet's father and mother are accompanied by Balinese music and dance forms, while Hamlet, shown here as assertive, aggressive, and warrior-like, is depicted by a black Brazilian actor who performs movements drawn from capoeira to the accompaniment of heavy drumming. When he feigns madness, his screams mimic animal calls over intense drumming — tropes not unlike those that have been used repeatedly in the past to symbolize the exotic and primitive in Western music. The "plague rats," or foreigners, who have invaded the realm celebrate with Western harmonies and a mariachi trumpet, but when Hamlet returns to take power, he is derided by the crowd, which now sings and performs Balinese-style music. Hamlet, in modern clothes, fights with those in Balinese garb, and then, over a bluesy backbeat and a melody played on an Indian flute, he "proclaims the rules of the new order," again by mimicking animal or bird sounds. Hamlet himself never speaks or sings, and he returns the kingdom to its Balinese origins.

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Hamlet's mother, followed by Hamlet, in the Ur-Hamlet www.borrowers.uga.edu/783573/show 4/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation While this is not, to be clear, the story of the student from Wittenberg, and is about brutality, the character of Hamlet is overtly racialized as the uncontrollable, animalistic black, set against those outside of his race. He alone of the major characters is stripped of his voice and allowed vocality only through the imitation of the sounds of non-humans — beasts and birds. The instrumental music that is used to signify him, the only example of black music used in the piece, is in striking contrast to the Balinese and Indian music used to accompany those of the court and the Western music that accompanies the foreigners. Hamlet is often accompanied by drums alone, the traditional cinematic musical signifier of primitivism, used in the past to indicate the presence of "Indian braves," and "African savages." These signifiers place Hamlet the character in a sphere of Otherness not applied to other characters in the saga.

This is not to say that other non-Western musics get a free pass: the glitter and opulence of Balinese costume and music represent corruption and the complexity of court politics: everyone is on the take, and no one notices the incoming "foreigners" until they have spread their pathogens. The Western music of these "plague rats" is itself a condemnation: they steal everything they can, including musical materials; when at the end of the production they try to rise up against the court, they do so to the sounds of blues, music with many parents much assimilated. The Ur-Hamlet, then, does not give us multiculturalism working in harmony, or even amicably side-by-side, but instead, reiterates past musical tropes of exoticism and racial stereotyping. Perhaps everyone here is "foreign," but the musical practices of the production make this less unifying and more alienating. The reification of white privilege and Eurocentrism, along with the positioning of a quasi-fictional Balinese culture in a doxastic setting, brings to mind George Orwell's self-contradictory concept of one culture being "more equal" than another.

MUSICKING ELIZABETHS, HER PEERS, AND HER PLACES The use of global music as a signifier of difference also extends to screen works about and set in the Elizabethan period itself, particularly biopics about major figures such as Elizabeth I. The exemplification of Elizabeth I as a representative of the English early modern is not a new phenomenon, and her numerous meanings and identities, as scholar Susan Frye has discovered, "continue to be constructed and contested, whether she is portrayed by Glenda Jackson [in Elizabeth R] in all the dignity of a BBC production, [or] by John Cleese cross-dressed as the Fairy Queen with a heavy mustache" (Frye 1997, ix). This iconic status has made Elizabeth a favorite figure for filmmakers, rendering every element of her identity available for musical interpretation. Indeed, as countless screen works about Elizabeth demonstrate, the Elizabeth I biopic as a genre functions as a doxastic-world sandbox in which writers and directors can try out new theories, suppositions, and projections about Elizabeth's life, politics, beliefs, preferences, and personality. Indeed, as Barbara Hodgdon has written, Elizabeth I "is and has been a construction — certainly one whose time has come round again but nonetheless one who had to wait for a critical practice that could re-produce her" (Hodgdon 1998, 111).

In screen works about Elizabeth, music plays an important and often prominent role in this process of construction. The music for these works has multiple functions, of which setting the period is only the beginning. Frequently, music signifies Elizabeth's gender, gender performativity, and gendered spaces; the expectations or restrictions placed upon her; and her social position, education, and religious beliefs, as well as those of the characters around her. The music of such screen works contributes to the citational environment in a variety of complex ways, creating references to the English early modern, intellectualism (for example, the use of Mozart in Shekhar Kapur's 1998 Elizabeth), the United Kingdom as a single realm (Elgar's "Nimrod" from the Enigma Variations in the same film), political conflicts with Scotland and Ireland, and concepts less precise: a sense of an era long past, an exotic world of wealth and adventure, and the strength of individual characters. And, as I have written elsewhere, music www.borrowers.uga.edu/783573/show 5/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation previously known to audiences can create "ghostly" resonances, in which the original context of the music bleeds through into the new use (Carlson 2003, 6). Viewers with previous musical knowledge of Mozart or those who have seen Amadeus will recognize Mozart's requiem in D minor at the end of Elizabeth, signifying the end of one period of Elizabeth's life. Music can guide an audience through the space that separates creator and consumer, mapping the multitudes of musical/visual relationships in what Richard Burt dubs the "cinematographosphere" (Burt 2008, 24; Leonard 2014b, 170).

The Virgin Queen, a 2005 BBC biopic mini-series, has an original score by Martin Phipps. Phipps combines a number of modern and non-western instruments; his choice of instruments also nods to England's colonial acquisitions and aspirations. The mix includes the Hardanger, a Scandinavian folk fiddle; the Indian sarangi and Persian kamancheh, both bowed string instruments that can sound remarkably like the human voice; the Celtic harp; the duduk, an Armenian wind instrument that produces a deep, buzzy sound; and a wide variety of percussion instruments. The low, almost ambient sound of the duduk has been used to signify the dangerous Other in films such as The Brotherhood of the Wolf , Hotel Rwanda, and Munich; in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, JAG, and The Path to 9/11 and the video games World of Warcraft, God of War, and Mass Effect III. Here it represents danger from any non-white or non-Protestant person or faction. The habitation created by the combination of Anglophone and Indian musics develops from Bartholomeusz's distinctive mutuality, suggesting nations equally dependent on and dangerous to one another, even if it is white privilege and a sense of Otherness on the part of white Britons (and, metadiegetically speaking, audiences) about all things Indian that allows for the signification of non-Western instruments in this way.

Indian instruments and music imitating various genres from the subcontinent are used primarily when Elizabeth is in danger. Instances in which this music is most obvious include when Mary Tudor is believed to be pregnant; immediately following Mary Stuart's execution, when Elizabeth thinks that her soul is in danger of hell; and when signal fires are lit, indicating the sighting of the Spanish Amada. These aural landscapes are in direct contrast to those that surround Elizabeth when she is shown in times of happiness or victory, which usually contain her theme (an original composition for the film) and an interweaving of pseudo-Elizabethan sounds, the Celtic fiddle, and modern rock sounds. Indeed, when Elizabeth is shown giving her famous Tillsbury speech, she is accompanied by Celtic-style fiddling that is apparently meant to signify the strength of her united nation and is easily identifiable as "British" music by naïve or uninformed audiences.

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The lighting of signal torches in The Virgin Queen Unlike the use of such music in Twelfth Night, where it represented a recognized history of colonialism, Indian music here is a superficial stand-in for menace and malevolence. The use of non-Western music to represent danger — particularly to a white Western woman — creates a racist perspective that permeates the series. The use of Celtic music is also problematic in a classist way; England's occupation and subordination of the Irish and their nationhood makes the use of Celtic fiddling here an appropriation of the art of one group by its oppressor. It suggests that the contemporary and continued appropriation of Irish national identity by the English, even as they seek to eradicate its creators, is somehow a positive attribute of Elizabeth's reign.

The score for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, directed by Shekhar Kapur, was written by two composers with rather disparate backgrounds: Craig Armstrong, who also created the score for Ray, and A. R. Rahman, later the composer of the score for Slumdog Millionaire. The film's three main themes, labeled "Love," "Destiny," and "Divinity," are all similar to the kinds of large, sweeping themes used in other Elizabethan and heritage productions, and which have become a common aural trope for the genre. It is within the confines of these themes that Indian music and other non-Western sounds are employed, citing the eventual reach of Elizabeth's power and legacy. Film music critic William Ruhlmann thought that the score for The Golden Age had "a seemingly inappropriate Indian flavor to the music" and wondered whether "the Indian or Indian-heritage artists making these films and these scores felt compelled to sneak a bit of their own culture in, whether it makes sense or not, perhaps as a claim on the Indian influence on the British Empire" (Ruhlmann 2012). However, I read this musical environment and its incorporation of Indian soundscapes as a deliberate acknowledgment of the empire Elizabeth was building, and the intercultural consequences — the cultural mutuality — that colonizing India would eventually have on the British Empire.

The opening text of The Golden Age contextualizes the film in terms of England's inferior status to Spain and its need to reassert itself as a strong nation. Kapur's conceit for the film is that heroic England, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783573/show 7/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation harassed and threatened by villainous Spain, rises to the top by dint of superior religion and leadership. At the beginning of the film, the music can be clearly demarcated into three categories based on the vocal writing — or lack thereof — included in the overall mix. King Philip II's Catholic Spain is repeatedly signified by chant, performed by low male voices. Mary Stuart, shown here as constantly plotting with Spain, is represented by wordless soprano voices, a feminine-coded counterpoint to the masculine-coded music of Philip. England and Elizabeth, on the other hand, are musically characterized with instrumental music only; Spain, in a way, has stolen the voices and power of the English.

The film shows Mary Stuart in captivity in Scotland, where her contextual villainy is orchestrated with sopranos and synthesizer as well as the timbres of non-Western instruments, signifying her foreignness in Elizabeth's kingdom. As The Golden Age progresses, this trope of sopranos and non-Western timbres becomes richer and denser. The arrest of Mary's supporters and the scene in which Mary receives news that she is to be executed are accompanied by soprano voices, and the execution itself is scored with non-Western winds and percussion under this wordless vocal line. The Otherness of the execution's soundscape, particularly the use of percussion, which includes synthesized sounds in the mix with Indian tabla (drums) and danda (sticks), further signifies Mary and her Catholic supporters as foreign to Elizabeth's England, although incorporated into the greater Empire.

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Mary's execution in Elizabeth: The Golden Age The use of Indian timbres and rhythms signify not only Otherness, but, as the film progresses and Indian instruments become more commonplace in the overall mix, they also come to indicate that Elizabeth's desires to exploit these locations and cultures for the benefit of England are crucial elements of her reign. They are accepted, albeit in a highly segregated manner, for the good of the whole.

CONCLUSION Examining the music used to represent early modern drama, the England of Elizabeth, and Elizabeth herself offers a number of modern viewpoints about the practices and manners of the early modern www.borrowers.uga.edu/783573/show 8/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation period, the ways in which the creators of screen works parse these practices, and how audiences hear this past. In the absence of authenticity, such works necessarily carry with them the mores of their own times as well as those from the past — or those thought to be from the past — that their creators wish to project. Based on a reading of shared practices in the scores surveyed here, the grittier aspects of life and the dangers of that past are cited through the use of music and sounds that many modern-day Western audiences still find "foreign," while the glories of early modern England are broadly signified by the sound of Western art music. Music directors make it clear just how foreign the past is, and how differently things are done there.

REFERENCES Barba, Eugenio, dir. 2006. Ur-Hamlet. Danish Nordic Theatre Laboratory/Odin Teatret. Bellisario, Donald P., creator. 1995-2005. JAG. Belisarius Productions, Paramount Network Television Productions, NBC Productions, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) (1995), Paramount Television. BioWare, developers. 2012-. Mass Effect III. Blizzard Entertainment, developers. 2004-. World of Warcraft. Burt, Richard. 2008. Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media. New York: Palgrave. Carslon, Marvin A. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cartelli, Thomas, and Katherine Rowe. 2007. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Polity. Christofferson, Erik Exe. 2008. "Theatrum Mundi: Odin Teatret's Ur-Hamlet." New Theatre Quarterly 24.2: 107-25. Cunningham, David L., dir. 2006. The Path to 9/11. Marc Platt Productions, Touchstone Television, UHP Productions Ltd. Eco, Umberto. 2011. Confessions of a Young Novelist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Frye, Susan. 1997. Elizabeth 1: The Competition for Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gans, Christophe, dir. 2001. The Brotherhood of the Wolf. Canal+, Davis-Films, Eskwad, Natexis Banques Populaires Images, Studio Image Soficas, TF1 Films Production. George, Terry, dir. 2004. Hotel Rwanda. United Artists, Lions Gate Films, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, Miracle Pictures, Inside Track Films, Mikado Film, Endgame Entertainment, Sixth Sense Productions. Giedroyc, Coky, dir. 2005. The Virgin Queen. BBC. Hodgdon, Barbara. 1998. The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kapur, Shekar, dir. 2007. Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Universal Pictures, StudioCanal, Working Title Films. Kapur, Shekar, dir. 1998. Elizabeth. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Working Title Films, Channel Four Films. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783573/show 9/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Leonard, Kendra Preston. 2016. "History Faux/Real: The 2006 Ur-Hamlet." kadar koli 10 (January): 84-90. Leonard, Kendra Preston. 2014a. "Sounds of India in Supple's Twelfth Night." In Bollywood Shakespeares. Edited by Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 147-63. Leonard, Kendra Preston. 2014b. "The Use of Early Modern Music in Film Scoring for Elizabeth I." In Gender and Song in Early Modern England. Edited by Leslie Dunn and Katherine Larson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 169-84. Lowe, Melanie. 2002. "Claiming Amadeus: Classical Feedback in American Media." American Music 20.1: 102- 19. Ruhlmann, William. 2012. " Elizabeth: The Golden Age [Music from the Motion Picture]." Available online at: http://www.allmusic.com/album/elizabeth-the-golden-age-music-from-the-motion-picture- mw0000750662 (http://www.allmusic.com/album/elizabeth-the-golden-age-music-from-the-motion- picture-%20mw0000750662) [accessed 3 August 2017]. SIE Santa Monica Studio, Ready at Dawn, and Javaground/SOE-LA, developers. 2005-. God of War. Spielberg, Steve, dir. Munich. 2005. DreamWorks, Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, The Kennedy/Marshall Company, Barry Mendel Productions, Alliance Atlantis Communications, Peninsula Films. Supple, Tim, dir. 2003. Twelfth Night. Projector Productions. Trivedi, Poonam, and Dennis Martholomeusz, eds. 2005. India's Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance. Delhi: Pearson Education India. Whedon, Joss, creator. 1996-2003. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mutant Enemy, Kuziu Productions, Sandollar Television, 20th Century Fox Television.

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Race, Post-Race, Shakespeare, and South Africa

(/current) ADELE SEEFF, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

ABSTRACT (/archive) In a newly democratic South Africa, the South African Broadcasting Company commissioned updated re-tellings of Shakespeares plays using local settings, vernacular languages, and black actors. They sought local programming that could be projected into a global entertainment market. These stories would help heal a nation's trauma and provide a broader representation of black South African scriptwriters, directors, and actors speaking African vernacular. I focus largely on two re-versionings of Macbeth (a King Lear and a Romeo and Juliet were also produced) to argue that these made-for-television appropriations are reclamation projects. Each employs different filmic and rhetorical strategies to represent a utopian post-racial world using the once imperial icon, Shakespeare, as a point of access to global audiences. Thoroughly exploiting Shakespeare's cultural capital, these programs show us that "African" indigeneity and identity are shifting and fluid, and infused with desire; that discourse(s) can be democratized but that hierarchies persist; and that strategies of identity formation remain hostage to apartheid's continuing afterlife. These Africanized re-versionings surrogate Shakespeare's text to dramatize and experiment with linguistic, national, and gender identities.

Ideas about race as a "socio-legal construct rather than as a scientifically measurable essence" (Posel 2001, 88) and ethnicity have defined South Africa since the Dutch established a colony at the Cape in 1652. South Africa remains today, in the words of Leon de Kock, a land "sundered at its heart by the politics of race" (2001, 266). Ideas about Shakespeare performance were exported to the Cape Colony in 1801, with an inaugural performance of Henry IV at the newly constructed African Theatre.1 From the mid-nineteenth century on, in this polyglot world, Shakespeare was used as a tool to advance the formation of national identity, first as an Anglicizing project, then Afrikanerized, and, in the www.borrowers.uga.edu/783544/show 1/8 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation twentieth century, Africanized. It is this "Africanization," in the context of a democratic South Africa, that I want to address in what follows.

In 2008, for a largely black audience, the South African Broadcasting Corporation commissioned a made-for-television drama series, Shakespeare in Mzansi (a Zulu word meaning south): updated retellings of three of Shakespeares plays, using local settings and African vernacular languages (with English subtitles) and performed primarily by black actors.2 These productions provide a window onto how Shakespeare is harnessed in the twenty-first century in what has been described as a "miraculous new nation."

I focus on two re-versionings of Macbeth to argue that these appropriations are reclamation projects. Each version attempts to repossess a cultural identity destroyed by historical events. This is not a nostalgic search for lost origins. The strategies they deploy to represent this recuperation differ markedly. One version — Entabeni — addresses South Africa's experiences of the socio-political stratification and economic exploitation of apartheid and apartheid's undoing. Its goal: to construct a raceless story-world in a restored South Africa. The result: a reproduction of Western dilemmas. In Entabeni, filmmakers use linguistic practice, adopt the conventions of film noir, and embed the supernatural in quotidian life in ways that are thoroughly consonant with the inherent ambiguity of the spirit world.3 In the second, Death of a Queen, conversations with many cultural pasts, including the cultural pasts explored in Shakespeare's text, facilitate a depiction of a nation's radical self-definition. Death of a Queen re-casts legend and myth to facilitate both a representation of a leadership/succession crisis that is gendered female and a resolution of that crisis in relation to the power of the ancestors, deceased fathers and mothers who guard one in death as they did in life.

Each re-versioning fuses local and international art forms to articulate a newly branded South African identity. Each uses different filmic and rhetorical strategies to project a utopian post-racial world into a global entertainment market. What is new and interesting is how these Africanized re-versionings surrogate Shakespeare's texts to dramatize and indigenize a contemporary black South African subjectivity and to represent a nation's trauma, now healed. In both productions, Shakespeare's Macbeth is the instrument for fashioning a new African leadership.

ENTABENI: MACBETH IN THE BOARDROOM Entabeni recasts Macbeth in a contemporary corporate setting, where issues of monarchy are transposed to dominance of business empires — a dark alleyway between skyscrapers, a homeless woman pushing her signature shopping cart towards a blind man singing tonelessly. The woman (whom the audience later discovers is the witch) picks up a newspaper and reads the headline, "A Scramble for Africa's Biggest Contract." We are being prepared for the boardroom scene which follows. In that scene, the Macbeth surrogate, Kumkani, a skilled warrior in the corporate wars with "balls of steel," makes the case for Entabeni's entry into the bidding war for the 2010 World Cup Communications Contract. Entabeni, the only 100% black-owned business in South Africa, is the company he has built single-handedly for his uncle, the Duncan surrogate. "Your attention, please, ladies www.borrowers.uga.edu/783544/show 2/8 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and gents," says Kumkani to the assembled board, code-switching seamlessly between English and Xhosa as he performs business-speak. (Xhosa is one of the eleven official languages in South Africa.) The single white actor on the board is the Macduff surrogate. Are we to assume that he can understand Xhosa, the language of the second largest cultural group in South Africa? Kumkani performs here a democratizing, egalitarian, raceless interlingualism, effacing first Dutch, then British colonialism. His speech to the board ignores his own role in building the company. Instead, Kumkani references apartheid restrictions on job opportunities and loss of identity, in what the Comaroffs term apartheid's "grammar of distinctions" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997, 25), as legislated in fine minutiae. Margo Hendricks has argued that in an American Shakespeare performance, you cannot "tell a black [sic] person by voice and speech because you cannot assume a singularity in voice for all blacks [sic]" (2006, 190). Yet, distinctions in speech patterns exist, as they do within any group. But, in South Africa, it is only since the 1990s, with the collapse of institutional apartheid, the opening of "whites-only" schools to all students, and the repeal of the Group Areas Act, that one cannot "tell" "race" as marked by accent and intonation. Behind Kumkani's virtuoso linguistic performance in the boardroom lie the deep inequities of apartheid Bantu education (which produced "township" English) and township living, and the current "tyrannical preoccupation with the unchecked accumulation of wealth and power" by business elites (Mattera 2008). The scene also alludes to such efforts as Black Empowerment business initiatives, awash in rumors of cronyism and corruption. But this is Macbeth, so of course the witchs' amphibology and the Duncan figure's nomination of his son as CEO over Kumkani are the spur to Kumkani's complicity in his own downfall.

MACDUFF AS OUTSIDER To return to the boardroom scene's single white actor, the Macduff surrogate: He is, by definition and historically, a member of the "settler colonial" or "non- indigene" group (Boehmer 2011, 257, emphasis in original). Jan van Riebeeck's landing at the Cape in 1652 to establish a refueling station for Dutch East India Company ships on their way to India was not, strictly speaking, an invasion, and so one could argue that an invasion did not initiate the imperial clasp. However, informal apartheid, successive frontier wars, and legislative apartheid wrought violence on the indigenous majority population through representational erasure, land re-distribution, and displacements/forcible removals. And this violence was born of the desire to achieve economic, cultural, and linguistic supremacy, and, not least, "whiteness," particularly in such a creolized context (Johnston and Lawson 2000, 362). According to this configuration, then, a question hovers over the figure of Macduff — as, indeed, it does in Shakespeare's play. Is his whiteness figured as default whiteness? Whiteness as a naturalized state (Royster 2006, 221)? Or, does he serve to remind us of centuries of privilege and oppression? He is certainly not "unmarked," "raceless," or colorless. Much later, a twist in the plot allows the murderer to tell Lady Macbeth that "the white man" knows who killed the Banquo character, a reminder that "white" is raced and that "white" Macduff is racially marked.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783544/show 3/8 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation South Africa, it has been argued, is the "first successful accommodation of a minority settler colonialism to a majority indigenous nationalism" (Boehmer 2011, 257-58). This was achieved through a process of negotiation between competing nationalisms: African and Afrikaner. Indigenes occupied the land long before the settlers arrived; therefore, settlers cannot claim ancestral belonging. If the settler- invader can be made to belong conditionally, then essential indigeneity can be calibrated, and "African" identity emerges as constructed and contingent. However, in order to include the settler, the indigene must reciprocally claim the settler as belonging, and must suspend his or her own claim to ancestral priority of the land. Entabeni, in the imaginative representation invoked by the boardroom scene, offers this utopian fictive racelessness. The end of apartheid restrictions signaled the inclusion of black South Africans into a political/economic civic society on an equal opportunity basis. But, it also meant that black South Africans would reciprocally have to accept white South Africans. The boardroom scene dramatizes this "interdependence of cultural terrains" (Said 1993, xxii-xxiii). Entabeni promotes this vision throughout the production. Its director deftly exploits the play's anxieties surrounding England's absorption of Scotland in the period leading up to Shakespeare's Macbeth.

NOIR AS CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM I turn now to narrative strategies. Entabeni's entry point to global currency (besides Shakespeare, of course) is the visual rhetoric of film noir, but it is noir with a difference, noir as critique of capitalism that promotes homelessness. Lady Macbeth is represented as the demonized femme fatale, a fully participating partner in the couple's destruction. Solitary, she walks through the deserted city streets at night in search of the poison she will need to engineer Duncan's death. These "dark, mean, and empty streets resound with . . . fear and hatred" (Murphet 1998, 29). The only other sign of life in this eerie, wasteland cityscape is a homeless musician, from whom she purchases the poison. Wheelchair bound, drumming on his bongo drum, his homelessness and exclusion from the social and "symbolic order" (MacCannell 1993, 286) in a democratic society serves as a painful reminder that, in South Africa, despite apartheid's formal demise, millions still live in apartheid-era shanty townships. Macbeth's hired gun is another visual trope out of Humphrey Bogart film noir. The murderer is a study in existential gravity, misogyny, and cynicism. The production anchors itself both to an African cultural past of the Moiriba tribe and to a Western cultural present in a high cultural register. The viewer will recognize the background music, the "Drinking Song" from La Traviata in a scene in which the doomed lovers recognize each other through the mechanism of a shared classical allusion.4Noir serves here as a visual grammar to make legible to the world of international business, of which South Africa is a part, the ills of liberal capitalism: a cautionary tale for captains of industry across the globe.

DEATH OF A QUEEN AND NATION-BUILDING I turn now to Death of a Queen, whose directors make very different interpretive choices as they offer their perspective on a power shift in the nature of leadership in twenty-first century South Africa. The contrast helps demonstrate aspects of the complexities at stake in both of these productions. Death of a Queen is set in www.borrowers.uga.edu/783544/show 4/8 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Limpopo province, South Africa, among the Balobedu nation. In contrast to Entabeni, where there are different domains of language, cultures, and political- religious histories, the world of the Rain Queen is more homogeneous, more "traditional," and agrarian and has remained so even with the coming of Europeans and Christianity. Death of a Queen re-colonizes Shakespeare by using Macbeth as a cultural lens on the myth of the immortal queen and on present-day Balobedu national politics. Macbeth's ongoing debate about paths to kingship maps neatly onto a struggle between matrilineal and patrilineal sovereign power. The program series captures very real conflicts between a matriarchal and patriarchal contemporary South African society. Death of a Queen outdoes Entabeni with a sonorous blend of four languages: se-Pedi, vha-Venda, se-Tswana, and se-Sotho, the language in which scriptwriter Bekker is fluent.

Macbeth, and its imbrication in the transition from Elizabeth I to "our cousin James of Scotland," are both a cover and a scaffolding for the legend of the Rain Queen and the legend's legacy in contemporary politics. According to both scriptwriter Marina Bekker and director/producer Pieter Grobbelaar, the Tribal Elders and the ancestors were appeased by the use of Shakespeare's Macbeth and the choice of another nation — the Bapedi — as covers for the Balobedu crisis (Bekker and Grobbelaar 2010). The succession crisis is gendered because queens had ruled Limpopo province for four-hundred years until the mysterious death of Queen Makobo Constance Modjadji VI in 2005, leaving her kingdom stunned with grief. Her brother now rules as regent, and the controversy about succession continues.

An early modern debate about the ontology of witches and their power maps equally neatly onto a belief system that mixes magic, witchcraft, ancestor worship, ritual, and the divine right of queens. Unlike Entabeni, Death of a Queen does not demand the meshing of the clashing modalities of an industrialized Western culture with a belief in ancestor worship. Throughout, the male witches, "paltering . . . in a double sense" (5.8.20),5 and the ancestors control the action. As with many adaptations, this rendition allows the Lady Macbeth figure a pregnancy. The pregnancy miscarries as she keens over the dead Rain Queen's grave. In a chilling invocation to the ancestors, Grace/Lady Macbeth calls on them, "You killed my baby! Dry the milk in my breast." The lines from Shakespeares play in 1.5.43-44, "Come to my woman's breasts / And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers," echo in the viewer's head. The bloody miscarriage signals Grace's descent into madness and death. She commits suicide onscreen, smearing the same poison on her lips that her husband had used to kill the Rain Queen.

The program also allows for a land dispute, one of the most vexed issues in South Africa today. It is the Macbeth surrogate's path to glory — earned glory. After calming the angry rioters, however, he encounters the witches, very quickly succumbs to their prophecies, and then, as ruler, refuses to restore the stolen land. This corrupt venality of leadership resonates as the single dystopic note in an otherwise optimistic vision for the Balobedu peoples.

The ideology of nation-building self-consciously drives this re-versioning. Scriptwriter Marina Bekker seizes the opportunity to change the déjà lu, déjà vu www.borrowers.uga.edu/783544/show 5/8 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation ending. Reconciliation, not vengeance and retaliation, is the only way forward. Bekker recasts the ending, and provides Puno, the young daughter of the murdered Queen, with both female and male qualities of leadership. We have seen her dead mother, as ancestor, appear in a dream to give her young daughter the legendary white stones — stones that endow the sacred queen with the power to make rain. (In fact, the Rain Queen's ability to make rain is shrouded in mystery.) By swallowing the white stones and the black stones — African symbol of male power found in the belly of a crocodile — Puno reconciles tradition (leadership gendered female) and rupture (leadership gendered male), inventing the way forward and urging Macbeth/Malôrô to live. Puno, successor to the Rain Queen's throne, says at the end, "Malôro does not need to die." For the filmmakers, this was "excruciatingly important" (Bekkler and Grobbelaar 2010). The altered ending represented the filmmakers' sense of responsibility towards the spiritual transformation of the new South African nation. The little girl swallows both the white and the black stones, bringing together the old and the new to invent the way forward. Rain falls in the final moments of the program, heralding the physical and spiritual transformation of a nation through reconciliation, its most urgent need. The production thus becomes a working through that is not idle entertainment (the broadcasters' mandate, like the African story-teller, is to educate and inform), but part of South Africa's social-moral history: a nation's soul searching to heal its recent traumatic past in relation to an ancient past.

CONCLUSION Shakespeare is decidedly neither Africa's contemporary nor Africa's kinsman. But, in these renditions, Shakespeare's play is re-fashioned as relevant and accessible to a temporally and geographically distant location through a process of cultural translation and the adoption of a particular poetics that allows the text, yet again, to speak ideologically. These programs move in several directions at once. They call attention to South Africa's recent past (the advent of democracy guaranteeing equal rights for all), and they advance a utopian vision of equality, the return of sacred matriarchal power to an ancient kingdom, the eradication of race as a category, and the establishment of a "rainbow nation." But they also remind the careful viewer in dystopic ways that old inequities persist. Rather than redistributing wealth, new corporate elites, like the old, are corrupt and committed to "their unbridled excesses," according to black poet Don Mattera (2008). Hierarchies endure. As in Macbeth, the nation is not fully healed. The new order, as in all of Shakespeare's tragedies, is far from clear; so, too, in these programs, resolutions are contingent. And both productions raise questions: do these programs concede their indigeneity by using subtitling in order to be marketable in an international entertainment world — even as they fulfill their brief to be "local" in terms of settings, languages, actors? What might it mean to be "South African" in a "new" South Africa in a globalized (once again) world? These Africanized renditions tranmute Shakespeare's depictions of ethnicity in plays such as Titus Andronicus, Henry V, and the Scottish play to new expressions of nation- building.

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NOTES 1. See Adele Seeff, "Recovering the history of the African Theatre" (2004). 2. These drama strands, as they are referred to, were produced according to the highly collaborative, time-consuming SEDIBA method, which requires script development in the vernacular language(s), followed by translation into English for subtitling. 3. I have written elsewhere about the contiguous worlds of the female and the witches. See Adele Seeff, "Shakespeare in Mzansi" (2013). 4. In the "Drinking Song" ("Libiamo"), Violetta and Alfredo make their first connection through her allusion to Hebe — "I'll be Hebe" — to which he responds, "And I hope just as immortal." Hebe is the gods' cupbearer. The use of the music in Entabeni is deeply ironic, and is perhaps an allusion to the fleeting nature of all human connection. I thank Leon Major for his assistance. 5. All references to Macbeth are from William Shakespeare, Macbeth, edited by William C. Carroll (1999).

REFERENCES Bekker, Marina, and Pieter Grobbelaar. 2010. Interview in telephone discussion with author. March. Boehmer, Elleke. 2011. "Where We Belong: South Africa as a Settler Colony and the Calibration of African and Afrikaner Indigeneity." In Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity, and Culture. Edited by Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 257-71. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Volume 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Death of a Queen. 2008. Dir. Pieter Grobbelaar. Scriptwriter Marina Bekker. South African Broadcasting Corporation. DVD. De Kock, Leon. 2001. "South Africa in the Global Imaginary." Poetics Today 22.1: 263- 98. Entabeni. 2008. Dir. Norman Maake. South African Broadcasting Company. DVD. Grobbelaar, Pieter. 2009. Good Storytelling. Available online at: http://inputwarsaw.org/en/good_storytelling.html (http://inputwarsaw.org/en/good_storytelling.html) [accessed 3 March 2011]. Hendricks, Margo. 2006. "Gestures of Performance: Rethinking Race in Contemporary Shakespeare." In Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. Edited by Ayanna Thompson. New York: Routledge. 187-203. Johnston, Anna, and Alan Lawson. 2000. "Settler Colonies." In A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 360-76. MacCannell, Dean. 1993. "Democracy's Turn: On Homeless Noir." In Shades of Noir: A Reader. Edited by Joan Copjec. London: Verso. 279-97. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783544/show 7/8 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Mattera, Don. 2008. " Entabeni, Shakespeare's Macbeth — Review." 05-05. Available online at: http://nfvf.co.za/blog/don-mattera?page=1 (http://nfvf.co.za/blog/don-mattera?page=1) [link no longer active]. Murphet, Julian. 1998. "Noir and the Racial Unconscious." Screen 39.1: 22-35. Posel, Deborah. 2001. "Race as Common Sense." African Studies Review 44.2: 87-113. Royster, Francesca. 2006. "Shakespeare Theater's Rose Rage: Whiteness, Terror, and the Fleshwork of Theatre in a Post-Colorblind Age." In Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. Edited by Ayanna Thompson. New York: Routledge. 221-39. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Seeff, Adele. 2013. " Shakespeare in Mzansi." In Shakespeare on Screen: Macbeth. Edited by Sarah Hatchuel, Natalie Vienne-Guerrin, and Victoria Bladen. Rouen: Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. 171-202. Seeff, Adele. 2004. "Recovering the History of the African Theatre." Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 58.4: 159-67. Shakespeare, William. 1999. Macbeth. Edited by William C. Carroll. Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

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Beds, Handkerchiefs, and Moving Objects in Othello

(/current) SUJATA IYENGAR, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

(/about) ABSTRACT

(/archive) This paper argues that a viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles, can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello, two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. I consider the ways in which three films, a South Indian art film, a North Indian "Bollywood" musical, and an Italian "Shakesteen" adaptation of Othello permit these objects to act expressively. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the "tragic loading" of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy.

INTRODUCTION This essay emerges from a series of challenges that Alexa Alice Joubin issued to Shakespeareans in her edited special issue of the British journal Shakespeare, in which her own essay, "Global Shakespeares as Methodology," asks: "How can Global Shakespeares be a methodology? What can we learn about Shakespeare without Shakespeare's language?" (Joubin 2013). Joubin suggests that imagining Global Shakespeare as a methodology might include: questioning the orientation of our Shakespearean world maps and enquiring where, and why, we do not find Shakespeare; commenting upon the failure of the metaphor of the map or the globe, and imagining other ways of organizing our knowledge about the world; seeking out archival silences within the record of globalization, moving from present to past, even as we might also work from past to future in examining the early modern and modern fascination with "the globe" and the global. Here I offer another approach to Global Shakespeare Studies. It seemed to me that, absent the language, we would pay more attention to the role of objects and character and action. I therefore intervene with a new methodology for Global Shakespeare: to watch three versions of Othello in languages that I do not understand — and to see what I learned.

ACTING OBJECTS www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 1/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation A viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in appropriations surrounding it. Two things dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. This essay considers the ways in which a South Indian art film in the Dravidian language Malayalam, a North Indian "Bollywood" movie in the Utter Pradesh dialect Khariboli, and an Italian teen movie adaptation of Othello permit or prohibit objects from acting expressively. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the "tragic loading" of the bed (5.2.426), in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy.1

I am deliberately cultivating in this essay what Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter, calls a new "anthropomorphism," a renewed "vibrant materialism" — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. Bennett adapts the vital materialism of Spinoza and Bergson, Driesch's notion of "entelechy," and the object-oriented ontology of Bruno Latour in order to argue, paradoxically, against a deterministic or mechanistic force in the universe and against what seems to us like an intuitive and immoveable distinction between life and matter (and here current events overtake theory: given the debates surrounding whether or not the matter of a human body is "alive" when connected to a life-support machine, clearly we need to continue theorizing what we understand as life or activity or agency or, to use Bennett's preferred term, intensities [2009]).

Using examples of material unpredictability ranging from the unprecedented change in the direction of electrons that caused the eastern seaboard blackout in 2003 to the changing status of stem cells in law, Bennett suggests that we start thinking of agents or movers as "assemblages" rather than individual humans or even individual objects. "'Objects' appear as such because their becoming proceeds at a speed or a level below the threshold of human discernment," she writes (Bennett 2009, 58). Moreover, "Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group" (24). How, then, can change or action take place?" Alongside and inside singular human agents there exists a heterogenous series of actants with partial, overlapping, and conflicting degrees of power and effectivity" (33). Actions happen collectively, enabled by multiple actants that function together to form the assemblage. Intensities manifest themselves at different points in the process that is action and at different sites within the assemblage. Action is the end result, but it is futile to attempt, in Bennett's materialism, to trace back a sequence of events in order to isolate a single agent or decision that makes an outcome inevitable.

To a certain extent, we can predict how actants, including objects, will act through "entelechy," a force within objects that contains the potential to shape them but yet does not define them, nor does it necessitate the object's or the process's taking form in a specific way. Akin, Bennett suggests, to Kant's "purposiveness" in art, entelechy offers a plan for the object's or the event's development but without compromising the pluripotentiality also innate within the object. "Entelechy coordinates parts on behalf of a whole in response to events and does so without following a rigid plan; it answers events innovatively and perspicuously, deciding on the spot and in real time which of the many possible courses of development will in fact happen" (Bennett 2009, 75). In other words, Bennett argues that we cannot predict what material objects, even elements, will do under every particular instance; while she does not attribute agency or identity to material objects, she does suggest that complex events can be better explained by imagining agency as a cluster of "intensity" that can be transmitted and distributed among human and non-human agents. Life itself emerges from the interactions among human and non-human matter.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 2/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Critiques of Latour's object-oriented ontology and of Bennett's vital materialism have emerged from various points on the political spectrum.2 Some accuse the new vital materialism of reinscribing a kind of holy mysticism or soul within objects, and of enshrining a quietist neo-humanism. We might also note that despite Bennett's critique of anthropocentric mechanism, one could retort that perhaps one of the reasons we cannot predict (in one of her examples) the direction in which a stream of electrons will flow is that we do not yet fully understand the underlying principles or forces; taken to its logical conclusion, Bennett's vital materialism might merely postpone the triumph of a mechanistic universe dominated by homo scientificus. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Bennett admits to the charge of normative biologism but suggests that complex assemblages will never be fully understood: I think that we are in fact constrained by some sort of nature, that we are free to operate but within iterated structures . . . nature or materiality constrains human (and nonhuman) activities but because nature or materiality is not a perfect machine, it and we are never fully analyzable. There is always something that escapes . . . The need to be kind and respectful to other bodies will remain, regardless of whether one understands human individuals and groups as embodied minds/souls or as complex materialities. (Bennett, quoted in Gratton 2010) Bennett defends herself against the charge of quietism by pointing out her own reliance on what she calls "strategic anthropomorphism" or a "Machiavellian . . . indirect" political agency. When pressed to imagine specific political changes that vital materialism could inspire, she suggests: There seems to be a resonance between the idea of matter as dull stuff/passive resource and a set of gigantically wasteful production and consumption practices . . . [that] endanger and immiserate workers, children, animals, and plants here and abroad. To the extent that the figure of inert matter sustains this consumptive style, another figure might disrupt it. (Bennett, quoted in Khan 2012, 50) Counter-intuitively, Bennett's vital materialism is "pragmatic." She argues that "ethics and politics have more traction on material assemblages and the way they reproduce patterns of effects than they can have on that elusive spiritual entity called the 'moral subject'" (Bennett, quoted in Khan 2012, 54).

There are some inconsistencies in Bennett's position, notably with regard to what is normative or even what she earlier called "pragmatic." She acknowledges in the interview with Khan that she "support[s] medical — in the sense of biochemical — discourses on schizophrenia," including research into "brain science and pharmacological agents that might re-calibrate the delicate chemistry that makes normal thinking possible." Her support for such endeavors draws from her own experiences growing up with a brother with schizophrenia (Bennett, quoted in Khan 50). Yet in her essay "Powers of the Hoard" she asks us to "meet the people, the hoarders, not as bearers of mental illness but as differently-abled bodies that might have special sensory access to the call of things" (Bennett 2012, 244), and suggests that we might consider "paranoia . . . less as a psychological disorder than as an over-extended receptivity to the activeness of material bodies" (Bennett 2012, 268).

Of course, a medicalized and a vibrant materialist outlook are not necessarily incompatible — we could study hoarding as a phenomenon in which "thing-power" becomes manifest while simultaneously imagining a therapeutic praxis that would attend to the desires of the assemblage of objects, family members, microbiomes, heavy metals, and so on that distribute agency around the body of the so-called hoarder — but Bennett herself does not in this essay offer any solutions, pragmatic or otherwise, to the disabling and unhappy predicament in which this distributed agency finds itself. Diana Coole more overtly makes the case for vital matter and other kinds of "critical new materialism" or "new material ontologies" as effective political strategies to alleviate "normative concerns about social justice"; she suggests that it offers "a detailed phenomenology of diverse lives as they are actually lived — often in ways that are at odds with abstract normative theories or official ideologies" (Coole and Frost 2010, 27). www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 3/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

"FAIREY NAPKINS' I will return to the ethical repercussions of vibrant materialism or object-oriented critical ontologies later, but first I want to demonstrate the productive generation of this kind of intensity surrounding the famous handkerchief in Othello. In Shakespeare and Literary Theory, Jonathan Gil Harris uses Deleuze and Guattari and Latour's Actor-Network-Theory to argue for the handkerchief as a rhizomatic network connecting multiple actors, meanings, and even time periods (Harris 2009, 61). Bennett's vibrant materialism also builds on Deleuze and Guattari and on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, but she adds to or inflects her sources with a re-enchantment of the material world. (Remember that Bennett suggests objects only appear as inert matter to us because we move and perceive too slowly to acknowledge their becoming.) The handkerchief is enchanted: it might or might not have been dyed in mummy made from maidens' hearts, but it operates as if alive. It is helpful to think of the handkerchief as a human/non-human hybrid or assemblage, an actant bearing within it a certain entelechy, but one that requires the coordination of human and non-human forces (for example, the gravity that lets the handkerchief fall, Othello's pushing it away, Emilia's taking it up) in order for the tragedy to take place.

The handkerchief shrouds its movements, at least early on, in mystery. How does it get from Othello to Desdemona and from Desdemona to Emilia? Folio and Quarto offer no help.3 The 1622 Quarto reads (figure 1):

Figure 1. Othello, TLN 1961-65, sig. Hv, British Library

Oth. Your napkin is too little: Let it alone, come I'le goe in with you. Des. I am very sorry that you are not well. Em. I am glad I haue found this napkin, Ex. Oth. and Desd. This was her first remembrance from the Moore. (TLN 1961-65, 3.3., Hv) Sometime after Desdemona's sympathetic words and the lovers' exit, Emilia sees and obtains the handkerchief. What happens in the space between those lines? Does Othello angrily push the napkin away from him and leave it on the ground, or on a table? Does he trample it underfoot and leave it stained, as in Orson Welles's 1952 film (Othello, figure 2)?

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Figure 2: Othello tramples Desdemona's handkerchief underfoot

The 1623 Folio reads (figure 3):

Figure 3. Othello, TLN 1921-24, 3.3 TT5 col.1, p. 325, Brandeis University

Oth. Your Napkin is too little: Let it alone: Come, Ile go in with you. Exit. Des. I am very sorry that you are not well. AEmil. I am glad I haue found this Napkin. (TLN 1921-24, 3.3 TT5 col.1, p. 325) This text leaves open the possibility that Desdemona and Othello exit separately, although if Desdemona remains on stage after Othello leaves, why doesn't Desdemona notice the loss of her handkerchief immediately? Does Desdemona "let it drop by negligence," as Emilia says (3.3.356)? Does it fall out of Desdemona's bodice? Does Emilia, as she later says, "filch" it from Desdemona's hand (3.3.361)? The word filch first appears in 1575 in John Awdeley's cony-catching pamphlet The Fraternity of Vagabonds, revealed as canting slang for the theft of small things. Shakespeare uses it only used twice in the canon, both times in the so-called temptation scene, 3.3, of Othello. Cassio laments, "he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him /And makes me poor indeed" (188), www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 5/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and Emilia asks Iago of the handkerchief, "What will you do with't, that you have been so earnest / To have me filch it?" (361). I speculate that Shakespeare enjoyed the sound-echo with "filth," but such surmises must remain unprovable.

The handkerchief is unpredictable, a "trifle . . . light as air" (3.3.370) so light that it threatens to render the tragedy farcical, as Thomas Rymer complained: So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief! . . . Had it been Desdemona's Garter, the Sagacious Moor might have smelt a rat, but the Handkerchief is so remote a trifle, no Booby, on this side Mauritania, could make any consequence from it . . . Desdemona dropt the Handkerchief, and missed it that very day after her Marriage; it might have been rumpl'd up with her Wedding sheets: And this Night that she lay in her wedding sheets, the Fairey Napkin (whilst Othello was stifling her) might have started up to disarm his fury, and stop his ungracious mouth . . . Then might he . . . touch'd with remorse, have honestly cut his own Throat, by the good leave, and with the applause of all the Spectators. Who might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, admiring the beauty of Providence; fairly and truly represented on the Theatre. (Rymer 1693, K6-K7) I do not endorse Rymer's reading, but he is correct that the magic handkerchief or "Fairey Napkin" connects to other problems in performing Othello: the credibility of Iago's deception and the violence of Othello's response, problems to which filmmakers respond in different ways. The three films that I study here attempt to compensate for the handkerchief's lightness by disenchanting it, by substituting for it an object of more immediately erotic significance to Desdemona and Othello, by adding additional motive to the Emilia character and, in Kaliyattam, by distributing agency and blame across supernatural actants (Hindu deities) located outside human or human-made assemblages.

KALIYATTAM

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 6/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Figure 4. Perumalayan Kannan wearing orange full-face make up as his theyyam character Jayaraaj's award-winning film Kaliyattam (figure 4) transfers Shakespeare's play to the South Indian state of Kerala and casts Othello as Perumalayan Kannan, the lead dancer in a complex religious dance practice and ritual called Theyyam. During Theyyam, the lead dancer becomes the deity incarnate, acting as a manifestation of the divine rather than as himself. Kannan wears his make-up to become the deity, but also, in this film, to murder his wife Thamara, tricked by the duplicity of a jealous player in the troupe, Paniyan, who yearns for a leading role. The handkerchief becomes a red and gold patta, a scarf or robe that in this film is a wedding gift also used as a bedspread or as ceremonial marriage sheets (figures 5-8).

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Figures 5-8. The patta as wedding gift Poonam Trivedi suggests that "Jayaraaj even betters Shakespeare here" (2007, 151) in associating the handkerchief with the vibrant color red, associated with fertility (figure 9). The childless Cheerma, Trivedi suggests, now has another motive for her theft of the patta (figure 10), namely her desire to please her husband by giving him children.

Figure 9. Thamara spreads out the patta as a bedspread on her wedding night

Figure 10. Cheerma steals the patta from Thamara's Hope Chest On the one hand, human agents in Kaliyattam such as the Emilia-character Cheerma work more intensively towards the tragic denouement. By forcing the Emilia character Cheerma actively to steal the patta from Thamara's Hope Chest and by making the handkerchief explicitly eroticized, the director has effectively done what Rymer suggested and made Desdemona drop her garter. On the other, Shakespeare's play carefully leaves open the possibility that there is indeed "magic in the web" of the

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 8/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation handkerchief (3.4.81): that it is to a certain extent the center of what Bennett might call an intensity that approaches agency. It turns both Paniyan and Cheerma into brides (figures 11 and 12).

Figures 11 and 12. Cheerma and Paniyan as brides The point is that the handkerchief is precisely a "trifle light as air" and that Emilia's actions, as Coleridge said of Iago's, are "motiveless" (1835-36, 36-37). The handkerchief-object can only work its magic as part of a human/non-human assemblage.

Kaliyattam does not eradicate non-human agents, however; it brings in supernatural elements and the natural world to relocate the enchantment of the handkerchief within the mythology of Theyyam. Repeated shots of Perumalayan and Thamara smeared with the former's theatrical make-up after love- making (figure 13) and of the pots shattering on the floor in the violence of their love evoke a supernatural or spiritual element to the tragedy, again in an attempt to wrest the enchantment out of the handkerchief. A shot of Thamara and Perumalayan looking at their own smudged reflections in a circular mirror turns their post-coital languor suddenly ominous (figure 14), an image that perhaps recalls a well-known moment in Welles's film in which Othello and Iago are mirrored back to themselves and to the viewer as Othello muses, "Haply for I am black . . ." (3.3.304; a still from one of the many shots with the circular mirror is reproduced in Stratford 2015). When the anguished Perumalayan calls out to the deities, they come to him on the mountain in full costume only to turn their backs on him ostentatiously (figure 15).

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Figure 13. Smeared make-up

Figure 14. Thamara and Perumalayan see their begrimed reflections

Figure 15. The gods turn their backs on Perumalayan After Perumalayan suffocates Thamara and Cheerma reveals the truth about the patta, Perumalayan hunts down Paniyan and beats him almost to death, after which Perumalayan immolates himself on the ritual purification fire of the Theyyam, with which the film has opened. There's no tragic loading of the bed; the lovers die apart.

OMKARA

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Figure 16. Movie poster for Omkara Bhardwaj's Omkara (figure 16) sets Shakespeare's play among rough gangsters in Uttar Pradesh, even down to deploying the distinct Khariboli language common amongst rural peoples of this area rather than the standard Bollywood Hindustani. Dolly, the beloved daughter of a high-ranking lawyer, falls in love with Omkara or Omi, a thug employed by a local politico to kneecap his opponents. Omkara kidnaps Dolly from her wedding to Rajju (the Rodrigo character) and, with the intercession of the politico, her father is reconciled to the upcoming wedding of Omi and Dolly. After a major coup, Omkara promotes Kesu (Cassio) over Langda (Iago), who vows revenge and convinces his wife Indu to steal a bejeweled kamarbandh (a cummerbund or waistband, figure 17), a piece of wedding jewelry belonging to Dolly, which Langda will use to convince Omkara that Dolly is having a clandestine affair with Kesu. Convinced by the kamarbandh and by an overheard conversation, Omkara kills Dolly on their wedding night, killing himself after Indu reveals Dolly's innocence.

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Figure 17. The kamarbandh or cummerbund The film disenchants the handkerchief by making the token explicitly erotic (it features in nearly every scene in which Omi and Dolly are intimate) and is itself caressed and beloved by other characters. Moreover, it is valuable in itself — made of precious metals and jewels — and, like the patta in Kaliyattam, forms part of a trousseau or wedding set. At the same time, the movie leaves it mysterious how Indu/Emilia gets this kamarbandh. We see it on Dolly's body as the camera pans up before she and Omkara make love, we see Omkara kissing it on her body (on a standing and fixed bed, not a traditional Indian swing-bed), during a love-scene interrupted by the brawl (set up by Langda) in which Kesu disgraces himself.

The kamarbandh explicitly associates eroticism with the threat of violence, and even with male arousal at the prospect of that violence. We next see it during the love-song "O Saathi Re," in the context of a montage love-scene showing Omi and Dolly's romance. The montage interpolates defused threats of battery. Kesu teaches Dolly the Stevie Wonder song "I Just Called To Say I Love You," and when Dolly sings it to Omkara, he laughs at her attempt. Angered, she play-fights him; they mock arm-wrestle; she pretends to threaten Omkara with a shotgun. Next we see Indu the Emilia character holding the kamarbandh and turning it over in her hands as if she's envious, watching the happiness of Omi and Dolly. After this scene, the next time we see the kamarbandh is when Indu gives it to Langda, who laughs with glee as he dresses himself up as a mock bride with the kamarbandh on his face (figure 18).

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Figure 18. Langda as mock-bride

Note the parallels with Kaliyattam, as both Iago characters use the handkerchief-function to mimic the joy of the new bride — it's perhaps a displaced homoeroticism (a subtext missing from both these films, although it appears prominently in, say, Oliver Parker's 1995 U.S. film of Othello). In Omkara the image even recalls a specific piece of bridal jewelry to be worn on the head: the matta pati. In all these shots the kamarbandh is as a character — in shot — at the expense of human characters.4

The sight of the kamarbandh on Langda's face intensifies its eroticism because we have previously seen this piece of jewelry on Dolly's belly, pointing towards her lower body. Later scenes associate the kamarbandh with the traditional Indian swing-bed. Kesu seems mesmerized by the hypnotic movement of the kamarbandh as Langda offers it to him. The swing-bed, a traditional piece of furniture, appears many times in this film both to foreshadow the murder-scene and to unsettle the viewer's point-of-view the way that Langda makes it impossible for Omkara to contemplate Dolly as faithful or steadfast. In this sense the use of the moving bed and the rocking camera recalls what Dan Juan Gil calls the "asocial sexuality" of Orson Welles's Othello brought out by that film through destabilizing camera angles and shot-reverse shots that don't quite match (Gil 2005). Asocial sexuality fits particularly well for this film: gangsters are asocial in every sense ''because they break up the social fabric of human relations. Organized crime disenchants objects and dehumanizes people.

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IAGO

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Figure 19. Movie Poster for Iago My final film takes us from tragedy to farce. Volfgango de Biasi's Iago (2009; figure 19) transforms Shakespeare's tragedy of love into a teen comedy. Set among architecture students in a prestigious college in a 1980s-inflected twenty-first century, the film presents Iago as a hard-working and intelligent orphan who supports his aged aunt; Desdemona as the privileged princess-daughter of the Rector of the University; and Otello as a former childhood playmate of Desdemona, returned after many years, the spoiled, lazy scion of a rich black donor who is Brabantio's close friend. This Cassio is indeed "a fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife" (1.1.22): he collects women and their pictures, snapping Polaroids of his lovers that he annotates with their telephone numbers and sexual idiosyncracies and files away in an index-card box.

Iago is a shallow movie: it depends upon a hip soundtrack, shiny costumes, and sexual innuendo for its claims to popularity. This is Shakespeare mediated through Baz Luhrmann, complete with Romeo + Juliet's masquerade ball and the extravagantly choreographed group dancing of Moulin Rouge (1996 and 2001). Nonetheless, I found Iago helpful in thinking about how we understand agency, or rather what Bennett calls "intensities," surrounding action in this play. It distributes the handkerchief's function among several items: a Polaroid snapshot of Desdemona and Cassio kissing, taken by Iago in seemingly a more innocent time but later used by Iago to fuel Otello's jealousy (figure 20); a lace handkerchief left by Desdemona in the ladies' room, stolen by Emilia and planted by Iago in Cassio's bed (figure 21); and

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 15/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the compact disc containing the group's work, which Iago replaces with a broken one in order to frame Cassio as a drunkard and a slacker (figure 22).

Figure 20. The Polaroid

Figure 21. The handkerchief

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Figure 22. The Compact Disc All these objects share the blame, as it were, for Otello's gulling.

Unlike in Shakespeare (or in the first two films), in this film the bed is not the only place to have sex: we see Otello and Desdemona embracing in an old library, an implied threesome among Iago, Cassio, and Bianca in the architectural studio (figure 23), and Rodrigo, a flamboyant cross-dresser in fabulous ball- gown, wig, and makeup, fondling the bare legs of the dancing crowd during the great set-piece masquerade ball at which Desdemona and Otello first kiss. Three scenes, however, feature a bed prominently. Brabantio, summoned profanely by Rodrigo (who is disguised in drag) and Iago, interrupts a post-coital Desdemona and Otello; Desdemona defends herself with dignity, as in Shakespeare's play. Iago plants the handkerchief in Cassio's bed, under the pillow, where Cassio, upon finding it, cannot imagine which of his many conquests might have left it there.

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Figure 23. Implied Threesome after hours in the studio

Just as in Shakespeare's Othello, the bed appears prominently in the final scene to connote marital union. In this version, however, Otello is long vanquished, and the consummation devoutly to be wished emerges between Desdemona and Iago. The sequence begins with Emilia castigating Desdemona for Iago's behavior, after which a penitent Desdemona is seen approaching Iago's house, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the background behind her. Iago's aunt at first refuses to let her in, but ultimately relents; Desdemona sits on Iago's bed, a four-poster with red curtains.

As Iago regards Desdemona in surprise, the film frames the bed as a kind of discovery space between the bed-curtains. Desdemona and Iago exchange glances — you can see Iago framed by the curtains with a cross in the background (figure 24) — and Desdemona scolds him, removes her leather jacket to reveal that she is wearing a transparent blouse that displays her breasts, walks over to him by the window, kisses him aggressively, and the screen floods with red light. The film ends with the lovers in a clinch, the bed in the background, after which a pair of red curtains close the scene, the film, and the play.

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Figure 24. Iago framed by bedcurtains.

CONCLUSION Bennett writes, in discussing the energy traders that the press and many consumers considered responsible for the great Northeastern blackout of 2003: Autonomy and strong responsibility seem to me to be empirically false, and thus their invocation seems tinged with injustice. In emphasizing the ensemble nature of action and the interconnections between persons and things, a theory of vibrant matter presents individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects. (Bennett 2009, 37; emphasis mine) Critics note, however, that the victims of the blackout (like the victims of so-called rogue traders during the financial crisis in 2008) bore the full responsibility of the consequences. Bennett acknowledges that there's something satisfying, humanly speaking, in attributing blame to "deregulation and corporate greed," but suggests that a modified ethical response for individual human beings under such circumstances — in which assemblages, rather than individual human entities, distribute both agency and blame — must be to ask oneself about "the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating . . . Do I attempt to extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm?" (Bennett 2009, 37). Anticipating accusations of quietism, she makes the case for "moral outrage" under certain circumstances, but suggests that de-emphasizing "material agency" merely in order to condemn particular humans risks "legitimat[ing] vengeance and elevat[ing] violence" over courses of political action (Bennett 2009, 38).

Avoiding blame is very counterintuitive, both to many who identify themselves as political progressives and to those who see themselves as conservatives in the tradition of populism. All of us, on some level, would love to find someone to blame for the market crash of 2008. Yet even as I resisted Bennett's notion of distributed blame among assemblages rather than humans, I thought of the success of Nelson Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation movement in the free South Africa. Resisting the urge to attribute blame to specific human beings, in that instance, indeed enabled the reconstruction of a juster and freer and more unified polity. And peculiarly enough, a focus on material trappings and gloss and sheen in www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 19/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Volfgango di Biasi's teen-movie is what enables tragedy to become comedy. Instead of watching silently during the eavesdropping scene, Otello interrupts Cassio and Bianca and beats up Cassio in order to take the handkerchief back to Desdemona. Otello slaps Desdemona (this is a version of Shakespeare's 4.1), but then directs his anger against the scale model of the town piazza that his group was designing. Otello destroys the group project, but expresses no more violence towards Desdemona. Then follow a series of angry but non-violent confrontations: Cassio admonishes Iago, Iago censures Otello for shirking his work on the project, Desdemona reproaches Iago for his trickery, Iago rebukes Desdemona for abandoning him, Brabantio reprimands and expels Otello, Desdemona scolds and breaks up with Otello, Emilia castigates Desdemona for being a tease — in other words, a comic resolution requires that blame be quite thoroughly "distributed" among various persons, situations, and objects and that violence be deflected or diverted. Where Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona, Emilia and possibly even Iago end the play a tangled assemblage of bodies dead and partly living, Iago's insouciant teens extricate themselves from assemblages that threaten to harm them, with no apparent ill-effects.5 Instead of tolerating the blow that Otello strikes, Desdemona leaves him and asserts her independence; instead of destroying Desdemona and then himself, Otello breaks the assembled city-model and then removes himself from the potentially harmful assemblage of Otello, Desdemona, and Iago.

Shakespeare's Othello has from its first performances been associated with the problem of blame and evil. Rymer famously and facetiously expressed his own "vital materialism" in blaming the handkerchief for the tragedy. Readers as diverse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Agatha Christie (in her posthumously published novel Curtain [Coleridge 1835-36; Christie 1975]) consider Iago the arch-engineer of the tragic plot. Feminist critics such as Ania Loomba have long pointed out that whatever Iago does does not justify Othello's murdering Desdemona and that we cannot understand the outcome independently of race and sexuality (1989). In performance, Othello and Iago vie for the role of tragic hero or anti-hero, to such an extent that in 1956 at the Old Vic, John Neville and Richard Burton took turns playing each part. Scholars have proposed various theories of Shakespearean tragedy over the years — tragedy of character (Bradley); radical or decentered tragedy, in which the subject itself is deconstructed (Belsey); tragedy borne out of political struggle and the subordination of various kinds of human (Dollimore); "festive" or sacrificial tragedy (Liebler). But perhaps Shakespearean tragedies are tragedies of entelechy and matter, vital matter. Tragedies of entelechy are Dionysian, in Nietzsche's sense (1994) — tragedies of becoming, of humans' inability to perceive objects becoming meaningful and agentic and of their becoming inert matter ("O Desdemon! Dead, Desdemon! Dead! O, O!" [5.2.332]) from vibrant life ("Kill me tomorrow" [5.2.100]) — and of the liminal electron-cloudy space between the two.

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Figure 25. Electron clouds, reproduced with permission

NOTES 1. Quotations from Shakespeare's works come from the Folger Digital Texts, unless otherwise indicated. 2. See, for example, the special issue of the minnesota review edited by medievalist Andrew Cole, which includes essays that both critique and extend the object-oriented turn in Medieval Studies. 3. Diplomatic transcriptions and images of Folio and First Quarto texts of Othello come from the Internet Shakespeare Editions' facsimile reprints unless otherwise specified: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/overview/play/oth.html (http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/overview/play/oth.html). 4. Diana Henderson, writing independently, discusses the erotics of the kamarbandh in an essay in the Oxford Dictionary of Embodiment (Henderson 2016). 5. Richard Burt points out in a personal communication that Shakespeare's play, too, concludes with a series of blame-ridden confrontations; notably, the epithet "devil" is used by Othello of Iago, Iago of Emilia, and Emilia of Othello in 5.2. It's also used of Desdemona by Othello in 4.1, and this is the scene that Iago transforms into comedy.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2013.827236 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2013.827236) [accessed 24 August 2017]. Kaliyattam. 1997. Dir. Jayaraaj [Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair). Perf. Suresh Gopi (Kannan Perumalayan], Lal [Paniyan], Manju Warrier [Thamara], Biju Menon [Kaanthan]. Reprint, 2013. Biscoot Malayalam. YouTube. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st3zAR6cK7Y (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st3zAR6cK7Y) [accessed 3 June 2014]. Khan, Gulshan Ara. 2012. "Vital Materiality and Non-Human Agency: An Interview with Jane Bennett." In Dialogues with Contemporary Political Theorists. Edited by Gary Browning, Raia Prokhovnik, Maria Dimova- Cookson. London and New York: Palgrave. 42-57. Liebler, Naomi. 1995. Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy. London: Routledge. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show 22/24 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Loomba, Ania. 1989. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. 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Reprint, Internet Shakespeare Editions. Available online at: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/overview/play/oth.html (http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/overview/play/oth.html) [accessed 6 November 2017]. Shakespeare, William. 1623. Works. London. Reprint, Internet Shakespeare Editions. Available online at: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/overview/play/oth.html (http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/overview/play/oth.html) [accessed 6 November 2017]. Shakespeare, William. 2017. Othello. Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 24 August, 2017. Available online at: www.folgerdigitaltexts.org (www.folgerdigitaltexts.org) [accessed 2 August 2017]. Stratford, Bruce. 2015. "British Film Institute programmer reflects on 'Great Disruptor.'" WellesNet. British Film Institute. Available online at: http://www.wellesnet.com/british-film-institute-programmer-reflects- on-great-disruptor/ [accessed 10 October 2017]. (http://www.wellesnet.com/british-film-institute- programmer-reflects-on-great-disruptor/) Trivedi, Poonam. 2007. "Filmi Shakespeare." Literature Film Quarterly 35.2: 148-58. Welles, Orson, dir. 1952. Othello. Perf. Orson Welles [Othello], Suzanne Cloutier [Desdemona], Micheál MacLiammoír [Iago]. Reprint, 1992. Criterion Collection. Reprint, 2013 YouTube License. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09NWcKA7JKw (https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=09NWcKA7JKw)[accessed 3 June 2014].

PERMISSIONS Image of electron cloud reproduced under license from the American Physical Society, Physical Review B, "Probing core-electron orbitals by scanning transmission electron microscopy and measuring the delocalization of core-level excitations," by Jon Seok Jeong et al. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.93.165140 (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.93.165140). License Number 419781005173.

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Comrade Fortinbras and Bourgeois Hamlet:

(/current) Global Leftist Hamletism

JEFFREY BUTCHER, COLLEGE OF COASTAL GEORGIA (/previous)

ABSTRACT | A LEFTIST CODE | GLOBAL HAMLETISM | RETHINKING SHAKESPEARE (/about) AND THE LEFT | REFERENCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT

In Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov creates the world of Padukgrad, a dystopian society symbolic of Stalin's tyrannical regime. In the novel, an obscure scholar proposes an adaptation of Hamlet to be performed at Padukgrad state theater. This adaptation transforms Fortinbras into the hero of the play and presents the tragic flaw of Hamlet as secondary. I use Nabokov's anti-Stalinist appropriation of Shakespeare as a point of departure to legitimize Marxist-Leninist appropriative deployments of Hamlet that precede the taint of Stalin. German, Soviet, and American Leftists alike incorporated Hamlet as a negative prototype — a representation of bourgeois individualism and uncommitted Leftist sympathizers — into political rhetoric so as to advocate commitment and reform. I argue that global Leftist "Hamletism" not only illustrates a clear (political) distinction between proletarian and popular appropriations of Shakespeare, but also demonstrates a theory crucial to the re-politicization of Shakespeare's social function today.

A LEFTIST CODE Hamlet has become a cultural code in popular and high culture alike. My paper centers on extractions of Hamlet in political contexts. I argue that Marxist-Leninist — or Leftist — Hamletism is a unique tradition in that it is distinct from popular and dominant cultural citations of Hamlet. It is unique in part because it aims to develop a global proletarian consciousness. Even though both popular and proletarian cultures are thought to be representative of the masses at large, there are major ideological differences. "Popular" typically appeals to the democratization of culture in the form of www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 1/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation materialist production, primarily with regard to access and ownership of particular media and cultural capital. Proletarian culture, on the other hand, is conditioned by Leftist ideals, historically influenced by Marxism-Leninism, which entail propagating a clear partisan political consciousness from the perspective of the proletariat. In addition, proletarian culture is not organically formed, but rather shaped by a vanguard comprised of highly educated individuals with access to high and popular culture. In this paper, I intend to show how Leftist Hamletism embodies proletarian principles and how it played a major role in the proletarian movement during the early- twentieth-century. I also want to explain why proletarian appropriations of Shakespeare are worth exhuming and studying.

The political principles of the Old Left — the Leninist Left — are often misconstrued, as they continue to be tainted by the horrors of Stalinism. In Bend Sinister (1947), the first novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote while living in America, Nabokov brings to life the world of Padukgrad — a dystopian society reflective of the authoritarian regime of Joseph Stalin. The novel centers on Professor Krug, a renowned philosopher and a sure reflection of the novel's émigré author. Krug appears to be in a sort of "Hamlet dilemma" — considering "to speak or not to speak" as a representative of the Ekwilist philosophy, the philosophy of the ruler Paduk's "Party of the Average Man." In fact, Shakespearean tropes are pervasive throughout Bend Sinister, but a more obvious interest in Hamlet is evident in what has been called the "Hamlet Chapter" (Chapter 7). In this chapter, a scholar named Ember recites a proposed adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy, one that Ember intends to stage at the Padukgrad state theater. In order for the government to find it "worthwhile to suffer the production of a muddled Elizabethan play," Ember must appease the state by making Fortinbras — "a blooming young knight, beautiful and sound to the core" — the hero of the play, instead of a cowardly Hamlet (Nabokov 1990, 107, 108). Ember claims that his biggest hurdle is persuading the players to adopt his translation of the play and to forget "the abominable one to which they are used" (107).

The alteration of Hamlet by Nabokov's character speaks to the history of the Russian stage and the controversy that surrounded the play in the Soviet Union. By the mid-1930s, even though Shakespeare continued to dominate the Soviet stage, Hamlet was essentially erased from the Soviet repertoire because Hamlet's internal conflict and hesitance did not echo the so-called "optimistic spirit" of the times (Rowe 1976, 127). There is no doubt that Nabokov was familiar with the Hamlet controversy; and it is quite possible that Ember's report that the "only respectable" Hamlet actors "left the country in disguise" (Nabokov 1990, 107) is an allusion to Soviet actors, such as Mikhail Chekhov, who took their business abroad. Chekhov was recognized as Russia's best Hamlet, but after his performance in a 1924 production of Hamlet, he was publicly censured for appearing to be "so crushed by grief and despair for himself and mankind that his consciousness seemed to disintegrate" (Rowe 1976, 128).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 2/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation I bring up Bend Sinister because it is to an extent historically accurate in its depiction of the Soviet stage. Broadly speaking, Hamlet was viewed as counterproductive to the Leftist program. As Arkady Ostrovsky explains, the "source of tragedy in the 1930s could be an accident, a misunderstanding, or a mistake as in Othello or Romeo and Juliet, but not the innate conflict or guilt of the protagonist as in Hamlet and Macbeth" (Ostrovsky 2006, 61). The play Hamlet was thought to represent bourgeois individualism, and the character Hamlet symbolized a weak-kneed individual who is the source of his own tragedy. We see this by examining Leftist Hamletism.

GLOBAL HAMLETISM An unsympathetic interpretation of Prince Hamlet is by no means unique to the Soviet Union. In his book Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art, R. A. Foakes explains the history of the phenomenon commonly known as "Hamletism," a term that describes Hamlet as a cultural signifier identified with "the problems of [an] age" and politicized as "mirroring those who from weakness of will endlessly vacillate" (Foakes 1993, 19). While this description may apply to a multitude of political purposes and disparate ideologies, the common ground in all forms of Hamletism is that they are "interconnected, and developed from an image of Hamlet as well-intentioned but ineffectual, full of talk but unable to achieve anything, addicted to melancholy and sickened by the world around him" (20).

As we trace Hamletism back to Ferdinand Freiligrath's 1844 poem "Deutchland ist Hamlet," we see that Hamletism has typically been motivated by nationalist agendas. In this poem, Freiligrath describes the German population as one filled with revolutionary thinkers who substitute philosophizing for action. In 1877, following German victories in the Franco-Prussian War, Horace Furness delivered a different German message as he dedicated his staging of Hamlet to the "GERMAN SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY OF WEIMAR REPRESENTATIVE OF A PEOPLE WHOSE RECENT HISTORY HAS PROVED ONCE FOR ALL THAT GERMANY IS NOT HAMLET" (quoted in Foakes 1993, 20). In the West, nineteenth-century British imperialists urged soldiers not to be Hamlets (26). And even in the United States, as recently as the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George P. Shultz applied a similar allusion to Hamlet during a debate over foreign policy. Shultz declared that we should not allow the United States to become the "Hamlet of Nations." In his book Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations, Thomas Cartelli makes a noteworthy assessment of Shultz's application of Hamlet:

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 3/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation The image of ruined bodies draped across the stage at the play's end and familiarity with the Reagan Administration's position on the fatal consequences of U.S. indecision in Vietnam combine to suggest that if decisive action is required to enforce yet another Cold War intervention, the United States is well-prepared to play the role of the late imperial Fortinbras. (Cartelli 1999, 87) These examples of German, British, and American Hamletism reveal imperialist-motivated — militaristic and nationalist — deployments of Hamlet. They are not far disconnected from Nabokov's satirical critique of what I see as "Comrade Fortinbras."

In contrast, Leftist Hamletism is implemented to reach an end goal of international proletarian solidarity in opposition to capitalist oppression. The literary Left during the 1920s and 1930s was far less concerned with military action than it was with political commitment. American Communist Party member and literary critic Joseph Freeman claimed, "Whatever role art may have played in epochs preceding ours — whatever may be its function in the classless society of the future — social war today has made it the subject of partisan polemic" (Freeman 1935, 9). And for this reason Leftist Hamletism was employed: for a partisan political purpose. The Left focused on creating a hegemonic proletarian literary tradition and did not use "Hamlet" as a popular expression without a literary and political purpose. "Hamlet" became the name for fellow-travelers, Leftist sympathizers, who would not fully commit to the proletarian movement — more specifically, wavering liberal intellectuals.

In contrast, what I call "Leftist Hamletism" is implemented to reach an end goal of international proletarian solidarity, in opposition to capitalist oppression. While Hamletism has become a cultural signifier in popular culture, I argue that Marxist-Leninist, or "Leftist," Hamletism is a unique tradition distinct from popular citations of Hamletism. It is unique in part because it aims to develop a global proletarian consciousness. Even though both popular and proletarian cultures are often thought to represent the masses at large, there are major ideological differences. "Popular" generally describes the democratization of culture in the form of materialist production, primarily with regard to access and ownership of particular media and cultural capital. Proletarian culture, on the other hand, is conditioned by Leftist ideals, historically influenced by Marxism-Leninism, which entail propagating a clear partisan political consciousness from the perspective of the proletariat. With regard to literature, American Leftist and literary critic Joseph Freeman claimed, "Whatever role art may have played in epochs preceding ours — whatever may be its function in the classless society of the future — social war today has made it the subject of partisan polemic" (Freeman 1935, 9). With the advent of the Leftist literature movement in the 1920s and 1930s, Leftists cited "Hamlet" as a proletarian expression with a literary and political purpose. And unlike previous historical uses of "Hamletism" in nationalistic rhetoric, the literary Left was far less concerned with military action than it was with political www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 4/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation commitment. And for this reason Leftist Hamletism was employed — for a partisan political purpose. "Hamlet" became the name for fellow-travelers, Leftist sympathizers, who would not fully commit to the proletarian movement — more specifically, wavering liberal intellectuals.

Leftist Hamletism has Russian roots. During the nineteenth-century, the intellectual classes sought to disgrace the nobility for resisting change, so they called noblemen "Hamlets"; thus, they formed the concept of "Russian Hamlets": "superfluous men" who "overemphasized psychology" (Freeman 1935, 9). The Soviet Left ultimately turned what it meant to be a "Russian Hamlet" against the intellectuals. A "Russian Hamlet" became one who would not commit to the proletarian movement. American Leftist Joshua Kunitz, after traveling to the Soviet Union around 1930 to observe the political climate, provided an account of the Bolshevik opposition to wavering fellow-travelers. As he explained, In contrast to the unswerving Bolsheviki, [the intellectuals] seemed a pitiable lot. And it is as such that we see them portrayed in Soviet literature. Weak-kneed Hamlets, whose "native air of resolution" had been "sickled o'er by the pale cast of thought," superfluous people, ludicrous creatures, nonplussed mourners with their noses timorously tucked in their ragged furs. (Kunitz 1930, 85) Such rhetoric can be found in Soviet works of literature. In N. Ognyov's The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate, there is a description of a lack of uniformity among the intelligentsia and the Left. One of the instructors says, "[I]f you tell me that the intelligentsia is co-operating with the Soviet Power, and serving the Soviet Power, I shall answer that you are mistaken — for it is not the intelligentsia as a whole, but only a few categories, a few individuals . . . Some [others] just look like Hamlets" (Ognyov 1929, 66, emphasis in original).

Leftist Hamletism also speaks to the challenges proletarian culture faced. The Left needed support from liberal intellectuals. Following the Kharkov Conference of Revolutionary Writers in 1930 — the biggest players being the Soviet, American, and German Left — it became understood that "proletarian [culture] . . . had not yet established its undisputed hegemony [and] was still waging a battle against the literary tendencies represented by the so-called 'fellow-travelers'" (Editors 1931, 6). This was even true in the Soviet Union. Contributing to the conference, American representatives created a ten-point list of things that needed to change. The very first point read: "The widening of activity of the John Reed Clubs and the New Masses in two directions: a) extending the proletarian base of our movement by drawing in new proletarian elements; b) winning over of radicalized intellectuals" (7). Mike Gold, arguably the most influential figure in the American proletarian movement, in a personal follow up to the conference stated, "We must bring our young artists and writers to a revolutionary consciousness, for this will give their work strength and clarity" (Gold 1931, 11). Gold was not only directing this statement to an American audience, but to the entire Communist International. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 5/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation According to Gold, "Intellectual Hamlets go through enormous sweaty tragedies," but they usually "drift contentedly" into the capitalist world where they serve as "a kind of intellectual Bomb Squad" (quoted in Aaron 1961, 329). In a review of John Howard Lawson's 1925 play Processional, Gold castigates Lawson, calling him a "bourgeois Hamlet." By using "'bourgeois' Hamlet" as an insult, Gold molds Shakespeare's character in order to chastise Gold's wavering contemporaries. In the Processional critique, Gold compares Lawson to an over-indulgent Hamlet to insinuate that Lawson "actually hurt the revolutionary movement by portraying the proletariat revolutionary" in a counterproductively idealistic fashion (Chambers 2006, 176). Not only does Gold harshly criticize Processional, but he also disparages Lawson as a stagnant playwright, one who does not understand his role in the Leftist movement. "[Lawson] is still lost like Hamlet, in his inner conflict," Gold writes, "Through all his plays wander a troop of ghosts disguised in the costumes of living men and women and repeating the same monotonous questions: 'Where do I belong in this warring world of two classes?'" (Gold 1934, 28).

Lawson did not wait long to respond. A week after Gold's written assault, in an article titled "'Inner Conflict' and Proletarian Art," Lawson unhesitatingly separates himself from many Leftist sympathizers who suffer from hesitancy. In his defense, stating that his position in the global class war is both "definite and disciplined," Lawson indicates that "many American intellectuals are so confused about the whole issue that they waver idiotically between Communism and various manifestations of social fascism" (Lawson 1969, 205). Lawson never defends any positive qualities in Hamlet; quite the opposite, he only tries to clear his own name from being affiliated with such a stigmatizing comparison and, ultimately, shares Gold's and the global Leftist attitude toward bourgeois Hamlet-esque intellectuals. Earl Browder, a prominent figure of the American Communist Party, also refers to Hamlet to attack The New Republic. Originally, The New Republic was a Leftist newspaper that protested fascism; but it maintained neutrality during the early formation of the Popular Front in 1936, remaining impartial toward the Left and the bourgeois intellectual writers. Browder criticized this neutrality, disavowing the "Hamlet-like paralysis that has gripped the minds of The New Republic's editors under the hypnosis of fascism" (quoted in Warren 1966, 156).

German playwright Bertolt Brecht publicly approached Hamlet in a different way, but I believe it still fits under Leftist Hamletism because he opposed the promotion of sympathizing or empathizing with Hamlet, and he used Hamlet to disseminate clear Leftist messages when discussing his "instructive" epic theater. For Brecht, Hamlet is code for "better sleep on it" (Brecht 1931, 49). In most cases, he turned to Hamlet in order to direct his actors not to "become" Hamlet on stage — in other words, to avoid appearing to encapsulate Hamlet's internal conflict (sort of the way that Chekhov was criticized for doing on the Soviet Stage). When an actor performed the part, Brecht said, Hamlet should be portrayed for what he appears to be in the text: www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 6/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation After at first being reluctant to answer one bloody deed by another, and even preparing to go into exile, [Hamlet] meets young Fortinbras at the coast as he is marching with his troops to Poland. Overcome by this warrior-like example, he turns back and in a piece of barbaric butchery slaughters his uncle, his mother, and himself, leaving Denmark to the Norwegian. (Brecht 1949, 201-202) Brecht understood 4.4 as the turning point in the play, a point when Hamlet's transformation of thought is a return to "feudal business." Hamlet's conflict between the humanist Reason received from Wittenberg and his irrational barbaric action causes him to fall "victim to the discrepancy between such reasoning and such action" (202). In essence, Brecht's alienation techniques were developed in order to keep the crowd alienated from emotional connections, so by showing Hamlet with unredeemable characteristics, Brecht was in a way saying to the crowd, "Don't be Hamlet." This is because embodying the characteristics of Hamlet might evoke an emotional response from the audience, rather than instruct and agitate, the audience to participate in social reformation.

RETHINKING SHAKESPEARE AND THE LEFT With the commencement of the Popular Front in the late 1930s and the Moscow Purge Trials, proletarian culture began to dissipate; in effect, the focus on political commitment lost much of its emphasis. It, however, was not forgotten, and Leftist Hamletism did not disappear. In 1958, Joseph Freeman tried to revive this commitment by delivering a speech titled "Vision of the Thirties" to American Studies majors at Smith University. The speech protested the House Un-American Activities Committee trials, but Freeman's main purpose was to rally the "uncommitted generation" to engage in politically radical literature and art that had been silenced by the "Terror of the Fifties," as manifested through McCarthyism (Freeman 1958). Near the end of the speech, in a moment of meta-theatricality, Freeman put on a satirical skit called "Waiting for Candide," fusing Voltaire's Candide and Clifford Odets's overtly political play Waiting for Lefty in a Hamlet-esque moment of indecisiveness.

In the skit, Candide was placed on the stand and questioned about his 1930s political position. Unlike Voltaire's naïve character, however, Freeman presented a well-read and informed Candide. Candide used his knowledge of literature to support a firm Leftist political stance. With a powerful allusion to a frequently cited line from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Candide declared, "Today something is rotten not only in the state of Denmark but in every state on the face of the earth without exception" (Freeman 1958). In this instant, Freeman used an unlikely candidate in Candide, whose naiveté was paired with Hamlet's hesitancy, to politicize literature in an effort to retrieve the political commitment of the 1930s. Freeman revived a Leftist literary moment in history by returning to a version of Leftist Hamletism, or Leftist "Candide-ism," to advocate the re-politicization of literature.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 7/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation I understand that Leftist Hamletism is certainly propaganda or, more fittingly, "instructive agitation," but it helps to define proletarian culture and Shakespeare's role in a political movement, which at times may be misunderstood. As Lawrence Guntner says: There is no such thing as a "socialist Hamlet," just as there is no such thing as a "socialist Shakespeare." On closer examination, what we find are socialist Hamlets and socialist Shakespeares; or, better, socialist readings or interpretations of what happens in Hamlet. Neither the Communist world nor a Shakespeare production behind the "Iron Curtain" — a metaphor in its own right — was as monolithic as the West would like to believe it to have been. (Guntner 2006, 197) We should not ignore that fact that the West has a part in communist and socialist global Shakespeares. And I, like Freeman, think that we can learn from this by looking at the past.

Andreas Huyssen argues, "The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory," and therefore "[t]he temporal status of any act of memory is always present, and not, as some naïve epistemology might have it, the past itself, even though all memory in some ineradicable sense is dependent on some past event or experience" (Huyssen 1995, 3). So if memory can make the past a part of the present, retrieving the past can make a difference in the present. And looking at Shakespeare within the realm of past political movements might be more effective than trying to invent ways in which Shakespeare is inherently political.

To conclude, I want to mention one last quote by Mike Gold. He claimed that the "New York woods . . . are full of glib intellectuals, who can tear a novel, a poem or a political movement to pieces, but are themselves as incapable as Hamlet of deed or decision" (quoted in Aaron, 1961, 329). Perhaps Leftist Hamletism will let us rethink our political motives when approaching Shakespeare's cultural authority and cultural appropriations of Shakespeare — those which are often categorized as popular and/or elite when they should perhaps be considered proletarian.

REFERENCES Aaron, Daniel. 1961. Writers on the Left: Episodes in Literary Communism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Inc. Brecht, Bertolt. 1949. "A Short Organum for the Theatre." In Sinn und Form; reprinted in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and Translated by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. 179-208.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 8/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Brecht, Bertolt. 1931. "The Film, the Novel, and Epic Theatre." In Veruche 3; reprinted in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and Translated by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. 47-50. Cartelli, Thomas. 1999. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London: Routledge. Chambers, Jonathan L. 2006. Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Editors. 1931. "The Charkov Conference of Revolutionary Writers." In New Masses (February): 6. Foakes, R. A. 1993. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, Joseph. 1958. "The Vision of the Thirties." In Joseph Freeman Papers, ca. 1920-1965. Available at Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 4. Columbia University, New York. Freeman, Joseph. 1935. "Introduction." In Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology. Edited by Granville Hicks et al. New York: International Publishers. 9-32. Gold, Mike. 1934. "A Bourgeois Hamlet of Our Time. New Masses (10 April): 28-29. Gold, Mike. 1931. "Notes from Kharkov." New Masses (March): 4-7. Guntner, Lawrence. 2006. "In Search of a Socialist Shakespeare: Hamlet on East German Stages." In Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Edited by Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 177-204. Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge. Kunitz, Joshua. 1930. "Men and Women in Soviet Literature." In Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia. Edited by Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz, and Louis Lozowick. New York: Vanguard Press. 66-173. Lawson, John Howard. 1969. "'Inner Conflict' and Proletarian Art." 1934; reprinted in New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties. Edited by Joseph North. New York: International Publishers. 204-207. Makaryk, Irena R., and Joseph G. Price. 2006. "Introduction: When Worlds Collide: Shakespeare and Communism." In Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Edited by Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 3-10. Nabokov, Vladimir. Bend Sinister. 1990. New York: Vintage International. Ognyov, N. 1929. The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate. Translated by Alexander Werth. London: Victor Gollancz.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783633/show 9/10 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Ostrovsky, Arkady. 2006. "Shakespeare as a Founding Father of Socialist Realism." In Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Edited by Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 56-83. Rowe, Eleanor. 1976. Hamlet: A Window on Russia. New York: New York University Press. Warren, Frank A., III. 1966. Liberals and Communism: The "Red Decade" Revisited. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Reading Madness in the Archive: Shakespeare's

(/current) Unread "Letters"

RICHARD BURT, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA (/previous)

ABSTRACT

Materialist Shakespeare criticism focusing on writing practices and utensils has tended to shelve the task of reading, abandoning philology and questions of textual corruption while reducing the temporality of objects to the spatial textual metaphor of the palimpsest. In response, Burt calls for a return to philology as a "textual fauxrensics," with close attention to what Derrida calls the "spectral structure of the archive." Some of Shakespeare's plays' letters go unread, moments frequently attached to madness that demand a different reading or a recording, a setting down. Examples of unread letters are to be found in scenes in Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Hamlet, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, and Julius Caesar. Shakespeare's unread letters put critical pressure on the ordinary understanding of letters, as if forcing the word into scare quotes — "letters" — letters meaning both messages with material supports and alphabetic letters. These letters also put critical pressure on what we mean by "reading," since some of these "letters" go unread, although not literally so. Burt discusses unread letters as multi-media archival effects — not as open and shut letters (enveloped, addressed, and posted significations), but as open and "cut" letters, taking the blurring between alphabetic letters and the material supports of letters as text messages. The material supports include not only paper, but also the mutilated body and even the wounded corpse, both in need of reading. Scenes of reading letters in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet call up deconstruction's ghosts, leaving open whether letters (Derrida) or language (De Man) has priority over the other.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 1/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation No, madam, I do but read madness. An mean your ladyship will have it as it ought to be, you must allow vox. — Twelfth Night

De foot et de coun! O Seigneur Dieu! ce sont mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user. — Henry V

No philological fundamentalism will ever efface the incredible fortune of the brilliant invention. For there is here, without doubt, a staggering artifact, the casualness of an exegetical move as hazardous as it is generous — indeed abyssal — in its very generativity. Of how many great texts would we have been deprived had someone (but who, in fact?) had not one day taken, and perhaps, like a great card player, deliberately feigned to take, one omega for another? Not even one accent for another, barely one letter for another, only a soft spirit for a hard one — and the omission of the subscript iota. — Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship

I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words. — Twelfth Night

There is never a choice between what is to be read in an open book (as visible as the nose in the middle of one's "face"!) and the most hermetic script. It's the same — insupportable support. I didn't dare say "like a post card," the atmosphere was too pious. On the way out, diverse presentations. "With you, one can no longer present oneself," a young American (I think) woman says to me. She gives me to understand that she has read (before me, therefore, she was just coming from the U.S.) "Moi, la psychanalyse" in which I let play, in English the so difficult-to-translate vocabulary of presentation, of presentations, of "introductions," etc. — Jacques Derrida

SHAKESPEARE'S ARCHIVE FEVER Is there a substantial, rigorous difference between Malvolio's mad desire to read Olivia's very C's, U's and T's in the letter Maria wrote, forging Olivia's handwriting, and the critical desire in attribution studies to discover manuscripts with Shakespeare's handwriting, his very C's, U's, and T's?1 I would answer my question in the negative. Textual forensics, I am quite willing to grant, is always more or less delusional, archival work being, by definition, feverish, a textual "fauxrensics," so to speak (Derrida 1995). Shakespeare's texts are corrupt and corrupting from the start. He is a "corrupter of words," as Feste puts it in Twelfth Night, a writer of foreign "mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique," as Princess Katherine puts it in Henry V.

In what follows, I am less concerned to demonstrate this rather broad argument about textual fauxrensics than I am with questions about unreadability, inaudibility, unreportability, and unarchivability that arise if we consider the First Folio as a palimpsest, an archive of performances and texts that can never be metaphorically X-rayed, then sorted and shelved according to the protocols of genetic criticism, or what I call "Under the Influence Studies."2 Taking Jacques Derrida's work on archive fever as my point of departure, I will discuss unread "letters" as multi-media archival effects — not as open and shut letters, enveloped, addressed, and posted significations, but as open and "cut" letters, blurring between alphabetic letters and the material supports of letters as hand- written messages (Derrida 1995).3 Derrida is particularly concerned with how writing media such as the fax, invented after Freud, have forced us to re- www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 2/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation conceptualize the archive and to reread Freud such that the space of the archive cannot be entirely mapped, metaphorically. Reading the archive in relation to Sigmund Freud's account of repetition compulsion and the death drive, Derrida maintains that an "anarchivity" of the archive produces inevitable breakdowns that compromise the archive's appearance of complete storage, preservation, retrieval, and recall and that therefore open the future to the possibility of what Derrida calls, after Kant and Arendt, "radical evil." As Derrida writes, "The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future" (1995, 45). Moreover, the anarchivity of the archive shatters all attempts to configure it either topographically, as if the archive were a building with a street address, or as a timeline. For Derrida, the archive is about the future, not the past, and archive fever arises from the structural possibility of the archive's self-destruction: The trouble de l'archive stems from a mal d'archive. We are en mal d'archive: in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in the attribute "en mal de," to be en mal d'archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble or from what the noun "mal" might name. It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there's too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a home sickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no "mal-de" can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d'archive. (Derrida 1995, 57) My discussion of Shakespeare's archive fever will involve close readings of moments in Shakespeare's plays where "letters" go unread by characters, moments frequently attached to madness that demand a reading, reporting, or a recording, a setting down.

By refusing to limit the madness of Shakespeare's text, to think the text instead as a pharmakon, a poison and a remedy, I put the relation between letters as material supports, with messages and letters as alphabetic characters, into question.4 Line delivery, as it were, is always a promise, dependent, as Feste says, on "vox." In what I take to be the madness of Shakespeare's text, the breakdown of the disciplinary distinction between textual criticism and literary criticism, that text ends up sedated and confined to the madness of particular characters, by simultaneously defaulting madness to ego psychology, as if we knew what madness is, or to the history of madness as written by Michel Foucault and anti- psychiatrists (Foucault 2006). Having caught the Freudian fever contracted in Derrida's psychoanalytic archive, I attempt to resist the impulse to displace the meaning of character as letter by the meaning of character as a person with a coherent psychology, a character whose self-deceptions, darker purposes, and manipulative behavior may be traced through sophisticated close readings of speeches preceded and contained, as it were, by proper names.5 I put the word "character" in "character criticism" in quotation marks, just as I put "letters" in quotation marks. I read "characters" as "letters," messages addressed, attributed www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 3/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation or signed by proper names, "characters" as quasi-human, quasi-writing and archiving machines, at times functional, at times dysfunctional. In addition, considered as an archival question, reading "letters" also turns on death, specters, and the disposition of the corpse.

"WHAT DO YOU READ, MY LORD? WORDS. WORDS. WORDS." — HAMLET

Two famous textual cruxes, one in Hamlet, the other in King Lear, throw into bold relief the way in which reading aloud a letter that is a prop may call into question whether the character reading the letter is quoting it directly or not. When Polonius reads aloud Hamlet's love letter to Ophelia, he occasionally interjects comments on Hamlet's "vile" word choice. Editors often help readers by inserting the word "reads" and italicizing the letter. Consider the Arden 3 Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor: "[Reads] To the celestial and my soul's idol . . . [Reads] 'In her excellent white bosom, these, etc. . . . Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, HAMLET" (Thompson and Taylor 2006, 2.2.108- 21). The crux is the meaning of the word "etc." Is Polonius quoting Hamlet here? Or is Polonius abbreviating the letter? In a footnote on "etc.," Thompson and Taylor observe that "either Hamlet, in writing the superscription, or, more likely, Polonius, in reading it, abbreviates the commendations" (Thompson and Taylor 2006, 245). Quite reasonably, Thompson and Taylor do not put "etc." in italics. Nevertheless, the crux becomes more puzzling if we conclude that Polonius says "etc." rather than quotes it from the letter. For in response to Gertrude's question — "comes this letter from Hamlet to her?" — Polonius says that he "will be faithful." Thompson and Taylor gloss these words as "I will keep my word (to tell you everything)', or perhaps 'I will read the entire letter'" (Thompson and Taylor 2006, 245-46). When Polonius finishes reading it, however, he will clearly not have read the entire letter. His fidelity is breached by an editorial judgment to abridge part of Hamlet's letter, even if that part is without consequence and Polonius' abridgement reasonable.

The crux in King Lear is more substantive. It is impossible to decide what Kent quotes or does not quote from Cordelia's letter after he has been put in the stocks.6 In a note to the Quarto History of King Lear in William Shakespeare: Oxford Textual Companion (1987), Gary Taylor begins an extraordinarily lengthy and brilliant commentary on this passage with this sentence: "This whole passage — 'and shall find time / from this enormious [sic] state, seeking to giue [sic] / Losses y [sic] remedies' — is one of the most difficult cruxes in the canon," adding that "nor can we easily assume that Kent reads two isolated phrases, out of context, from the letter" (G. Taylor 1987, 245).7 In the Arden second edition of King Lear, R. A. Foakes tries to resolve the crux both by inserting a stage direction and by silently adding quotation marks to isolate the second of the two phrases that Kent reads aloud: "[reading the letter] 'and shall find time / From this enormous state, seeking to give losses their remedies'" (Foakes 1997, 236). In a note, Foakes writes that "Kent could be reading from Cordelia's letter here. Q and F agree in this obscure passage, regarded by most scholars as corrupt" (262; see also 166-68). As Alan Stewart comments, "This passage has caused editors considerable grief. How does Kent have a letter in his possession? How does it www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 4/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation reach him? Does he read it at this point? Are some of these words then Cordelia's? — as R. A. Foakes's edition, cited here, suggests? Or all of them Kent's?" (Stewart 2009, 220). These are all wonderfully feverish questions. A materialist "reading" of written letters in King Lear that focuses on material supports, the messages on them, and their messengers, however, reduces reading to the sending, transmission, and reception of information. A materialist reading is a reading that refuses to read, to account for the play's resistance to reading letters. This resistance generates the kinds of textual forensics questions that Stewart raises while making answers to them maddeningly elusive. In one case, as Stewart notes, we cannot be sure if a character is referring to a written letter, adding that "even the letter disappears" (2009, 220).8

Even when there clearly is a prop for a letter, the prop is not transparently readable. For example, as a prop, Maria's forged letter poses problems of staging. How many times does Malvolio unfold it as he reads it aloud? Where is the postscript? Is it written on the letter? Or is it an attachment? Similarly, when the dying Edmund sends his sword, in afterthought, along with a message to stay the executions of Cordelia and Lear, the prop adds nothing to the message it supplements. Edmund's message neither condemns nor saves Cordelia and Lear; it may never have arrived. Furthermore, when Titus refers to "bloody lines" written in paper on the death sentence he shows to Tamora when she impersonates "Revenge," it is not clear whether he means that the "lines" have been written in blood or he is being hyperbolic: "for what I mean to do / See here in bloody lines I have set down; / And what is written shall be executed" (Titus Andronicus, 5.2.13-14).9 If Titus does mean literally "bloody," whose blood did he use as ink? His own?10 In addition to these performance problems is a question internal to Twelfth Night that involves Feste reading aloud Malvolio's letter. Olivia stops him from reading it, apparently because Feste is doing so in some of objectionable manner. Feste answers in his defense, "I do but read madness. An mean your ladyship will have it as it ought to be, you must allow vox" (Twelfth Night, 5.1.308-10). Of course, what Feste means by "as it ought to be," what it means to read madness, we can never know.

"I DO NOT MEAN TO READ." — JULIUS CAESAR To wish for an archive of letters as intact material supports with legible writing, the wish for audio-recordings of speech in Shakespeare's voice, is to wish for a supplement, another text message that is not reducible to a prosthesis or material support.11 Consider the way in which alphabetic letters involve an improvised writing prop, sign-language, and translation when Lucius Marcus finds Lavinia, mutilated and mute, in Titus Andronicus. Even before Lavinia manages to spell out "rape" in Latin and the names of her violators with her "stumps," Lucius Marcus says he will turn her gestures and signs into "an alphabet" in order to "understand her" (Titus Andronicus, 3.2.41-43). Titus asks "O, do ye read, my lord, what she hath writ? / 'Stuprum. Chiron. Demetrius'" (4.1.76-77). Although the alphabetic letters here are read aloud, they are rendered readable only through textual metaphors — "pen" and "print" — and the example, provided by Lucius Marcus himself: "[L]ook here, Lavinia: / This sandy plot is plain; guide, if thou canst / [. . .] / Heaven guide thy pen to print www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 5/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation thy sorrows plain" (4.1.69-70, 76). Even what she will have written is described not as words, but as what they will have allowed her to express, namely, her "sorrows." The Latin word Lavinia writes, "stuprum," meaning "rape," is not translated into English by Shakespeare, as if the act were unspeakable, and "stuprum" oddly echoes the word "stumps" in the stage direction given just before Titus says the word, as if writing and rape could not either be separated or severed through translation: "She takes the staffe in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps and writes." The stage direction creates a staging problem as well, since the "sandy plot" is apparently to be imagined, the writing on it hallucinated by the audience.

Moreover, Lavinia's writing proceeds indirectly, as if through an archive, by way of culling a book off a shelf, reading it, and "quoting" it. When Titus notices that Lavinia "busily turns the leaves" (4.1.48) of Ovid's Metamorphoses, stops at "the tragic tale of Philomel" (4.1.47), and asks her "Shall I read?" (4.1.47), Marcus says, "Note how she quotes the leaves" (52). The use of "quotes" is certainly odd, but the word "quotes" stresses both how Lavinia's report is a repetition of another rape, a quotation of a book, and how her writing the names of the perpetrators repeats the example Titus offers her: "He writes the name with his staff, and guides it with his feet and mouth" (4.1.68).

PERFORMANCE IN THE ARCHIVE AS PRONUNCIATION We may gain a clearer understanding of what Derrida would call the "anarchivity" of Shakespeare's archive if we turn to alphabetic letters in the English lesson scene of Henry V.12 Repetition is crucial to Derrida's account of the structure of the archive: [W]e must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction. Consequence: right on what permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. (Derrida 1995, 14) Quotation marks, or the lack thereof, in the letters we discussed in Hamlet and King Lear underscore only one of the forms in which the repetition of "letters" is present in Shakespeare's "letters." Sometimes repetition bears on pronunciation by making it possible to hear alphabetic letters activating puns. The English lesson in Henry V makes something clear that is harder to see in the examples we have hitherto discussed: repetition structures readability. As Gary Taylor says in an astute note in his edition of the play, the Princess activates a series of bilingual bawdy puns by reciting (the French word "recitation" is hers) English words that she has (mis)translated: She (mis)hears the English word "foot" as the French word "foutre," sometimes glossed as ejaculate, but more often glossed as "fuck"; and editors of the play tend to help the Princess out, translating "la robe" as "gown" when Alice (mis)pronounces it as "coun" (phonetically, in modern English, "cown"), so that it may also heard as French for "con" and then translated back into English glossed by editors as "cunt").13 There is an odd www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 6/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation sonic repetition in two French words, however, before her "recitation," which is activated by French pronunciation of the Princess's phrasing "ce sont de mots son," meaning "are bad sounding words." A strange homonymic effect, in which a non-signifying repetition is already installed in "sont" and "son" by muting — literally, not reading — the letter "t" in "sont," an unspoken, inaudible letter dropped at the very moment the Princess is expressing her disgust not at the "bad" ("mauvais") English words she mistakenly thinks she has just learned but at their sound: "Ce sont mots de son mauvais." The Princess's "letters," in this case, are not just unread, but unsound. And by "unsound" I mean not only unspoken and unheard but faulty, a word I use advisedly, and this repetition, not the recitation, approaches whatever serves to border what I consider to be the madness of the text and the madness of reading. In the Princess's unreadable, inaudible muting of two letters, I suggest, we may contract the fever that comes with the anarchivity or self-destruction of the Shakespeare archive, the orientation of the archive to a future possibly guided according to Derrida (1995), by what Freud identifies as the silent and invisible death drive (as you will recall, both Henry V and Henry VI are on the way; in Henry V, royal marriage equals death, disaster, imbecility, and civil war). Speaking broadly, Shakespeare's unread letters not only involve repetition, but are structured by a repetition that encloses, perhaps hides, perhaps deafens, another repetition. The archiving of a "letter" also tends to be a moment of another "letter," another kind of archiving.

GHOSTS IN THE ARCHIVE: "THE QUEEN, MY LORD, IS DEAD." — MACBETH

What Derrida calls the "spectral" structure of the archive, already evident in some of the missing alphabetic letters and disappearing props we've examined, is forcefully exemplified in Lady Macbeth's unwitnessed, unread letter that we hear about second hand from her Gentlewoman. Derrida writes: The structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent "in the flesh, "neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met, no more than those of Hamlet's father, thanks to the possibility of a visor. Also, the spectral motif stages this disseminating fission from which the archontic principle, and the concept of the archive, and the concept in general suffer, from the principle on. (1995, 54) Here is the Gentlewoman's account of Lady Macbeth's "archive fever" as scene of letter writing and reading: Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon't, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep. (Macbeth, 5.1.4-9) Some editors try to doctor the text, so to speak, by providing an antidote to their own archive fever, the "paper," meaning written "letter," to be the same letter Lady Macbeth received much earlier in the play from Macbeth and from which she quoted aloud.14 There is only one written letter in this reading, in other words. In my view, it doesn't matter whether the second letter is the same one or www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 7/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation a different one. The first letter is already structured by repetition, as a number of critics have noted: Lady Macbeth repeats what we already know.15 The crucial aspect of Lady Macbeth's "performance," as the Doctor calls it, is that it is repetitive: she gets up "again." Is she writing on the same paper each time, or is she taking a new piece of paper each time? What is she writing on it? A confession? Gibberish? Transcriptions of what she said when she sleepwalked and sleep talked in the past? Is it a kind of script she will perform later when she is sleepwalking? Why does Lady Macbeth write on the letter before she reads it? What is she reading? An original letter she received or the letter she has just composed, or perhaps decomposed, a more fitting word? Is her unconscious doing a kind of automatic writing? Given Lady Macbeth's writing on the letter, can it be said to be Macbeth's? Or is it now Lady Macbeth's? Can it rightly be called collaborative? What kind of authorship is in play here?

We cannot but help catch the archive fever this passage presents, so to speak, as we note the kinds of repetition in play in the archive that Lady Macbeth performs and is witnessed performing by her Gentlewoman. The letter is not only inaccessible, but also a palimpsest of repeated rewritings. "When was it she last walked?" the doctor asks the gentlewoman, almost echoing Duncan's conclusion that the bloody sergeant "can report, / As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt / The newest state" (1.2.1-3). Just as the battle seems perpetual ("newest," not "latest" or "current," implying that the battle has been raging forever), so Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking is of uncertain duration. The gentlewoman says afterwards that Lady Macbeth reads the letter, seals it, "and again / Return[s] to bed." There is no "last" time, only last times to be reported on and archived. Even before we see Lady Macbeth re-enacting the night she helped Macbeth murder Duncan, Lady Macbeth is on the way to becoming a recording device; we switch from the gentlewoman's account of what she saw Lady Macbeth doing and visual to audio when she enters sleepwalking.

The shift to audio does not provide direct access to the archive, however, but poses its own problems by making the Gentlewoman's report of when Lady Macbeth last sleepwalked or what she has said and done as inaccessible to us as the letter Lady Macbeth writes and reads. The doctor himself wants to become a recorder, his own archivist: "Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly" (5.1.34-36). When does or when will the archiving happen? When the Doctor says, "I will set down," is he using the present or the future tense? The Doctor's ability to archive what Lady Macbeth did is further compromised by his own metaphor for speech of the mentally ill: the audio report he wants to remember is in fact unreportable. The recording device the Doctor mentions, namely, a pillow, functions because it does not record but is disabled. Personifying the pillow, the Doctor says that "infected minds / To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets" (5.1.76-77). "Deaf" pillows cannot discharge secrets not because they are apparently mute, but because they could never have heard them in the first place. As if bearing out Derrida's conclusion that the archive is structured by a secret that can never be disclosed, by ash it can never contain, the Doctor describes a recording device that does not record anything. Whatever the pillow discharges or does not discharge has never been archived. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 8/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation The resemblance between Lady Macbeth's inaccessible letter and the Gentlewoman's report on Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking becomes even clearer if we attend to problems in recording or hearing what the Gentlewoman refuses to report. Twice. When the gentlewoman will not answer the doctor's questions about what she "heard" Lady Macbeth "say" in her other nighttime performances, the Doctor asks her what she has heard Lady Macbeth say: "In this slumb'ry agitation, besides her walking and other actual performances, what, at any time, have you heard her say?" (5.1.12). Surprisingly, the Gentlewoman refuses to respond to this request: "That, sir, which I will not report after her" (15). (Is it too much of a stretch to hear, in this scene about the hard of hearing, the words "after her" as an anticipation of Macbeth's response to her death, "She should have died hereafter?") When the Doctor presses her a second time, the Gentlewoman again refuses to answer him: "Doctor. You may to me: and 'tis most meet you should. / Gentlewoman. Neither to you nor any one; having no witness to confirm my speech" (17-20). By introducing a demand for a witness the second time she refuses to answer, the Gentlewoman's response radicalizes the problem the Doctor already faced in archiving "the truth" of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking performances. Having given a report to the doctor to which we are never given access — the Doctor's report here of the Gentlewoman's earlier report goes unreported to us because it happened off-stage — and thereby motivating the Doctor to watch and see if Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, the Gentlewoman suddenly will not report to the Doctor or "any one" for an apparently new reason — namely, a witness is the condition of her reporting. This condition would be impossible to meet: even if she had a witness for her testimony, that witness would in turn need a witness for her testimony, and so on. Double, double, toil, and archive trouble.

The Gentlewoman's insistence on a witness after the doctor assures her that it she is permitted to tell him is particularly odd, given that she and the Doctor have been acting as co-witnesses even before the scene begins: "I have two nights watched with you." The Doctor is there to verify: "but can perceive no truth in your report" (Macbeth, 5.1.1). And when the Doctor asks for a specific date — "When was it she last walked?" (2-3)— the Gentlewoman does not supply one. Instead, she describes what she has seen in relation to a prior event, namely, Macbeth's departure: "Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed" (4-5). Moreover, in describing to the Doctor what she has seen, the Gentlewoman does not refer back to the most recent sleepwalking, or even to a single time in the past. The past tense — "I have seen" — she uses to describe Lady Macbeth's recurrent bouts of sleepwalking opens up two readings of what she has seen: "I have seen" could be limited to what she saw once or expanded to include what she saw several times. And there is no way to decide on the truth of either of these readings. (Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking is strangely both singular and repetitive.)

However truthful the Gentlewoman's unheard, unreported report that the Doctor wants to verify may be, the partial report we do hear the Gentlewoman give does not match up with the full report. In some respects, the reports are more radically inaccessible, more spectral, even more anarchivic than Lady Macbeth's letter. Unlike the closet in which Lady Macbeth files her paper (or www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 9/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation papers?), the report has no filing cabinet. There isn't even a case file to which Lady Macbeth could be assigned.

The archival problems we have thus far examined in the sleepwalking scene — the paper's inaccessibility and the report's unreportability, so to speak — extend to the errors, blockages, and interferences that structure Lady Macbeth's speech in the very same scene. As she re-enacts the murder scene (2.2.), Lady Macbeth turns into an archivist, a recording machine of her own performances. She is a broken machine, however, unable to repeat while sleepwalking anything she actually says in the murder scene. Instead, she interpolates new lines, some of which she repeats, perhaps in an unconscious effort to wash out the bloody ink of the earlier lines impressed in her memory. Despite, or perhaps because of, the way in which Lady Macbeth becomes a kind of broken recording machine that stutters as it gets stuck in play-back, a death drive legible only as a repetition compulsion finally overrides all intra-psychic and inter-psychic interference in Lady Macbeth's off and on again nighttime transmissions: after the sleepwalking scene, the next time we hear about Lady Macbeth, we learn — by Seyton's report — that she is dead. How she died is not explained. Whether she was sleeping or awake at the time, we will never know. If she screamed on the way down, there is no textual trace of it, only "the cry of women" (Macbeth, 5.5.10).

Having seen that the archival problems in Macbeth, the unreadability of "letters" extends well beyond the moment in which Lady Macbeth writes, reads, and seals a paper that we will never be able to access and reports that are never reported to us, we are now in a position to grasp why Shakespeare's unread letters cannot safely be limited to letters as material supports, but must be surrounded by quotation marks as "letters." We are also now in a better position to understand the archivolithic drive of the archive in relation to a death drive. Some archival moments in Shakespeare's plays involve writing, and in these moments writing is related not only to madness, but also to death and memory. Very similar moments concerning the archive that occur in Macbeth, Hamlet, and Titus Andronicus are worth collating: in each play, a character wants to archive, to set down evidence of a crime or possible crime that character wants to remember. The Doctor's desire to "set down" what Lady Macbeth will say, "to satisfy [his] remembrance the more strongly" (Macbeth, 5.1.35-36) at a future date, resonates with Titus Andronicus's desire to archive Lavinia's identification of her rapists and mutilators: "I will go get a leaf of brass, / And with a gad of steel will write these words" (Titus Andronicus 4.1.103-104). Hamlet wants to take dictation from Old Hamlet's ghost:

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 10/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. (Hamlet, 1.5.102-11) Hamlet's reference to his tables is perhaps the most vexing of all these archival moments. New New Historicists have used this passage to explore material memory tablets, but they have blanked out the passage itself, as if they had gotten so high on facsimiles of "real" tablets that they forgot about the passage that launched them (Burt and Yates 2013, 17-46). Or perhaps repressed it. For the archival moment is also intensely metaphorical. Even if actors who play the role of Hamlet sometimes take out a notebook in this scene and pretend to write in it, the passage does not call for a prop: the phrases "table of my memory" and "the book and volume of my brain" do not have a stage prop as a referent (Thompson and Taylor 1990 and Hopkins 2002). Archiving is an event, not a chronological moment of archiving in any material or empirical sense. Only Hamlet's memories will be erased and replaced; no erasable memory device will be used to re-record the Ghost's words dictated to Hamlet.

THE SPECTER OF THE ARCHIVE: ARCHIVING THE CORPSE The issue raised by the archival moments I have collated, however, concerns the relation between death and a desire for revenge more than it does the materiality of the referent. Speaking more broadly, why do unread "letters" so provoke tele- technical connections between specters and the living, between death, or the condemning to death, an accidental death or a suicide to a desire for material supports? Why does the writing down on the support tend to be deferred to a later time, a deferral that means the archival record to come will be less reliable because remembered after the fact instead of recorded instantaneously? Is the desire to write down — either now or in the future — the moment in which the death penalty is delivered and becomes absolutely binding? Or does the deferral of writing and archiving mean that any tele-technical or spectral delivery of the death penalty has already been suspended, cancelled, as if the death penalty were simultaneously a stay of execution? We may bring these questions together in order to broach an even larger question about Shakespeare's unread "letters" if we first attend to a passage on the fate of corpse in Jacques Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume 1: "In the passage I am going to read to you," Derrida writes,

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 11/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation You will discover that there is something worse than the death penalty: there is a punishment more terrifying still because more inhuman, more ahuman than the death penalty, more than the death penalty, which remains a thing of reason and the law, a thing worthy of reason and the law (logos and nomos). The criterion of the distinction between the death penalty and what is supposedly still worse than the death penalty, the line of demarcation between the bad and the worst, is not determined by what precedes death, nor is it in the instant of death but in the corpse; it is what follows death and happens to the corpse. (Derrida 2013, 9) With this passage in mind, let me close by asking a question about Shakespeare's death or what some Bardicide wannabes might consider to be his failure to die: what would happen to our understanding of letters, death, and tele-technical media in Shakespeare's play if we were to consider Shakespeare's corpus as a human corpse?

Let me close by considering not only Caesar's ghost but the archiving of Caesar's corpse in Julius Caesar. Brutus rules out desecration of Caesar's corpse, telling the plebeians: "Do grace to Cæsar's corpse" (Julius Caesar, 3.2.63). Antony imagines Caesar's spirit leaving the corpses of the traitors "groaning for burial": And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men groaning for burial. (3.1.296-301) Caesar's corpse apparently will be cremated, however. The plebian says, "We'll burn his body in the holy place" (3.2.268).

Inhumation and cremation are apparently both options for the disposal of Caesar's corpse. We don't learn what happens to Caesar's corpse. Mark Antony enters with it, as a stage direction in the Folio makes clear: "Enter Mark Antony with Cæsars body" (3.2.42). And Brutus announces, "Here comes his body, mourned by Mark Antony," (3.2.43). After Antony finishes reading Caesar's will, the second plebian says "Take up the body" (270).

The unresolved question this scene raises about what happens to Caesar's corpse is less crucial than is the way Mark Antony links Caesar's will to how Caesar's remains are to be archived. Antony initially says that he does not "mean to read" Caesar's will: But here's a parchment with the seal of Caesar. I found it in his closet. 'Tis his will. Let but the commons hear this testament, Which, pardon me, I do not mean to read. (3.2.140-43) Antony's account of finding Caesar's will raises questions of provenance, since only Antony testifies to its validity. Let us bracket all such questions, however, and assume the will really is Caesar's and that Antony is not just making it up as www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 12/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation he goes along when, after the plebeians have forgotten about it, he finally does read it.

There are other wills, other legacies that are hidden by Caesar's will, other wills that are released, as it were, by the invocation of Caesar's will. Before he appoints himself executor of the will, Antony puts into question who rightfully gets to take records of Caesar's remains and, on their deathbeds, will the records to their heirs. The conspirators, Antony says, would go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds And dip their napkins in his sacred blood — Yea, beg a hair of him for memory And, dying, mention it within their wills, Bequeathing it as a rich legacy Unto their issue. (144-49) As I noted earlier, Shakespeare's unread "letters" have a curious structure: the unread letters I am collecting are not the opposite of read letters; they are not recorded on material supports as opposed to unrecorded speech; they are not transcripts, as opposed to scripts. One letter is archived by another, less visible archive. Just as Lady Macbeth's "paper" gets folded up into reports that do not report, Caesar's will calls up other wills. By saying that he does not mean to read Caesar's will, Antony is able to speculate on the wills of the conspirators, what they would do with Caesar's wounded corpse, what they want to do with it now and what they want to do in the future, "within their wills," with their records of Caesar's blood or hair (Burt 1990). Antony turns Caesar's will, uncloseted and sealed on parchment, into speculative capital that he spends even before he deposits it. Not reading Caesar's will, at least not yet, allows Antony to archive other wills that go unread because they have not been written. Yet Antony uses the future anterior conditional tense as if it were the future anterior: what would have happened is the same as what will have happened. Antony acts as a witness, just as he serves as his own witness for the authenticity of Caesar's will (Caesar having used the word "will" earlier on the play to express his desire). The conspirators' speculative wills — in this case, partly spoken and partly written by the conspirators — nevertheless serve as containers, housing the relics of Caesar's remains "within their wills," wills that in turn house the relics rendered as memories ("beg a hair of him for memory"). And these entirely speculative wills are limited, by virtue of their being the conspirators' last words, as it were, and testament. The brilliance of Antony's speculation lies in the way he does not make the conspirators appear to be calculating. Precisely the opposite is the case: they have collectively assassinated a public figure and will at some future time each have personalized a piece of his remains, turned it into a family heirloom. But they will not have a piece of the corpse, as the mob who will tear Cinna the Poet to pieces might have. My speculations on the speculative capital Antony makes of Caesar's yet to be disposed of corpse lead me to my concluding speculative questions: what would it mean if we were to phrase the question of Shakespeare's will, his legacy, not as a question of "sur-vival," or living on, but as a question of "dying on," so to speak?16 What would it mean to have condemned Shakespeare to death?17 www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 13/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

NOTES 1. I would like to thank both Judith Haber for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay and Alexa Huang for inviting me to deliver a much shorter version of this essay at the Global Shakespeares Symposium at George Washington University, 24-25 January, 2014 (http://theshakespearestandard.com/global-shakespeares-symposium-george- washington-university-24-25-jan-2014-great-feast-languages/ (http://theshakespearestandard.com/global-shakespeares-symposium-george- washington-university-24-25-jan-2014-great-feast-languages/)). 2. On the archive and unreadability, see Burt and Yates 2013. See also Galey 2014. On textual fauxrensics, see Burt 2012. On the new media archive, see Burt 2013. 3. On the archive and fire, see Derrida 1991 and Derrida 2006. On the destruction of letters, see the "Envois" in Derrida 1987. 4. On the pharmakon and writing, see "Plato's Pharmacy," in Derrida 1983. 5. Harry Berger, Jr. is the pre-eminent practitioner of this kind of penetrating, closely-read character criticism. See, for example, Berger 1991. A similarly remarkable reader, Stephen Booth, "reads without readings," in his words, and carefully describes what he calls "non-signifying patterns." Yet Booth continually defaults to psychologizing character criticism in practice. See Booth 1983 and Booth 1995. The same point holds true for Randall McLeod 1983. On character criticism and names, see Fowler 2003. 6. For a materialist discussion of this letter and others in Lear, see the chapter entitled "Messengers in King Lear," in Stewart 2009, 219-23. In a section of this chapter entitled "Undirected Letters: Critical Confusion in King Lear," Stewart observes that "the Letters in King Lear have infuriated critics" (219). 7. Taylor, William Shakespeare: Oxford Textual Companion (1987), 7.163/1179, 515. 8. The referent of Stewart's title is itself unstable. It may conjure up for some readers a fantasy of letters written by Shakespeare to his contemporaries. 9. All references to Shakespeare's works are from the Folger Digital Texts edition (Shakespeare 2017). 10. For a highly stimulating discussion of blood-writing in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, see Gallagher 2006. 11. Or we might say that the prosthesis is not external to the human body, as Derrida maintains; see Derrida 1999. On the material support of writing, see Derrida 1994. 12. For an insightful account of the made-up language in All's Well That Ends Well, see Crider 1995. See also the crux posed by Timon's epitaph in act 5 of Timon of Athens; Dawson and Minton provide a very valuable account (2008, 104-109 and 338-39).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 14/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 13. Katherine's "de hand" would have been pronounced "de and," an "h" always being silent in French when it is the initial consonant. Do we have here an example of Shakespeare's "[h]and writing?" For brilliant close readings of this scene, see Fleming 1989 and Haber 2013. Fleming offers indirect support for my point about the possible inaudibility of some of the audible letters: "Although even a word-conscious Elizabethan audience may not have caught every pun, it would certainly have been aware that the French lady's English lesson was actually a lesson in talking dirty. Although she realizes that male words are slippery in the mouth of a woman, Katharine repeats them in her enthusiasm to learn another language" (Fleming 1989, 45). I would say she learns "an Other" language. 14. See 1.5. For examples of Shakespeare using the words "paper" and "papers" to mean "letter," see King Lear. In the case of "paper" and "papers," the letter as message is not distinct from the letter as writing support, and the support is grammatically divisible: it can be either singular or plural. 15. See Kiefer 1996, 81, n. 71. Why Macbeth writes her a letter has been a source of critical perplexity, given that the letter could have been intercepted and his plot revealed to Duncan. 16. On the "sur-vival" or "sur-vivance" of texts, see Derrida 2010, 102-91 and Derrida 2011, 130-33. See also Kahan 2013 and Calbi 2013. On Shakespeare's inscription of his initials "W" and "S" in his works, see Fineman 1991. 17. On inhumation and cremation, see Derrida 2011, 160-69.

REFERENCES Berger, Harry, Jr. 1991. Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page. Berkeley: University of California Press. Booth Stephen. 1995. Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night. Berkeley: University of California Press. Booth, Stephen. 1983. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Burt, Richard, and Julian Yates. 2013. What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Burt, Richard. 2013. "Shelf-Life: Biopolitics, the New Media Archive, and 'Paperless' Persons." Special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net." Edited by Nicholas Thorburn and Sas May. New Formations 78: 22-45. Burt, Richard. 2012. " Hamlet's Hauntographology: Film Philology, Textual Faux- rensics, and Facsimiles." In A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Edited by Deborah Cartmell. London: Blackwell. 216-40. Burt, Richard. 1990. "'A Dangerous Rome': Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the Discursive Determinism of Cultural Politics." In Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France. Edited by Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 109-27.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 15/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Calbi, Maurizio. 2013. Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Crider, Scott F. 1995. "Our Boundary Stones: 'Torture' in All's Well That Ends Well." Ben Jonson Journal 2: 73-100. Dawson, Anthony B., and Gretchen E. Minton, eds. 2008. William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, Timon of Athens. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, third series. London: Bloomsbury Arden. Derrida, Jacques. 2013. The Death Penalty, Volume 1. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2011. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2010. "Living On." In Parages. Edited by John Leavey, Tom Conley, and James Hulbert. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 102-91. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Translated by Beverley Bri Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1999. "Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin." Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics 25.2: 9-63. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. "Maddening the Subjectile." Translated by Mary Ann Caws. Yale French Studies 84: 154-71. Derrida, Jacques. 1991. Cinders. Translated by Ned Lukacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1983. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fineman, Joel. 1991. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fleming, Juliet. 1989. "The French Garden: An Introduction to Women's French." ELH 56.1: 19-51. Foakes, R. A., ed. 1997. William Shakespeare, King Lear. Arden Shakespeare, third series. London: Bloomsbury Arden. Foucault, Michel. 2006. History of Madness. Translated by Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy. New York and London: Routledge. Fowler, Elizabeth. 2003. Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Galey, Alan. 2014. The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783684/show 16/18 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Gallagher, Lowell. 2006. "Faustus's Blood and the (Messianic) Question of Ethics." ELH 73: 1-29. Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., ed. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton. Haber, Judith. 2013. "'I cannot tell wat is like me': Simile, Paternity, and Identity in Henry V." Shakespeare Studies 41: 127-47. Hopkins, Lisa. 2002. "Reading between the Sheets: Letters in Shakespearean Tragedy." Critical Survey 14.3: 5-13. Kahan, Jeffrey. 2013. Shakespiritualism: Shakespeare and the Occult, 1850-1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kiefer, Frederick. 1996. "'Written Troubles of the Brain': Lady Macbeth's Conscience." In Reading and Writing in Shakespeare. Edited by David Moore Bergeron. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 64-81. McLeod, Randall. 1983. "Gon. No more, the text is foolish." In The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear. Edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 153-93. Shakespeare, William. 2017. Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Mowat, Barbara, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles. Available online at: http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/ (http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/) [accessed 9 October 2017]. Stewart, Alan. 2009. Shakespeare's Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Gary. 1987. William Shakespeare: Oxford Textual Companion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor, eds. 2006. William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Bloomsbury Arden, third series. London: Bloomsbury Arden.

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The Art of Curation: Searching for Global

(/current) Shakespeares in the Digital Archives

CHRISTY DESMET, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA (/previous)

ABSTRACT

Scholarly sites devoted to global Shakespeare are strictly curated, usually by one or two persons with impeccable credentials. By contrast, YouTube, as the quintessential crowd-sourced and user-structured video archive, depends on individual contributions for its raw material, and on a combination of imitation, dialogue, and a complicated computer algorithm to establish relationships among the videos. This essay considers how differences in curation and context between these two kinds of archives might affect the understanding and reception of global Shakespeares. The paper compares cognitive and intellectual strategies brought to bear in the YouTube environment with the more structured methods of curating and providing intellectual paratexts in three sample scholarly archives: Bardbox, CASP (Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project; and the Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive (MIT).

INTRODUCTION Increasingly, online archives are the medium through which students, teachers, and scholars gain access to the embarrassing riches of global Shakespeare. Digitization of physical materials has created a particular challenge for material archives. As Kate Dorney, a curator at the Victoria and Albert, writes, "the recent word in museums and libraries has been . . . large-scale digitization of material with minimal cataloging" (2010, 25). These "factory digitization projects," as they are called satirically, suggest that in the physical, as well as the digital archives, there is much work to be done to make properly documented artifacts accessible to a wide audience. While many of the conditions governing the construction of and access www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 1/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation to archives are the same for material and digital projects, there are additional ones peculiar to digital media. Alexa Huang's ground-breaking account of the possibilities inherent in a digitized performance archive was positive: "Part archival record and part performance, digital video can register the theatrical contingency in a manipulable medium . . . that creates discursive knowledge about Shakespeare as site specific performance" (Huang 2011a, 50. See also Huang 2011b). And while I think that her assessment has been largely borne out by the development of digitized Shakespeare archives, I want to "get under the hood" of the digital machine, so to speak, to get a further sense of how media, people, and material interact in these Shakespearean sites that offer so much to teachers and researchers.

In particular, curation is a central issue distinguishing crowd-sourced websites from scholarly archives. YouTube, as the quintessential crowd-sourced site for Shakespeare offerings of all kinds, is regulated but loose in terms of curation: anyone, anywhere, can upload any clip that they can lay their hands on and that catches their fancy — at least until YouTube removes it for copyright violation. Academically sponsored digital archives of global Shakespeare, by contrast, depend heavily on the presence of scholars whose expertise shapes the site. To explore the role of curation in the experience of global Shakespeare on digital sites, I will compare the experience of YouTube, as a crowd-sourced archive, with a range of more strictly curated sites: Bardbox; the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP); and the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive.1 In this way, I hope to define a little more precisely the affordances and constraints attending on the online archives upon which, increasingly, we depend for scholarly and pedagogical work.

KEYWORDS The online archive is a hybrid creature, located ambivalently within a spectrum of three organizational structures: the database, the archive, and the collection. The resources discussed here involve to some extent database structures and what Lev Manovich calls "database logic" to organize their artifacts. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a database rather narrowly as "a structured set of data held in computer storage and typically accessed or manipulated by means of specialized software." In his article on the topic, Stephen Ramsay notes that the database is by no means new: The design of such systems has been a mainstay of humanistic endeavor for centuries; the seeds of the modern computerized database being fully evident in the many text-based taxonomies and indexing systems which have been developed since the Middle Ages. Whenever humanists have amassed enough information to make retrieval (or comprehensive understanding) cumbersome, technologists of whatever epoch have sought to put forth ideas about to represent that information in some more tractable form. (Ramsay 2004, 177) Databases sort data, including some and excluding others; then they map "relationships among entities" (177) within the database. Rhetorically, in database design the sorting and separation of data entails a "certain estrangement from what is natural," but the establishment of rule-governed relationships between these atomized data bits has the beneficial effect of allowing "the serendipitous www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 2/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation connection to come forth" (178).2 This balance between estrangement and the forging of potentially surprising connections is useful to understanding Shakespearean databases and their related forms.

Lev Manovich, in a more sweeping theoretical gesture, defines the logic of database, in opposition to the logic of narrative, as the two central structures for processing information. In the age of new media and computer culture, he argues, the database, founded on the principle of an unordered list, now dominates over cause-and-effect narrative: "Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have a beginning or an end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise, which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other" (Manovich 1999, 80). While he acknowledges the narrower, more technical definition, for Manovich the database is, quite broadly, a cultural form that "represents the world as a list of items, and refuses to order this list" (225). Thus, photo albums are databases, as are their digitized counterparts in various delivery media. "Virtual museums" are a form of new media database, and so is the World Wide Web itself.

For Manovich, the database/narrative dialectic maps onto a fundamental post- Saussurean linguistic structure, in which utterances engage along both a paradigmatic axis and a syntagmatic axis. Linguistic utterances forge largely causal relations through syntax (syntagmatic axis), while semantics relies on selection of words from a grammatically aligned set of possibilities (paradigmatic axis). In other words, you could substitute "cat" for "bat" in the sentence "The cat has escaped the house," but you could not substitute "svelte" for "bat" in that same sentence. When the syntagm dominates, narrative is privileged; when the paradigm dominates, database is privileged, and narrative is proportionately "dematerialized" (231). It is worth mentioning that some scholars, such as Jerome McGann, object to Manovich's elision between a "structured data set" and "collections of items."3 But in the broad, metaphorical sense articulated by Manovich, all the sites discussed in this essay are databases and obey database logic in that separate objects (most typically, video clips) are collected in one space, but not in a defined order.

While the database, as a master metaphor for digitized scholarly resources, has its problems, the complementary concept of archive is subject to an even greater ideological debate among humanist scholars. To return once more to a simple dictionary definition, an archive is at once the place where "public records or other important historic documents are kept" and the documents themselves (OED). Thus, the term elides the distinction between container and contained, the archive building and the documents housed within it. This paradox underlies Jacques Derrida's influential concept of "archive fever." From Derrida, we understand that an invisible power governs the archive, whose guardians regulate access and have the power to interpret its contents. From Derrida as well, we understand that an archive at once conserves and destroys, functioning as an agent of both historical memory and amnesia. What's in the archive is commemorated, what outside invisible, forgotten, even ruled out of existence. What is inside the archive is, paradoxically, also invisible, lost to living memory and discourse; only when removed from the archive and made public do the records, documents, and artifacts www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 3/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation become history.4 While the sites discussed in this essay are all open access, not hidden behind a pay wall or even requiring a password, the archive's subjection to the law (through its etymological link to "arkhe, the principle of the commandment" [Derrida 1995, 9]) remains pertinent in that technical constraints, user access and bandwidth, and legal concerns all can influence what viewers get to see and know about digitized Shakespearean artifacts. Derrida's deconstructionist excursus into the archive also contributes to this discussion the helpful notion of the archive's necessarily incomplete state — its failure to perfect and stabilize memory — and therefore the importance of a supplemental context for its very existence. Explicitly referencing Derrida's notion of "archive fever," Peter Holland's (2010) exploration of the Shakespearean performance archive stresses the importance of process and performativity to the ongoing creation of archives as art works; and Barbara Hodgdon's (2016) elegant analyses of theatrical "leftovers," from promptbooks to rehearsal photographs, demonstrate not only the necessarily incomplete nature of theater archives, but also the need, especially in the case of the photographs and other visual evidence, for supplementary writing to complete or even compensate for the work of memory.

Finally, there is the collection. The OED tells us, rather unhelpfully, that a collection is "a number of objects collected or gathered together, viewed as a whole; a group of things collected and arranged." Like Manovich's database, these objects are discrete, but they are organized and "arranged," and the collection as a whole seems self-sufficient, needing no extra contextualization. Within digital contexts, the collection's ephemerality can be exacerbated by changes in media, as Marcus Boon's charmingly tongue-in-cheek meditation on the "apparent destruction" of his MP3 collection demonstrates at length (Boon 2013). But the collection strives for self- sufficiency, clear and consistent boundaries that mark what is in and what is outside it. As Susan Stewart writes in her theoretical exploration of the collection as a symptom of nostalgia, the "disease of longing," the collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricism. The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synrchronous within the collection's world. (1984, 151) As this quotation suggests, while the selection of objects might at first blush seem idiosyncratic — items picked up by the owner in the course of her peregrinations — in fact, narrative reigns supreme: collections "are objects generated by means of narrative," with syntagm dominating paradigm, to revert to Manovich's terms (1999). The collection, much more than the database and archive, presents itself as an "autonomous world — a world which is both full and singular, which has banished repetition and achieved authority" (152). The archetypal collection, as Stewart puts it, is Noah's ark — complete, without redundancy, severed from its origins and oriented to the future rather than the past. In this way, the collection rejects nostalgia, and in fact, erases the memory of its artifacts' origins. To some extent, collection is the least intellectually rigorous, or institutionally controlled of the three activities, but the most human. There must be an agent to collect and arrange objects; collections require collectors with curiosity and affect. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 4/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Of course, these terms are often enfolded into one another. Online archives and collections can be searched as databases. Collections may contribute to and be the foundation of archives. From this excursion into definition, however, I would extract four ideas: first, global Shakespeare sites are databases formed from discrete objects that can be manipulated in different arrangements; second, they are archives with hidden ideologies and power structures that are both masked and communicated through supplemental context; third, they demonstrate a tension between completeness and incompleteness, and between memory and forgetting; and fourth, at the heart of all of these sites is the figure of the collector or, more broadly, an impulse toward collection. When considering the effect of digital technologies in mediating viewers, readers, scholars, and cultural tourists' experience of global Shakespeare, it is useful to consider the interplay of these concepts within each given digital resource.

SITE 1. MIT GLOBAL SHAKESPEARE VIDEO AND PERFORMANCE ARCHIVE

The MIT Global Shakespeare Video and Performance Archive is curated by Peter Donaldson and Alexa Alice Joubin, now in conjunction with an international team of collaborators at different sites. This is a scholarly resource, by scholars and teachers for scholars, teachers, and students. With a "catalogue of more than 397 productions, 75 video clips, and online videos of over 30 full productions" (an accounting first accessed in 2014),5 MIT Global Shakespeares has built a substantial database of videos that are catalogued with accurate and substantial metadata; searches by key word, Shakespeare play, language, and region are supported. Global Shakespeares aims specifically to be a collaborative resource, soliciting contributions from other scholars and providing opportunities for reader comments. The site also is committed to civic goals. According to the "About" page, "this archive is intended to promote cross-cultural understanding and serve as a core resource for students, teachers, and researchers. We invite you to participate in this international research and educational online community" (MIT Global Shakespeares 2017, emphasis in original). The metadata, collaborative ethos, and civic emphasis define this site as an archive, with all of the regulatory apparatus that goes with this label. At the same time, the core of the site is SPIA (Shakespeare www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 5/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Performance in Asia), which itself was based on the personal collection of Alexa Alice Joubin. Since I first consulted the archive in 2013 for an earlier presentation on this topic, the range of regional areas represented in the archive has grown steadily. Regions represented within the archive include the Arab World, East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, India, Brazil, Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America. Since 2017, there has also been a substantial and distinguished list of Regional Editors, as well as the traditional Advisory Board. The kinds of Resources housed at the site are catalogued in a recognizable way for scholars; there are Video Interviews; Scripts; Essays, Reviews, and Written Interviews; List of Theater Companies; Glossary; Bibliography; and Online Links. There is nothing surprising here, in that sites of this type grow over time, especially when they, like this one, solicit crowd-sourced contributions; and while there is a database of videos at the heart of this project, that database (or archive) is necessarily never completed and the shape of the website itself is conditioned by the contingencies attendant on voluntary contributions and other social factors. Alexa Alice Joubin writes: A challenge that we faced at MIT Global Shakespeares is the issue of copyright. While an increasing number of directors and theatre companies proactively donate their video materials to be hosted by our platform as part of their outreach effort, other companies subscribe to a different notion of liveness, investing in idea that their productions are valuable because they are ephemeral and not available in any other format beyond the performance on stage. Additionally, even though Global Shakespeares is an open-access non- profit educational project, some companies charge copyright fees. They are well within their right to do so, but some productions are priced out of reach for academics. In still other instances, we have not been able to establish contact with some companies, and as a result their works are not represented. These factors lead to some form of what I call "archival silence." What is not there is as important as what is there or included. An archive — despite its encyclopedic impulse — is never complete and should not be treated as such. (Personal Communication 2017) As is true of databases/archives generally, the systematic method of collection and mapping intersects with the more ad hoc nature of collections.6

SITE 2. CANADIAN APPROPRIATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE (CASP)

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The brainchild of Daniel Fischlin of Guelph University, CASP represents itself as a "systematic exploration and documentation of the ways in which Shakespeare has been adapted into a national, multicultural theatrical practice" (Canadian Adaptations 2017, emphasis added). The site's structure differentiates the database explicitly from the rest of its material, which includes bibliography, essays, interviews, multimedia, teacher resources, and more. This self-named "project" is also an archive with ambitions toward historical, geographical, and political inclusiveness; as the front page proclaims, "CASP is the first research project of its kind devoted to the systematic exploration and documentation of the ways in which Shakespeare has been adapted into a national, multicultural theatrical practice" (Canadian Adaptations 2017). Here, as in the MIT Global Shakespeares, the regional is also global. This statement is something of a paradox. Discussions of Shakespeare's global or intercultural potential are obviated or made more contingent in the case of digital archives. For instance, Sonia Massai's suggestion that for performed drama the distinction between local and global Shakespeares can be defined by a production's intended audience — Shakespeare for local, national, and international audiences — does not hold up in the case of a digital archive (Massai 2005), where liveness or a site-specific setting are not in play.7 In many ways, the internal organization of both MIT Global Shakespeares and Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, such as the metadata recorded for the artifacts — the categories chosen to organize the site and connect entries — and even the physical layout of their interfaces and the construction of their search engines (more on the role of interface, below) — make the regional perspective within the global and the global context that structures a variety of local, regional Shakespeares visibly noticeable to users who navigate the site.8

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 7/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare "project," while best defined as a digital archive built upon a database, also bears the stamp of its originators' personal perceptions and goals, which makes it more like a collection. In a 2010 interview archived on the CASP website, Fischlin talks about the origins of the project, which was fueled by frustration at how few works could be included in his and Mark Fortier's 2000 print volume from Routledge, Adaptations of Shakespeare (2000). The website aimed to exploit digital technologies to make available additional materials that the project had brought to light: "The digital commons we had created was pearl diving in a much bigger sea of information and research we had uncovered . . . We were relying on our own instincts in a way as in, 'We think we need more information on French Canada; we think we need more information on queer adaptations; and what about all those musical adaptations of Shakespeare in Canadian pop culture?'" (Fischlin 2017). Thus, the database and archive are, in effect, reliant on the ethos of its creators — their assessment of what is missing and what we need more of — revealing the lingering shadow of the collection at the foundation of this project. Finally, CASP has the civic emphasis that characterizes archives: for instance, there is a "Learning Commons" aimed at secondary school teachers and the online game 'Speare, directed at what Fischlin, in the interview, identified as a "surprise constituency" that flocked to CASP: Canadian teenagers. Between 2014 and 2017, when I began and finished this study, the site has continued to grow and develop, and although there is no mechanism for direct contributions, as there is in the MIT Global Shakespeares site, the "Contact Us" page invites interactions with users: "Please feel free to email CASP with any questions or comments concerning Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare or the website. We would love to hear about adaptations not yet recorded in the database and we are constantly seeking additional information pertinent to the site. Also, we invite critical and constructive commentary on any part of the site you may have visited" (Canadian Adaptations 2017). CASP, although now more thoroughly institutionalized, is at heart a collection from an impassioned connoisseur.

SITE 3. BARDBOX

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 8/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation So far, we have an intercultural Shakespeare archive and a national Shakespeare archive, both of which are driven by database logic. Luke McKernan's BardBox, built on a simple Wordpress blog, is more properly a collection, introducing in simple sequence examples that the blogger finds artistically meritorious, representative of a particular genre, or simply interesting. Whitney Trettien defines it as a "new kind of online archive: a loosely-cataloged, feed-syndicated collection that continues to grow" (Trettien 2010, para. 21). The videos are classified in a rather heterogeneous manner as "adaptations, animals, animation, etc." Even more than in the first two sites, BardBox has ample paratext that provides not just production information or metadata, but a more extensive and chatty critical context for and evaluation of the selected videos. As Sylvia Morris says, "No need to wade through endless people awkwardly intoning one of Shakespeare's famous speeches. He's done all the sifting for you and you know that anything he's chosen is worth the time it takes to look at it" (2012). Take, for example, this assessment of a rap video: There are plenty of Shakespeare raps out there, mostly performed with a snigger by American high school students and not telling us a great deal beyond the realisation that fashion does not necessarily equate with relevance. But this looks and sounds like the real deal. Made by a Los Angeles video production company, it has all the moves, poses (guns pointed at the camera), flash style (DeLorean car), clothes and locations (sunny Los Angeles with the Hollywood sign in the background), plus a fine music track. But then the words reveal that what is being played out is the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio, and not in any superficial manner but one in which real psychological dilemma is displayed through poetry. The text for the rap is helpfully given with the video: — H for the Rizzo 2009. (BardBox 2017)

This was the more expansive account that accompanied the video in 2014. In 2017, when I found the video in McKernan's list of top ten videos, the blurb reads more succinctly: "Fantastic rendition of Hamlet from Horatio's point of view, told as a California-based hip-hop number that looks and sounds like the real deal" (BardBox 2017). As the video was "promoted" on the BardBox site, its description became more succinct and less personal. As a comment on the relationship between YouTube and other archives, this same clip is available at the MIT Global Shakespeares site. It is unclear whether or not the YouTube example is pirated from MIT Global Shakespeares.

In contrast to the previous examples, here the figure of the collector himself is foregrounded, and he has a definite personality and a set of criteria that has emerged during the lifespan of the site. As McKernan's vocabulary suggests, his methodology is Arnoldian — a search for touchstones of greatness — and his critical sensibility is at once Romantic (valuing originality and authentic psychological drama) and modernist (deriving from high culture and favoring novelty, complexity, and technical polish). Unlike the classic collection but like archives, BardBox is plagued by incompleteness, which occurs when videos featured on the site are removed by the creators. McKernan keeps a separate section called "Alas, Alas" to document videos that are no longer available, a

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 9/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation commemorative supplement to the Derridean archive that erases memory in the act of preserving its artifacts.

CURATION So far, I have stressed the taxonomic differences among these sites, which can easily be deconstructed to show slippage within those categories. In particular, as I was working on the essay, I became aware of how the collection is the doppelganger of its more systematic cousin, the archive, and that the logic of collection is both the origin and the terminus ad quem for both archive and database. Collecting is the foundational impulse underlying all three forms, with the function of curation becoming the basis for the generic distinctions among them. For this reason, it is important to understand how curation — the process that gives value and authority to archives and also shapes how we access, experience, and understand global Shakespeare through digital archives — actually works.

Take the collection: from a commonsense point of view, a collection bears the stamp of its human source. But the collection, in Susan Stewart's classically Derridean definition, is actually a self-perpetuating system with its own essentially linguistic logic that, like Derrida's archive, is rooted in a tension between conservation and destruction. What is destroyed in the creation of a collection, Stewart says, is context. To some extent, Stewart's collection is beginning to look like Manovich's database, a loose, non-hierarchical collocation of objects. But while we tend to look at a database as a neutral structure, the collection is motivated by aesthetic criteria that are nonetheless ideological. Under the banner of aestheticism, "the collection is a form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context" (Stewart 1984, 151). This formulation describes pretty well BardBox's modus operandi as a collection; videos are selected, removed from the context of their production and dissemination, then reframed in order to focus attention on their artistic features.

Within the art history world, opinion varies about the proper role of curators: deriving from the Latin curare, the curator is, on the one hand, a humble caretaker of objects, just as a religious curate helps the priest care for his congregation. But the curator also judges artworks, selecting some and rejecting others as the iron fist of institutional authority. In Rethinking Curating, Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook consider how the practice is changing with the advent of digital art and offer two alternative metaphors for curation in new media: curators may be filters rather than judges, or "context providers" rather than gatekeepers and guardians. These metaphors take us one-step closer toward understanding curation as a practice in digital sites for global Shakespeare. Filtering, at least in institutional art contexts, involves more or less a conscious choice on the part of curators, decisions about what to include and exclude, where and how to display artifacts, and so forth (Graham and Cook 2010, 45). Even in the most de-centered forms of new media art, the audience-as-curator is not a completely random collection of users. User- curators of avant-garde new media art tend to be friends and collaborators, or at the very least, like-minded patrons who have chosen to visit a certain exhibit or museum (Graham and Cook 2010, 268-75, passim). In our terms, the curator-as- filter gestures nicely toward the relationship between a database and search engine- www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 10/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation plus-the user, a human-machine cooperative. The curator-as-context provider, on the other hand, points to the paratext (essays, interviews, and so forth) that are important to the digital Shakespeare site as scholarly archive.

YOUTUBE AND THE "ABSENCE" OF CURATION YouTube depends on individual contributions for its raw material, and on a combination of imitation, dialogue, and a complicated computer algorithm to establish relationships among the videos. YouTube uploaders are often sloppy about providing metadata, and the archive is unstable as users add and remove videos and the YouTube administration monitors copyright violations. From either a scholarly or civic perspective, this seeming lack of curation can be problematic. For instance, a basic search on the phrase "Romeo and Juliet" in Fall 2014 produced the following results.

The same search on 21 October 2013 brought up a somewhat different mix of items. Heading the list was the trailer for the 2013 Carlo Carlei (Hailee Steinfeld) film version; fan uploads from trailers of the earlier versions by Baz Luhrmann (1996) and Franco Zeffirelli (1968); and two of the waning genre of youth-culture mashups. There were also clips from "The Animated Tales," a healthy dose of Dire Straits as a momentary distraction, some school productions — but surprisingly few examples of global Shakespeare. It took me until the third screen of uploads to find Gerard Presgourvic's French musical, Romeo e Julietta: de la Haine a L'Amour, which premiered in Paris in 2001 and was produced subsequently in multiple national locales. YouTube presents the musical in full through a fan upload. On screen 9, we find at last Oh Tae-Suk's 2010 Korean Romeo and Juliet in a short clip. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 11/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation YouTube is much less stable than the scholarly online archives surveyed here. On YouTube, surfing is more natural than attending closely to the videos (see Huberman 2009), and the predominance of imitation and repetition mitigates against the economics of attention that Stewart sees at play in the collection; YouTube might be said to be governed instead by an economics of "inattention," and what teacher or scholar wants to cultivate that? (see Desmet 2016). YouTube's penchant for parody and hospitality to novel effects can also work against the historical and civic bent of the archive. While the machinations of repetition and recombination that, according to Michael North (2013), are foundational to novelty abound in YouTube and its remix culture, an appreciation of the exotic can turn easily into orientalism or outright racism, as Ayanna Thompson's (2010) analysis of commentary appended to YouTube Shakespeare from the youth sector has demonstrated. At the same time, paradoxically, YouTube can bring us closest among all these sites to a perfected collection — a hermetically sealed constellation of videos chosen specifically by creator-user as a personal playlist. Frustration with YouTube's tendency toward disorder has produced a need for curators to work on behalf of other users. Gretchen Stiegchrist (2016), for instance, demonstrates how any YouTube user can become a YouTube curator, and various startups are offering themselves as the curatorial mediators between the sprawling YouTube database and viewers who want high-quality videos on any number of topics. (For discussion and examples, see Sormunen 2013; see also the earlier essay by Gehl 2009, which traces YouTube as collection back to the early modern wunderkammer.)

CONCLUSION: READING (ON) THE INTERFACE At this point I might seem to be moving toward a recommendation that we should all avoid YouTube for our global Shakespeare and stick to the scholarly, strictly curated sites. But that is not exactly true. In the course of working through these issues, I have come to see heavily curated and wild archives like YouTube as complementary rather than antagonistic. I want to argue for the utility of YouTube as an "insane collection" based on its ability to make visible and available to intellectual scrutiny the rhetoric of the interface. In an essay on "Reading Interface," Johanna Drucker calls into question the tendency to regard digital interfaces as neutral, and preferably invisible, conduits between digital archives, databases, or collections and their users. Drucker sees digital interfaces instead as first, organizing rather than representing the user's reading experience and second, as forming a boundary space. The interface, by organizing objects (as Stewart says the collection does) and by defining boundaries (as Derrida says the archive does) functions, in effect, as a curator. Interface, as an agent of curation, also has significant ideological effects. As Drucker writes, "We have to understand interface as a constitutive boundary space, not just a place of mechanistic negotiation and exchange among elements" (2013, 216). Interface constitutes us as subjects, and "we are in constant formation in relation to interface" (216). If we live increasingly on and through the interface, and if curation constitutes the self as it constitutes the archive or collection, then the practice of curation is a foundational, rather than a specialized life skill.

This is where YouTube can prove useful. First, YouTube allegorizes the search process that scholarly sites seek to streamline and to contextualize with scholarly www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 12/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation paratext. How did Dire Straits appear next to Franco Zeffirelli, you might ask? And so begins an excursion into the rhetoric of databases. Second, YouTube is all about curation; creating ad hoc playlists from one's inattentive searches is a major asset of the site, and the fun and frustration of marshalling those items into some semblance of order offers practice in the art of curating. Finally, precisely because it permits rapid, even sloppy, searching and disjunctive juxtapositions of videos, YouTube paradoxically can provide vigorous exercise, as Drucker points out, in "frame jumping," the rapid and disjunctive shifts among cognitive frames of reference that have characterized the Web since the days of hypertext. This is the function that Richard A. Lanham (1993) has identified with electronic text as a species of postmodernism; frame jumping resembles the kind of shifts in focus and scale that we might find in Roy Lichtenstein's close-up comics or the parodic collage of disparate images in Richard Hamilton's Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing (see Lanham 1993, 40).

Richard Hamilton, Just What Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? Frame-jumping and the rhetoric of electronic text support the experience of novel effects, which are typical of YouTube and its remix culture. The shock of novelty, according to Aristotle, also characterizes striking or powerful metaphors. "How true," a good metaphor makes us say, "but I never saw it before." Such metaphorical thinking is an important practice for us all in a digital world where every, man, woman, child, and machine is necessarily their own curator. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 13/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

NOTES 1. Alexa Alice Joubin rightly points out that there is no hard-and-fast line between curated and crowd-sourced archives. The MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive, for instance, is a "collaborative" venture as well as scholarly, carefully curated site. (See the "About" message from Peter S. Donaldson, http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/about/ (http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/about/).) Thus, there is such a thing as academic crowdsourcing, and the curated/crowd-sourced binary is a matter of degree. 2. Ramsay is writing specifically about relational databases, which work via charts of data, but argues that his analysis is pertinent as well to object oriented databases. 3. In part, McGann challenges the notion that a collection of texts marked up with markup languages (XML and SGML) technically may be considered as constituting a database. More broadly, he objects to the implication that the database's lack of hierarchy is "liberating" because it is not hierarchal. In McGann's view, neither assumption is true. McGann registers his objections when commenting on Ed Folsom's 2007 PMLA essay, which celebrates database as a new textual genre (see Folsom 2007, McGann 2007). 4. Two articles by Marlene Manoff (2004 and 2010) discuss the evolution of "archive" as a concept from the perspective of archivists and librarians as professionals. In the 2010 essay, Manoff offers a clear, succinct summary of Derrida's essay, "Archive Fever" (1995). 5. While this statement, which I first accessed in 2014, remains the same in 2017, my most recent search shows that the site contains 450 items. 6. On archival silence, see Joubin 2017, 436-39, passim. 7. For more on the complexities of the site of production vs site of performance, see Huang 2014. Her argument goes beyond conditions of individual performance to show how cultural politics of the moment, as well as perceptions about the originating cultural tradition, complicate cross-cultural or "transcultural" productions of Shakespeare. 8. Looking at the interface of MIT Global Shakespeares, for instance, we notice the logic of the page layout (a series of separate boxes), complemented by the (largely invisible) machinations of the search engine, which threads to together videos according to the selected categories established by metadata.

REFERENCES BardBox: Shakespeare and Online Video. 2017. Available online at: http://bardbox.wordpress.com/ (http://bardbox.wordpress.com/) [accessed 17 July 2017]. Boon, Marcus. 2013. "Meditations in an Emergency: On the Apparent Destruction of My MP3 Collection." In Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things. Edited by Kevin M. Moist and David Banash. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. 3-12.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 14/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP). 2017. Available online at: http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/ (http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/) [accessed 17 July 2017]. Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. 1995. "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression." Diacritics 25.2: 9-63. Desmet, Christy. 2016. "The Economics of (In)Attention in YouTube Shakespeare." Special Issue on Shakespeare and Social Media. Edited by Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O'Neill. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 10.1 (Spring/Summer). Dorney, Kate. 2010. "The Ordering of Things: Allure, Access, and Archives." Shakespeare Bulletin 28.1: 19-36. Drucker, Johanna. 2013. "Reading Interface." PMLA 128.1: 213-20. Fischlin, Daniel. 2010. "New interview with CASP Director, Daniel Fischlin: 'Parallel Streams': Sustaining the Digital Commons." Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. 18 October. Available online at: http://news.canadianshakespeares.ca/2010/10/18/new-interview-with-casp- director-daniel-fisch/ (http://news.canadianshakespeares.ca/2010/10/18/new- interview-with-casp-director-daniel-fisch/) [accessed 17 July 2017]. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier, eds. 2000. Adaptations of Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Folsom, Ed. 2007. "Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives." PMLA 122.5: 1571-79. Gehl, Robert. 2009. "YouTube as Archive: Who will Curate this Digital Wunderkammer?" International Journal of Cultural Studies 12.1: 43-60. Graham, Beryl, and Sarah Cook. 2010. Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hodgdon, Barbara. 2016. Shakespeare, Performance, and the Archive. London: Routledge. Holland, Peter. 2010. "The Lost Workers: Process, Performance, and the Archive." Shakespeare Bulletin 28.1: 7-18. Huang, Alexa. 2014. "Locating Asian Shakespeares: The Aesthetics of Transculturation." Special issue on Shakespeare in Asia, ed. Alexa Huang, Shakespeare International Yearbook 17: 181-98. Huang, Alexa. 2011a. "Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive." Shakespeare Survey 64: 38-51. Huang, Alexa. 2011b. "Global Shakespeares and Shakespeare Performance in Asia: Open-Access Digital Video Archives." Asian Theatre Journal 28.1: 244-50. Huberman, Bernardo A. 2009. "Social Attention in the Age of the Web." In Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship. Report of a Workshop Cosponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Council on Library and Information

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 15/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Resources, Washington, D.C. March 2009. Available online at: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf (http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf) [accessed 21 April 2016]. Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2017. "Global Shakespeare Criticism Beyond the Nation State." In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Edited by James C. Bulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 423-40. Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2017. Personal Communication, 19 September. Lanham, Richard. 1993. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Manoff, Marlene. 2010. "Archive and Database as Metaphor: Theorizing the Historical Record." portal: Libraries and the Academy 10.4: 385-98. Manoff, Marlene. 2004. "Theories of the Archive from across the Disciplines." portal: Libraries and the Academy 4.1: 9-25. Manovich, Lev. 1999. "Database as Symbolic Form." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5.2: 80-99. Reprinted in The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 212-43. Massai, Sonia. 2005. "Defining Local Shakespeares." In World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. London: Routledge. 3-11. McGann, Jerome. 2007. "Database, Interface, and Archival Fever." PMLA 122.5: 1588- 92. MIT Global Shakespeare Video and Performance Archive. 2017. Available online at: http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/ (http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/) [accessed 15 July 2017]. Morris, Sylvia. 2012. "Bardbox: Shakespeare on YouTube." The Shakespeare Blog, 7 April. Available online at: http://theshakespeareblog.com/2012/04/bardbox- shakespeare-on-youtube/ (http://theshakespeareblog.com/2012/04/bardbox- shakespeare-on-youtube/) [accessed 17 July 2017]. North, Michael. 2013. Novelty: A History of the New. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ramsay, Stephen. 2004. "Databases." In A Companion to Digital Humanities. Edited by Susan Schreibman, Raya Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell. 177-97. Siegchrist, Gretchen. 2017. "What is a Video Curator and what do they do?" Lifewire, 17 October. Available online at:https://www.lifewire.com/video-curation-channels- 1081774 (https://www.lifewire.com/video-curation-channels-1081774) [accessed 16 July 2017]. Sormunen, Vilja. 2013. "How YouTube is Broken (And How Video Curation Will Fix It)." AdAge, 20 September. Available online at: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/youtube-broken-video-curation-fix/244280/ (http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/youtube-broken-video-curation-fix/244280/) [accessed 17 July 2017].

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783934/show 16/17 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thompson, Ayanna. 2010. "Unmooring the Moor: Researching and Teaching on YouTube." Shakespeare Quarterly 61.33 (open peer review edition). Trettien, Whitney Anne. 2010. "Disciplining Digital Humanities, 2010: Staging Shakespeare, XMAS, Shakespeare Performance in Asia, Shakespeare Quartos Archive, BardBox." Shakespeare Quarterly 61.33 (open peer review edition).

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Five Kings: Adapting Welles Adapting Shakespeare in Québec

(/current) JENNIFER DROUIN AND FIONA RITCHIE, MCGILL UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT (/archive) Five Kings: L'Histoire de notre chute is an ambitious adaptation in French of Shakespeare's two tetralogies of history plays. As the title suggests, the creators have been influenced by Orson Welles's adaptation of the same name, and in the program notes they express their desire to pick up where Welles left off. We can therefore read Five Kings as an attempt by these four adapters to stake their claim as artistic professionals and redoubtable Shakespeareans. The Five Kings creative team is to be congratulated for managing to stage the entire sequence of Shakespeare's eight history plays in the same five-hour time frame in which Welles staged the second tetralogy. Besting Welles is no mean feat.

Five Kings: L'Histoire de notre chute, by Olivier Kemeid. A production of Théâtre PAP, Théâtre des Fonds de Tiroirs, and Trois Tristes Tigres in coproduction with the Théâtre Français du Centre National des Arts (Ottawa) and the Théâtre de Poche (Bruxelles). Director, Frédéric Dubois. Artistic Direction, Patrice Dubois. Lighting and scenery, Martin Labrecque. Costumes, Romain Fabre. Original Music, Nicholas Basque and Philippe Brault. Video, Silent Partners. Movement, Estelle Clareton. Cast: Olivier Coyette, Jean-Marc Dalpé, Patrice Dubois, Hugues Frenette, Jonathan Gagnon, Gauthier Jansen, Park Krausen, Louise Laprade, Marie-Laurence Moreau, Étienne Pilon, Isabelle Roy, Vlace Samar, and Emmanuel Schwartz. Espace Go, Montréal, QC. 8 November 2015.

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Five Kings: L'Histoire de notre chute is an ambitious adaptation in French of Shakespeare's two tetralogies of history plays, telling "the history of our fall" (although the French word "histoire" has retained the playful double sense in early modern English of both "story" and "true events").1 As the title suggests, the four creators of Five Kings, Olivier Kemeid (a Governor General's Award-winning playwright), Patrice Dubois, Frédéric Dubois, and Martin Labrecque, declare themselves to have been influenced by Orson Welles's adaptation of the same name, and in the program notes they express their desire to pick up where Welles left off. Welles only realized the first part of a projected two-part sequence: his Five Kings (staged in 1939 and reconceptualized as the film Chimes at Midnight in 1966) covers just the second tetralogy, but nevertheless lasted for five hours on stage. Richard France writes in his Preface to the printed text of the play that Welles seemed "to stage this sprawling compilation of Shakespeare and Holinshed as little more than a worthwhile challenge to his own redoubtable skills, to be judged on how well he managed to acquit himself in the performance of so Herculean a labor. It would have seemed utterly presumptuous for a lesser figure merely to tackle so massive an amount of material" (France 1990, 170). We can therefore read Five Kings as a similar attempt by these four adapters to stake their claim as artistic professionals and redoubtable Shakespeareans. Furthermore, they are grappling with the legacy of Welles himself, a long-standing interest of Patrice Dubois and Martin Lebrecque. In 2003, they produced a play called Everybody's Welles pour tous, in which Dubois's character spends his life researching the great actor and director (Leroux 2009, 154-55). The Five Kings creative team is to be congratulated for managing to stage the entire sequence of Shakespeare's eight history plays in the same five-hour time frame in which Welles staged the second tetralogy.2 Besting Welles is no mean feat.

The creators were also influenced by the rich tradition of Québécois adaptations of Shakespeare. In an interview with the magazine L'actualité, Kemeid reveals that Jean-Pierre Ronfard's epic six-part play Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux, which he read at age nineteen, influences his theatrical style in terms of its "dimension épique, la langue qui emprunte à tous les registres, ce savoir encyclopédique et jouissif, cette verve rabelaisienne, cet humour mêlé à un grand sens du tragique" [epic dimension, the language which www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 2/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation borrows from all registers, this encyclopedic and pleasurable knowledge, this Rabelaisian verve, this humor mixed with a great sense of the tragic] (Duchesneau 2014). In the entire canon of Québécois adaptations of Shakespeare, of which there have been at least thirty-five re-writings since 1960 (Drouin 2014, Appendix), Five Kings most closely resembles Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux in its ambitious scope. Roi Boiteux's six parts were originally performed in 1981, either as a single fifteen-hour marathon or spread out over six nights, with a different conclusion depending on the performance schedule (for a full analysis of this play, see Drouin 2014, 112-32). Kemeid's monumental adaptation of Shakespeare's octology certainly achieves this epic quality, and it evokes Ronfard's work in its irreverence, particularly in the debaucherous Falstaff scenes and the campy Richard III part of the play, derision being characteristic of Québécois adaptations in general but especially of Ronfard's work.

Of course achieving such brevity involves brutal cutting. Richard II is covered in less than an hour, the two Henry IV plays and Henry V in an hour and a half, the three Henry VI plays in an hour and a quarter, and Richard III in forty-five minutes. The relatively short run time is also achieved by limiting the breaks given to the audience. During the intermission, an on-site catering service offers sustenance, but at only twenty minutes long there is barely enough time to use the washroom, let alone eat. Each half of the performance is punctuated by a five-minute break, but the audience is asked to remain in their seats. The concision of the text works in part because the plays have been updated to a modern setting: the action begins in the 1960s and ends in the present day. While the aim of the broad chronological sweep seems to have been to move from the optimism of the 1960s (evidenced in the bright, warm lighting of the opening segment) to a bleaker view of the contemporary moment (suggested by the black and red tones of the stage design at the end of the play), this interpretation was somewhat hampered by the renewed sense of optimism experienced by many in Canada at the landslide election of new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the night before the opening of the show's run. This link with contemporary events took on additional significance, given Five Kings's emphasis on the dynastic relationships between the characters and the fact that Justin's father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was also a notable Canadian Prime Minister. His reign lasted more than fifteen years spread over three decades, making him Canada's third longest serving PM. Both Trudeau père and Trudeau fils are Québécois. Moreover, Pierre's wife and Justin's mother, Margaret Sinclair Trudeau, also hails from a political dynasty, her father having been the charismatic Liberal federal minister James Sinclair. Five Kings expands on the women's roles in Shakespeare's history plays by incorporating the dynasty of Amasia women into four of the five segments of the play.

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A rehearsal photograph showing the Plantagenêt family tree

As the characters in Five Kings have been reimagined as businessmen rather than monarchs and the performance does not, like that of Welles, seek to recreate a historical chronicle of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries à la Holinshed, the drastic cuts are easier to stomach. Kemeid has associated each king with an element (snow, fire, iron, sand, blood) in order to differentiate them and to give each segment a unique character,3 similar to Robert Lepage's use of natural elements and colors as a structuring device in his work.4 The five parts of the performance have been retitled accordingly. The sections do indeed offer Kemeid's reading of the essence of each king, which contributes to the distillation effect. Furthermore, the elemental characteristics ascribed to each monarch reveal their individual flaws, developing a sense, shared by other recent productions of the histories, that Shakespeare's kings are compromised heroes corrupted by power.

We here offer brief descriptions of each section and conclude with a discussion of Five Kings as an adaptation of Shakespeare. There is a great deal of rich contextual material on the show's blog which might elucidate the rationale behind some of the performance choices. 5 However, we focus here on www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 4/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation what we saw in the performance we attended and on pointing out some of the more significant elements of Five Kings. Our descriptions are based on the performance rather than on a detailed study of the printed text, although we quote from the script when citing lines from the play. It should be noted, however, that the published playtext diverges from the stage production at times, a significant instance of which we will discuss below.

LE ROI DE NEIGE (RICHARD II) The staging of the first play in the sequence begins demurely with a line of actors barely moving down the stage, step-by-step, slowly, blankly staring straight ahead. Once we as spectators overcame our trepidation that we might be in for five hours of minimal stage movement without interaction between characters, it became apparent that this was something of a Brechtian performance of classical French theater. The few stage directions that do accompany this segment (e.g., "Il prend Aumerle dans ses bras." [He takes Aumerle in his arms.]) are projected on the back wall of the theatre as text for the audience to read (Kemeid 2015, 35), but the actors do not perform the actions. Only towards the end of the piece, when the advancing line of actors has reached the furthest point downstage, does Richard Plantagenêt (Richard II, played by Étienne Pilon) begin to move more fluidly, leaving the formality of the line to sit down casually on the edge of the stage. Even after Richard breaks formation, the line of actors remains otherwise intact, turns around, and returns upstage just as slowly as before. More naturalistic stage movement only begins as Richard's death approaches and the actors are forced to move to carry off this bit of stage business. In this sense, the opening section of the play strongly evokes, and surpasses, the early modern bare stage that depended on the imaginative abilities of Shakespeare's audience.

Le Roi de neige: the line of actors with Richard Plantagenêt in the center

In this production, the depiction of Richard departs from the contemplative and often effete portrayal of the character to which contemporary audiences are accustomed. Here, Richard is a self-assured www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 5/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation businessman, relatively in control of the situation for most of the play. Richard is not as stern and menacing as Aumerle York (Patrice Dubois), who is clearly the most powerful man on stage, but is more commanding than Henry Lancaster (Bolingbroke, played by Olivier Coyette), who as a stocky man with a slow demeanor lacked the vigour with which he is normally associated.

This section of the show closes with the energy that will characterize the next one: a scene between Percy Northumberland (Gauthier Jansen), and his wife Kate Mortimer (Park Krausen), who stands out by speaking English in an otherwise francophone production. Five Kings conflates Shakespeare's Kate Percy with his Lady Mortimer, who speaks only Welsh while her husband speaks English. In the adaptation, this bilingual coupling seems also to stand in for Henry V's later wooing of Katherine. Percy and Kate jump into each other's arms and partially undress onstage, alluding to their passionate sexual relationship and foreshadowing the free love atmosphere of the next piece.

LE ROI DE FEU (1 HENRY IV AND 2 HENRY IV) While the first section of the play is set in February 1965, and is evocative of the age of Lester B. Pearson and JFK in the costuming of the characters, the next section jumps to November 1974 and has all the flare of an era associated with hippies, free love, alcohol, drugs, and excess. When characters from the previous piece enter, they provide a stark visual contrast; for example, Aumerle in his stiff 1960s business suit is juxtaposed with Harry Lancaster (Hal, played by Emmanuel Schwartz), who is dressed in a more relaxed '70s outfit consisting of a brown corduroy jacket, lime green shirt, and bell bottoms. Le Roi de feu opens with a soliloquy by Falstaff (Jean-Marc Dalpé), who calls for lots of beer and interjects Hamlet's line "Words words words" (Kemeid 2015, 78), implying that the rest of the play is dull in comparison to his humorous disposition. The audience therefore does not encounter Harry immediately but is instead encouraged to respond to Falstaff and his merry-making. The energy of this section contrasts sharply with the previous one as Falstaff and Harry move dynamically across the entire stage.

Harry is clearly depicted as a carefree party animal, happy to participate in Falstaff's debauchery and not particularly concerned with his father or any expectations he might have to fulfill, at least until the Gadshill robbery. Although Harry does deliver a mostly complete version of his speech about "glitt'ring o'er [his] fault" (1.2.213), it is not a soliloquy. Rather, Harry stands on a bar reminiscent of Studio 54 surrounded by Falstaff, Ned (i.e., Poins, played by Étienne Pilon), Lola (Doll Tearsheet, played by Louise Laprade), Barmaid (Mistress Quickly, played by Marie-Laurence Moreau), and Danseuse (an additional female character, played by Isabelle Roy). At the end of the speech, Harry turns to deliver the final lines about becoming "un astre sublime" [a sublime star] to Falstaff (Kemeid 2015, 84). The same part of the bar also serves as a spot from which Harry and the other revellers snort lines of cocaine. After the Gadshill episode (which is not staged), Falstaff engages in a fair amount of stage business in his attempts to obtain his criminal dossier from Maître Shallow (Jonathan Gagnon), who here appears immediately after the robbery as a sleazy, middle-aged notary, stringing Falstaff along with promises that he will get the charges dropped.

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Le Roi de feu: Falstaff, Danseuse, and Barmaid with Harry standing at the bar

During the party scenes, the disco-inspired atmosphere is marked by songs that stand out from the rest of the script, since they are in English: "Those were the days my friend" (rather than the French equivalent of the same song, "Le temps des fleurs") as well as "Good Morning Starshine" from the musical Hair. Indeed, Harry has long hair like a Vietnam draft-dodger, which he keeps long even after he promises his father that he'll live up to his expectations in battle against Percy. Later, the deathbed scene is also delivered in a serious manner, emphasizing their father-son relationship and Harry's potential as a future leader. Notably, Five Kings retains Harry's banishment of Falstaff, but the adaptation softens it slightly by removing the threat of a death sentence for coming within ten miles of the king's person. After Falstaff, alone onstage, feebly tries to convince the audience that the banishment was just for show, we never see him nor hear about him again, the reported deathbed scene in Henry V having been cut.

LE ROI DE FER (HENRY V) This brief segment opens in September 1990, towards the start of the First Iraq War. Harry marries Ines Amasia (Isabelle Roy), who is dressed in a chic orange jumpsuit, which simultaneously evokes both a '90s businesswoman's power suit and, more disturbingly, the uniform later worn by prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. She accepts him in an attempt to unite their two nations. The country in question shifts from Québec to a more generalized North America, at war with Ines's unspecified Arab country. The historical combat between England and France is thus replaced with a global conflict designed to appeal to a contemporary audience, ironically erasing the anglophone-francophone hostility traditionally found in Québécois culture. The projections at the back of the stage reflect this Gulf War context, showing distorted footage of ground targets from the air. Strobe lighting and the sound of gunshots add to the militaristic effect. The text is very short compared to the length of Shakespeare's www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 7/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Henry V; from the decision to invade, we jump immediately to the breach, which becomes a brief camp scene. After the military audio-visual effects that replace the Battle of Agincourt, we suddenly move to the wooing of Ines, a scene devoid of romance in stark comparison to the earlier depiction of Percy and Kate. Joan La Pucelle is transposed into this play to become Jihanne (Marie-Laurence Moreau), who is clearly portrayed as a religious extremist.

Two Arab characters (Ines and Jihanne) stand in for all Arabs in this play. While this seems problematic, it is not dissimilar to Shakespeare's inclusion of only a handful of French characters to represent an entire nation in Henry V. More questionable is the fact that at least one of the actors playing an Arab character in Five Kings does not appear to be Arab herself: the blonde hair of the actress playing Jihanne (who also portrayed Hizia Amasia in the first section of the show) peeks out from under her hijab. However, this casting decision was presumably made by the director, Frédéric Dubois, rather than the author, Kemeid, who is Québécois of Egyptian descent. Aumerle finally loses power in this segment, leading to the rise of Suffolk (Gauthier Jansen). In this sense, this section of Five Kings functions primarily as a bridge between the two tetralogies.

Le Roi de fer: Ines Amasia

LE ROI DE SABLE (1 HENRY VI, 2 HENRY VI, AND 3 HENRY VI) Over the course of this piece (set in 2002, at the same time as the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan), a series of portraits projected onto the screen at the back of the stage makes the transfer of power clear. First we see Harry Lancaster (Henry V) seated (his legs spread and arms resting powerfully on the boardroom chair in the same pose in which he ended the previous segment, just before the intermission), with his son, Harry Lancaster Jr. (Henry VI, played by Jonathan Gagnon), standing at his shoulder. This gives way to a portrait of Harry Jr. still in the same position, almost cowering behind the chair, but with his wife, Mariam Amasia (Isabelle Roy), now on the throne. Finally, we see Cécile York (Louise Laprade) www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 8/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation powerfully flanked by her three sons, Édouard (Hugues Frenette), George (Étienne Pilon), and Richard (Patrice Dubois). The specter of Harry Lancaster (Henry V) reappears onstage, the same actor (Emmanuel Schwartz) now performing the part of the revolutionary Jack Cade, his combat gear demilitarized and paired with a modern-day activist's hoodie. This doubling neatly reminded us of the fine line between reactionary and revolutionary behavior. Indeed, doubling was used throughout the production to draw links between characters and to give a sense of history as repetition rather than progress.6 The centerpiece of the set for this section is a large table which serves as both a banquet and a boardroom table. Jihanne the jihadist now becomes a suicide bomber who attempts to blow herself up on this table in order to end the civil war. She is shot down by soldiers, but the bomb still explodes. A similar attempt to implicate the female characters deeply in the violence of the play can be seen in the fact that Mariam murders Rutland York (Vlace Samar) by slitting his throat. Towards the end of this section, the temporal setting jumps forward, and the current date (8 November 2015) is projected on the screen at the back of the stage. Elements of Richard III are also interpolated here: Richard's wooing of Anne Warwick (Marie-Laurence Moreau) takes place at the end of this segment, over the corpses of both Harry Lancaster Jr. (Henry VI) and her father, Warwick (Jean-Marc Dalpé). Édouard has just raped Anne but Richard one-ups his brother, revealing his subtler (although no less brutal) attempts at gaining power in preparation for the final section of the show.

Harry Lancaster and Caporal Gower in Le Roi de fer (left) and Jack Cade in Le Roi de sable (right)

LE ROI DE SANG (RICHARD III) Whereas the central table in the set of the previous piece evoked media representations of the boardroom, including Donald Trump's cut-throat drama The Apprentice, the show's final section now explicitly uses trashy television staging by employing a mash-up of reality TV and soap opera styles. A camera and microphone are placed downstage center, and the image is projected on the screen at the back of the stage, distorted so that the close-up image of the person speaking is repeated half a dozen times, each iteration off from the original by about a second, creating a kaleidoscopic effect which makes us question the truth of what we see and hear. Several characters use this close-up camera to address the audience in a personal vein reminiscent of the Big Brother diary room. Richard usually positions himself in the center of the stage for his soliloquies, which are delivered directly to the audience in a manner akin to Kevin Spacey's character Frank Underwood in the Netflix series House of Cards, whose breaking of the fourth wall is widely acknowledged to have been inspired by Shakespeare's Richard III. The family dynamics of the piece put us in mind of an extreme version of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, but the performers also employ an exaggerated emotional acting style strongly redolent of soap opera. This style is emphasized when, after moments of intense emotion onstage, their faces go blank and their bodies relax as they exit, although they remain in the audience's view. Indeed, "dead" characters continue to www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 9/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation stand on the margins of the platform stage after their deaths have been announced by Buckingham (Olivier Coyette). The name of this reality show/soap opera is projected on the screen at the back of the stage: York. Every time Richard pulls off one of his schemes, we see a close-up on this screen as he turns his head to the camera with a smug look and the words "directed by Richard York" (in English) appear, emphasizing both his role in orchestrating the action and his theatricality, in keeping with Shakespeare's character.

Le Roi de sang: Richard York and Élisabeth Grey with her infant

Prior to Richard's election "à la direction de notre Conseil" [to the head of our Council] (Kemeid 2015, 236), however, the play establishes an interesting, yet problematic, parallel between Richard and Pierre Karl Péladeau. PKP (as he is popularly known) is a multimillionaire who inherited the Québecor media empire from his father before becoming a Member of the National Assembly of Québec on 7 April 2014 and then the leader of the sovereignist Parti Québécois on 15 May 2015, after a long leadership race that culminated in what many considered a coronation rather than an actual election. Five Kings first links Richard and PKP by having Buckingham list the diverse groups whose vote Richard is courting: "Syndiqués assistés sociaux organisations caritatives groupes environnementaux associations transgenres cercles bouddhistes et regroupements d'artistes" [Union workers, welfare recipients, charitable organizations, environmental groups, transgender associations, Buddhist circles, and artistic collectives] (Kemeid 2015, 230). Repeated mentions of the union vote constitute an ironic wink to a Québécois audience familiar with PKP's history of locking out striking workers. Second, the general populace demands someone "pour nous sauver" [to save us] (Kemeid 2015, 232), a popular refrain in Québec every time a leader for any party is chosen. Indeed, Buckingham asserts, "Notre pays sera sauvé" [Our country will be saved] (Kemeid 2015, 231), setting up Richard-cum-PKP as the "sauveur" [savior] commonly sought in Québec politics. Third, Richard emphasizes his marriage to Anne Warwick as a strategic move to help him win votes with the general public, and their marriage evokes the media hoopla surrounding PKP's marriage to television star Julie Snyder on 15 August 2015. Only after the marriage to Anne, on the eve of his election, does Richard finally give a version of Shakespeare's "Now www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 10/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation is the winter of our discontent" speech (1.1.1), approximately two-thirds into the Roi de sang segment of the play. Finally, in his election pitch to the public, Richard states that his program rests upon his deepest and most intimate conviction to make "notre pays un pays riche sécuritaire / et / Indépendant" [our country a rich, secure, and Independent country], punching the air with his fist on the word "Indépendant," a clear reference to the same gesture made by PKP on the day he announced his candidacy for the National Assembly during the 2014 election campaign. This action was so widely discussed in the media that many critics attributed the PQ's election loss solely to his raised fist. Having delocalized Québec in the parallels with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, this section brings Five Kings back into a Québécois context, but not without troublingly aligning the leader of the primary nationalist party at the time of the play's production with Shakespeare's most Machiavellian murderer.

The Roi de sang section follows some productions of Shakespeare's play in portraying Mariam (Margaret) as a dishevelled and confused version of her former self. A significant departure from Shakespeare occurs in the play's ending, however. Rather than offering his kingdom for a horse, this Richard ends the play in an emotional encounter with Cécile, offering his kingdom in exchange for his mother's love. Just as the audience thinks she might give it to him, Cécile, standing behind the seated Richard, pulls out a knife and slits her son's throat. This is one of the most striking changes to the printed text of the play, in which the other female characters (Élisabeth, Anne, and Mariam) fall on Richard's body and begin to stab it in a collective attempt to annihilate him. Cécile's solo murder of her son in the stage ending departs not only from Shakespeare's text but also from Normand Chaurette's 1991 adaptation Les Reines, both of which portray the women as a collective force to be reckoned with. The show ends with the play's subtitle projected onto the screen at the back of the stage: "L'histoire de notre chute," the history of our fall.

ADAPTATION Kemeid opens the introduction to the published text of the play with the bold assertion that Five Kings "n'est ni une traduction, ni une adaptation de ces pièces" [is neither a translation nor an adaptation of these plays] (Kemeid 2015, 7), a claim that is repeated both in the program notes and on the production blog. However, in the "Correspondance" section of the production website (which reproduces emails between members of the artistic team over the course of their five years of work on the piece), the word "adaptation" is used thirteen times, with Kemeid using the term in reference to adaptations by other authors and artistic director Patrice Dubois using the term consistently in reference to their own project. Clearly, there is not a consensus about the meaning of the term among the four co-creators of the piece, with Kemeid seeming to use it in a sense synonymous with that of an innovative staging that remains loyal to the text and Dubois using it in a sense consistent with the way that we, the authors of this article, interpret the concept. Strangely, however, in the same set of email correspondence, Kemeid nonetheless uses the word "adaptation" to refer to his Oedipe (2013) (Five Kings Artistic Collective 2015). We would argue that Five Kings certainly fits our definition of "adaptation" and also constitutes an "appropriation" at points because of its socio-political agenda, particularly in the allusions to Pierre Karl Péladeau and to the Trudeaus.7 Indeed, Kemeid says, "Le texte déploie son propre univers, se nourrit de l'époque actuelle, brise et recompose l'arbre généalogique des Yorks et des Lancaster à sa guise, trahit et honore à la fois sa source originelle, fait théâtre de tout roi"; in sum, for Kemeid, "Il s'agit donc d'une réécriture" [The text deploys its own universe, feeds on the current era, breaks and reconstitutes the genealogy of the Yorks and Lancasters as it sees fit, at once betrays and honors its original source, makes theater out of each king; it is thus a re-writing] (Kemeid 2015, 7). For us, this type of "re-writing" lies at the heart of the definition of "adaptation."

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 11/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Kemeid also writes of losing himself in the Shakespearean forest, trying to hack his way out, and risking ending up in the exact same place from which he started (Kemeid 2015, 8).8 Clearly, Five Kings represents a huge effort in grappling with both the length of these eight Shakespeare history plays and the status of the dramatist himself. Kemeid describes how "les oeuvres fascinantes de Shakespeare nous auront servi de port de rassemblement pour regarder, du point de vue de notre temps, les traits de nos sociétés, de nos cultures et de notre humanité" [Shakespeare's fascinating works will have served for us as a meeting point to look at, from the point of view of our time, the characteristics of our society, of our cultures, and of our humanity] (Five Kings Artistic Collective 2015). Conceptualizing Shakespeare as a vast forest, full of countless trees, each of which has something to say about our humanity, is in keeping with the Québécois characterization of Shakespeare as "le grand Will" (Drouin 2014, 3-4), a sort of friendly giant whose transhistorical and transcultural status is a given. Shakespeare's cultural capital is acknowledged and employed in order to lend weight to the Five Kings collective's exploration of the sociopolitical issues of the last five decades. Furthermore, the production's faithful use of specific elements of the Shakespearean source in an updated setting is evidence of an assumption that, arguably, is widely shared by many practitioners, including Welles, that Shakespeare provides a guarantee of artistic quality. Although the observation that Shakespeare's plays speak to all of humanity across time and space is not particularly original and may seem similar to the attempts of many theater directors simply to set the plays in a different geographical locale or another time period, the breadth of Five Kings goes well beyond such transpositions and updatings. In finishing the work that Welles started by producing the eight plays in a sequence designed to be seen in one sitting, Kemeid, the Dubois brothers, and Labrecque make Shakespeare's octology tangible to a contemporary Québécois audience whilst elucidating recent North American history. What is more, the production succeeds in drawing sharp distinctions between each historical moment, both in the early modern period and the present day. Ultimately, Five Kings shows us that it is unnecessary to ask "Why adapt Shakespeare in Québec?"; the question is rather "Why not?"

NOTES 1. We are grateful to Patrick Leroux and Leanore Lieblein for their helpful commentary on a draft of this essay. 2. To our knowledge, no staging of the entire cycle has achieved such concision to unite the eight plays into one show. Michael Boyd's "Glorious Moment," a 2008 event for the RSC, staged the eight plays separately over four days. Even Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews's The War of the Roses for the Sydney Theatre Company in 2009 lasted eight hours, and its two parts could be watched on different days. In Québec, Five Kings's main predecessor is Jean Asselin's 1988 eight-hour production of the second tetralogy, Le Cycle des Rois. Unlike Five Kings, these two latter examples are stagings of Shakespeare's text in condensed form, rather than adaptations. 3. "Ça m'a permis de qualifier chaque roi, d'y coller un élément qui fait sens, qui m'a servi tout le long de l'écriture comme fil conducteur, comme énergie, comme champ lexical." [It allowed me to qualify each king, to glue to them an element that makes sense, that served for me throughout the writing process as a narrative thread, as energy, as a vocabulary] (Five Kings Artistic Collective 2015). 4. We are indebted to Patrick Leroux for this observation.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 12/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 5. This article cites material from the fivekings.ca website, including a blog and email correspondence between the four creators. Since that website is no longer available, we provide here a PDF archive compiling the entire website as it appeared online on 25 June 2015 (Five Kings Artistic Collective 2015). See also the 126-page dossier of media coverage (http://issuu.com/theatrepap/docs/rapport_de_presse_five_kings_final?e=1675609/31846286 (http://issuu.com/theatrepap/docs/rapport_de_presse_five_kings_final?e=1675609/31846286)) and the dramaturgical notebook (http://issuu.com/theatrepap/docs/cahier_dramaturgique_fk/1? e=1675609/30811351 (http://issuu.com/theatrepap/docs/cahier_dramaturgique_fk/1? e=1675609/30811351)). 6. Alice Dailey offers a detailed discussion of the ways in which doubling emphasizes history as repetition in the RSC's performance of the octology as the "Glorious Moment" (Dailey 2010). 7. For us, adaptations are "additions [. . .], transpositions, rewritings, or translations that alter significantly the content or meaning of the source text"; going a step further, an appropriation is "an adaptation in which the author uses the source text in order to advance a socio-political agenda, to make the source author's text her own for a particular purpose. As such, all appropriations are de facto adaptations, but all adaptations are not necessarily appropriations since some adaptations may be concerned with making aesthetic, contextual, poetic, or structural 'improvements' to a text" (Drouin 2014, 63-64, 45). For a detailed theory of both terms, see Drouin 2014, 42-67. 8. The program credits Kemeid as the author of the text "d'après [after] Shakespeare." In the printed text, he notes that he began with French translations of Shakespeare by Jean-Michel Déprats, "puis nous nous sommes attaqués à la source même, épaulés par une armée de dictionnaires, d'ateliers, de spécialistes, de conférences, de recherches en tout genre" [then we attacked the source itself, helped by an army of dictionaries, workshops, specialists, guest lectures, research of all kinds] (Kemeid 2015, 8).

REFERENCES Dailey, Alice. 2010. "The RSC's 'Glorious Moment' and the Making of Shakespearian History." Shakespeare Survey 63: 184-97. Drouin, Jennifer. 2014. Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Duchesneau, Pierre. 2014. "Raconte-moi un auteur: Olivier Kemeid." L'actualité. 24 October. Available online at: http://www.lactualite.com/culture/raconte-moi-un-auteur-olivier-kemeid/ (http://www.lactualite.com/culture/raconte-moi-un-auteur-olivier-kemeid/) [accessed 12 November 2017]. Five Kings Artistic Collective. 2015. Compilation of the fivekings.ca website, including blog and email correspondence, as of 25 June. (PDF (/media/783847/FiveKings_WebsiteArchiveCompilation.pdf)) France, Richard. 1990. Preface to Five Kings. In Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The W.P.A. and Mercury Theatre Playscripts. Edited and introduced by Richard France. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies 30. New York: Greenwood Press. 169-73. Kemeid, Olivier. 2015. Five Kings: L'histoire de notre chute. Montréal: Leméac. Leroux, Patrick. 2009. "Le Québec en autoreprésentation: le passage d'une dramaturgie de l'identitaire à celle de l'individu." Ph.D. dissertation. Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle-Paris III. Shakespeare, William. 1996. 1 Henry IV. In The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Second edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 884-927. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783936/show 13/14 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Shakespeare, William. 1996. Richard III. In The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Second edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 748-804.

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"Thou Art Translated": Peter Sellars's Midsummer

(/current) Chamber Play

CAROL MEJIA LAPERLE, WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT

For over sixty seasons, the Stratford Theatre Festival in Canada has annually showcased notable performances in dramatic arts and musical theater. Peter Sellars's chamber-play appropriation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed for Stratford's 2014 season, broadens the experience of Shakespeare to invite divergent, and often troubling, interpretive strategies. Appropriating the sprawling comedy to convey instead unsettled intimacies and disconcerting eroticism, the chamber play suspends the mirth a seasoned Shakespeare audience member expects from watching one of the bard's most frequently performed comedies. Closely considering festival audience expectations in the context of the largest classical theater repertory in North America, I furthermore illustrate the ways the performance challenges the principles of privileged access and inviolable universality underwriting the festival experience. By creating internal fissures in the Shakespeare experience, the chamber play underscores the possibilities for reassessing what we mean by the Shakespeare experience.

A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play, by William Shakespeare. Stratford Festival. July 24-September 20, 2014. Director, Peter Sellars. Set and Installation Designer, Abigail DeVille. Lighting, James F. Ingalls. Sound, Tarek Ortiz. Performers, Sarah Afful, Dion Johnstone, Trish Lindstrom, Mike Nadajewski.

"Reduce. Reuse. Recycle" — a pithy statement to capture one's first impression of Peter Sellars's chamber-play appropriation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed for Canada's Stratford Theatre Festival during the 2014 www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 1/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation season.1 To materialize the catch phrase, the Masonic Concert Hall was fully converted into an industrial waste container with scrap metal and decrepit furniture hanging from the ceiling over the audience. Set and installation artist, Abigail DeVille, mounted large and looming objects overhead: bent car fenders, old chairs, metal scraps, broken wood beams, an old lawn trimmer, rusty bed frames, and old television monitors, spread over a backdrop of crumpled, purple-shaded aluminum foil. There is a feeling of danger, even in sitting, lest these objects drop from overhead. There is a sense of demise, seeing objects with no apparent beauty and no immediate use. And yet closer inspection yields a different effect. Six of the old chairs were taken from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's historical opening in 1953. Many of the materials are from the largest costume and props warehouse in the world, representing sixty years of the festival's material history, or junk, depending upon your point of view. Indeed, the transformation of space anticipates a bifurcated gaze, provoking questions such as: Is the set an expansion of the components that constitute the Stratford Theatre Festival, or an irreverent treatment of the material culture of the festival's history? Beyond the remarkable use of props, can this performance even be considered A Midsummer Night's Dream if it is devoid of the play's intricate plots and vivacious characters? Why evoke Shakespeare's comedy if the title merely thwarts the expectations it evokes? Can the performance be called "Shakespearean" at all if it renders the bard's language unmoored from its original context by the chamber play's emphases and aesthetics? By resetting and recasting the Shakespeare play — using only four actors to perform Shakespeare's multi-plotted comedy of varied characters, extreme emotions, and volatile desires — Sellars's chamber play explores the concentrated intensity of the chamber play aesthetic, thus emphasizing the desires that shape subjects and the cruelty that underlies passions. In Anna Westerstahl Stenport's study of August Strindberg's foundational chamber plays, she finds that "In these plays' spectacular and morbidly engrossing denouements, Strindberg allows a radically different spatiotemporal conception of embodied subjectivity to take center stage. In these plays, the investigation settles, metaphorically and literally, on the interior" (2007, 35). Appropriating the sprawling comedy to convey instead troubled intimacies and disconcerting eroticism, Sellars's chamber play denies the laughter a seasoned Shakespeare audience member expects from watching one of Shakespeare's most frequently performed comedies. Closely considering festival audience expectations in the context of the largest classical theater repertory in North America, I furthermore illustrate the ways in which the performance challenges the principles of privileged access and inviolable universality underwriting the festival experience.

STRATFORD THEATRE FESTIVAL: THEN AND NOW For over sixty seasons, the Stratford Theatre Festival has annually showcased notable talent in stage management, design technology, costume craft, dramatic arts, and musical theater. It has been dubbed Canada's national theater — which rings true, if not in any official capacity, certainly in size and scope, the festival boasting approximately half a million viewers per season. Managing a $57.4 million budget in 2014 (under 10% of which comes from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario provincial government), the festival has met most of the stated aspirations of its 1953 opening, which Arnold Edinborough described in a 1954 article in www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 2/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Shakespeare Quarterly: "as momentous for Canada as the founding of the Old Vic was for England, or the Abbey Theatre for Dublin" (1954, 50). The festival's first artistic director, Tyron Guthrie, invokes nationalism, profitability, and cultural authority as they overlap at the inception of the festival: "Canada is busting with money and more importantly, busting with a sort of XXth century nationalism — they want to scrawl their names on the wall of history."2 Whether or not this graffiti is best inscribed using Shakespearean ink is a question Canadian theater historians have productively considered.3 With special attention to the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, Daniel Fischlin notes that "Shakespearean sites of production have proliferated in Canada across multiple media, diverse ethnicities, and multiple ideologies" (2007, 3). But even amidst the manifold Canadian productions of Shakespeare, the Stratford Festival is recognizably unique in its commitment to classical theater. If, as Mark Thornton Burnett assesses, festivals constitute a kind of "Shakespearean franchising" (2011, 445), the Stratford brand is "classical" and "traditional" writ large. Indeed, Margaret Groome declares that the Stratford Shakespeare Festival was "the answer to the quest for cultural respectability," emerging as "the longed-for national icon, as both cultural commodity and cultural authority" (2002, 125, 108). The dominance of the festival as international emblem of Canadian high art prevails as indelibly linked to the influential commodity of Shakespeare, made apparent in the "About Us" section of the Festival's official website: With William Shakespeare as its foundation, the Stratford Festival aims to set the standard for classical theatre in North America. Embracing our heritage of tradition and innovation, we seek to bring classical and contemporary theatre alive for an increasingly diverse audience. ("About Us" 2017)4 To this end, Stratford casts marquee names in theater alongside experimental stage visions, using traditional acting practices but with innovative casting choices. Some festival highlights include The Tempest (2011), featuring Christopher Plummer as Prospero with Indonesian-born, American actress Julyana Soelistyo as Ariel floating and flying across the stage on wires. Twelfth Night (2012) infuses rock music into the Shakespeare play to enliven a show starring Brian Dennehey. Stratford thereby blends traditional realism with progressive performance possibilities, but usually without deviating from the model of a recognizable Shakespeare adaptation. Furthering the mission of inclusion and multiplicity, the current artistic director, Antoni Cimolino, marked the 2014 season with novelty, for the first time having the same play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed during the same season with two different directors, cast members, and venues. With Shakespeare still as its foundation, the layering of contemporary social politics evoked by two risk-taking directors — Chris Abraham and Peter Sellars — was meant to diversify the theatrical experience. But while Sellars is part of the "innovative" and "diverse" Shakespeare sprinkled throughout the festival experience, his chamber play goes beyond a non-traditional adaptation and into the realm of a provocative appropriation. So remote from the usual fare is Sellars's production that his chamber play required the manufacturing of an entirely different stage, despite four permanent stages being available for the festival's offerings.

At the main Festival Theatre, one of four established theaters constituting Stratford's permanent stages, Chris Abraham's socially conscious performance of A www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 3/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Midsummer Night's Dream is framed by a modern, same-sex wedding. The celebration is the premise for a group of friends improvising a "backyard" Shakespeare performance. In highlighting the range of sexual orientations of the group of friends, Abraham foregrounds the fluidity of modern gendered identities as these parallel the arbitrariness of early modern gender expectations throughout the play. For instance, casting a female actor, Tara Rosling, as Lysander instigates a renewed look at Egeus's refusal of consent. Her sexual pursuit of Bethany Jillard's Hermia suggestively defies premarital conventions. And yet, rather than explore the staging of same sex desire (which is not at all the same as staging a same-sex wedding), Abraham conveniently veils lesbian relations with stage props. A frolic coinciding with Lysander's persuasion that "One turf shall serve as pillow for us both; / One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth" and Hermia's resistant "do not lie so near" (2.2.40-43) is left to the imagination as the two women's shadows scamper within a camping tent. In another instance of interrogating the performance of gender, Evan Buliung and Jonathan Goad interchangeably play Titania and Oberon on different nights, each cross-dressing into the fairy queen's bridal-type gown.

Figure 1. Evan Buliung (left) as Oberon and Jonathan Goad as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2014. Photography by Michael Cooper. This performance of the play was directed by Chris Abraham and located at the Festival Theatre While these choices provide contemporary grounds for the play's sexual politics, they also suspend any serious interrogation — or as the camping tent proved, occlude any actual perception — of the vexed and contested experiences of same sex couples in the twenty-first century. Instead, featuring the falsetto voice and the hairy-chested Titania's drag queen simulation, performed by a male actor who will play Oberon the next night, the gender-switching scenes are hilarious but far from critically provocative. The political intervention prompting inclusivity and diversity is thus subsumed under the imperative of a good laugh.

PETER SELLARS'S APPROPRIATION OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM For Peter Sellars's four-actor, radical appropriation of the frolicking comedy into an intimate chamber play, a fifth stage was transformed in the Masonic Concert Hall. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 4/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation In Maria M. Delgado's overview of Sellars's career, she highlights the director's attention to the classics as an intervention in contemporary political and social conflicts. She states, "These productions brought audiences into contact with the darkest recesses of the human psyche, asked unpleasant questions about complicity, guilt, and moral responsibility, and refused to provide easy or comforting answers" (Delgado 1999, 206). Sellars's chamber play — constructed outside the usual parameters of Stratford's stage offerings yet constituted by Stratford's material history — calls into question conventions of spectatorship in a festival context by exposing the "darkest recesses" of desire percolating under the play's comic surface and in doing so, withholds the one thing we can usually expect from a comedy: laughter. Sellars defies audience expectations for A Midsummer Night's Dream and heightens the way private emotions shape social identities by imposing upon the marquee festival comedy the aesthetics of a chamber play. It is precisely by means of the chamber play's emphasis on the interior motivations of desire — a motivation marked primarily by cruelty — that the appropriation calls attention to audience expectations. The disjunction between expectation and affect is apparent even in considering the promotional materials leading up to the performance. Publicity posters and pamphlets for Sellars's chamber play show a modern interpretation of the pastoral. Two males and two females comprise a young, attractive, smiling group gathered around, enjoying a picnic and casually singing to a guitar. Even prior to overcoming the staging challenges of reformulating Shakespeare's play, Sellars's chamber play is already in tension with the expectations about what kind of picture matches the headline A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Figure 2. From left Mike Nadajewski, Sarah Afful, Dion Johnstone, Trish Lindström. Photography by Don Dixon; Digital Artist: Krista Dodson. Apart from the cast, nothing about the promotional picture accurately predicts the experience of the performance. Sellars's chamber play is literally no picnic; not a jot www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 5/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of casual banter or joyous gathering is to be found. Even the quintessence of charming servitude, Puck, played by Sarah Afful, hotly grumbles that she will "put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes" (2.1.175). She stomps heavily around the stage, looking out into the audience as if facing down a dare. Afful's acerbic Puck is one of the ways in which the play incites one volatile confrontation after another. Margaret Jane Kidnie precisely captures the experience of the chamber play's many powerful scenes when she claims, "One doesn't really 'watch' a sequence like this — one is battered by it, one survives it" (Kidnie 2016, 17).

AUGUST STRINDBERG'S CHAMBER PLAY AESTHETICS Much of the chamber play's emotional volatility is generated by moments of sexual intimacy that occur when they are least expected, an eroticism that stresses the aesthetic developed by August Strindberg in 1907 for his Stockholm theater, conceived as Intima teatern (intimate theater). Yet intimacy is not synonymous with seclusion; thus, the chamber play's focus on the sexual motivations of the psyche is not without far-reaching social consequences, as Lynn R. Wilkinson claims in her study of the genre. She observes that "Strindberg almost always ties his psychological interests explicitly to questions of power, domination, sexual difference, and politics" (Wilkinson 1993, 464). This observation is applicable to the portrayal of Helena and Hermia in that seemingly innocuous scene about Hermia's beauty and the lovers' plan to steal out into the woods. In it, Sarah Afful's Helena and Trish Lindstrom's Hermia aggressively push against each other in an intensely physical encounter. Their foreheads and chests are squared; they are simultaneously locked in opposition and in embrace.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 6/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Figure 3. Trish Lindström (left) as Hermia and Sarah Afful as Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play, 2014. Photography by Michael Cooper. Sellars explains his desire to capture the ways "our hearts and our minds bounce wildly from love to hate, from anger to contentment, from irritation to repose, and from self-absorption to a wider concern for others" (Sellars 2014, 9). A scene that is frequently performed as sisterly consolation and alliance is here transformed into an uproar of resentment and attraction. Despite their seething anger, the female characters' aggression is no less charged with sexual tension, engaging issues of erotic desire alongside a broader scrutiny of the limits of female sexual agency. Another instance indicative of the overlaps between private sensuality and public commentary is Oberon's raging plea for the changeling boy. The demands directed at Titania are brutally insistent and physically aggressive. The changeling boy is played by Dion Johnstone as Theseus, whose prowess as a conquering black man is established in the play's opening lines.

Figure 4. Dion Johnstone (left), Trish Lindström and Mike Nadajewski in A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play, 2014. Photography by Michael Cooper. As the clingy changeling boy, however, he is enveloped in the tender caress of Titania's arms while she possessively clutches, grabs, and grinds him. Keeping in line with the chamber play's preoccupations with infusing the drama of domestic relationships with the profundity of collective anguish, the scene's changeling boy represents the couple's conflict beyond a petty quarrel. When Oberon, played by Mike Nadajewski, desperately wrenches the boy from Titania, his pleas permeate with the hysterics of one reacting to the optics of miscegenation. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 7/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Figure 5. Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play, 2014. Photography by Michael Cooper. As Oberon, Mike Nadajewski seeks to sever the embrace of Trish Lindström and Dion Johnstone playing Titania and the changeling boy. This scene of triangulated desire is thus not only a rewriting of a domestic oedipal conflict but also charged with the racist undertones of Oberon's hysteria. Sellars appropriates audience expectations for Shakespeare and the aesthetics of the chamber play to heighten the way emotional interiors shape social identities. Oberon and Titania's contest therefore transitions seamlessly into the same cast members playing Lysander and Hermia escaping into the woods. As Sellars warns: "Identities twist and shift and morph and warp across hallucinations, psychic projections, willful blindness, haunting premonitions, and layers of regret that will never go away" (Sellars 2014, 9). This is apparent, for instance, as Mike Nadajewski transitions between Oberon and Lysander. The intensification of Oberon's jealous anger informs Lysander's hostile aggressions, displacing what seems like a private conflict between Oberon and Titania into a wider misogynistic attitude that assaults the vulnerabilities of a woman in love. Wilkinson notices this trajectory as part of Strindberg's chamber plays when she traces how they generate "part of a narrative that questions and redefines traditional notions of public and private and of the role of politics within individual psychology and the home" (Wilkinson 1993, 465). As desire permeates through morphing identities, the transmission only intensifies it. When the same actor playing jealous Oberon shifts to Lysander attempting to make love to Hermia, his violent urgings to lie together, as "two bosoms interchained with an oath" (2.2.49), is close to rape and seems causally, if not logically, to follow the aggravations of his previous role as the frustrated fairy king. Akin to Strindberg's intimate theater, the precise and seamless transitions of characters from one personal anguish to another, from one emotional interior to another, privileges the private implications of what is a sprawling, multi-plotted play. In doing so, Sellars's chamber play troubles the politics of spectatorship underwriting Shakespeare's comedy. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 8/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation By tracking the difference between the promotional materials that match the headline A Midsummer Night's Dream and the precarious experience of watching the chamber play, one begins to notice what is at stake. In her theorization of dramatic theater as a "social gathering," Susan Bennett observes that "in much contemporary theatre the audience becomes a self-conscious co-creator of performance and enjoys a productive role which exceeds anything demanded of the reader or the cinema audience" (Bennett 2003, 21). But as the chamber play reveals, an audience's productive role involves not just reacting to the performance as it unfolds; it also includes the negotiation of varied factors beyond what they are viewing — factors such as the drama's confirmation of previous knowledge brought by play readers and the performance's conformity to the viewing expectations of seasoned theatergoers. Sellars forces into investigation the habits of theater spectatorship that align with the aesthetic discernment of a privileged community of patrons on whom the festival depends and for whose pleasure performances are tailored. This pleasure is often marked by laughter; indeed, laughter is the only time an audience member is allowed, even encouraged, to make noise during a performance. In his study of contemporary drama, Mattias Broth pursues a methodology of how "members of the audience achieve audience status" (Broth 2011, 113).5 In it, he shows the importance of laughter in establishing a shared experience: "Members of the audience do not laugh independently from what is happening around them. Instead, to be able to laugh aloud, it seems that they have to coordinate themselves with the other participants to the theatrical situation, both actors and other members of the audience" (Broth 2011, 122). In his historical analysis of audience affect, Jeremy Lopez establishes humor's unifying function: "Laughter bridges the distance between the stage and the audience, shows the audience to be happily complicit with whatever is going on on-stage" (Lopez 2003, 174). For both theater critics, laughter is the public and shared experience of an audience reaction, one that binds them to the performance and to each other. But in the context of festival Shakespeare, or what Douglas Lanier theorizes as "destination" theater (Lanier 2002, 154), I contend that laughter is both a spontaneous reaction to a humorous moment and an anticipated opportunity to establish one's privileged expertise of Shakespeare. Laughter emerges not just as a marker of enjoyment, but also as confirmation of a shared experience as knowledgeable consumers of the bard. So in turning the comedic expectations promised by the promotional materials into an emotional tour-de-force and minefield of eroticism, Sellars withholds the recognition and identification indelibly linked to the laughter Shakespeare audiences come to expect when watching A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The most striking transformation from Shakespeare comedy to chamber-play tragedy occurs during the meta-theatrical moments involving Dion Johnstone's depiction of the amateur thespian, Bottom. When Bottom seeks to "play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split" (1.2.25-26), he has none of the hyperbolic self-importance we can readily mock. Instead, he is earnest, fiery, majestic — in fact, rather convincing as a tyrant. The agonies of representation that vex Bottom's unfulfilled ambitions alert us to the harsh misfortune of being denied a part he wishes to play and is shown to be capable of playing well. Sellars sabotages our expectation to laugh at linguistic failures and theatrical follies. The final act's revision of a botched "Pyramus and Thisbe" is acted with the longing and tenderness suited to tragedies. Gathered around the dying Pyramus, the hard- www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 9/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation handed men convey kindness and compassion far exceeding the same actors' previous depictions of lovers. Beyond the parody of an Ovidian narrative, Bottom's death as Pyramus is a passionate and poignant meditation on unfulfilled possibilities. No longer a hammed-up routine to turn theater's shrewd social criticism to itself, "Now die, die, die, die, die" (5.1.295) is both resignation to self- annihilation and an angry taunt directed at the audience.

Figure 6. From left Mike Nadajewski, Dion Johnstone, Trish Lindström and Sarah Afful in A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play, 2014. Photography by Michael Cooper. Johnstone as Pyramus dies a noble, poignant death. Johnstone's performance heightens our awareness of emotions often derided or erased by the comedic expectation of Bottom's folly. The biblical malapropism — "eye of man hath not heard" (4.2.221-22) — is not a bungled exclamation of wonder but a terrified and anguished plea, a testimony to the cruelty of laughing at someone else's loss. To experience a sliver of love and adoration, only to find it stripped and mocked, is depicted as an unbearable disappointment. The performance forces a look at Bottom for the first time, who Johnstone plays as fraught and at times openly weeping, coinciding with a renewed understanding of the play's unrelentingly cruel language.

RECEPTION AND REVIEWS The chamber play's cruel and mirthless performance was widely documented in the reviews. As Robert Cushman of the National Post observes about Helena, "in a notable departure from just about every other production of the play, neither her complaints . . . nor her subsequent repeated throwing of herself at [Demetrius] are treated as being in the least comic" (Cushman 1, 2014). Charles Isherwood of The New York Times also noted that "this most surefire of Shakespeare comedies has been bleached of every ounce of humor" (Isherwood 2014). Like The New York Times, widely distributed news outlets such as The National Post and The Globe and Mail noticed the deletion of humor and the intensification of emotion, while www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 10/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation suspending any outright condemnation of Sellars's deviation from comedy. Theater bloggers were far less ambivalent about their assessment of the "bleach[ing] of humor." Reviews by Robyn is representative: "So about twenty minutes into the performance . . . the audience ceases to care . . . There is no gentleness, no humor, no forgiveness" (G. 2014).6The Slotkin Letter, also a popular blog site directly accessible through the Stratford Festival's official website, published a similar sentiment: "Me, I hated it. Hell would be having to sit through this raging, joyless, loveless mess again" (Slotkin 2014). Anecdotally, I can confirm that many sided with the bloggers, including festival organizers and marketing strategists with whom I conversed about the play. The discontent of those unwilling to "sit through" the play was palatable, mostly because the venue does not allow a graceful way to exit. Audience members walked out.

In his book Studying Shakespeare in Performance, John Russell Brown contends: "Clearly a study of the plays in performance should try to take into account the composition, experience, and response of the audience" (Brown 2011, 197). Such a study would be especially revealing when the response is markedly hostile. Habits of viewing A Midsummer Night's Dream are highlighted precisely because the appropriation of Shakespeare in the chamber play resists these habits. Audience members would laugh at "the usual" moments, as one would expect from closely knowing or previously watching the play. But their mirth seemed jarringly strained before a scene in which actors are sobbing or seething. Expected cues for laughter were simply absent. Laughter is integral to viewing habits because it functions, in the way sociologist Gail Jefferson theorizes in her study of intimacy, as a recognition point (Jefferson 1974, 7). In the context of Shakespeare theater, laughter acknowledges an intimacy with the play, one enjoyed by a privileged community that Douglas Fowler has coined "cultural custodians" (Fowler 2014, 213).7 Laugher can confirm an elite group's influential status as judgers of taste and arbiters of interpretation.8 Without it, audiences lose the recognition points that establish their ideal-audience status as Shakespeare custodians, and are thus potentially denied the pleasure of public consumption of Shakespeare's cultural capital. In pushing beyond what some audience members consider to be Shakespearean, the performance interrogates the institutionalization of Shakespeare in a festival context and turns the critical gaze from stage to spectator. Sellars's chamber play, in its removal of "recognition points" and defiance of what Broth calls "the distinctive character of different kinds of institutional interaction" (Broth 2011, 114), challenges the privileged authority of an influential community of patrons by bringing to the fore the proprietary compulsion of rejecting "deviations" from classical Shakespeare.

It is therefore of note that the Stratford Theatre Festival embraced — by that I mean actively promoted, extended, and financially backed — Sellars's "deviant" appropriation of Shakespeare. Some reviewers applauded the choices made by Sellars and, by extension, recognized the risks taken by the festival. Kelly Nestruck of The Globe and Mail observes, "Peter Sellars's production busts many myths that have been built up around the plays of William Shakespeare and how they are best done — myths that Stratford, you would think, has an institutional interest in maintaining" (Nestruck 2014). That most of the festival's reputation lies in the spectacle and respectability of classical Shakespeare theater seems precisely to be www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 11/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the point in contention. The pleasure of laughter in a comedy, as is the spectacle of the emotions in a tragedy, is the expected product consumed by an influential demographic for which such performances are staged. Resisting the expectations of a Shakespeare comedy to explore the severe emotions of a chamber-play production undercuts the habits of theater spectatorship in a festival context. This tactic is in line with the director's approach to Shakespeare not as a classical icon but as a contemporary lightning rod. Matthew Kozusko observes of Sellars's engagement with the bard: "For Sellars, Shakespeare is both a story that needs fresh reading and a theater tradition that needs reinventing" (Kozusko 2009, 725). The appropriation of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a form of "fresh reading" but one that, in the context of a festival experience, defies the aesthetic discernment of an erudite clientele to determine what counts as Shakespeare, forcing into investigation habits of viewing that risk foreclosing alternative Shakespearean experiences.

BROADENING THE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL EXPERIENCE Thus, Sellars's chamber play broadens the experience of Shakespeare to include new forms of interpretive strategies, despite the potential displeasure of those on the patron list (and it is a long list, occupying approximately thirteen pages of the play bill). Sellars's chamber play eschews the importance of public endorsement by appropriating Shakespeare in a way that is so radically unrecognizable as to be unacceptable or inaccessible to many on that list. But what if, as P. A. Skantze theorizes, "accessible veils its true meaning of consumable" (Skantze 2014, 131)? If so, the forms of rejection expressed by audiences — some by departure, some by apathy — could directly affect the viability of a theatrical institution that describes itself as "North America's largest classical repertory theatre company" ("About Us" 2017). The performance foregrounds the role the audience plays in the commercial interaction of a theatrical performance — habits of spectatorship shape the spectacle, demand the respectability, and generate the pleasure that constitute the Shakespeare festival franchise — and thus keeps that franchise viable. But by creating internal fissures in the Shakespeare experience, the chamber play underscores the possibilities of reassessing what we mean by the Shakespeare experience.

So denied the spectacle, respectability, and mirth of a Shakespeare comedy, what do we get from what one critic called "this joyless mess"? We get what no twenty-five- year festival patron ever gets: to see a Shakespeare play for the first time. Seasoned viewers struggle to track characters as they morph from one to another. Sophisticated spectators are assailed by unexpected and often uncomfortable emotions: genuine pity for Bottom, fear of Puck, disgust at Titania. Shakespeare aficionados react to and ponder lines that echo the play text but are strangely re- accented, re-formed to stress the cruelty of language unfettered by the comfortable cues of comedy. Sellars exacts from the audience unusual interpretations of, and uncomfortable reactions to, the play's depiction of desires. Erotic, ambitious, imaginative desires do not function to amuse; instead, they are displayed in earnest desperation to evoke an empathic encounter typically occluded by derision. Festival patrons are thrust into the volatility, the thrill, and let's face it, the indifference, of experiencing Shakespeare's play without the crutch of recognition, without the rewards of familiarity. Audiences are transformed from established, nuanced www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 12/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation viewers of Shakespeare to struggling, shocked, challenged, even surprised spectators of a play they have heard of, but never actually seen. Audience: thou art translated.

NOTES 1. I wish to express gratitude for the permission granted by the all of the talented actors featured in this article and to acknowledge the assistance of Stratford Theatre Archives in facilitating my requests. This work is dedicated to my Wright State University study abroad students who have enriched my experience of the Stratford Theatre Festival through the years. It is through their eyes that a short trip north opens a world of possibilities. 2. This letter from Tyron Guthrie to Alex Guinness, dated 11 September 1952, is housed at the Stratford Festival Archives and quoted in Richard Knowles (1995). Founding father, Tom Patterson, evoked the success of Stratford-upon-Avon when proposing to turn Stratford, Ontario as a site for Shakespeare theater in Canada. Patterson lured Tyron Guthrie from the British theater with the promise of artistic freedom and a hearty investment in lavish spectacles. 3. Daniel Fischlin asks, "why perpetuate Shakespere-centrism in the name of complex national signifying practices supposedly seeking a degree of autonomy from their colonial precursors as embodied in the iconicity of Shakespeare, the fraught symbol of colnial cultural dependency?" (2002, 314). 4. The Festival's website has since changed the "About Us" section; the version quoted here can be found at http://www.stahome.org/stratford-festival/ (http://www.stahome.org/stratford-festival/). 5. Broth theorizes audience laughter in his claim that "in deciding when to react, [audiences] not only monitor the actors, but also their fellow audience members. Analysis of the full corpus shows that, if no one accompanies them, members of the audience regularly either stop laughing or change the character of their laughter very quickly — often within the time space of a syllable — and thereby visibly orient to the fact that laughter can only be done collectively in this particular situation" (2011, 127). Jure Gantar's sociological analysis of audience laughter comes to a similar conclusion in that an implicit agreement within the theatrical context may be arbitrary, but it is powerful: "Theatrical communication thus depends on the reception of messages as structured from transmittable signs whose universal acceptance is a matter of the conventional agreement between the performers and the spectators, and whose relation to their reference — the staged world — may be purely arbitrary" (1994, 146). 6. The review quoted here was formerly available at http://reviewsbyrobyn.blogspot.com/ (http://reviewsbyrobyn.blogspot.com/). An October 2017 entry announced the end of Reviews by Robyn: "Thanks for reading and following my blog, but as of December 1st 2017 I've decided to call it a day and will be deleting the account. It's been a pleasure reviewing the Festival these past years!" 7. Gale Jefferson makes this point in "Notes on Laughter in the Pursuit of Intimacy," as quoted in Broth (2011, 120).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 13/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 8. In his study of what he calls "British Theatre Hegemony," Douglas Fowler underscores the ideology on which arguments of universality and access hinge: "A select group of cultural custodians are making work based on intuitive assumptions (where Shakespeare 'doesn't feel comprehensible') that determine in advance what audiences can and cannot cope with" (2014, 213).

REFERENCES "About Us." 2017. Stratford Festival Website. Available online at: https://www.stratfordfestival.ca/AboutUs (https://www.stratfordfestival.ca/AboutUs) [accessed 11 November 2017]. Bennett, Susan. 2003. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. Second edition. New York: Routledge. Broth, Mathias. 2011. "The Theatre Performance as Interaction Between Actors and Their Audience." Notinghham French Studies 50.2: 113-33. Brown, John Russell. 2011. Studying Shakespeare in Performance. New York: Palgrave McMillan. Burnett, Mark Thornton. 2011. "Shakespeare Exhibition and Festival Culture." In Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts. Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 445-63. Cushman, Robert. 2014. "Theatre Review: Stratford's A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play Strikes a Fine Balance." National Post. 1 August. Available online at: http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/on-stage/theatre-review-stratfords-a- misummer-nights-dream-a-chamber-play-strikes-a-fine-balance (http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/on-stage/theatre-review-stratfords-a- misummer-nights-dream-a-chamber-play-strikes-a-fine-balance) [accessed 11 November 2017]. Delgado, Maria. 1999. "'Making Theatre, Making a Society': An Introduction to the Work of Peter Sellars." New Theatre Quarterly 15.3: 204-17. Edinborough, Arnold. 1954. "A New Stratford Festival." Shakespeare Quarterly 5.1: 47- 50. Fischlin, Daniel. 2007. "Giving Shakespeare Meaning, Canadian Style: Canadian(?) Shakespeares." Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3.1: 1- 12. Fischlin, Daniel. 2002. "Nation and/as Adaptation: Shakespeare, Canada, and Authenticity." In Shakespeare in Canada: 'A world elsewhere'? Edited by Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 313-38. Fowler, Douglas. 2014. "Culture Clash: What the Wooster Group Revealed about the RSC (and British Theater Hegemony) in Troilus and Cressida." Shakespeare Bulletin 32.2: 207-34.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 14/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation G., Robyn. 2014. Reviews by Robyn. Available online at: http://reviewsbyrobyn.blogspot.com/ (http://reviewsbyrobyn.blogspot.com/) [accessed 11 November 2017]. Gantar, Jure. 1994. "Theatrical Laughter and the Concept of Cryptic Noise." Rechereches Semiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 14.3: 143-56. Groome, Margaret. 2002. "Stratford and the Aspirations for a Canadian National Theatre." In Shakespeare in Canada: 'a world elsewhere'? Edited by Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 108-36. Isherwood, Charles. 2014. "Beyond Shakespeare's Wildest Dreams." The New York Times. 12 August. Available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/theater/beyond-shakespeares-wildest- dreams.html? (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/theater/beyond- shakespeares-wildest-dreams.html?) [accessed 11 November 2017]. Jefferson, Gail, Sacks, H., and Schegloff, E. A. 1987. "Notes on Laughter in the pursuit of Intimacy." In Talk and Social Organization. Edited by G. Button and J. R. E. Lee. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 152-205. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. 2016. "Proximal Dreams: Peter Sellars at the Stratford Festival of Canada." The Shakespearean International Yearbook 16. Guest Edited by Susan Bennett. General Editors Tom Bishop and Alexa Huang. New York: Routledge. 11- 28. Knowles, Richard. 1995. "From Nationalist to Multinational: The Stratford Festival, Free Trade, and the Discourse of Intercultural Tourism." Theatre Journal 47.1: 19-41. Kozusko, Matthew. 2009. "Rev. of Othello Performed at Public Theatre, New York, NY." Shakespeare Bulletin 31.4: 722-27. Lanier, Douglas. 2002. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lopez, Jeremy. 2003. Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makaryk, Irena. 2002. "Introduction." In Shakespeare in Canada: 'a world elsewhere'? Edited by Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 3-42. Nestruck, Kelly. 2014. "A Dream Fulfilled: You have to see Stratford's radical rethink of Shakespeare." The Globe and Mail. 25 July. Available online at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and-performance/theatre- reviews/a-dream-fulfilled-you-have-to-see-stratfords-radical-rethink-of- shakespeare/article19768105/ (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and- performance/theatre-reviews/a-dream-fulfilled-you-have-to-see-stratfords-radical- rethink-of-shakespeare/article19768105/) [accessed 11 November 2017]. Sellars, Peter. 2014. "Cosmos for a Quartet of Voices: Director's Notes." A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play Program. 24 July-20 September. 9. Shakespeare, William. 1979. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited by Harold F. Brooks. Arden Shakespeare, second series. London: Methuen & Co.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783685/show 15/16 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Skantze, P. A. 2014. "O-Thell-O: Styling syllabules, donning wigs, late capitalist, national 'scariotypes.'" In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 129-38. Slotkin, Lynn. 2014. "Review: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, A Chamber Play." The Slotkin Letter, 29 July. Available online at: http://slotkinletter.com/2014/07/review-a-midsummer-nights-dream-a-chamber- play (http://slotkinletter.com/2014/07/review-a-midsummer-nights-dream-a- chamber-play) [accessed 11 November 2017]. Stenport, Anna Westerstahl. 2007. "From Arsonists and Bastards to Vampires and Zombies: Urban Spatio-Pathologies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays." Studies in the Literary Imagination 40.1: 35-54. Wilkinson, Lynn R. 1993. "The Politics of the Interior: Strindberg's Chamber Plays." Scandinavian Studies 65.4: 463-86.

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ALEXA ALICE JOUBIN, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

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Emily Sun, Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of (/previous)Politics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. English Romantic reception of King Lear is an important part of (/about) Shakespeare's afterlife. Emily Sun's book investigates Anglo-American post- Romanticist readings and appropriations of Lear as a seminal text on the relationship between literature and politics, specifically succession as a (/archive) philosophical and political issue in British Romanticism and American modernism. Sun suggests that King Lear helps William Wordsworth, journalist James Agee, and photographer Walker Evans articulate their anxieties about literary representation and political successions. The Introduction announces that the book intends to show how Wordsworth, Agee, and Evans become successors to Lear when they turn to the play as a source of inspiration as they grapple with questions of sovereignty and the relationship between literature and politics.

Succeeding King Lear begins with a chapter on sovereignty and King Lear, devotes two chapters to Wordsworth, and concludes with a fourth and the final chapter on Agee and Evans. Writing The Borderers in 1797, Wordsworth sets his play on a heath. Herbert's lines echo those of Lear's, and Herbert's relationship with Matilda bears resemblance to that between Lear and Cordelia. The play also contains echoes of Iago, Othello, and Macbeth. Fast forward to 1941: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a work of documentary journalism with photos by Evans and text by Agee, reframes the lives of cotton tenant farmers in the American South during the Depression for public consumption and private reflection on what it means to be a spectator. Sun finds cursory links between that work and Lear in Agee's and Evans's epigraphs that quote the disillusioned former monarch on the heath. The chapters on Sun's own interpretation of the crisis of succession in Lear and the first chapter on Wordsworth are more successful.

Chapter one examines King Lear's "unrelenting and cruel probing of spectatorship" (Sun 2010, 11). This long chapter suggests that Lear yearns for an unattainable form of freedom: freedom from the burden of the political realm. Sun notes that "freedom so conceived does not take place between men, in a realm of human affairs where human beings speak and act with each other to decide the affairs and interests they have in common. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783689/show 1/4 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Rather . . . freedom so conceived simulates the freedom enjoyed by God or gods" (18, emphasis in original). It is therefore Lear's mistake to harbor such transgressive desire. While not entirely conversant with current scholarship on Lear or Shakespeare studies, this chapter nonetheless offers some interesting points for consideration in interpreting the tragedy. Cordelia's defiant reply of "nothing" to her father is destructive because it "exposes the limits of sovereignty" (21). As Sun argues, "the 'nothing' that she speaks insists on something radically in excess of any political realm defined as such, an excess that keeps any kingdom from closing in on and completing itself as a whole . . . " (21). Cordelia's "nothing" demolishes the knowable political realm in favor of an as-yet unknowable world of human conditions, thereby "set[ing] into motion the protagonist's and the play's departure from the closed realm of ritual into the uncertain world of theater" (23).

Chapter two focuses on the heath in Lear. First, Sun interprets The Borderers as an autobiographical text that "puts the very relationship between autobiography and politics fundamentally in question" (83). Building on the critical understanding of the play as an autobiography that sheds light on Wordsworth's political position, Sun argues that the play also complicates the politics of autobiography. Drawing heavily on Hannah Arendt's theories, Sun argues that Wordsworth juxtaposes characters' autobiographies (especially of Herbert, Rivers, and Mortimer) in The Borderers to open up the possibility for "autobiography-in-the-plural, a way of enacting one's life story that is non-sovereign but exposed to human plurality" (102). Wordsworth "succeed[s] King Lear," not only by "succeed[ing] the play," but by succeeding "where the play's characters fail" (102). This is especially true in Wordsworth's re-envisioning of the heath, which is "a site of exposure, a barren, inhospitable place that, in juridical- political terms, is a non-place between the sovereign jurisdictions of England and Scotland" (106, emphasis in original). It is Mortimer's refusal to "tell his own story" that turns the heath into "the site of an 'exposure beybeyond exposure,'" writes Sun. By refusing to create his own autobiography (and thereby leaving it for the reader to determine), Mortimer opens up the possibility of an unstructured community that "emerges in the readers' radical exposure to the life stories of others" (107). It is unclear, however, what the payoff is in this chapter. The significance of Wordsworth's interpretation of Lear remains tangential.

Chapter three analyzes Wordsworth's 1798 poem, "The Discharged Soldier." The poem narrativizes an exposure to the "unassimilable alterity" of the other — in this case, the eponymous soldier, who is notably "indifferen[t] to the company of others" and resists Wordsworth's "attempts to mediate for him" (112, 122). As we wade deeper into Succeeding King Lear, we begin to wonder why Lear and Shakespeare are advertised prominently in the book's title and introduction, when chapters such as this do not seem to have a place in the book.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783689/show 2/4 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Chapter four leaps two centuries and turns to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a unique case of documentary journalism, or what Sun calls an "unpredictable, idiosyncratic, and extravagant" work (127). Most of the chapter uses a cultural studies approach to analyze Agee and Evans's joint enterprise. King Lear has all but receded to a distant background. One tangential connection to Lear might be located, as Sun writes in the Introduction, in the ways in which Evans show "how his subjects see — that is, he exposes to the viewer his seeing of another's seeing" and how Agee, in his writing, discloses his shame of being "exposed to the unassimilable shame of the other, who is, equally yet commensurably, like him actor and spectacle in the world among others" (6-7, emphasis in original). Commissioned by Fortune magazine to report on the cotton farmers, Agee and Evans reinvent their assignment. Instead of reporting on the farmers from their journalistic perspective, Agee and Evans wish to "unwork" the prevailing societal conception of division of labor and the discourse of "us" versus "them."

Sun's reading of the texts and judicial analysis of their respective historical contexts are admirable, and the book is wonderfully ambitious. However, the connections, if any, between Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and — out of the blue — Agee and Evan are not articulated and taken productively to task. The chapter on American documentary journalism would have been a wonderful journal article. There are moments when one wonders if the book is not a monograph but a collection of intriguing seminar papers, because there is no concluding chapter and the book does not seem to achieve what the Introduction promises. The prose is generally clear, though it is marred by repetition of entire sentences and clauses. The vast historical gap and leap remain baffling.

REFERENCES Sun, Emily. 2010. Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Contributors

(/current)

Richard Burt was Professor of English and Loser Studies at the University of (/previous)Florida. He was the co-author, with Julian Yates, of What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and the author of Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media; Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer (/about) Theory and American Kiddie Culture, and Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship. He also edited Shakespeares After Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture; Shakespeare After Mass (/archive) Media; and The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere. Burt co-edited Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, and Shakespeare the Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD. So far, Burt has published more than forty articles and book chapters on topics including Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, literary theory, film adaptation, the Middle Ages in film and media, the erotics of pedagogy, stupidity, cinematic paratexts, biopolitics, posthumography, and censorship.

Jeffrey Butcher was awarded his Ph.D. in English from George Washington University and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Coastal Georgia. His scholarly interests in the early modern period, namely Shakespeare studies, are complemented by his engagement in political interventions into Marxist-inflected theory. Most of his publications entertain the impact on teaching and research when we historicize economic movements — nationally and globally — in literature. This is evidenced in his "Review of Robert Lewis's Red Hamlet" which appears in Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association. The article is not a traditional review, but rather an analytical reconstruction of a dramatic text. In addition to his publications in peer-reviewed Shakespeare venues, Jeffrey has published scholarship in the Journal of Medieval and Religious Cultures and the American Communist History journal. While his true passion is his teaching, Jeffrey intends to continue to work with working-class literature to further investigate class dynamics and their influence on conditioning power relations and social constructions.

Christy Desmet is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: www.borrowers.uga.edu/783635/show 1/4 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992) and editor or co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (with Robert Sawyer 1999), Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (with Robert Sawyer, 2001), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams, 2009), and Helen Faucit (2011). Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, coedited with Natalie Loper and Jim Casey, is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2017. With Sujata Iyengar, she founded and edits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Jennifer Drouin is the author of Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation (University of Toronto Press, 2014). She has also published numerous essays on Shakespeare and early modern drama, gender and queer studies, and film studies. She is working on a digital humanities project entitled Shakespeare au/in Québec (SQ). Formerly a tenured Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, she is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF) at McGill University where she is also completing a double degree in Québec civil law and Canadian common law.

Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is author of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), Shakespeare's Medical Language (Arden/Bloomsbury, 2011), and editor of Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2015). She has scholarly articles in press or in print in ELH, Literature/Film Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Quarterly, and many essay collections. Her essay in this issue forms part of a trio of articles on Othello on film or video; the others appear in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Dympna Callaghan (Blackwell, 2016) and in the Oxford Handbook to Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford, 2016). With Christy Desmet, Professor Iyengar co-founded and co-edits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Alexa Alice Joubin teaches at George Washington University, where she is founding co-director of its Digital Humanities Institute. Her forthcoming books include Cinematic Allusions to Shakespeare: International Appropriations (edited collection; Palgrave) and Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (co-edited; Palgrave).

Dr. Carol Mejia LaPerle is Professor and Honors Advisor for the Department of English at Wright State University. Her research interests include Renaissance/early modern drama, poetry and culture, the history of race, gender theory, material culture, and affective performances of and in Shakespeare. She regularly teaches a survey of early English literature, special topics in early modern drama, and the methods and materials of academic research. While her current book project focuses on early modern depictions of race, she also publishes on contemporary encounters with Shakespeare on stage and in film. Her work has been supported by Wright State University's Research Council, College of Liberal Arts Research Grant, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the www.borrowers.uga.edu/783635/show 2/4 11/21/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation National Humanities Center, Ohio Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kendra Preston Leonard is a musicologist and music theorist whose work focuses on women and music and music and screen history. She is the author of Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations, and has published on music and Shakespearean film in Upstart, Global Shakespeares, This Rough Magic, and Early Modern Studies Journal. She has contributed chapters to Shakespeare in Bollywood and Beyond (Routledge), Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Ashgate), and The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press). She is the director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive.

Fiona Ritchie is Associate Professor of Drama and Theatre in the Department of English at McGill University. She is the author of Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and the co-editor (with Peter Sabor) of Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her publications include essays in Shakespeare Survey, The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is currently researching women's involvement in British theatre outside London in the long eighteenth century and working on a collaborative project on Shakespeare and riot.

Dr. Adele Seeff earned her doctorate from the University of Maryland in Renaissance drama and the history of Shakespeare production. From 1986 to 2011, she directed the multidisciplinary Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, developing humanities programs for regional and international audiences, and winning awards for service and for building school-university relations. She has co-edited seven conference proceedings volumes associated with the "Attending to Early Modern Women" conference series, and co-founded and co-edited the first scholarly journal in the field, Early Modern Women. She has published on Shakespeare and performance and is currently revising a book on Shakespeare performance in South Africa. Courses include Shakespeare performance on stage, screen, and television.

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