sign in sign up
<<
Home , Betty Hutton, Billy Strayhorn, Bill Berry (trumpeter), Britt Woodman, Cat Anderson, Cleo Laine

Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'56 PM

ISSN 1554-6985 VOLUME I · NUMBER 1 (/current) SPRING/SUMMER 2005

(/previous) Shakespeare in the American South (/about) EDITED BY

(/archive) Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar

CONTENTS

S HAKESPEARE AND THE DUKE

The Duke's Man: Ellington, Shakespeare, and Adaptation Terence (/781405/show) (pdf) (/781405/pdf) Hawkes

Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap: Shakespeare, African American Music, Douglas and Cultural Legitimation (/782016/show) (pdf) (/782016/pdf) Lanier

Stephen Form and Character in 's and 's M. (/781406/show) (pdf) (/781406/pdf) Buhler

Swingin' Shakespeare From to Fran (/781407/show) (pdf) (/781407/pdf) Teague

Jazz, Shakespeare, and Hybridity: A Script Excerpt from Alan Swingin' the Dream Corrigan (/781411/show) (pdf) (/781411/pdf)

http://borrowers.uga.edu/7148/toc Page 1 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'56 PM

P ERFORMING RACE / GENDER IN THE OLD AND N EW SOUTH

They Were Always Doing Shakespeare: Southern Actresses and Robin Shakespearean Appropriation (/781416/show) (pdf) Warren (/781416/pdf)

The Old and New South: Shakespeare in Margaret Mitchell's Darlene Gone With the Wind (/781418/show) (pdf) (/781418/pdf) Ciraulo

Confession; or, the Blind Heart: An Antebellum Christy (/781419/show) (pdf) (/781419/pdf) Desmet

C LASS AND COUNTRY IN THE CONTEMPORARY S OUTHEAST

A Way of Life Worth Preserving? Identity, Place, and Sharon Commerce in Big Business and the American South O'Dair (/781421/show) (pdf) (/781421/pdf)

Country Matters: Shakespeare and Music in the American South Robert (/781423/show) (pdf) (/781423/pdf) Sawyer

S HAKESPEARE FESTIVALS IN THE AMERICAN S OUTH

"The Sun Looking with a Southward Eye upon Us": Kevin Shakespeare in South Florida (/781425/show) (pdf) Crawford (/781425/pdf)

Bard in a Barn: Iconography, Appropriation, and Shakespeare at Matt Winedale (/781426/show) (pdf) (/781426/pdf) Kozusko

"NC Shakes": The Shakespeare Festival Bethany (/781428/show) (pdf) (/781428/pdf) Sinnott

Performing Shakespeare in the Old/New South, or What Susan Happens When Shakespeare Is Your Middle Name Willis (/781430/show) (pdf) (/781430/pdf)

A PPROPRIATIONS IN PERFORMANCE

Mark Z. Ophelia, by Douglas Huff (/781437/show) (pdf) (/781437/pdf) Muggli

Hamlet, Revenge of a King, by Herbert Newsome Alan F.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/7148/toc Page 2 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'56 PM

(/781880/show) (pdf) (/781880/pdf) Hickman

B OOK REVIEWS

Shakespeare's Violated Bodies, by Paschale Aebischer Rebecca (/781438/show) (pdf) (/781438/pdf) De Haas

Spectacular Shakespeare, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Scott Lisa S. Starks (/781440/show) (pdf) (/781440/pdf) Reed

C ONTRIBUTORS

Contributors (/781605/show) (pdf) (/781605/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/7148/toc Page 3 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

The Duke's Man: Ellington, Shakespeare, and (/current) Jazz Adaptation

TERENCE HAWKES, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) Professor Hawkes provides an introduction to the cluster of essays on Duke Ellington and Shakespeare.

For people of my generation, it's been evident for some time that, in terms of sheer outrageous performative energy, the music of New Orleans has long proved to be more than a match for the urgent literary and theatrical ebullience of Shakespeare's London. Strolling from Southwark to Eastcheap four hundred years ago, or from Jackson Square to Bourbon Street more recently, few observers of the dynamics of cultural formation would deny that just as the teeming Bankside once generated a popular theatre of quintessential early modern Britishness, so the boisterous Crescent City has functioned as the womb for an equally spirited art whose nature remains distinctively of our own time and uniquely American. As its most eloquent chronicler characteristically put it, New Orleans is "the place where the birth of jazz originated from" (Lomax 1950, 40). And there's a subtle sense in which, though we're scarcely comparing like with like, his list of the qualities necessary for success in the one creative sphere might also be said to apply, with intriguing force, to the other: "sweet, soft, plenty rhythm."

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781405/show Page 1 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

So, when the Shakespeare Association of America decided to hold its annual meeting in New Orleans in 2004, a particular encounter proved irresistible. A session which would set out to explore what happens when one mode of vital public entertainment engages with another became not only desirable, but necessary. The papers presented there under the title "The Duke's Man: Ellington, Shakespeare and Jazz Adaptation," and now revised for inclusion in the inaugural issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, are the result.

The crucial notion is of course "adaptation," with its conceptual link to the more complex question of appropriation. The case that American jazz music and British public drama can meet as equals is not of course incontestable, and the idea that one form might "adapt" itself to another certainly raises the issue of subservience which appropriation entails. The matter of mode is also a factor. However intricately involved in aural and visual communication, European drama, and particularly the plays of Shakespeare, is overwhelmingly discursive in character. Music, on the other hand, remains stubbornly non-discursive.

Stephen Buhler's paper confronts this issue boldly, locating it in a revealing social and historical context. It's appropriate to do so, for adaptation and appropriation have deep roots in the American psyche. They were, after all, the African American's historical lot. Forcibly abstracted from one culture, violently appropriated by another, the question of how to adapt must always have been crucial to an experience whose institutional centre lay in New Orleans. Since, at its heart, it involved a major subjugation in respect of language itself (African languages being forbidden by slave-owners), it could have proved — and did so for many — to be ultimately overwhelming. In the event, an important mitigation turned out to be available in the potential, fully embraced by slaves, for the sly appropriation — and manipulation — of the master's tongue. Burrowing into some of its established meanings to the extent that "bad" or "wicked" might even come to mean "good," or "admirable," and — no less subversively — foregrounding the acoustic and rhythmic features of utterance (in "signifying" or, latterly, rap), they finally forced the discursive to give the non-discursive its due (see Gates 1992, 131-51). It's at least arguable that a good deal of African American art — and particularly jazz music — stands as a monument to this process.

What could be termed a larger American experience is also at work. An adapting, re-fashioning commitment to "newness," embodied, not only

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781405/show Page 2 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

in the city's name, but in the very fibre of its way of life, works its way decisively into the music for which New Orleans is best known. Its two most famous native-born composers, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829- 1869) and Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941), both deliberately engaged with "high" as well as "low" culture and sought to foster an "adaptive" relationship between the two.1 Gottschalk made a point of drawing on African and Latin American rhythms and harmonies in a number of his compositions (e.g., "Bamboula"), whilst Morton, asserting a pivotal "American" status for jazz music, reinforced his notorious claim to be its originator by ensuring that his personal version of its history was recorded — also in person — in the central archive of "official" culture, the .

The contribution of both these New Orleans citizens, latterly endorsed by the recent appearance of each one's likeness on a U.S. postage stamp, exemplifies a kind of all-American, racy, liberating, republican irreverence, whose mode can be said to be broadly adaptive. It's no accident that the serried ranks of British nobility are devastatingly undermined as well as gently mocked in the jazz musician's employment of sobriquets such as "King," "Count," "Earl," and of course, "Duke." And in the case of Ellington's Shakespearean Such Sweet Thunder, we find not just a whimsical "adapting" to or appropriation of the Bard, and not simply a spirited attempt to render the discursive in terms of the non-discursive, but a tough and determined quasi-political commitment which pulls even the name Henry across the Atlantic, so that it turns gratifyingly into "Hank." Even more American is its adaptation of something so fundamental as numbering, whereby Henry V becomes "Hank Cinq." To fight free of Englishness by recourse to things French has, after all, been a major transatlantic ploy since the eighteenth century. That Ellington's "Sonnet to Hank Cinq" achieves all this, whilst overtly presenting itself as simply submitting to the rigours of assonance, reinforces a sense of unremitting subversion.

Douglas Lanier's paper goes some way towards confirming this view. The confrontation of Shakespeare and jazz, he argues, is shaped in twentieth-century America by an association between the Bard and minstrelsy which forms part of a massive and highly complex political interpenetration of "high" and "low" cultures. Race is undoubtedly a major factor here, with white literary and intellectual "highbrow culture" set in opposition to a black musical and more visceral "popular culture." But, needless to say, the creole inheritance of New Orleans complicates and sophisticates such dispositions. Far from being the http://borrowers.uga.edu/781405/show Page 3 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

intuitive, native "folk" artists of legend and stereotype, many of the early jazz musicians proved expert enough in complex European musical modes to find employment in the orchestra of its much-admired French opera house. Jelly Roll Morton was not slow to emphasise his own European ancestry: as he put it, "My folks was all Frenchmans" (Lomax 1950, 3).

Fran Teague's account of Play On!, a musical show that combined aspects of the plot of with biographical material from Duke Ellington and his compositions, shifts the focus to . That, of course, is entirely appropriate. The migration of jazz from New Orleans, consequent upon the closing down of the "red-light" district of in 1917, was an event of not only national cultural importance. The spreading of the music's influence first to , then to New York, and particularly to the centre of the vital and expanding African American culture in Harlem, ensured its world-wide recognition. Professor Teague's consideration of Swingin' the Dream, a short-lived jazz adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, thus makes sense of the fact that the character of Bottom was carefully, if oddly, assigned to one of jazz's major international "stars": .

But, perhaps more than any other musician of his generation, it is still Duke Ellington who remains a symbol of the transformation in the status of jazz that followed its expansion beyond the limits of New Orleans. In his music, it ceases to be an art of subsequence, dependent on some "primary" work which it aims to "swing" as earnest of its subservience. Instead, it has become, like the America which gave it birth here in , its own unique and self-present entity, capable not just of adaptation, but of appropriation on its own terms. By now, in this city, it can surely claim to encounter the work of Shakespeare on an equal footing.

NOTES 1. Curiously, the composers found common ground in the "Miserere" from Il Trovatore. Gottschalk produced a transcription of the piece which embroidered and embellished it (Miserere du Trovatore, paraphrase de concert, opus 52) whilst Morton cites the "Miserere" as an example of the sort of music heard in the New Orleans French opera, and then plays Lomax a jazz version of it on the piano. The Library of

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781405/show Page 4 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Congress recording hints at the sort of promiscuously casual, "adaptive" context of the city's musical life: Lomax: Did you ever hear of a composer named Gottschalk? Morton: Yes. Lomax: Did they use to play his stuff around there? Morton: No doubt they did, but I was kind of young at that time. This is "Miserere" from Il Trovatore. (cf. Lomax 1950, ix-xv)

REFERENCES Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1992. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lomax, Alan. 1950. Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz." New York: Grove Press.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781405/show Page 5 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap: Shakespeare, African (/current) American Music, and Cultural Legitimation

DOUGLAS LANIER, UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | SHAKESPEARE SINGS THE | SHAKESPEAREAN MINSTRELSY | TO BE- (/about) BOP OR NOT TO BE-BOP | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT Even though, it must be conceded at the start, Shakespeare has made no more than marginal appearances in blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop, the potential for their conjunction has had a particular symbolic resonance. Sketching out the history of that conjunction — my purpose here — offers us one way of understanding African American music's pursuit of artistic status and cultural respectability, and in particular a means for reevaluating the hybridizing of Shakespeare and jazz. My argument here will be that mid-century jazz adaptations of Shakespeare serve as an ambivalent middle-term between Shakespearean minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, where the relationship between Shakespeare and African American music was first codified, and contemporary hip-hop, where musicians have reclaimed Shakespeare as a minor yet symbolically significant point of reference for African American music.

SHAKESPEARE SINGS THE BLUES At the end of the first chapter of Stomping the Blues, 's pioneering study of African American music, the discussion turns to that most canonical exemplar of the blues, Shakespeare's melancholy Dane. Murray observes that Hamlet's florid self-debates, his struggles to fend off anguish and

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 1 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Form and Character in Duke Ellington's and (/current) Billy Strayhorn's Such Sweet Thunder

STEPHEN M. BUHLER, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN (/previous)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) Form and Character work not separately, but together, in the jazz suite entitled Such Sweet Thunder, and their interaction suggests ways in which we who study and teach Shakespeare might be influenced by Ellington's and Strayhorn's compositional practices. The suite consists of twelve instrumentals of various lengths, each linked by its title and by programmatic commentary to various Shakespearean characters and works. When Such Sweet Thunder has received critical notice, the focus has been on the success or failure of the individual songs' evocation either of character or of Shakespearean verse itself. Ellington, however, asserts a more complex objective, claiming that he and Strayhorn had endeavored to "parallel the vignettes of some of the Shakespearean characters": that is, they tried to present, in musical terms, the characters in scenes, in dramatic context. They succeed in conveying a sense of selected characters by crafting analogues both to specific elements of Shakespeare's stagecraft and to formal structures in his works.

I begin by acknowledging what must strike many readers as an aggressively old-fashioned cast to the title of this essay.1 A somewhat retro approach to these materials might indeed be appropriate, since "Form" and "Character," as separate terms, were as much a part of the http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 1 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

New Critical project as "Irony" and "Ambiguity"; it would not be unreasonable, then, to discuss Duke Ellington's and Billy Strayhorn's musical responses to Shakespearean texts in 1956 and 1957 in terms of the newly dominant interpretive mode in literary criticism at that moment. Translations of literary texts into other media often reveal the

Carl Van Vechten, Earle Stanley Hyman as Othello strong influence of how those texts are studied and taught (Buhler 2002, 247; 2003, 119-20). But here I am less concerned with the impact of, say, critical close-reading on how Shakespeare was read in the than with the interplay of critical categories such as "Form" and "Character" with one another and across modes of creative expression;

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 2 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

examining that interplay more closely can have an impact on critical strategies for understanding texts. "Form and Character" work not separately, but together, in the jazz suite entitled Such Sweet Thunder, and their interaction suggests ways in which we who study and teach Shakespeare might be influenced by Ellington's and Strayhorn's compositional practices.

The suite consists of twelve jazz instrumentals, ranging in length from about one-and-a-half minutes to just over four, each linked by its title and by the programmatic commentary supplied on the sleeve of its first recording to various Shakespearean characters and works. When Such Sweet Thunder has received critical notice, the focus has been on the success or failure of the individual songs' evocation either of character or of Shakespearean verse itself. Ellington, however, asserts a more complex and interesting objective. In the liner notes for the suite's original recording, he asserts that he and Strayhorn, his co- composer and orchestrator, had endeavored to "parallel the vignettes of some of the Shakespearean characters": that is, they tried to present, in musical terms, the characters in scenes, in dramatic context. They succeed in conveying a sense of selected characters not only impressionistically, but also by crafting analogues both to specific elements of Shakespeare's stagecraft and to formal structures in his works.

Before addressing those specifics, an account of the suite's genesis is in order. After two well-received concerts at the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival in 1956, Ellington elicited a request from Festival organizers to write a Shakespearean work. In an interview with shortly before his death in 1966, Billy Strayhorn recalled that the entire process, which included reading "all of Shakespeare," took about six months (Dance 1970, 32). Carrying copies of the plays and the sonnets on tour and discussing Shakespeare with people "all over the U.S.," he and Ellington selected titles for which they could assume "the full burden of explaining" specific Shakespearean works "musically" (33). The musical process started earlier than even the composers themselves had realized: the first piece that was recorded, entitled "Half the Fun," had been produced under another title during a session on August 7, 1956, at the Columbia studios in ; it was subsequently renamed and added to the Shakespearean project, for which served as producer. Sessions devoted to the suite first occurred on April 15 and 24, 1957; five more pieces completing the album, all of which will be discussed in this essay, were recorded on May 3. On April 28, shortly before the final session for http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 3 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Such Sweet Thunder, Ellington and his orchestra premiered most of the suite at a Music for Moderns concert at New York's Town Hall: they were the second half of an eclectic program that included a performance of 's twelve-tone Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra. I say that they premiered most of the suite, because Ellington — always dependent upon and struggling against deadlines — had not yet finished writing "Circle of Fourths," the concluding summary for the work. Somehow, it was completed and scored in time for the last recording session, just five days later. The live performance was a critical and popular success. Ross Parmenter, the reviewer for The New York Times, declared each selection to be "an imaginative portrait in sound suggested by characters or scenes" in Shakespeare. He was impressed, but somewhat surprised by the title song, "Such Sweet Thunder," which he describes as having given the impression of "a powerful locomotive, though its program was Othello's speech to Desdemona" (emphasis mine). Parmenter's overall assessment is worth quoting in full: "The pieces were thoroughly winning, for none went on too long, and each sketch had sympathy as well as humor. And though the musical invention might have derived in part from other pieces of the 'Duke' it sounded fresh" (Parmenter 1957).

The critic's views reflect concerns that had been raised for over a decade about Ellington's earlier "serious" works, such as Black, Tan, and Beige: jazz, many felt, was simply incompatible with longer compositional forms. The "vignettes" of Such Sweet Thunder deftly sidestep that perceived problem. It appears, in addition, that the critic recognized not only the reworking of familiar Ellington themes and textures, but also the incorporation into the suite of recently composed pieces, notably the aforementioned "Half the Fun," which began its existence as a tune called "Lately," and "The Star-Crossed Lovers," which was adapted from Billy Strayhorn's lovely ballad "Pretty Girl."

In subsequent decades, critical opinion toward Such Sweet Thunder became polarized. Considering the suite in his 1987 critical biography of Ellington, describes it as "a collection of self- indulgent fragments that are tied to Shakespeare by great leaps of logic and that show very little understanding of what the plays are actually about." Collier summarily dismisses the work: "It does not seem to me that Ellington managed to really capture much of the flavor of Shakespeare's thick-textured verse or the nature of his characters" (Collier 1987, 285). By contrast, A. H. Lawrence, in his 2001 survey of Ellington's career, simply inverts Collier's dismissal, averring that in the suite, "Ellington and Strayhorn manage to capture the essence of http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 4 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Shakespeare's thick-textured verse" (Lawrence 2001, 345). Lawrence also attributes to Ellington himself the opinion of Stanley Dance, expressed in the interview with Strayhorn, that Richard III would have made an ideal subject for a blues piece in the suite (Lawrence 2001, 346; Dance 1970, 32). Artistic response has, in general, been more enlightened and enlightening. 's Pas de "Duke," a modern dance tribute to Ellington first performed in 1976, employs three selections from the suite. As artistic advisor for the Classical Jazz series at in New York, revived the work in its entirety in 1988, enlisting the aid of musicologist Bill Dobbins and critic Stanley Crouch (Tucker 1993, 440). Selections from the suite have been part of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra repertoire ever since, especially its showcase for , "Madness in Great Ones." For their part, the people at the Stratford Festival, to which the suite is dedicated, were sufficiently impressed with Such Sweet Thunder to commission from Ellington incidental music for Timon of Athens in 1963. The scores from that production were reconstructed by for a revival at the Festival in 1991 and augmented with such familiar Ellington melodies as "" and "." Timon and the Duke, it appears, are now strongly linked together: the Royal Shakespeare Company used Ellington's music in Gregory Doran's production of the play in 1999-2000. In his review of the production, Benedict Nightingale found the Duke's "smoky music" fit well with the "posh leather chairs and sherry decanters" of the staging's blend of historical periods (Nightingale 2000); to Robert Smallwood's ears, Ellington's music had a "late-night, slightly sleazy style" that contributed a "satiric mood" suitable for commentary on "the rather decadent, superficial world presented in the first half of the play" (Smallwood 2000, 249-50).

Ellington, Strayhorn, and Shakespeare come together in Such Sweet Thunder and its negotiations of literary and dramatic form and character. One form that Ellington and Strayhorn clearly embrace in their evocations of character is the sonnet. Four selections are called sonnets: "Sonnet for Caesar, ""Sonnet to Hank Cinq," and "Sonnet in Search of a Moor" (the latter two among Ellington's and Strayhorn's wittiest titles), along with "Sonnet for Sister Kate," from The Taming of the Shrew. All four compositions carefully replicate aspects of sonnet structure, centering on fourteen melodic phrases, each consisting of ten notes, often conforming to iambic rhythms. Partly in concession to a standard "ABA, Coda" song form, the sonnets of Such Sweet Thunder parallel the three quatrains and couplet of an English sonnet. Crouch asserts that Bill Dobbins discovered this fact while transcribing the http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 5 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

pieces for the Lincoln Center revival (Tucker 1993, 441), but, as early as 1964, and Cleo Laine had recognized the formal possibilities in "Sonnet to Hank Cinq." On Laine's Shakespeare — And All That Jazz release (and reprised for Wordsongs 1978), arranger Dankworth and vocalist Laine apply the words of Sonnet 40, "Take all my loves," to Ellington's and Strayhorn's "Hank Cinq." Laine, of course, had and still possesses the vocal range to follow the fourteen phrases, compellingly played on the original track by . Even those of us who do not have such range can still follow the form in "Hank Cinq" by intoning the words of a familiar sonnet — such as number 18 — along with Woodman's expressive (track 1). mp3 TRACK 1: Lyrics, "Sonnet 18" (9-14); "Sonnet to Hank Cinq" — conclusion

In the liner notes for the album, Ellington is quoted as saying that the piece's "changes of tempo have to do with the changes of pace and the map as a result of wars." We can also hear aural reflections of the king of "English Mercuries" (Henry V, 2. Prol. 7) in all his capacity for chameleon-like change, constantly responding and adapting to contexts and audiences. His geniality, his rhetorical and anti-rhetorical skills, and his flair for the grand gesture are captured expertly in this portrait. This, we recall, is a sonnet to Henry, both gleefully irreverent and painstakingly accurate. Connecting with the Sonnets as a whole, "Hank Cinq" casts Henry V as the political equivalent of the physically and socially enchanting Fair Young Man.

Elsewhere in the suite, Ellington and Strayhorn take pains to present characters in some aspect of their dramatic contexts and origins. In his interview with Dance, Strayhorn contrasts the task involved in composing the suite with the later job of providing incidental music for Timon of Athens: "In Such Sweet Thunder we were doing the whole job, but in Timon you heard the actors and saw the action" (Dance 1970, 33). He and Ellington also recognize that we come to know Shakespearean characters not only in themselves, but also in how they are seen, heard, and described by other characters in the plays. The title track may draw its name from Hippolyta's description, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, of the howls of Spartan hunting dogs (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.112-18), but its music is applied to Othello's accounts of his own experiences (see Othello 1.3.128-45). Ellington and Strayhorn factor in how these adventures and the man who endured them might have sounded to Desdemona (track 2).

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 6 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

mp3 TRACK 2: "Such Sweet Thunder" — conclusion

Their sense of Othello's self-assurance, tinged with melancholy, is unmistakable in the music; the Times critic might have not been expecting such power, but it registered with him nevertheless. Such a reading of Othello clearly connects with the character's serving increasingly at the time as figuring African and African American pride. This shift in symbolic resonance was both marked and precipitated by stage performances in the United States by black actors, including in 1942 and 1943, Earle Hyman beginning in 1952 (Hill 1984, 135-40), William Marshall as early as 1953, and James Earl Jones in 1956 (Potter 2002, 157-61), the year in which Ellington and Strayhorn began work on the suite. The note of confidence also derives from the character with which the piece was first connected. The tune was originally entitled "Cleo"; if its swagger had remained associated with Cleopatra, the piece would certainly register differently with most listeners. But Ellington realized that another piece, the recently recorded "Lately," could serve to evoke the allure of Cleopatra for her Antony. Renamed "Half the Fun" (as in "getting there is . . ."), this composition by Ellington alone provides a tonal equivalent to the famous description by Enobarbus of Antony's first encounter with Cleopatra on her barge (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.190-226). , on alto sax, conveys the deliciously sensual details (track 3). mp3 TRACK 3: "Half the Fun" — excerpt, Hodges's solo

Summing the piece and the meeting that Enobarbus describes, Ellington is quoted in the LP's liner notes as observing: "The generally accepted theory is that the mood was specific."

In other pieces of the suite, Ellington and Strayhorn more overtly use specific instruments to represent characters, although still firmly within dramatic contexts. "Madness in Great Ones" may have initially been titled "Hamlet," but his name in isolation doesn't match the musical evocation of the character's "antic disposition" (Hamlet 1.5.172) and its intended audience. The next excerpt is that song's conclusion, vividly conveying an impression of Hamlet, represented by the trumpet of "Cat" Anderson, first running circles around his would-be handlers and then taking flight (track 4). mp3

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 7 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

TRACK 4: "Madness in Great Ones" — conclusion

Similarly, "Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down)" came into being simply as "Puck." Here, too, the composition provides far more than a character sketch. Instead, we have the two unharmonious pairs of lovers from act 4, scene 1 — Helena suspicious of the newly ardent Demetrius, Hermia outraged by Lysander's alienation of affection — given expression by and Nance, on and violin, and by Johnny Hodges and John Sanders, on alto and valve trombone. on trumpet is Puck, who misleads, guides, and comments on the lovers, concluding with his judgment on human folly (track 5). mp3 TRACK 5: "Up and Down" — conclusion

"Lord, what fools these mortals be," waggishly announces Terry, at least on this take, which was featured on the 1957 LP and on the Sony/Columbia Special Products CD version, produced in France by Henri Renaud and issued in the 1990s. On the beautifully remastered 1999 re-release, produced by , an alternate take was unwittingly used — even though the original liner notes and new commentary by longtime Ellington sideman both call attention to Terry's musical quotation of Puck's line. The alternate version has no direct textual referent (track 6). mp3 TRACK 6: "Up and Down," re-release version — final bars

Although the loss of the quotation mars the newer reissue, the different take reveals the flexibility with which Ellington and Strayhorn handled the orchestra's soloists: sometimes their parts, along with everyone else's, were carefully scored all the way through; at other times, however, the artists were given freer improvisational rein.

In "Up and Down," Ellington and Strayhorn place characters from the same play in relationship to one another; the same dynamic is present in "The Star-Crossed Lovers," in which Juliet (voiced by Johnny Hodges's alto sax) rightly dominates — as in Shakespeare's playtext — every scene she shares with Romeo (portrayed by 's tenor). In contrast, "The Telecasters" brings together characters from the very different plays, Macbeth and Othello, the better to underscore the similarly seductive, destructive messages conveyed by the Witches and by Iago. Such Sweet Thunder concludes with "Circle of Fourths," the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 8 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

hastily completed piece missing from the debut concert. "Circle" progresses through all twelve major keys in fourths (the key of C major gives way to F major, and then to B-flat major, and so on), adding a flat to the scale, or subtracting a sharp, at each step. The piece's canny exploration of the harmonic relationship of musical keys via fourths serves to dramatize the interconnections among the four genres in which Shakespeare composed — comedy, history, tragedy, and the poems — and among the works that participate in each genre. Tying all this together is the fluid phrasing of Paul Gonsalves's tenor sax (track 7). mp3 TRACK 7: "Circle of Fourths" — conclusion

These selections indicate Duke Ellington's and Billy Strayhorn's understanding of a range of literary and dramatic forms, as well as their empathetic grasp of character. Some of this understanding grew out of theatrical as well as musical experience: Ellington, alone or with collaborators, produced a remarkable amount of music for the stage, contributing original material to over fifty reviews, plays, and musicals (Franceschina 2001, 191-201). Ellington and Strayhorn, though, valued textuality, as well as performativity. In his appreciation of "Hank Cinq," Terence Hawkes reminds us that It's been suggested many times that black music, such as jazz, with its commitment to the improvised reworking of the chord structure of original melodies, has always represented a major American challenge to the European idea of an author's or composer's (or, mutatis mutandis, a king's) authority, unity and coherence . . . music's quintessential, non-discursive nature immediately project[s] "Hank Cinq" beyond the reach of one kind of textuality, just as jazz music's ultimate independence of any "written" requirement makes performativity so fundamental a factor. (Hawkes 2002, 124-25) That challenge to an idea of authority is complicated, however, by Ellington's insistence on carefully orchestrated parts for the majority of his players in any one composition, and in some, even for his soloists. "Hank Cinq," along with the rest of Such Sweet Thunder, aims at its own kind of textuality, as Ellington's and Strayhorn's approach to jazz incorporates one "written" requirement after another. Perhaps it is no accident that Ellington embraced the aristocratic sobriquet "Duke." The challenge to authority is confirmed, however, by the intensely collaborative nature of Ellington's work with Strayhorn: as Bill Berry

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 9 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

observes in his comments for the liner notes supplied with the 1999 re- release, "It is as hard to pin down which of these two individuals created specific words or phrases as it is to figure out which one wrote which musical notes."

In addition, the composers occasionally allowed their instrumentalists improvisational independence and always tailored their orchestrations to the distinctive talents of the ensemble's members. John Edward Hasse has drawn a persuasive analogy between Shakespeare's theatrical troupe and Ellington's "own repertory company": Ellington "wrote exclusively for its players — Hodges, Nanton, and Bigard, and the others" (Hasse 1993, 332). Ellington's and Strayhorn's compositional practices, then, can help to shed light on the dynamics at work in the Shakespearean playtext itself and in its realization in performance. The plays posit a productive tension between collaboration and control. In the interplay between Shakespeare's words and the actors for whom he wrote them, between his works and their not-so-purely musical translations, and between jazz orchestrations and improvisations, we may perceive a kind of balance through an oscillation, otherwise known as swing, that negotiates between the different, but overlapping demands, insights, and liberations of both text and performance. As Bubber Miley, the magnificent trumpeter in Ellington's early bands, is credited with saying first: "It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing" (Lambert 1999, 52).

NOTES 1. For their insightful comments and encouragement, I am grateful to Terry Hawkes, Doug Lanier, and Fran Teague — my fellow panelists for the session on "The Duke's Man: Ellington, Shakespeare, and Jazz Adaptation" at the 2004 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. I am also indebted to Matthew Landis and Rod Scher for their discerning ears and technical expertise in preparing the musical excerpts.

REFERENCES Buhler, Stephen M. 2002. "Reviving Juliet, Repackaging Romeo: Transformations of Character in Pop and Post-Pop Music." In Shakespeare and Mass Media. Edited by Richard Burt. New York:

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 10 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Palgrave. 243-64. Buhler, Stephen M. 2003. "Shakespeare and Company: The Lion King and the Disneyfication of Hamlet." In The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom. Ed. Brenda Ayres. New York: Peter Lang. 117-29. Collier, James Lincoln. 1987. Duke Ellington. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dance, Stanley, ed. 1970. The World of Duke Ellington. New York: Scribner's. Duke Ellington's Incidental Music for Shakespeare's Play "Timon of Athens." 1993. Varese Sarabande VSD 5466 (CD). Franceschina, John. 2001. Duke Ellington's Music for the Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. Hasse, John Edward. 1993. Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hawkes, Terence. 2002. Shakespeare in the Present. London: Routledge. Hill, Errol. 1984. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Laine, Cleo. 1964. Shakespeare — And All That Jazz. Philips 6382 014 (LP). Laine, Cleo. 1978. Wordsongs. RCA RL 25176 (LP). Also 1986; Philips 830 461-2 (CD). Lambert, Eddie. 1999. Duke Ellington: A Listener's Guide. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press. Lawrence, A. H. 2001. Duke Ellington and His World. New York: Routledge. Nightingale, Benedict. 2000. "King Lear's Shambolic Twin." Times [London]. 6 March, 40. Parmenter, Ross. 1957. "Music for Moderns." New York Times. 29 April, 20: 4. Potter, Lois. 2002. Othello. Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 11 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. Tobin. 2d ed. : Houghton Mifflin. Smallwood, Robert. 2000. "Shakespeare Performances in England, 1999." Shakespeare Survey 53: 244-73. Such Sweet Thunder. 1957. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. Columbia CL 1033 (LP). Such Sweet Thunder. 1994. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. Jazz Originals Series. Sony/Columbia COL 469140-2 (CD). Such Sweet Thunder. 1999. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. Columbia/Legacy CK 65568 (CD). Tucker, Mark, ed. 1993. The Duke Ellington Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PERMISSIONS Photograph of Earle Stanley Hyman as Othello reproduced by kind permission of the Van Vechten Trust.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781406/show Page 12 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

hopelessness, his engagement with "the most fundamental of all existential imperatives: affirmation, that is to say, reaffirmation and continuity in the face of adversity" — all these are also at the heart of the blues and thus at the heart of African American musical traditions (Murray 2000, 6).1 Without doubt, Murray's parallel draws upon the cultural capital of the canon — he also includes Oedipus Rex and The Waste Land in his list of examples of the blues — in order to make a case for the aesthetic authenticity, emotional depth, and broad appeal of a distinctively African American musical form. And yet at the same time, Murray's allusion to Hamlet subtly suggests a reading of the play particularly keyed to the African American experience of racism when he describes the source of Hamlet's despondency: "the young is charged by the ghost of his late father to rid the kingdom of Denmark of the evil forces that dominate it" (Murray 2000, 6).

The sense of obligation to a prior generation, the responsibility to purge society of a system of oppression, the blues that spring from the twin burdens of subjugation and moral duty — these emphases recast Hamlet as an allegory of the African American struggle for social justice in the second half of the twentieth century. Murray's strategic allusion to Shakespeare in the context of the blues is, of course, a well-worn critical ploy, a means for lending a novel object of academic study cultural legitimacy by association. But it is more than that. It is a reminder that in such exchanges Shakespeare is often as much the object as agent of legitimation, particularly from the perspective of popular culture, within which Shakespeare so often serves as its ambivalent high- cultural Other. And perhaps more important, Murray's conjunction of Shakespeare and the blues points to the potential of a reciprocal exchange of meaning and cultural power between Shakespeare and African American music. Even though, it must be conceded at the start, Shakespeare has made no more than marginal appearances in blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop, the potential for their conjunction has had a particular symbolic resonance — witness, to take a familiar example, 's jazz-inflected Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) — one that has taken on different connotations at different moments in the history of African American music. Sketching out the history of that conjunction — my purpose here — offers us one way of understanding African American music's pursuit of artistic status and cultural respectability, and in particular a means for reevaluating the hybridizing of Shakespeare and jazz.2

What gives the conjunction of Shakespeare and African American music its special frisson is that throughout much of the last century the two have been emblematic of what have been perceived as distinct cultural realms. Shakespeare exemplifies highbrow art, fundamentally intellectual in its appeal and demanding specialist knowledge for its full appreciation, British in origin http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 2 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

and tied to European cultural traditions, the very icon of the mainstream Anglo canon. African American music, by contrast, has been widely regarded as profoundly emotional, bodily, sexual, rhythmic, and exotic in its appeal; improvisational and performative and thus in a sense anti-literary; somewhat disreputable in its venues, styles, and uses and thus surrounded with an aura of popular transgression; and symbolic — in the case of jazz — of a distinctively American experience of urban modernity. The relationship between the two has been treated as emblematic, in short, of the relationship between highbrow and popular American cultures. These distinctions, we might note in passing, do not bear up long under critical scrutiny, but nevertheless that does not render them any less culturally dominant or powerful. To rest upon this emblematic contrast between highbrow and lowbrow, white canon and black pop, however, is to miss, I think, the historical dynamics of the relationship between Shakespeare and African American music, the interplay of different forms and ratios of cultural legitimation shaped by racial politics and cultural nationalism, the rise of youth culture, and ever-changing hierarchies of musical genres. My argument here will be that mid-century jazz adaptations of Shakespeare serve as an ambivalent middle-term between Shakespearean minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, where the relationship between Shakespeare and African American music was first codified, and contemporary hip-hop, where musicians have reclaimed Shakespeare as a minor yet symbolically significant point of reference for African American music.

SHAKESPEAREAN MINSTRELSY African American music entered the wider cultural consciousness through the minstrel show. First performed in New York's Bowery Amphitheatre in January 16, 1843, the minstrel show thrived throughout the mid-nineteenth century until vaudeville began to displace it in popular taste at century's end. An amalgamation of Irish folksong, African American instrumentation and musical styles, and theatrical extravaganza, the typical minstrel show offered dances, comic, lyrical and sentimental songs, and instrumental numbers performed in , punctuated by banter between the end-men (named Tambo and Bones, for the instruments they played) and Mr. Interlocutor, the comically stuffy master of ceremonies. At least early in the form's history, minstrel music was presented as offering access to actual African American musical practice and thus to an indigenous, authentically American culture. An essay published in The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1845, a mere two years after the minstrel show first appeared and in the midst of its initial craze, makes the point with tongue-not-quite-firmly-in-cheek. It characterizes "our negro slaves" as artists of natural genius unsullied by education or cosmopolitanism, in contrast to America's Euro-centric Brahmins: "That is the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 3 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

class in which we must expect to find our original poets, and there we do find them. From that class come the Jim Crows, the Zip Coons, and Dandy Jims, who have electrified the world. From them proceed our ONLY TRULY NATIONAL POETS" (Kennard 1996, 52). Later in the same essay, Shakespeare becomes an ambivalent standard against which the popularity and artistic achievement of minstrelsy should be measured. "Let Webster tell of the tap of Britain's drum, that encircles the world!" we are told. "Compared with the time occupied by Great Britain in bringing this to pass, 'Jim Crow' has put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes" (Kennard 1996, 55). Elsewhere in the essay, Shakespeare is presented as part of the hide-bound dominion of the British literary canon, the counterpart to the British Empire alluded to here, against which American minstrelsy is juxtaposed. And yet the phenomenal popularity of minstrelsy is lent additional (and ironic) force through the allusion to the speedy global circumnavigation by Shakespeare's Puck (interestingly enough, also a slave and poetizer). The critical attitude toward African American music in the minstrel show was to remain divided: celebrated as an exotic, distinctively American form of popular entertainment, yet never quite raised to the level of a conscious or legitimate "art" except under the veil of irony.

The content of minstrel songs combined racist, ethnic and gender stereotyping, nostalgia for an edenic image of southern plantation life, and various forms of class-oriented parody. This last element grew considerably with expansion of the roles of the end-men, who served both as buffoons and unruly tricksters, and with development of the olio, the second section of the minstrel show. The olio featured short theatrical pieces burlesquing various forms of dominant cultural and political authority: the stump speech, the lecture, the social soirée, the opera, and legitimate theater. These burlesques turned on the contrast between their "high" content and low "Ethiopian" style, that is, the same plantation dialect and racist personae in which the music was performed. The result for African American culture was twofold and deeply contradictory. On the one hand, these burlesques obviously worked to reinforce the image of blacks and black culture as irredeemably "low." The concert and theatrical sections of the minstrel show functioned as an ideological circuit: while the music demonstrated the potential legitimacy and undeniable popular appeal of what was presented as indigenous African American art, the burlesques demonstrated that blacks were incapable of performing properly the mainstream discourses of social and cultural authority. The minstrel show established, in other words, that African American music was a form of entertainment denied the legitimacy of "culture": art without power or, worse, in 's phrase, a form of symbolic self-maiming (Ellison 1995, 103). On the other hand, the blackface persona provided minstrel performers with a ready means for lampooning and subverting figures and rituals of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 4 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

authority both political and cultural, no small part of the minstrel show's core appeal. That is, the minstrel Negro became a vehicle for symbolic counter- violence against the injuries of class, a voice of popular transgression, albeit one rendered only temporary and comically inert.

Because Shakespeare was one of the most ubiquitous icons of nineteenth- century cultural authority and a focus for questions about America's relationship to European culture, the fact that Shakespeare would become a favorite target of the minstrel show is hardly surprising. Though passing citations of Shakespeare, both mangled and straight, appear throughout minstrel songs (as they do in much popular music of the day), it is in the olio where the relationship between Shakespeare and African American culture was first codified in a mass-market artform (Browne 1957; Browne 1960; Mahar 1991; Haywood 1966). "Ethiopian" burlesques of Shakespeare — in the form of short plays and vignettes within "parade" plays — wedded knockabout farce and American racist humor with elements of the British Shakespeare burlesque (they often adopt its doggerel couplets, for example); the subgenre was popular enough to support stand-alone "Ethiopian" burlesques, independent of the minstrel show. The Shakespearean content of these parodies was often reduced to no more than a few key scenes or speeches, and it typically served as a mere armature on which to hang topical satire — Julius the Snoozer (White and Ryman 1875), for example, lampoons Boss Tweed's political corruption — or, far more often, to recycle commonplaces of racist stereotyping — as in the comic operetta Hamlet the Dainty (Griffin 1880), where the appearance of old Hamlet's ghost sends Horatio, Marcellus, and Hamlet into paroxysms of bug-eyed fright, and jokes about liquor abound.3

Two qualities of these burlesques are of special notice. First, Othello is a favorite object of parody. Indeed, it is almost as if the rise of blackface parodies of Othello appears concurrently with the rise of minstrelsy — "Daddy" Rice himself, the original "Jim Crow," had produced a short burlesque of the play as early as 1833.4 As William Mahar argues, "the authors of the Othello burlesques recognized that the audience's fear about racial mixing had greater potential for comedy than the more complex dramatic problems inherent in portraying Othello's jealousy and Iago's obsession with vengeance" (Mahar 1991, 253; see also Edelstein 1982, 179-97). But in these plays fear about miscegenation also involves fear about new possibilities for African American political clout, social mobility, and cultural legitimacy. "Ethiopian" burlesques of Othello thus typically remake Shakespeare's tragedy into travesties of mobility, portraying Othello as a black buffoon with social or cultural pretenses — tellingly, the illustrations for Alexander DoMar's Othello: An Interesting Drama, Rather! (1850) picture Othello in the garb of Zip Coon, the foolish urban dandy who was a stock character of minstrelsy.5 Second, a http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 5 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

number of burlesques concern themselves with the desire of blacks, motivated by easy money or pretensions, to become Shakespearean actors, with the invariable result that they mangle and misapply the text, misunderstand the plot and characters, and in the case of Dar's De Mony (ca. 1880), reduce the final scene of Othello to a comic brawl. Henry Llewellyn Williams'sThe Black Forrest (1882) turns on the preposterous substitution of aspiring actor Jerry Mander for the "eminent American tragedian" Edwin Forrest who, scheduled to play "Shakespeare's tragedy of Aborigine life, entitled Metamora, or the Ginuine Live Injun and the Yankee Captain," turns up missing. The play even offers a subtle reminder of Othello: when at play's end Mander is exposed as a charlatan, the theater manager roars that he is "the rogue who sparked round my daughter" Lucy, and she, like Desdemona, springs to her man's defense (Williams 1882, 10). In her incisive discussion of Maurice Dowling's Othello Travestie (1834), Joyce Green MacDonald observes that nineteenth-century burlesques of Othello worked to delegitimize black performance of Shakespeare — and, more generally, black self-representation of blackness onstage — at the very cultural moment when black Shakespeareans such as Ira Aldridge had begun to take the stage (MacDonald 1994; see also Collins 1996). This point might be extended: "Ethiopian" burlesques of Shakespeare work more generally to undermine African American aspirations to cultural legitimacy on two fronts at once: first through their treatment of Othello as a signal example of black overreaching, comically absurd rather than tragically noble, and second, through their lampooning of black efforts to stage Shakespeare and thus to lay claim to one form of cultural prestige. In the minstrel show, Shakespeare becomes a symbolically powerful means for denying the mantle of cultural authority, paradoxically even as their music — a quintessentially American artform — was putatively being introduced to the world.

In the late 1930s and early , the height of the swing craze, the relationship between Shakespeare and African American music became once again an active issue in American culture. It should be seen in the context of a larger drive throughout the 30s to adapt classics to American mass cultural genres — the early Shakespeare talkies; The Boys From Syracuse, a musical adaptation of the Comedy of Errors; and The Hot Mikado, a swing version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, to name a few (Rodgers and Hart 1938; Bell et al 1939). By virtue of its wide cross-racial and cross-class appeal during this period, swing came to be regarded as having the potential to be a genuinely universal African American musical form, capable of democratizing and popularizing whatever content it touched.6 That potential is articulated clearly in an 1936 comedy short, Shake, Mr. Shakespeare, produced in response to the mid-decade Shakespeare film boom (Mack 1936).7 In an extended dream sequence, various Shakespearean characters celebrate their "goin' " http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 6 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

by dancing and singing to . Film and jazz, the short suggests, are media interchangeably emblematic of American modernity, capable of getting the stuffy, outmoded Bard to join in the group dance craze, which he obligingly does at film's end. The utopian dimensions of hybridizing Shakespeare and African American music can be seen in Paradise in Harlem, a 1939 "race" film directed by Joseph Seidler (Seidler 1939). As its somewhat ironic title suggests, its subject is the gap between African American aspirations for cultural legitimacy, symbolized by Harlem, and the sordid reality and precarious nature of black life in America. As the film opens, we are introduced to Lem Anderson, a black actor who is struggling to make a living as a blackface comedian at a white-owned nightclub catering to blacks. Backstage, Lem tells the black girlfriend of the clubowner about his dream to leave behind minstrelsy and play Othello. That dream is soon deferred when he accidentally and innocently becomes implicated in a gangland hit and becomes relentlessly pursued by a white gangster's black thugs. Their harassment forces Lem to move South, where he tries to pursue his Shakespearean aspirations while working menial jobs, but the thugs soon find him and he returns to New York, only to be entrapped by the white clubowner's black girlfriend, who is accidentally shot protecting him. At film's end, under police custody, Lem is allowed to play his Othello.

At first, despite the nobility of Lem's performance, the black audience mocks him. "Yeah, put out the light," one man shouts, "so we can all go home." But as Desdemona pleads for her life, the performance, in dreamlike fashion, changes from Shakespearean oratory to a slow blues built on the half-sympathetic, half- taunting refrain, "I don' wanna die." Soon the blues transforms into a moving choral spiritual, with the audience, former hecklers included, joining in. After Lem's Othello murders Desdemona, the music shifts yet again, this time from minor to major key and becoming an up-tempo hot swing number to which the audience jitterbugs in frenetic delight. We are never shown Othello's mistaken jealousy, his confrontation with Iago, or his final speeches and suicide. Instead, the murder is treated as an unproblematic act of black power in which Lem channels anger at white oppression into the quasi-religious sacrifice of a symbolic white betrayer. In obvious parallel, Seidler intercuts this sequence with the shooting backstage of the white clubowner and revelation of Lem's innocence. The performance of Othello becomes for Lem a complex act of cultural and self-redemption: his performance definitively purges his degrading blackface past and crafts a way to unite Shakespeare and African American music without resorting to minstrel travesty. Lem reclaims Shakespeare for black agency, both simply by performing Othello as a black man and by boldly breaking with the tragic trajectory of Shakespeare's version of the role through a survey of black musical forms. And this, the film imagines, is the prelude to wider cultural legitimacy, for, as Lem reveals in the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 7 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

final reel, he's been offered the chance to play Othello on Broadway, "the Great White Way," "with a jazz band and a choir".

And yet minstrelsy continued to cast a very long shadow when the most ambitious early example of jazzed-up Shakespeare, the musical Swingin' the Dream, premiered on Broadway in 1939 (the same year as Paradise in Harlem). Swingin' the Dream is the apotheosis of the 1930s drive to musicalize and modernize Shakespeare (Charell and Seldes 1939). The lavish production boasted an astounding assemblage of talent: Gilbert Seldes and Erik Charell wrote the book, and songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen composed the music, basing his swing adaptation largely on Mendelssohn's score; Agnes De Mille choreographed such notable dancers as Bill Bailey and the Rhymettes; two bands were used, the Bud Freeman band and 's sextet, both directed by Don Voorhees; and the African American cast featured "Moms" Mabley, Maxine Sullivan, Butterfly McQueen, the Dandridge sisters, and, most famously, Louis Armstrong as Bottom. Significantly, the play's action was shifted from Athens, seat of canonical Western culture, to 1890s New Orleans, the mythic birthplace of jazz, as if to underline the cultural translatio imperii at work in this Americanization of a classic. And yet the show was quickly dubbed a grandiose failure, closing after only thirteen performances. Part of the reason can be traced to Seldes and Charell's decision to remain overly faithful to Shakespeare's plot and, more importantly, his language. Converting Shakespeare to contemporary musical form was, after all, a means to transcend the problem of archaic Renaissance diction on the modern stage. Instead, one reviewer observed, "at one moment you hear genuine pentameters in the style and sometimes the original wording of the bard, at another you hear anti-climactic lines like 'go fly a kite'" (quoted by Bergreen 1997, 395-6), a juxtaposition that only widened the gap between classical art and hip modernity that the show sought to traverse. So, too, perhaps the use of Mendelssohn as the basis for Van Heusen's swing score.

But clearly the specter of minstrelsy also figured in the reception of Swingin' the Dream. The supposed inability of African American actors to speak Shakespeare properly surfaced in several notices, as did the expectation that the adaptation would be, in the words of the New York Times reviewer, "a Negro carnival" (Atkinson 1939, 24). The transposition of the action to the Old South ended up unwittingly evoking the plantation setting of the minstrel walkaround. Accordingly, what was singled out for praise was the instrumental music, the "dark-skinned steppers who take to rhythm as though it were created for them" (Atkinson 1939, 24), and the passing moments of travesty provided by Butterfly McQueen's squeaky-voiced Puck. Consider the telling comment on the show by John Mason Brown in the New York Post, 10 November 1939: "It is at its best and a delightful best that is, when http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 8 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Shakespeare is being pushed offstage by its dancers and musicians. It is at its happiest when he is being irreverently dealt with" (quoted by Hill 1984, 115- 6). Because Swingin' the Dream used African American music, actors, and milieu to update rather than to lampoon Shakespeare, the show was regarded as overly serious, inappropriately grandiose, even incoherent. Instead of codifying swing's cultural prestige — this was, after all, the first major Broadway production to use luminaries from black jazz circles — Swingin' the Dream seemed to confirm the fundamental incompatibility of African American music with Shakespeare.

Of course, that incompatibility could also potentially be a valuable resource. A favorite film plotline of this period involved a stuffy, old-fashioned (and often just old) authority figure whose cultural tastes are challenged or transformed through contact with the jazzed-up world of swing (and, just as often, with unrepressed sexuality in the form of a working-class chorus girl). Unsurprisingly, in these films Shakespeare serves as one of several icons of highbrow taste and is the typically ironic object of jazzing-up. For examples of this motif, one might look to Leslie Goodwins's Casanova in Burlesque (1944), involving a Shakespeare professor who secretly works summers as a vaudeville comic; John Farrows's Red, Hot and Blue (1949), which features Betty Hutton doing a four-minute jazz version of Hamlet; and H. Bruce Humberstone's She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), which offers a swing production number referencing Antony and Cleopatra and , and Ronald Reagan as a college professor. A British variant can be found in Walter Forde's Time Flies (1944), a zany time-travel comedy in which the historical Shakespeare himself ends up participating in an American chorus girl's impromptu — and immediately lucrative — swing number on the Globe stage. Each of these features toys with the possibility of hybridizing Shakespeare with swing, but each presents that possibility as a means of confirming rather than challenging the high-low cultural divide, with an eye toward establishing the film's "popular," gently subversive orientation by reaffirming Shakespeare as its high cultural Other.

One of the first films in this vein, David Butler's Playmates (1941), demonstrates this dynamic at work. In this case, the cultural odd couple was popular (white) bandleader and , the American Shakespearean who had triumphed in the but who was by this point declining into alcoholism and personal scandal. The film's plot turns on Shakespeare's uncommerciality. Otherwise unemployable, Barrymore (playing himself) agrees to appear in a Shakespearean show for a radio executive's blueblood wife. For publicity reasons, the revue includes the homespun Kyser, and Barrymore is enlisted to teach him how to perform Shakespeare, a prospect he resolves to sabotage. Throughout, the film pits the elitist http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 9 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Barrymore and his beloved Bard against the corny, but sincere Kyser and his swing music. Over and over again, Kyser demonstrates that he is, simply, incapable of mastering "authentic" Shakespearean performance, even though a romantic subplot illustrates the (supposed) utility of high cultural savoir-faire in the seduction of , singer for Kyser's band. With fascinating ambivalence, the film's finale addresses the crucial question of transposing Shakespeare into the popular idiom of swing. After silencing Barrymore with alum in his throat spray bottle, Kyser and his band present their own musical adaptation of . It opens with , the band's resident idiot, reciting the prologue and homing in on the difficulty of Shakespearean language. "It sounds like English," he observes, "but I know it ain't." As if in answer, Kyser, dressed as Shakespeare himself, bursts through the giant pages Kabibble has been reading and offers to do Shakespeare "in the modern way." What we get is the tale of swing musician Romeo Smith and opera singer Juliet Jones, with Juliet's father, a devotee of classical music, as the obstacle to their romance. Juliet's father soon changes his tune when he learns that Romeo has a lucrative contract as a bandleader. With the prospect of a rich son, a Romeo who brings the benefits of a , he blesses the match and even vows to join the band, as Shakespearean characters dance to the swinging reprise: Cheek to cheek Bless you, I say, 30 grand a week That ain't hay. (Butler 1941) Popular appeal and commercial success avert the tragic trajectory of Shakespeare's version of events, and in the process magically resolve the conflict between cultural classes. Once emptied of the problem of language and fidelity and filtered through swing, Tin Pan Alley rhymes, and the conventions of musical comedy, Shakespeare becomes wildly successful. The crowd roars its approval, and the executive, convinced that the adaptation is Barrymore's, rushes to sign him for radio endorsements. Two things are striking about this "utopian" evocation of jazzed-up Shakespeare. First, despite the triumphant performance, ambivalence persists about this mode of popularizing Shakespeare. When, still dressed as Shakespeare, Kyser comes to take his bow, he accidentally takes a drink of alum and, like Barrymore, chokes up on stage. The final tableau depicts both the proper Shakespearean and his swing-era counterpart reduced to . Second, conspicuously absent is any acknowledgement of the relationship between swing and African American culture; both Kyser's band and the audiences he plays for are exclusively white, and the only hint of non-Anglo ethnicity is a Latin American chanteuse who plays the bad girl role of Kyser's would-be seducer. It is possible to connect these points: is jazzed-up Shakespeare denied full

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 10 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

cultural legitimacy in the film because of swing's association with black culture?

TO BE-BOP OR NOT TO BE-BOP The promise of a jazz Shakespeare faded with the precipitous fall of swing after World War II. With only a few exceptions, bop utterly ignored Shakespeare — except in the occasional song title, such as Horace Silver's "To Beat or Not to Beat?" (1956, on Silver's Blue).8 The rejection of Shakespeare was in line with the new racial politics of bop. No longer were black musicians willing to produce dance music for white audiences easily appropriated by white bands; instead, they defined themselves as artists intent upon expressing African American pain, aspirations for freedom, and defiance of bourgeois musical taste. Bop's Afrocentric bent, evident in many song titles, sorted poorly with Shakespeare, that old lion of the mainstream canon. Indeed, with the important exception of Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder (Ellington 1957), jazzed-up Shakespeare after 1950 tended to drift in two main directions — first, toward adaptation to cabaret format, the most successful of which were John Dankworth's settings of Shakespeare's lyrics for singer Cleo Laine's Shakespeare — And All That Jazz (1964) and Wordsongs (1978); and second, toward the use of jazz as a musical signifier in stagings of the plays. The most famous example of the latter is West Side Story, in which 's jazz-via-Stravinsky is meant to lend musical street credibility to this American underclass adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (Bernstein and Sondheim 1957).9 Once again, as in \Playmates, though African American music is used throughout the score, African Americans themselves are conspicuously absent, replaced by Puerto Ricans.

There are two major exceptions to these two groups, both large-scale musical statements by important jazz composers: Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder, which was premiered and recorded in 1957, and George Russell's Othello Ballet Suite, first recorded in 1967 (Russell 1981). Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder represents a crucial milestone in the relationship between Shakespeare and jazz and, it should be noted, in his own career. The fall of swing and rise of bop, changes in personnel in his orchestra, and a certain conservatism of repertoire made Ellington seem, by the 1950s, like a relic of the musical past. Jazz historians agree that the second chapter of Ellington's career began with his band's electrifying performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" at the 1956 , after which the popular press quickly established Ellington as an elder statesman for jazz (Hasse 1993; Vail 2002, 103-13). Such Sweet Thunder was composed and recorded in the next year, on the heels of Ellington's concerts for the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival, and it seemed to affirm Ellington's stature as "classic,"

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 11 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

not has-been. Stratford's inclusion of jazz musicians of an older generation as part of its festival reinforced the idea that pre-bop concert jazz styles constituted a "classical" artform, on a par with Shakespeare and in line with the discerning tastes of Stratford's target audiences. In essence, Ellington's suite acknowledges this act of legitimation and returns the favor with a jazz suite, in what would become something of a standard practice for the composer's later years. Stratford's inclusion of Ellington also acknowledges that as a "classical" artform with a limited elite audience, Ellington's brand of jazz, like Shakespeare's plays, requires special state subsidy. It is to the hint of elitism in this exchange of prestige that Ellington reacts in his program notes for the suite's first performance. The shared problem faced by performers of Shakespeare or jazz is, Ellington asserts, the perception that these sophisticated artforms require special expertise to be appreciated properly — in other words, that these artforms do not have the immediacy and broad appeal of popular culture. If in the 1930s and 1940s swing had been seen as a means to popularize Shakespeare, in 1957 linking Shakespeare with jazz ran the risk of classicizing the music in a way that made it the property of (largely white) cognoscenti. In his program notes, Ellington tries to negotiate the problem: I have a great sympathy with Shakespeare because it seems to me that strong similarities can be established between a jazz performance and the production of a Shakespeare play​. Basically, both groups face comparable problems in the reluctance of some participants to expose themselves and join the audience. Their hesitance is due, in both cases, to a misconception that the major supporters of both these artistic manifestations — Shakespeare and jazz — are the people who have invested time and money in becoming experts. There is an increasing interrelationship between the adherents to art forms in various fields. . . it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line, and I see no place for one if my own feelings tell me a performance is good. Any musician will agree that the final judgment of a musical performance lies in its immediate impact on the human ear, rather than in previous knowledge or academic study. In the final analysis, whether it be Shakespeare or jazz, the only thing that counts is the emotional effect on the listener. Somehow, I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself — he'd appreciate the combination of team spirit and informality, of academic knowledge and humor, of all the elements that go into a great jazz

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 12 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

performance. And I am sure that he would agree with the simple and axiomatic statement that is so important to all of us — when it sounds good, it is good. (quoted in Ellington 1973, 192-3) On the one hand, Ellington insists upon the intellectual and emotional depth of the two artforms, the way in which they reward repeated viewings or listenings, a quality which divides them from pop ephemera. On the other hand, he emphasizes that the impact of both "top-grade" jazz and Shakespeare is "immediate" upon the listener's ear, as a means of arguing for their fundamentally democratic appeal. Ellington's delicate recasting of the nature of Shakespeare's art in his program notes reveals the twin and not always compatible ambitions of Ellington's later career — to create a music with the cultural legitimacy of other "classical" arts and with the inclusive immediacy of popular culture.

Ellington's suite consists of eleven numbers, each linked to Shakespearean characters: Such Sweet Thunder Sonnet for Caesar Sonnet to Hank Cinq Lady Mac Sonnet in Search of a Moor The Telecasters ["The Three Witches and Iago"] Up and Down, Up and Down, I Will Lead Them ("Up and Down") Sonnet for Sister Kate The Star-Crossed Lovers (aka "Pretty Girl") Madness in Great Ones ("Hamlet") Half the Fun (aka "Lately") ["Cleopatra"] A final number, "Circle of Fourths," which was added later, is a musical tribute to Shakespeare himself. The suite engages the problem of wedding Shakespeare with African American music in several different ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, the music is entirely instrumental, bypassing the issue of setting Shakespearean language in an African American idiom. Even so, many of Ellington and Strayhorn's seem designed to convert Shakespeare's voices to musical form, each distinctive in timbre, style, and emotional tone. In a few cases, the sections have something of a narrative quality. The opening number, "Such Sweet Thunder," for instance, musically depicts the seductive stories that Othello tells Desdemona, specifically "the sweet and swinging, very convincing story Othello told Desdemona." The song was originally assigned to Cleopatra and parenthetically subtitled "Cleo" (Ellington 1957). Second, and related to the first, is Ellington's conception of Shakespeare's artistry in terms of characters with highly individualized

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 13 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

personalities. Indeed, Ellington conceives of the suite as a series of musical portraits of Shakespearean characters, ending, coda-like, with a portrait of Shakespeare himself — it is a suite of solos, if you will. This conception of Shakespeare's artistry is akin to Ellington's own compositional methods; famously, he took the distinctive sound and style of individual band members as a starting point and inspiration for composition. Last, and most important, Ellington stresses Shakespeare's affirmation of black characters. The suite of Shakespearean characters begins and ends with blacks — Othello in Such Sweet Thunder"" and Cleopatra in "Half the Fun" (as the liner notes wryly observe, Antony seems to be on hiatus). A third portrait, "Sonnet in Search of A Moor," closes the embedded "Sonnet" sequence, and it too concerns Othello, this time depicting his tenderness and pathos rather than his wit. Significantly, all three portraits actively celebrate black erotic power — as the pun on "a moor/amour" suggests — and defy stereotypes of black sexuality by stressing these characters' sophistication and sly charm. Since Shakespeare is popularly known as a poet of love, this emphasis on black sensuality also provides a rationale for resituating Othello and Cleopatra at the center of his artistic achievements. By framing the suite with black characters and stressing the affirmational qualities of Shakespeare's depictions (excluded are Othello and Cleopatra's tragic ends, and Aaron in his entirety), Ellington argues for the fundamental compatibility between African American music, even elements of Ellington's early so-called "jungle style," and Shakespeare. The final number, "Circle of Fourths," a work that traverses all the musical keys in less than two minutes, even slyly hints at an analogy between Shakespeare and Ellington himself — if Shakespeare was renowned for his universal poetic facility, his ability to mime any verbal idiom, so too Ellington demonstrates his ability to think in any musical key and to move freely, deftly among them.10

Ellington's emphasis upon intelligence, wit, craft, and sophistication in the arrangements thoroughly rejects the notion that transposing Shakespeare into an African American idiom can lead only to travesty. Indeed, the title "Such Sweet Thunder," taken from Theseus's description of his dogs baying in the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream, both acknowledges the sullied historical reputation of African American music — perhaps Ellington was thinking in particular of his own "jungle music" — and asserts its extraordinary "sweetness" and potentially universal cultural reach:11 never did I hear Such gallant chiding: for, besides the groves, The skies, the fountains, every region near Seem'd all one mutual cry: I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. (4.1.118) More generally, the suite serves to illustrate the capacity of Ellington's brand http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 14 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

of jazz to assimilate other artistic forms and traditions while keeping faith with its fundamental African American roots. Ellington's approach here and after was to search out and emphasize points of contact; his approach to jazz adaptation was mutually affirmational rather than confrontational or revisionary. Indeed, Such Sweet Thunder seems to announce Ellington's late- career ambition to establish jazz as a global language, an international modernism rooted in African American culture, into which other cultures might be translated. Such was the hallmark of later Ellington, as a sampling of titles suggests — The , The , The Afro- Eurasian Eclipse, his adaptations of Tchaikovsky and Grieg, and his Sacred Concerts.

In the summer of 1963, Ellington was to return to Shakespeare one more time with incidental music for Michael Langham's staging of Timon of Athens for the Stratford Festival. Unfortunately, the original score exists only in a fragmentary state in the Stratford archives, though it was skillfully reconstructed and augmented by Stanley Silverman for Stratford's revival of Timon in 1991. As Silverman acknowledges, one purpose of the score was simply to jazz up one of Shakespeare's least known and less-regarded plays using Ellington's wide popular appeal, strengthened by his many jazz performances at the Stratford Festival in the 1950s and , to build interest in a potential box-office loss-leader. But given the year of its creation and Ellington's concerns at the time, this score also bears in interesting, if oblique, ways on the relationship between Shakespeare and debates about the civil rights struggle in the United States. At first glance, Timon, conspicuously unconcerned with questions of racial identity, seems far removed from the themes of Ellington's other major work of 1963, My People, for the Chicago Century of Negro Progress Exposition, a musical cavalcade that surveyed American black history and music, emphasizing African Americans' dignity and essential contributions to American culture. But Ellington's interest in Timon hints at subtle parallels between Shakespeare's acerbic tragedy about money, the "good life," and social approval and Ellington's focus on black aesthetic sophistication and on economic and social exclusion in America. The jaunty "banquet theme" of Ellington's Timon score, a repeated leitmotif, suggests affinities between Timon's generosity and desire for friendship and Ellington's own role as entertainer and bon vivant. Read in this fashion, Timon's bitter impulses, to embrace misogyny and to support violence against a society that fails to appreciate his generosity, might be seen to exemplify embittered and militant responses to American racism, potential responses very much in evidence in the civil rights movement and ones that Ellington consistently rejected. Thus the musical theme that Ellington assigns to revolutionary Alcibiades and his men, instruments of that violence: a pompous march in which momentary appearances of a major key quickly lead back to a http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 15 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

minor tonic.

This is not to claim that Langham's 1961 production or 1991 revival actively pursued this reading of the play — they did not. Stanley Silverman's reconstruction offers a somewhat different impression of the relationship between Ellington's music and Shakespeare's tragedy. By fleshing out the surviving fragmentary score (primarily in the banquet scenes) with several of Ellington's best-known "" pieces — "," "The Mooche," "Creole Love Call," "Ring Dem Bells" — Silverman potentially solidifies our surmise that Timon might be identified with Ellington in his celebratory vein. (It is also chronologically appropriate to director Langham's resituation of the play's action to Mediterranean Europe between the two world wars.) But Silverman also fashions a new song-motif, "Timon's Theme," from a 10-measure fragment by Ellington that was not included in his original score, a motif that Silverman links to Timon and that is woven in various guises throughout his reconstruction. This bittersweet, highly chromatic theme introduces a persistent element of wistfulness and regret to the play, the nostalgic sense of an earlier, more generous and innocent era lost, an era that Timon tragically comes to exemplify. I argue that Ellington's incidental music for Timon has as one of its subtexts his assimilationist response to the issue of racial oppression. That subtext operates on two levels: first, by suggesting subtly that the tragedy of Timon is the tragedy of an unappreciated man who falls prey to the impulses of bitterness and revenge and too late repents that response, a tragedy that speaks obliquely to debates within the civil rights movement; and second, simply by demonstrating a potential congruency between the concerns of that white classic, Shakespeare, and Ellington's own black classical music.

Though it too seeks to make the case that jazz is an appropriate vehicle for Shakespearean content, George Russell's Othello Ballet Suite, written and recorded 10 years after Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder, adopts a quite different strategy of appropriation. Part of 's coterie and composer of early bop standards, George Russell is best known as the codifier of the modal system that underlay the hard bop pioneered by and . Russell has described his mature jazz style as "panmodal" and "panrhythmic," an effort to embrace a variety of musical styles rather than a single identifiable sound, and his later work often layers those styles upon one other synchronically, according to Russell's concepts of "vertical structure" (Russell 1981).12 His Othello Ballet Suite offers a rather challenging example of Russell's post-bop idiom: a dark dirge of sliding low wind and brass notes over nervous polyrhythmic figures in the forms the suite's theme, one that constantly threatens to fall into rhythmic chaos. It soon transforms into Ellingtonian swing, then moves freely and with http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 16 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

minimal transition between various styles, including bop, so-called "" experimentalism, free jazz (several moments recall Ornette Coleman), and even twelve-tone classical modernism. Interestingly, the subjects for Russell's music, particularly in this ex-patriate period (he lived in Scandinavia from 1964 to 1969), oscillated between broad universalist themes (particularly nature and spirituality, as in his Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, 1966) and Afrocentrism, themes that would come together in his magnum opus, The African Game (1983).

His treatment of Othello in the Ballet Suite is his first attempt to synthesize these two concerns. Other than to retain Othello's tragic dramatic curve, Russell makes little discernible attempt to present the particularities of Shakespeare's narrative. Instead, he speaks of creating "mood objects" for the dancers, treating the play as a sequence of emotional states that are abstract and universal rather than particular to the racial sociopolitics of Shakespeare's play (Russell 1981). At the same time, Russell identifies Othello as the work's conceptual armature, as if he were reclaiming Shakespeare's play for performance in a predominantly Afrocentric idiom. Though the suite is not , the musical "narrative" (such as it is) returns again and again to a tenor sax soloist, clearly the protagonist Othello, who struggles to accommodate his langorous blues voice — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — to the barrages of complexly-layered, often rhythmically-agitated musical styles that confront him one after another. (Iago's voice seems to be taken up by the tuba, Desdemona's by the .) At the suite's end the return of the opening dirge-like theme lends a certain tragic fatedness to the sequence of "mood objects" that we have just heard; after this theme disintegrates and fades, Russell daringly concludes with a harmonically ambiguous, ominous organ chord, held unchanging for almost a minute — the musical version of a theatrical tableau. Earlier in the suite's second part, this very same chord was used as the sole accompaniment for an affecting slow blues by the sax soloist, perhaps a musical presentation of Othello's sorrowful, tragic succumbing to jealousy. Russell treats Othello not as a master ideological narrative about race, but as an abstract psychological study of human nature in crisis, and he uses the play to demonstrate how various jazz idioms might translate that powerful portrait into music. In short, in the Othello Ballet Suite the "blackness" of Othello is supplied not by Shakespeare — who provides only a portrait of universalized human nature — but by the African American musical styles Russell supplies and orchestrates. It provides an apt example of mutual legitimation: Russell's jazz forms provide Shakespeare's Othello with a measure of black authenticity, while Shakespeare provides his music with a weighty, universal content appropriate to genuine "art."

We should also acknowledge that the aesthetic politics of Russell's piece are http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 17 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

complicated by his situation at the time as a jazz ex-patriate. Finding it difficult to support himself in the United States, Russell emigrated to Scandinavia in 1964 and benefitted from the patronage of Radio Sweden, and in particular of its director Bosse Broberg, who commissioned and recorded Russell's work during this five-year period. The idea of an Othello ballet suite originated not with Russell, but with choreographer ; its production and subsequent recording were underwritten by Broberg and Radio Sweden and featured an all-European jazz orchestra (with future stars Jan Garbarek and Terje Rypdal). Indeed, jazz's status in Europe — and Russell's European reputation in particular as a "serious" jazz composer and theorist — perhaps make moot the question of African American cultural legitimacy that had long haunted jazz and its relationship to Shakespeare. Certainly Russell's suite avoided the issue of using jazz to provide Shakespeare with popular and commercial appeal, for his compositions were clearly directed to a jazz cognoscenti capable of appreciating thorny complexity rather than to a general listening audience. Indeed, Russell's suite simply assumes that jazz is high art, consonant with Shakespearean content. By 1967, the date of Othello Ballet Suite's composition, many of the questions earlier associated with jazz and Shakespeare had migrated elsewhere, particularly in an American context, to the relationship between Shakespeare and rock-and-roll.

One last example also considers the conjunction between Shakespeare and jazz from a distinctly European perspective, using Othello as its key reference point and, interestingly enough, even referencing Ellington. Basil Dearden's film All Night Long, produced in 1960 at London's Shepperton Studios, offers a modernization of Othello set in the world of post-swing jazz (Dearden 1961). On the night of his first wedding anniversary party, Aurelius Rex, a black big band leader, is coaxed by Johnny Cousin, his ambitious drummer, into believing that his white wife Delia Lane is involved with the band's saxophonist and manager Cass. The party features an extraordinary group of jazz luminaries, jamming in an ever-changing line-up — , , and a host of all-stars such as , John Dankworth, and Johnny Scott, all playing themselves. The gathering is hosted

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 18 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

by millionaire jazz-fan Rod Hamilton, who uses his South London warehouse pad as a private after-hours jam club and who, like his namesake Roderigo, still secretly carries a torch for Delia. Striking is the extent to which the film mutes the source play's concern with racism. The anniversary party is depicted as a miniature racial and jazz utopia: on and off the bandstand, blacks and whites mingle easily as they enjoy the music, and the interracial nature of the relationships between Rex and Delia and between Cass and his black girlfriend Benny hardly occasion notice or comment. Interestingly, the film both alludes to and elides the real-life interracial marriage between white sax player John Dankworth and his black wife, vocalist Cleo Laine. When Dankworth arrives at the party alone, Rod points up Laine's absence: "I'm so sorry Cleo couldn't make it." Even so, Laine does make an uncredited appearance in the film, but in voice only: she provides the vocals for "All Night Long," the plaintive tune about unfulfilled desire that we see Delia singing in the film, and for "I Never Knew," Delia's duet with Cass.

With his debonair manner, trimmed moustache, aristocratic name, and laidback piano style, Rex unmistakably evokes the image of Duke Ellington — he even leads the group in two Ellington standards, "" and "." The image thus brings to the film an oblique reminder of Ellington's ideal of jazz, particularly swing, as a force for racial harmony, and at first Rex and Delia's interracial marriage seems to confirm that ideal. In this

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 19 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

adaptation it is not racial prejudice that occupies centerstage, but the vexed business of jazz. Frantic to create his own band, Johnny Cousin needs not only Rod's financial backing, but also commercial credibility with promoter Lou

Berger, and Delia, a once famous and still popular chanteuse, becomes the key to both. Delia retired, however, when she married Rex, in part so that she could devote herself entirely to him, in part, as Rod comments in passing, so that Rex could keep her out of the public eye. Though she still longs to perform (and even secretly rehearses a song with Cass for the anniversary celebration), Delia rejects Johnny's business offer and clumsy romantic overture, and so he resolves to destroy her marriage by exploiting for innuendo her close friendship with Cass. The location of the at the margins of London and under Rod's sponsorship, the comment of the musicians as they arrive that because the music is noisy "you can't have an all-night session in Mayfair," Berger's complaint that he has more bands than he knows what to do with, the sense that Rex's elegant repertoire of popular standards is somewhat outdated in the context of modal bop and : all point to the fact that at the time of the film's production jazz was on its way to becoming a coterie rather than a widely popular musical style. That awareness fuels Cousin's increasingly desperate desire to create a big band of his own before opportunity passes him by. Interestingly, Delia acknowledges the change in tastes. After singing "All Night Long," her signature ballad in the style of an

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 20 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

old-fashioned torch song, she offers a sample of her "new style," a bopped-up version of the standard "I Never Knew" that she performs as a duet with Cass. Rex erupts in fury, not only out of jealousy over the imagined affair between Delia and Cass, but also out of anger that she has taken up performing again and in a musical style pointedly not his own. As Rod introduces her performance with Cass, he unwittingly underlines this conjunction: "Aurelius Rex, a year ago tonight you married a woman you thought you knew. There was, however, something you did not know, an aspect of her personality which you never suspected. Mister Rex, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new, the true, Delia Lane".13 Even though race is pointedly and surprisingly not central to this jazz adaptation of Othello, nevertheless the issue perhaps inescapably surfaces as a subtext. Rex's impulse to control Delia — he pressured her to give up her singing career — springs from his fears of her abandoning him, and the only indication of the source of those fears comes in this exchange between the two early in the film: REX: Will you ever be sorry that you married me? DELIA: Never. REX: You don't feel in an alien world? DELIA: Don't say that. REX smiles, reassured. It is not clear whether the "alien world" to which Rex alludes is the domestic realm to which Delia referred moments earlier — unconvincingly, she proclaims herself to be newly devoted to homemaking — or marriage to a black man. That Rex may feel uneasy about his interracial relationship with Delia is also hinted at by Johnny Cousin, who observes to Rod that "maybe he doesn't want their marriage in the limelight," a comment that echoes Rod's own surmise. These moments never rise above the level of ambiguity, and they

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 21 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

seem to fly in the face of the racial harmony portrayed at the party, so that we are allowed to postulate that while Rex and Delia's relationship may be accepted by enlightened boho jazz-lovers, the reaction of the general public — a public that, we are told elsewhere, lionizes Rex — may be another matter altogether.

In any case, it is Johnny Cousin who most explicitly voices a consciousness of racial politics. When he suggests that Cass use Delia to get reinstated into Rex's good graces, he adds that "Rex wouldn't refuse Delia tonight even if she asked him to move to Johannesburg," a comment with which Benny agrees before she catches herself. In an equally crass quip, Cousin declares to Lou Berger that he belongs to "that new minority group, white American jazz musicians; we're going to hold a mass meeting in a phone booth." It is only Rex's chuckle that prompts Lou and his insufferable assistant to join comfortably in the laughter. The quip about white jazzmen underlines Cousin's insecure place in the emergent jazz world of the 1960s and reveals that he, unlike everyone else at Rod's party, does not or cannot share the ideal of a jazz-race utopia. Indeed, in his final conversation with Emily he brutally rejects the idea of mutual love: COUSIN: I love. You love. She loves. Everybody loves everybody. Well, I don't — see? I love nobody. I don't even love Johnny.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 22 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

This climactic speech makes Johnny's earlier race-oriented comments into symptoms of his own personal psychology, twisted by ambition and self- loathing, rather than indicators of a more pervasive racial politics operating in this fictional jazz world and beyond. That is, Cousin's final tirade tends to mute our perception that this version of Othello turns on wider issues of race.

Unlike Such Sweet Thunder, which evinces Ellington's active effort to make a case for the cultural legitimacy of jazz, in the process redeeming the relationship between Shakespeare and African American music, All Night Long harmonizes Shakespeare and jazz by largely eliding the problem of race not merely in its treatment of Shakespeare's play, but also in its treatment of jazz. Though as a black musician Rex is portrayed with respect, by and large the film does not depict jazz as specifically "black" or inclusively "popular" music. Rather, jazz is treated as a coterie art underwritten by a rich (and white) aficionado, addressed to a hip elite with the specialized, educated taste to appreciate it properly (such is the burden of Cass's harangue at the vulgar promoter Berger). Particularly telling is how the film uses its two major jazz stars, Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus. Both are given significant cameos and, considered in retrospect, both point to very different directions for the future of jazz.14 Brubeck pioneered so-called "cool jazz" — harmonically and rhythmically clever, emotionally restrained, sweet and smooth in timbre, but, as many critics complained, with immediate radio-friendly appeal and lacking in expressive force — bop domesticated for mainstream white audiences. All Night Long features Brubeck prominently in a full-length performance of his "It's a Raggy Waltz," capitalizing on the song's premiere as part of Brubeck's 1960 British tour. Though Mingus saw himself as an heir to Ellington, his music exemplified a thornier, more aggressive, even iconoclastic style that was explicitly linked to African American experience, particularly the rage and aspirations born of racism and economic injustice. (Indeed, in the year of the film's making, Mingus formed the Jazz Arts Guild with the intention of offering jazz musicians more control over their work.)

It is striking, then, how in comparison with Brubeck's prominence, Mingus's cameo is shunted to the margins. Though he is the first jazz celebrity we see — when Rod arrives at the warehouse, Mingus is playing a free version of "All Night Long" on the solo bass — and he boasts "I'll be the last to leave," Mingus in fact serves only as an occasional sideman in the jazz sequences, and even then, is pictured very briefly. His duet with Brubeck, "Non-Sectarian Blues" (one of two numbers Mingus contributes to the film's jazz score), occupies less than 30 seconds of screen time and constitutes his longest appearance in the film. Another lengthy celebrity instrumental, Johnny Dankworth's "Fall Guy," also suggests the racial politics governing the film's portrayal of jazz, for in this sequence Dankworth is featured as soloist with an http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 23 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

all-black back-up band. This is perhaps intended as yet another example of the "jazz/race utopia" at Rod's after-hours party, but since only Dankworth is accorded closeups, the sequence tends to place his sidemen in the role of lending a measure of black authenticity to Dankworth's white British . Indeed, this sequence suggests that the muting of blackness in this jazz Othello might be understood as a reflex of the film's British provenance; in 1960s Britain, jazz was not so closely linked to a specifically African American struggle for cultural recognition and social justice, and so its "blackness" might be pushed to the margins. My point in examining these cameos is not to malign the musicians or their performances (these sequences are extraordinary snapshots of jazz history), but rather to highlight how the ideal of jazz Shakespeare — a Shakespeare at once broadly popular and harmonized with black culture — was, only three years after Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder premiered, becoming increasingly vexed by the post-swing politics of African American music. If, as I have suggested, Rex is meant to evoke Ellington and his racial and cultural ideals, in All Night Long we are given a disturbing image of the persistent racial anxieties and tensions that lurk just below the surface of his jazz utopia. The image of Rex, under Cousin's poisonous influence, brutally choking Delia, seems to confirm the barbaric rather than the noble impulses of Shakespeare's black protagonist.

CONCLUSION With Such Sweet Thunder and Othello Ballet Suite, Ellington and Russell mark out paths of Shakespearean adaptation largely not taken. There are many reasons for this: the fragmentation of styles in the 1960s made impossible the notion of jazz as a musical Esperanto; the increasing Afrocentrism of black music, particularly jazz, and, more generally, the counter-culturalism and youth-market nature of pop music made Shakespeare seem largely inhospitable territory (with the important exceptions of Romeo and Juliet and Shakespearean rock musicals); the assimilative and affirmational quality of Ellington's suites were increasingly out of step with the more confrontational politics of social justice in the 1960s and after (indeed, Ellington was accused of "being above" the civil rights movement, a comment that gave him great pain); and perhaps most important, popular culture itself increasingly became the cultural dominant, with both Shakespeare and jazz, with their largely coterie audiences, far more the objects rather than instruments of cultural legitimation. Even so, one sign that the conjunction between African American music and Shakespeare has persisted on the cultural radar is the minor and unlikely phenomenon of Shakespeare rap in the 1990s.15 Its appearance might be chalked up merely to coincidental timing: hip-hop rose to cultural prominence in the same decade as Shakespeare film moved from the art house to the mall cineplex, and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and the teen

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 24 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

adaptations that followed marked out Shakespeare as canonical fodder for pop culture sampling. It should be noticed, however, that many examples of Shakespeare rap predate Luhrmann's film by several years — the cause-effect relationships, that is, are not that simple. It is perhaps more accurate to characterize Shakespeare rap as one of several concurrent attempts to bring Shakespeare in line with the protocols of American pop and corporate culture, at the very moment when the culture of the African American underclass gained a broad cultural cachet among youth of all races. After all, it is now Shakespeare, not rap, that benefits from this exchange of legitimation, if "exchange" is even the proper term.

And yet even here, the specter of minstrelsy continues to haunt the relationship between Shakespeare and African American music. The year 2000 saw the off- Broadway premiere of The Bomb-itty of Errors, a full-length hip-hop version of The Comedy of Errors (Allen-Dutton et al 2000). The show was written and performed by five white rappers in full "in the 'hood" personae, who punctuated their adaptation with crude ethnic and gender caricatures, off-color humor, comic dancing, and a general atmosphere of travesty. The rappers were in fact New York University classmates who first conceived the project to satisfy a course assignment. Though not performed in blackface, Bomb-itty has the unmistakable flavor of an updated minstrel show, once again suggesting under the banner of admiration for African American music that recasting Shakespeare into a black idiom leads only to burlesque. The show went on to be a surprise, if minor, hit. Extraordinarily enough, very few reviewers remarked on its problematic racial politics, perhaps because the five performers insisted so strongly (and disingenuously) in the publicity materials upon their own street credentials.16 In the very next year, Rennie Harris and his Pure Movement Dance Company produced Rome and Jewels, a hip-hop Romeo and Juliet filtered through two canonical "street" adaptations, West Side Story and Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (Harris 2001; Bernstein and Sondheim 1957; Luhrmann 1996). Harris shifts the focus from the love story to the savage world of inner-city violence that Rome struggles to transcend. At the heart of the show is rivalry between two gangs, the Monster Qs and the Caps, depicted in terms of competition between two dance styles, b-boy and hip-hop. In the piece, dance depicts the unremitting, claustrophobic brutality of male violence, but the show also seeks to co-opt that violence's energies and transmute them into something creative and beautiful, into art. Romeo and Juliet here becomes the occasion for examining the urban culture that gave birth to hip-hop, to suggest its unrealized possibilities while interrogating the destruction and degrading styles of manhood it purveys.

I conclude with these two examples for several reasons. They testify yet again to the persistent and ambivalent desire to link Shakespeare with African http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 25 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

American music, an idiom regarded as authentically indigenous, of the people, and not quite culturally legitimate. The history of Shakespeare and black music reveals that the interplay between different forms of legitimation, shaped by cultural stratification and racial politics, has long been central to their relationship. But equally important, these two quite different examples suggest that both the degradation and utopian promise of Shakespeare in a black idiom remain historical potentials very much alive in American culture. They suggest, that is, that the final chapters of the history of Shakespeare and African American music remain yet to be written.

NOTES 1. I am indebted to Professor Les Fisher for drawing my attention to this reference. 2. The assertion that jazz is a distinctively African American music remains a point of some heated controversy within jazz criticism. Though jazz indisputably originates from a mix of African and American musical forms, whether the music exclusively expresses African American experience and whether it can be played authentically by white musicians continues to generate debate. For the perspective of jazz as distinctively African American music, see Jones (Baraka) 1963, and the final three chapters of Kofsky 1998, 83-142; for the opposing view, see Gerard 1998 and Nisenson 2000a. The controversy is certainly relevant to the question of whether Shakespeare, an icon of mainstream white culture, can be the subject of jazz adaptation without violating its fundamental nature. 3. For a detailed reading of the play, see Katz 1993, as well as Mahar 1991, 261- 62. 4. See the recently published text of this work in Lhamon, Jr. 2003, 343-83, as well as Lhamon's incisive discussion of minstrelsy and Shakespeare's Othello in his introduction, 11-14 and 70-90. 5. A related illustration, of Othello as a minstrel with banjo wooing Desdemona, graces the cover of Ye Comic Shakespeare, a series of twelve British Shakespearean burlesques written by Charles Ross and illustrated by William Gray (1864). 6. For a full consideration of the utopian potential and racial realities of the swing craze, see the thorough discussion in Erenberg 1998. 7. In the case of films without video releases, I worked from off-air recordings or from viewings in film archives. 8. Note also Shearing, To Be or Not to Bop, written and first recorded in 1949, which is also the title of 's memoirs (1987). For reasons that may relate to analogies between soloing and soliloquies, Hamlet has been a

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 26 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

persistent source for titles for jazz instrumentals. For a sampling of examples, see Pepper, "Ophelia," 1975; Brecker, "Slings and Arrows," 1996; Coster, "To Be or Not to Be," 1993; Erskine, "To Be or Not to Be," 1991; Jackson, "Hamlet's Favorite Son," 1996; and Marciano, "Hamlet," 2003. Othello has supplied far fewer jazz titles, though "Othello" is the title of instrumentals by Lyle 1990 and Morris 1990. Irvin Mayfield, a protege of Wynton Marsalis, has two Shakespeare titled instrumentals — "Othello and Desdemona" and "Romeo and Juliet," 2001. Titles from The Tempest often indicate a Latin- or New Age-tinged pedigree: see, for example, Braga, "Ariel," 1992; James, "Prospero," 1985; and Toney, "Ariel's Dream," 1995. References to Romeo and Juliet are far more frequent in jazz or swing songs with lyrics than in instrumentals. Most of these titles date from the 1990s, an indication that Shakespeare's relationship to popular culture and jazz has changed significantly since the 1950s. 9. Though not strictly jazz, other examples of cabaret Shakespeare include Mulcahy and Jones 1981; Young and Leslee 1995; and Luscombe and McKee 1995. 10. For a detailed musical analysis of Ellington's adaptational strategies, see Stephen Buhler's essay in this issue. 11. Quotations from the works of Shakespeare come from the Riverside Shakespeare (Shakespeare 1997). 12. For a succinct survey of Russell's life and musical concepts, see Nisenson 2000b, 50-73 and 177-81. See also Monson 1999, 963-72. 13. All citations from All Night Long are transcribed from the region 2 Carlton DVD release. 14. Brubeck and Mingus appear in the film simply because they were touring in Britain at the time of its filming. 15. For a fuller discussion of Shakespeare and rap, see Lanier 2002, 73-80, and Burt 2002. 16. I am reminded by Fran Teague that the London production of Bomb-itty included a black cast member, a fact that complicates but does not invalidate the point I am here making (Allen-Dutton et al 2000).

REFERENCES Allen-Dutton, Jordan, Jason Catalano, GQ, Erik Weiner, and J.A.Q. 2000. The Bomb-itty of Errors. Directed by Andy Goldberg. Performers Jordan Allen- Dutton, Jason Catalano, GQ, Erik Weiner, and J.A.Q. Atkinson, Brooks. 1939. Review of Swingin' the Dream. New York Times, 30 November, A24.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 27 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Bell, David H., Rob Bowman, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. 1939. The Hot Mikado. Bergreen, Laurence. 1997. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. New York: Broadway Books. Bernstein, Leonard, and . 1957. West Side Story. Braga, Leandro. 1992. "Ariel." E Por Que Nao? Arabesque Recordings 104 (CD). Brecker, Michael. 1996. "Slings and Arrows." Tales from the Hudson. Grp Records 191 (CD). Browne, Ray B. 1957. "Shakespeare in the Nineteenth-Century Songsters." Shakespeare Quarterly 8.2: 207-18. Browne, Ray B. 1960. "Shakespeare in American Vaudeville and Negro Minstrelsy." Shakespeare Quarterly 12.3: 374-91. Burt, Richard. 2002. "Slammin' Shakespeare In Acc(id)ents Yet Unknown: Liveness, Cinem(edi)a, and Racial Dis-integration." Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2: 201-25. Butler, David, dir. 1941. Playmates. Performers John Barrymore, Ish Kabibble, Kay Kyser, Lupe Velez. RKO Radio Pictures. VHS tape distributed by Turner Home Entertainment. Charell, Erik, and Gilbert Seldes. 1939. Swingin' the Dream. Collins, Kris. 1996. "White-Washing the Black-a-Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy and Parodies of Blackness." Journal of American Culture 19.3: 87- 101. Coster, Tom. 1993. "To Be or Not to Be." Let's Set the Record Straight. Jvc (City Hall) B000008ANS (CD). Dar's De Mony, Othello Burlesque. ca. 1880. New York: Samuel French. Dearden, Basil, dir. 1961. All Night Long. Performers Richard Attenborough, Betsy Blair, Dave Brubeck, Marti Stevens, Patrick McGoohan. Rank Distributors. DoMar, Alexander. 1850. Othello: An Interesting Drama, Rather! London: T. L. Marks. Dowling, Maurice. 1834. Othello Travestie. [London]: J. Duncombe. Edelstein, Tilden G. 1982. "Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage." In Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 28 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 179-97. Ellington, Edward Kennedy [Duke]. 1957. Such Sweet Thunder. Columbia Legacy CK 65568. Ellington, Edward Kennedy [Duke]. 1973. Music is My Mistress. New York: Da Capo. Ellison, Ralph. 1995. "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke." In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Edited by John Callahan. New York: Modern Library. 100-12. Erenberg, Lewis A. 1998. Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Erskine, Peter. 1991. "To Be or Not to Be." Sweet . Fuzzy Music B00004UAU5 (CD). Farrows, John, dir. 1949. Red, Hot and Blue. Performers Betty Hutton, . . Forde, Walter, dir. 1944. Time Flies. Performers Tommy Handley, Evelyn Dall. Gainsborough Pictures. Video Distributor Englewood Entertainment. Gerard, Charlie. 1998. Jazz in Black and White: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Jazz Community. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. Gillespie, Dizzy. 1987. To Be or Not to Bop. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Goodwins, Leslie, dir. 1944. Casanova in Burlesque. Performers Joe E. Brown, . Republic Pictures. Green, Benny. 1960. Liner notes. All Night Long: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Harkit HRK 8095 (CD). Griffin, G. W. H. c.1880. Hamlet the Dainty: An Ethiopian Burlesque on Shakespeare's Hamlet performed by Griffin & Christy's Minstrels. New York: Happy Hours Co. Harris, Rennie. 2001. Rome and Jewels. Performers Rodney Mason, Ozzie Jones. Hasse, John Edward. 1993. Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington. New York: Da Capo. Haywood, Charles. 1966. "Negro Minstrelsy and Shakespearean Burlesque." In Folklore and Society: Essays in Honor of Benj. A. Batkin. Edited by Bruce Jackson. Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates. 77-92. Hill, Errol. 1984. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 115-16.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 29 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Humberstone, H. Bruce, dir. 1952. She's Working Her Way Through College. Performers Mayo, Ronald Reagan. Warner Brothers. Hughes, Langston. 1942. Shakespeare in Harlem. New York: Knopf. Jackson, Javon. 1996. "Hamlet's Favorite Son." A Look Within. Blue Note 36490 (CD). James, Bob. 1985. "Prospero." The Swan. Warner 45978 (CD). Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). 1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Harper Collins. Katz, Leslie S. 1993. "'Julius the Snoozer': Independence Day in Blackface." Theatre History Studies 13: 17-32. [Kennard, J.] "Our Salt-Fish Correspondent." 1996. "Who are Our National Poets?" Knickerbocker Magazine (1845). Reprinted in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Edited by Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press. Kofsky, Frank. 1998. Black Music / White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz. New York: Pathfinder. Laine, Cleo. 1964. Shakespeare — And All That Jazz. Fontana TL5209 (LP). Laine, Cleo. 1978. Wordsongs. Polygram Records B000008BJF. Lanier, Douglas. 2002. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lhamon, W. T., Jr. 2003. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Luhrmann, Baz, dir. 1996. Romeo + Juliet. Performers Leonardo DiCaprio, Clare Danes. Twentieth-Century Fox. Luscombe, Christopher, and Malcolm McKee. 1995. The Shakespeare Revue. That's Entertainment 1237 (CD). Lyle, Bobby. 1990. "Othello." The Journey. Atlantic B000008BMJ (CD). MacDonald, Joyce Green. 1994. "Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness." Theatre Journal 46: 231-49. Mack, Roy, dir. 1936. Shake, Mr. Shakespeare. Performers Richard Lane, Carolyn Nash.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 30 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Marciano, Carla. 2003. "Hamlet." Trane's Groove. DDQ/BlackSaint/SoulNote B0000AKPCY (CD). Mahar, William J. 1991. "Ethiopian Skits and Sketches: Contents and Contexts of Blackface Minstrelsy, 1840-1890." Prospects 16: 241-79. Mayfield, Irvin. 2001. "Othello and Desdemona" and "Romeo and Juliet." How Passion Falls. Basin Street 402 (CD). Monson, Ingrid. 1999. "George Russell." In The International Dictionary of Black Musicians. Edited by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. 2: 963-72. Morris, Butch. 1990. "Othello." Dust to Dust. New World Records #80408 (CD). Mulcahy, Lance, and Don Jones. 1981. Shakespeare's Cabaret. Murray, Albert. 2000. Stomping the Blues. New York: Da Capo. Nisenson, Eric. 2000a. Blue: The Murder of Jazz. New York: Da Capo. Nisenson, Eric. 2000b. The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and his Masterpiece. New York: St. Martin's Griffin. Pepper, Art. 1975. "Ophelia." Living Legend. Ojc #408 (CD). Rodgers, Richard, and Lorenz Hart. 1938. The Boys From Syracuse. Ross, Charles and William Gray. 1864. Ye Comic Shakespeare. London: W. Oliver. Russell, George. 1981. Othello Ballet Suite and Electronic Sonata No. 1. Soul Note, 121014-2. Seidler, Joseph, dir. 1939. Paradise in Harlem. Jubilee Pictures. Performers Frank L. Wilson, Mamie Smith. Video Distributor Timeless Multimedia. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. Tobin. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Shearing, George. 2003. "To Be or Not to Bop." The Complete Savoy Trio and Quintet Sessions. The Jazz Factory. Silver, Horace. 1956. "To Beat or Not to Beat?" Silver's Blue. Epic 3326 (LP). Toney, Kevin. 1995. "Ariel's Dream." Pastel Mood. Ichiban Emd B000008OYZ (CD). Vail, Ken. 2002. Duke's Diary: The Life of Duke Ellington, 1950-1974. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 31 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

White, Charles, and Add Ryman. 1875. Julius the Snoozer, or, The Conspirators of Thompson Street: An Ethiopian Burlesque in Three Scenes. New York: R. M. DeWitt. Williams, Henry Llewellyn. 1882. The Black Forrest: An Ethiopian Farce. New York: De Witt. Young, Thomas, and Ray Leslee. 1995. Standup Shakespeare: A Cabaret Revue. By Thomas Young and Ray Leslee. Folger Consort. B000003LAA (Audio CD).

ONLINE RESOURCES Additional Images from All Night Long. http://atropos.english.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/request?id=118292 (request? id=118292). Internet Broadway Database Information for The Boys From Syracuse. http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=12397 (http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=12397) Internet Movie Database Information for Casanova in Burlesque. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036700/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036700/) Internet Broadway Database Information for The Hot Mikado. http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=12440 (http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=12440) Internet Movie Database Information for Playmates. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034033/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034033/) Internet Movie Database Information for Red, Hot and Blue. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041795/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041795/) Internet Broadway Database Information for Shakespeare's Cabaret. http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=4091 (http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=4091) Internet Movie Database Information for She's Working Her Way Through College. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045144/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045144/) Internet Broadway Database Information for Swingin' The Dream. http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=13212 (http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=13212) Internet Movie Database Information for Time Flies. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037380/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037380/)

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 32 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Internet Broadway Database Information for West Side Story. http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=2639 (http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=2639)

PERMISSIONS All still images from All Night Long are reproduced by kind permission of the University of New Hampshire Library.

ABSTRACT | SHAKESPEARE SINGS THE BLUES | SHAKESPEAREAN MINSTRELSY | TO BE- BOP OR NOT TO BE-BOP | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show Page 33 of 33 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Swingin' Shakespeare from Harlem to Broadway

(/current) FRAN TEAGUE, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT Play On! was a great hit at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre in 1997, but a (/archive) tepid non-hit on Broadway in the same year. The show is a derivative of Twelfth Night, re-set to the , with music by Duke Ellington. Critics complained that the show was too fantastic, yet the history of Shakespeare in the Harlem Renaissance suggests that the show is, in fact, closer to the historical record than its creators probably realized. The essay examines the 1939 musical Swingin' the Dream, as well as briefly considers the trouble that women musicians had receiving recognition.

Play On! was a great hit at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre in 1997, but a tepid non-hit on Broadway in 1997, although it enjoyed regional success, and one regional production was included in the prestigious Public Broadcasting Service series "Great Performances" (2000; Ellington and West 1997).1 The show is a derivative of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, re-setting the plot to the Harlem Renaissance and dropping Shakespeare's language, while adding the music of Duke Ellington.

The show's creators use twenty-one songs by Duke Ellington throughout the show, but in this plot summary I shall mention only a few. A young woman named Vi comes to New York from the country, arriving on "The 'A' Train" determined to make it as a songwriter by learning from the Duke, Harlem's finest song composer (track 1):

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 1 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

mp3 TRACK 1: "The A Train" (Mel Tormé)

Her uncle Jester tells her she cannot succeed as a woman, so she cross-dresses to gain employment with the Duke, who is having a dry spell. All the Duke can think about is the beautiful nightclub singer, Lady Liv, so he laments, "I've Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" (track 2): mp3 TRACK 2: "I Got It Bad" (Carmen McRae) Cheryl Freeman as Vy at the Old Globe The Duke sends Vi-man to woo Lady Liv, and — after managing to get past Liv's club manager, the Rev — Vi-man tries to persuade Liv to care. Liv falls for Vi- man, who has fallen for the Duke, while the respectable Rev yearns for Lady Liv. By himself, the Rev sings "Don't You Know I Care." Jester and his friends overhear him and tell him that he needs to loosen up because "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing" (track 3): mp3 TRACK 3: "It Don't Mean a Thing" (Joe Carroll)

Dressed in a yellow zoot suit, Rev sings and dances up a storm with Lady Liv in "I'm Beginning to See the Light." When she rejects him, Rev is heart- broken and returns to his navy-blue manager's suit. Liv pursues Vi-man until the untimely entrance of the Duke. Duke renounces both Liv and Vi-man, Vi http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 2 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

rejects Liv, and everyone is unhappy. The show ends with Vi's revealing her female identity to the Duke by asking him to help her complete "Prelude to a Kiss" (track 4): mp3 TRACK 4: "Prelude to a Kiss" (Carl Anderson and Cheryl Freeman)

Meanwhile Rev and Liv fall in love in a duet, "I Want Something to Live For." Everyone lives happily ever after (track 5):

Yvette Cason, Lawrence Hamilton, Larry Marshall, and Andre de Shields

mp3 TRACK 5: "Something to Live For" ()

The alterations that the musical Play On! makes to Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night are similar to those made by other Shakespearean musicals, since musicals generally streamline the plot, trimming "name" roles and expanding the number of supernumerary roles. Such methods provide more room in the production for musical numbers, allow the book to focus on the show's stars, and offer a good dramaturgical reason for a chorus to exist. But in Play On! these changes have other effects worthy of note. One major plot change, for example, is the elimination of Viola's twin brother Sebastian and his loving rescuer Antonio. Cutting those characters reduces the size of the company, but it also brings a consequent reduction of homoeroticism in the show's subtext. Another change is that Sir Toby and Feste are combined in the person of Jester, who is given a familial connection to the Viola figure rather than to

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 3 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Olivia/Lady Liv. That shift reduces the danger that Vi-man runs, since her secret is known early on by the benevolent Jester, but isolates Olivia more thoroughly than in Shakespeare's play. The sweet country girl has family on whom she can draw, while the sultry singer must stand alone. That plot change also affects what may be the most significant character change: the Rev, serving as the Malvolio figure, ends up in a romantic relationship with Lady Liv, rather than as the object of humiliation.

Such changes make sense in terms of African American culture. The resistance to homosexuality, after all, has been called "the greatest taboo" among African Americans."2 Thus, reducing such homoerotic elements as Antonio's declared passion for Sebastian for Antonio neatly trims the production budget for salaries while eliminating Nikki Crawford as Lady Liv at the Pasadena Playhouse social discomfort. The image of the isolated Lady Liv may recall the "tragic mulatto" stereotype so often found in American drama about race, yet reclaims that stereotype: this character has agency and concludes the show with a new love, a strong African American man, and a successful career. As for Malvolio/Rev, surely the idea that a hard-working black servant becomes a partner and wins his love is, in this cultural context, more bearable than that a black servant should be mocked, humiliated, imprisoned, and finally driven away.

Although the idea for the show came from Sheldon Epps and the joyful http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 4 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

choreography from Duke Ellington's granddaughter, Mercedes Ellington, the writer of the book was Cheryl West, a noted African American playwright whose dramas Jar the Floor (1991) and Before It Hits Home (1989) have enjoyed success and won awards. These plays interrogate gender and sexuality within the African American community. In Play On! her concern clearly was to privilege African American culture both in her emphasis on the Harlem Renaissance and in her refusal to let a black man be humiliated.

But while the alterations make political sense, does the history that West fictionalizes seem at all likely? Does the show in any way resemble what went on in the Harlem Renaissance or in Duke Ellington's life? Since the production declared that the show was set in "the magical kingdom of Harlem," it is unsurprising that critics pointed to the fantasy feeling of the show in their reviews of the New York production. In the Times (Brantley 1997), Ben Brantley called Play On! a "romantic fable," asking "why not substitute a bygone Harlem, nostalgically remembered as a stylishly self- contained cradle for dazzling musical talent, for the fantastical dukedom of Illyria?" Brantley considered West's manipulation of the Lady Liv-Rev relationship clumsily handled, and complained that "This awkwardness wouldn't matter as much if the show could create, as it obviously means to, a fluid, fairy-tale sense of Harlem as a hip Brigadoon" (Brantley 1997). Some

Natalie Venetia Belcon, Raun Ruffin, and cast at the Pasadena Playhouse critics were skeptical about Vi's cross-dressing. Newsweek's Jack Kroll called the device "silly fun," and the show "a cartoon" (Kroll 1997, 74), while Mark Steyn, more irascible, dismissed Vi as a "budding lady Songwriter" and the show as "necrophilic" (Steyn 1997, 44). In Variety, Greg Evans complained, "'Play On!' maintains (loosely) the Bard's storyline and characters, but http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 5 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

replaces complexity with sketch-comedy mechanics," adding that "A chance to visit the famed Harlem nightclub [Ellington's Cotton Club] remains, like most of 'Play On!,' a missed opportunity" (Evans 1997). Clearly the critics thought that the show's events were unlikely. I want to argue that considering what actually happened in Harlem, the events in Play On! are plausible. The "cartoon" or "fantasy" comments are directed, I think, at the plot device of a woman's cross-dressing to participate fully in the world of music and at the idea that the Harlem Renaissance has anything to do with . Such skepticism, I shall argue, is not only unwarranted, but also condescending and ignorant.

Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s was not simply the source of the hot swing music from Duke Ellington, Dizzie Gillespie, , and Louis Armstrong that was fast replacing the sweet jazz played by such popular bands as Guy Lombardo and his Canadians. The Harlem Renaissance had been in full swing since 1919. African Americans came to New York from across the nation for its opportunities in education, business, and the arts. Many understood an interest in Shakespeare's works to be an indicator of their privileged status as members of the talented tenth. Thus Langston Hughes published a collection of poems, Shakespeare in Harlem, while the late Errol Hill has written of important African American Shakespearean productions in the Harlem Renaissance (Hill 1984). That Shakespearean interest was included in the world of swing, most notably in the interest and affection that Ellington and his collaborator Billy Strayhorn felt for Shakespeare. But Ellington was not the only swing musician to care about Shakespeare.

In 1939, a musical comedy version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, entitled Swingin' the Dream, re-set the action to Louisiana around 1900, with white performers playing Theseus's court (Theseus becomes governor of Louisiana) and African American performers playing the mechanicals (New Orleans firemen) and fairies (Charell and Seldes 1939). The production of Swingin' the Dream employed an impressive group of musical artists: Louis Armstrong, the Bud Freeman band, and the Benny Goodman sextet, with Don Voorhees conducting.3 Unfortunately, no script for the show survives, although thanks to Alan Corrigan's research, readers of this journal have the opportunity, for the first time, to see what part of the script looked like.

But music was not all the show offered. Agnes de Mille choreographed the production for such notable dancers as the Rhythmettes and Bill Bailey. Louis Armstrong played Bottom, Bill Bailey played Cupid, the Dandridge sisters were attendant fairies, Juan Hernandez played Oberon, Moms Mabley played Quince, Dorothy McGuire played Helena, Butterfly McQueen played Puck,

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 6 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Maxine Sullivan played Titania. These are important performers, either in the African American theatrical tradition (Moms Mabley never really broke through with a white audience, for example, but was enormously influential in African American clubs, performing until the 1970s), or in the broadest popular spectrum (Louis Armstrong and Butterfly McQueen are obvious examples).

The show was preceded by talk about how important it would be. Donald Bogle notes that "During rehearsals, word spread among jazz aficionados and fans that Swingin' the Dream was a progressive production that made excellent use of its often underemployed Negro talents" (Bogle 1997, 72). Special effects were plentiful: The huge Center Theatre's stage was exploited for various trick and interesting effects, with sets and costumes modeled after Walt Disney's cartoons. Titania made an entrance in a World's Fair "World of Tomorrow" electric wheelchair, a Murphy bed emerged from a tree in the forest; microphones (to help audibility in the cavernous playhouse) sprang up in the shape of caterpillars and snails; and there was a noteworthy scene of plantation life on the lawn of the governor's . . . mansion, with a cast of jitter-bugging celebrants. (Leiter 1989, 502) wrote with excitement about the upcoming show and his high hopes for it (Hampton 1939a). He also commented that "It's in 'Swingin' the Dream' that the sextette really puts over to you how much wider a scope and opportunity for each man for better playing we now have" (Hampton 1939b). The leader of the show's other swing band, Bud Freeman, talks about the show's promise: We were at Nick [Condon]'s for about six or seven weeks when we got an offer to do a Broadway show called "Swingin' the Dream." The show was produced by Eric Charell, who had tremendous success in Europe with a show called "White Horse Inn." He came to America with enormous financial backing to create a revue mixing Midsummer Night's Dream with black vaudeville. He had just about the finest talent you could get. Just about everyone in the show became world-renowned. He had Louis Armstrong, Nicodemus, Troy Brown, Oscar Polk, Butterfly McQueen, Bill Bailey, Dorothy Maguire, and Maxine Sullivan. If Charell had known the greatness of the black people he could have had a revue that would still be running. There was some excellent music in the show. Jimmy Van Heusen wrote a number of pieces for it, and one of them, "Darn That Dream," has become a classic (Freeman 1989, 49-50) (track 6):

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 7 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

mp3 TRACK 6: "Darn that Dream" ()

If prominent names and promising talk were all that a play needed to succeed, Swingin' the Dream would have had a long and happy run. It failed. The production closed in less than two weeks. The Afro-American reported that the total loss was over $80,000 (Newspaper Column, 1939); Bogle says the total loss was over $100,000.

Historian Lewis Erenberg has demonstrated that swing was an agent of remarkable social change in America, especially in precipitating racial integration. There was popular recognition that the best music and the best dancing in America was African American, leading to white customers visiting Harlem's clubs (most notably Ellington's Cotton Club) and to the success of New York's first integrated club, Cafe Society. But if addressing racial inequity was part of the swing movement, and Erenberg makes a compelling case that it was, gender inequity was ignored. In Play On! Viola/Vi-man's fictional case mirrors what actually occurred to women who tried to succeed as musicians.

When Anita O'Day wanted to be recognized as a musician instead of simply the vocalist, she asked if she could wear a jacket like the men in the band. "She wanted audiences to 'listen to me, not look at me. I want to be treated like another musician,' not a trinket 'to decorate the bandstands.' Soon, however, rumors circulated 'that I preferred ladies to men!'" so O'Day went back to glamour gowns. "Girl" vocalists were not recognized as musicians, nor were women instrumentalists welcomed (Erenberg 1998, 200).

Indeed, to get jobs as a , Dorothy Tipton began passing as a man in the 1930s, and did so successfully until after her death in 1989, when the coroner informed her startled third wife and three (adopted) sons that Billy Tipton was in fact a woman. Diane Middlebrook's recent biography of Tipton, Suits Me (1998), makes it clear that women were not easily admitted into the world of swing, although Tipton's case is complicated by personal desires. In Play On! when Vi turns herself into Vi-man, the show is not simply imitating Shakespeare: it's imitating life.

With its evocation of the Harlem Renaissance, Play On! suggests a nostalgic fantasy to most reviewers, not a reconstruction of history. I've tried to suggest that the show is, in fact, closer to the historical record than its creators probably realized. But in this version of history, Duke Ellington and William Shakespeare are recognized as equals, and swing is a triumphant force in America's culture. And that finally is the fantasy, more's the pity.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 8 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

NOTES 1. The show ran from March 20 to May 11, 1997. Three Tony nominations — Tonya Pinkins for Best Actress in a Musical, Andre DeShields for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, and for Best Orchestrations — suggest that the show did have some strengths. 2. I take the epithet from Delroy Constantine-Simms and his anthology, The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (2001), with contributions from bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates, and 's Toure. 3. Accounts of the show's music are confusing. Jimmy Van Heusen composed some of the music, Goodman did much of the arranging, and Eddie De Lange wrote the lyrics. One finds the occasional claim that Jimmy Van Heusen created all the music, basing his compositions on Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I cannot find support for that. According to Ross Firestone (1993, 274), Van Heusen wrote only half a dozen songs, one of which, "Darn that Dream," has become a standard. Bordman's Chronicle credits Van Heusen and Goodman with "Spring Song," Alec Wilder and Van Heusen with "Love's a Riddle," and lists "Peace Brother," "There's Gotta Be a Wedding," "Moonland," "Comedy Dance," "Dream Dance," and "Darn That Dream" as being by Van Heusen.

REFERENCES Anderson, Carl. 1997. "Prelude to a Kiss." Play On!: A New Musical (1997 Original Broadway Cast). [CAST RECORDING]. Varese #5837. Bogle, Donald. 1997. Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography. New York: Amistad. Bordman, Gerald. 2001. American : A Chronicle. 3d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brantley, Ben. 1997. "Swinging Shakespeare Gets aboard the A Train." New York Times. 21 March, C1. Carroll, Joe. 2001. "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." Great American Songwriters 5: Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Rhino Records #71507. Charell, Erik, and Gilbert Seldes. 1939. Swingin' the Dream. Connor, Chris. 1999. "Something To Live For." Great American Songwriters 5: Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Rhino Records #71507.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 9 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Constantine-Simms, Delroy, ed. 2001. The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities. : Alyson Publishers. Ellington, Edward [Duke], and Cheryl West. 1997. Play On! Erenberg, Lewis. 1998. Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans, Greg. 1997. "Play On!" Variety. 21 March. Firestone, Ross. 1993. Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman. New York and London: Norton. Freeman, Bud. 1989. Crazeology: The Autobiography of a Chicago Jazzman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hampton, Lionel. 1939a. Newspaper Column on Swingin' the Dream. Afro- American. 4 November. Hampton, Lionel. 1939b. Newspaper Column on Swingin' the Dream. Afro- American. 2 December. Hill, Errol. 1984. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press. Hughes, Langston. 1942. Shakespeare in Harlem. New York: Knopf. Kroll, Jack. 1997. "Take The A Train To Illyria." Newsweek. 31 March, 74. Leiter, Samuel. 1989. Encyclopedia of the New York Stage 1930-40. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. McRae, Carmen. 2001. "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)." Great American Songwriters 5: Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Rhino Records #71507. Middlebrook, Diane. 1998. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Newspaper Column. 1939. Afro-American. 23 December. Steyn, Mark. 1997. "Stonewall Jackson Slept Here." New Criterion 15: 41-45. Tormé, Mel. 1990. "Take the A Train." The Duke Ellington and Count Basie Songbooks. Polygram #23248. Ziemba, Karen. 1996. "Darn That Dream." Shakespeare On Broadway. Varese #5622.

ONLINE RESOURCES

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 10 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Author Information for Fran Teague [cited June 1, 2005]. http://www.english.uga.edu/~fteague/MyStuff.html (http://www.english.uga.edu/~fteague/MyStuff.html) Erenberg, Lewis A. Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. University of Chicago Press [cited June 1, 2005]. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13468.ctl (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13468.ctl) Internet Broadway Database Information for Play On! [cited June 1, 2005].http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp?ID=7127 (http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp? ID=7127) Internet Broadway Database Information for Swingin' the Dream [cited June 1, 2005]. http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp?ID=10892 (http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp?ID=10892) Middlebrook, Diane. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. DianeMiddlebrook.com [cited June 1, 2005]. http://www.dianemiddlebrook.com/tipton/bt.html (http://www.dianemiddlebrook.com/tipton/bt.html) The Old Globe Theater (San Diego, Calif.) [cited June 1, 2005]. http://www.oldglobe.org/ (http://www.oldglobe.org/) Pasadena Playhouse (State Theater of , Pasadena, Calif.) [cited June 1, 2005]. http://www.pasadenaplayhouse.org/ (http://www.pasadenaplayhouse.org/)

PERMISSIONS Publicity photos from The Old Globe production of Play On! are reproduced by kind permission of The Old Globe and of photographer Ken Howard. Play On! 1: Cheryl Freeman as Vy in The Old Globe's world-premiere production of Play On!, directed by Associate Artistic Director Sheldon Epps, in the Old Globe Theatre September 14 – October 26, 1996. Photo by Ken Howard. Play On! 2: (left to right) Yvette Cason as Miss Mary, Lawrence Hamilton as Rev, Larry Marshall as Sweets and André De Shields as Jester in The Old Globe's world-premiere production of Play On!, directed by Associate Artistic Director Sheldon Epps, in the Old Globe Theatre September 14 – October 26, 1996. Photo by Ken Howard. Publicity photos from the Pasadena Playhouse production of Play On! are reproduced by kind permission of the Pasadena Playhouse.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 11 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'49 PM

Play On! 3: Nikki Crawford in the Pasadena Playhouse's production of Play On!, directed by Sheldon Epps, July 9 - August 22, 1999. Photo by Craig Schwartz Photopgraphy, copyright 1999. Play On! 4: Natalie Venetia Belcon and Raun Ruffin and the cast of the Pasadena Playhouse's production of Play On!, directed by Sheldon Epps, July 9 - August 22, 1999. Photo by Craig Schwartz Photopgraphy, copyright 1999. Musical clip of "Darn That Dream" reproduced by kind permission of Varese Sarabande Records.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781407/show Page 12 of 12 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Jazz, Shakespeare, and Hybridity: A Script Excerpt (/current) from Swingin' the Dream

ALAN CORRIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO (/previous)

ABSTRACT | "A HYBRID SHAKESPEAREAN SHAGEROO" | A SCRIPT EXCERPT FROM SWINGIN' THE (/about) DREAM | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT This essay examines the contemporary critical assumptions surrounding Swingin' the Dream — the short-lived 1939 swing production of A Midsummer Night's Dream — in light of a recently discovered script excerpt (click on highlighted text (/borrowers/files/issue1/Pyramus_and_Thisbe.pdf)) from the "Pyramus and Thisbe" scene. Whereas theater critics generally viewed the play as consisting of two irreconcilable elements, swing and Shakespeare, the excerpt draws attention to the ways in which the production attempted to combine these elements fruitfully. If this scene is at all indicative of the approach taken in the rest of the play, then the critical consensus appears to have been prejudiced by a reluctance to accept the manner in which Swingin' the Dream places swing and Shakespeare on an equal footing.

Somehow, I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself. — Duke Ellington

Given its "prominent names" and "lively design,"Swingin' the Dream, the 1939 swing version of A Midsummer Night's Dream adapted by Gilbert Seldes and Erik Charell to depict plantation life in 1890s New Orleans, should "have had a long and happy run" (Teague 2002, 229). Instead, it "was open on Broadway for about three minutes" (Eddie Condon, quoted in Carr, Fairweather, and Priestley 2002, 159).1 In this essay,

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 1 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

however, I would like to skirt the question of what went wrong, save for to say that the critical consensus at the time was that the production was not very well executed, probably because of inadequate preparation. Most soon forgot the show, though one of its songs, "Darn that Dream," has become a standard (track 1). mp3 TRACK 1: , "Darn that Dream"

I will give the critics the benefit of the doubt, although as a jazz fan, I confess I would love to hear Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman play in any context. What I would like to examine is a fundamental assumption that underlies critiques of the production: the notion that swing and Shakespeare are irreconcilably opposed and that the production should, therefore, have given precedence to one or the other, but failed to do so. I will then examine these assumptions in light of a recently discovered script excerpt (click on highlighted text (/borrowers/files/issue1/Pyramus_and_Thisbe.pdf)) from Swingin' the Dream.

"A HYBRID SHAKESPEAREAN SHAGEROO" Most reviewers of Swingin' the Dream focused on the production through the discursive lens of either swing or Shakespeare. One reviewer writes, for example, that "the show which was meant to be a mammoth orgy of swing missed its objective." He makes no mention of Shakespeare, but describes the "dreadful distance" that "separated the audience from dancers and music alike" and complains that the elements of the production did not "reach out to the spectator and make him take part, even vicariously, in the festivities" (Review, Theatre Arts 1940). For the reviewer, the production should have capitalized on the conception of jazz as an interactive art form, one in which the distance between performer and audience is minimized. This was, after all, dance music. As Ralph Ellison wrote much later in a nostalgic vein, contemporary musicians might "do better if they went back to playing for dances, went back to the communal situation in which there's a closer identification between their artistic goals and their prospective audience's desire to participate in the creation of the jazz spell" (Ellison 2001, 33).

A few reviewers complained that the play should have focused more on Shakespeare; one called it "more Cotton Club than bard," and a "hybrid Shakespearean shageroo"; but by far the consensus was that the production should have stuck to what its players knew best: swing (Review, Variety 1939a). This bias resulted in part because fewer of the kinds of reviewers who would have wanted more Shakespeare would have seen the play. In a survey of the most recent spate of Shakespearean productions, for example, the theater critic from Time acknowledged Swingin' the Dream only in a disparaging footnote: "Swingin' the Dream, a jitterbug version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, opened a week earlier; but no self-respecting Bard-hunter would stalk such mongrel prey" (Review, Time 1939c). The reviewer's dismissive comment, http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 2 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

especially his use of the term "mongrel," betrays an anxiety about intermixing cultures, and suggests that the text itself has been miscegenated. "'At one moment you hear genuine pentameters in the style and sometimes the original wording of the bard,' said a reviewer, 'at another you hear anti-climactic lines like "go fly a kite" that are appropriate neither to Shakespeare nor to the New Orleans 1890 setting into which the story has been dumped'" (Bergreen 1997, 396).

According to then-contemporary essentialist views, African Americans had an inherent understanding of jazz. The following description of jazz by Hugues Panassi from 1942 is just one of many that perpetuated racial dichotomies: "We know that there are good jazz musicians belonging to the white race. But in general the Negroes prove more gifted, and while the Negro masses among themselves have an instinctive feeling for this music, white people approach it with resistance and assimilate it slowly" (quoted in Clark 2001, 19). Shakespearean acting, on the other hand, was considered to be inherently foreign to African Americans. Thomas Anderson, who acted in 's famous 1936 "Voodoo" Macbeth, recalled how "people came to laugh at them because of the 'oddity' of their speech" (Gill 1988, 114). In reviews of early African American performers, it is common to read "the complaint that black Othellos could not enunciate Shakespeare's text correctly because of inherited, 'incorrigible flaws'" (Iyengar 2002, 106); in particular, their lips and mouths were thought to be inappropriately shaped for the articulation of Shakespearean verse. In contrast, Armstrong's nickname "Satchmo," from "Satchelmouth," draws proud attention to the size of his mouth as a metonymic representation of his musical prowess.

While it was perhaps utopian to imagine an equal exchange between swing and Shakespeare, this is exactly the sort of rhetoric that surrounded jazz during the : "Jazz, to its proselytizers, was above all a democratic music, a product of 'the people,' accessible to all classes and cultural types, marked both by a spirit of collective cooperation and by spontaneous individuality" (Stowe 1994, 53). One of the ways in which this democratic spirit manifested itself in practical terms was through interracial bands such as the one Goodman brought to Swingin' the Dream, which included Lionel Hampton, , and , and, one could argue, helped legitimate the production's racially mixed cast (track 2).

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 3 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

The Benny Goodman Sextet Rehearses for Swingin' the Dream

mp3 TRACK 2: Benny Goodman Sextet, "Flying Home"2

Combining jazz and Shakespeare was not unprecedented. In a version of The Comedy of Errors staged in 1923, a jazz band played during scene changes and during a few scenes. Its director "was responding to calls for a Negro drama that would utilize the resources of the race as expressed in the folk arts of song, dance, and pantomime" (Hill 1984, 99). While reviewers praised some of the acting, most called the production "faddish and absurd" (100). One notable exception, however, was W. E. B. Dubois, who suspected that New Yorkers would have lapped it up "if this new thing had come out of France with a European imprint" (100). The successful The Boys from Syracuse (based on The Comedy of Errors and staged the year before) was obviously part of the impetus for Swingin' the Dream, but its white cast and Rodgers and Hart score make it somewhat different.

Given the perception that the combination of Shakespearean acting and swing music was incongruous, the proper approach to such a combination would have been to capitalize on the ironic spectacle of the performance. As Teague writes:"Clearly the pleasure that the audience was intended to receive from Swingin' the Dream involved their recognition that African American performers who were important on the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 4 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

variety stage were doing Shakespeare, the epitome of the legit stage from which they were largely excluded" (Teague 2002, 229). Is it possible, then, that part of the problem with the reception of the play was that it attempted to place swing and Shakespeare on equal footing? "Challenged about the adaptation," writes Gary Jay Williams, "Charell observed that, for most Americans, Shakespeare's play was in a foreign language," while "Seldes's interest in the project probably followed from his campaign to give the popular arts (jazz, musical comedy, vaudeville, comic strips) the kind of critical attention the high arts enjoyed" (Williams 1997, 187). Although Seldes "felt committed to cultural democracy" (Kammen 1996, 207), it would be difficult to imagine that those involved were oblivious to the irony in coupling swing and Shakespeare.

Most blatantly, Swingin' the Dream plays white and African American performance against one another by casting white actors as the members of Theseus's court and African Americans in the "outsider" roles of the mechanicals and fairies. Their position as outsiders coincides, of course, with the marginal social position of African Americans and African American performers; whether this casting choice was simply mirroring racist social conventions or subtly critiquing them, however, is unclear. Williams reminds us that "Swingin' the Dream was created by whites for a predominantly white Broadway audience" (Williams 1997, 187), and he goes on to describe the racial stereotypes inherent in the production and the racist rhetoric underlying many of the reviews. His point is well-taken, but as I will demonstrate shortly, a close reading of one scene shows that interpreting Swingin' the Dream only in terms of its racial dichotomies does not give us the whole picture.

We can, and should, examine Swingin' the Dream in terms of cultural domination and subordination; by doing so exclusively, however, we neglect an alternate way of entering into the play, one that examines it more in terms of hybridity than of opposition. According to Nicholas Evans, whose analysis applies contemporary theories of hybridity to jazz, the belief that "jazz draws on cultural practices and aesthetic traditions associated with different social groups and fruitfully combines them [. . .] has existed at least since 1938, when the early jazz critic Winthrop Sargeant published Jazz: Hot and Hybrid" (Evans 2000, 11-12). Borrowing from Evans's analysis of jazz as a hybrid art form, I suggest that Swingin' the Dream is a hybrid whose identity is dictated by neither swing nor Shakespeare. At least one reviewer, Robert Benchley, writing for The New Yorker, seems to have experienced Swingin' in such a way. He tells the reader that he went to the show "prepared to wince." Afterwards, Benchley says, he still loathed A Midsummer Night's Dream (joining a tradition of Dream haters stretching back at least as far as Samuel Pepys) and swing, too, for that matter, but, he conceded, "somewhere in the combination" of swing and A Midsummer Night's Dream,"Erik Charell has produced a swell treat for the eye and ear. I don't understand it" (Benchley 1939). Benchley's somewhat tongue- in-cheek inability to understand why he would like the sum of two parts he hates has http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 5 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

to do, I suspect, with the fact that "the significance of a hybrid entity need not be circumscribed by the categories that define its parents" (Evans 2000, 31).

A SCRIPT EXCERPT FROM SWINGIN' THE DREAM It is difficult to examine Swingin' the Dream through the limited comments of reviewers and the partial memories of the cast and crew. Unfortunately, there is also no extant script or film of the production. The UCLA Music Library's Jimmy Van Heusen collection, however, contains a number of items related to the production. Van Heusen, the Tin Pan Alley composer who wrote the music for such classics as "Love and Marriage" and "Call Me Irresponsible," composed and arranged songs for Swingin' the Dream. The items in the collection are primarily copyright-related documents, though the collection also contains for a number of Van Heusen's compositions for Swingin' the Dream, and, most important, a photocopy of three typewritten pages constituting the "Pyramus and Thisbe" scene. Of course, any assertions based on this small fragment of the script will necessarily be partial and limited, since it is difficult to tell how far we can generalize the approach taken with this scene to that taken with the rest of the production. Furthermore, the "Pyramus and Thisbe" scene is constructed to emphasize its hybrid nature through a fruitful combination of swing and Shakespeare. It is quite possible that this was one of the better-received scenes, since it does not deal with what John Mason Brown dubbed "the tedious story of the lovers," whom yet another reviewer called "ghastly bores" (Brown 1939; Review, Time 1939b). At the very least, we can look at this scene as the moment in the play that most strikingly combines swing with Shakespeare.

Before explaining how the scene does so, I should point out quickly the nature of the excerpt. The pages reprinted here (click on highlighted text) (/borrowers/files/issue1/Pyramus_and_Thisbe.pdf) are clearly pre-theatrical. The title at the top of the first page reads "OPERA," although there appears a hand-written title, "Swingin' dream," above and to the right of the title. The date at the upper right corner of each page is "11/2/39," twenty-seven days before Swingin' the Dream opened, suggesting that the show was, as many reviews indicate, put together rather hurriedly. The "Pyramus and Thisbe" scene, as presented in these pages, begins with

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 6 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Louis Armstrong as Bottom in "Pyramus and Thisbe" Quince's prologue ("If we offend, it is against our will") and ends with Pyramus's death ("To die, die, die, die, die"). The text is probably not complete, since we do not witness Thisbe's discovery of Pyramus.

Another relevant document from the archives, dated October 7, 1939 (fifty-three days before the show opened), lists the repertoire for the production. This scene, the penultimate one (followed by a finale that consists of a "repetition of three numbers from show") is described as "Pyramus & Thisbe — medley from old Negro tunes." The manner in which the script is laid out clearly indicates the medley format. Song titles are typed in capital letters on the right margin, presumably to indicate the tune to which their corresponding lines are to be sung. The choice of material — hardly "old Negro tunes," but "Darktown Strutters' Ball," "St. Louis Blues," "Hold Tight," "Jeepers Creepers," "Ain't Misbehavin'," and so on — is clearly not meant to reflect the setting of the play, but to present what were, for the most part, still contemporary popular songs, several of which had been recorded by Armstrong, Goodman, or both. Only a year before, in fact, Armstrong had sung "Jeepers Creepers" in the film Going Places, and recorded a version of "Ain't Misbehavin'," a song he re-recorded several times throughout his career. http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 7 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

There is at least one spoken section in the excerpt. When Pyramus delivers the line, "What dole is here, / Eyes do you see," "SPOKEN" is indicated in the left margin. It is unclear whether or not this spoken section lasts until the end of the scene. Further songs are listed, but there is also a song, "Harvest Moon," listed for this spoken section. It is safe to assume that previous sections were sung; otherwise, the stage direction would not have been required to indicate the spoken section.

The only other direction noted in the left margin of the script occurs during Pyramus's earlier lines, "Thanks, Wall. May Jove / Shield thee for this," where we read that "LOUIS plays trumpet" (track 3). (This is, tellingly, the only reference to an actor by name in the excerpt.) mp3 TRACK 3: Louis Armstrong, "Ain't Misbehavin'"

Since Armstrong was cast as Bottom, who "plays" Pyramus, he must have interspersed his playing with his lines. In nearly every photograph that I have seen of Armstrong in the production, even when he is embracing Maxine Sullivan (Titania), he appears with trumpet in hand, though he apparently did not play it enough for most audience members. Brooks Atkinson writes, "Although Louis Armstrong carries his golden horn whenever he appears, he hardly has a chance to warm it up until the show is well over" (Atkinson 1939), and , though he was relatively complimentary about the play, noted that Armstrong played "only occasional snatches of trumpet" (quoted in Bergreen 1997, 396).

The clearest way in which the script emphasizes the combination of swing and Shakespeare is in its overall form. The layout of the script, with the adapted and truncated, but recognizably Shakespearean lines appearing on the left, and the corresponding song titles that provide the melody for each section on the right, can be viewed as a representation of swing and Shakespeare coming into contact. The structure is reminiscent of the form of some of Langston Hughes's earlier poems, such as "The Black Clown" and "The Big-Timer," in which "THE MOOD" is written on the left margin, separate from "THE POEM" on the right; Hughes uses this structure extensively for poems such as "Cultural Exchange" (from Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz), in which we read a detailed description of the musical accompaniment for the poem on the right column of the page: The rhythmically rough scraping of a guira continues monotonously

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 8 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

until a lonely flute call, high and far away, merges into piano variations on German lieder gradually changing into old-time traditional 12-bar blues up strong between verses until African drums throb against blues fading as the music ends. TACIT (Hughes 2001, 89-90) The similarity in layout between Hughes's poem and the excerpt from Swingin' the Dream encourages us to read both works in relation to their mise-en-scène, in the sense in which Patrice Pavis uses the term, as "the confrontation of all signifying systems, in particular the utterance of the dramatic text in performance" (Pavis 1992, 25). In the space between these two elements are the many dialogic possibilities for a meeting between swing and Shakespeare, text and performance, and performers and audience(s). The complexity of these interactions does not allow for simplistic oppositions. It is there that we might find the something that is not quite swing, not quite Shakespeare, "something yet undefined" (Evans 2000, 32).

We might expect Swingin' the Dream's version of "Pyramus and Thisbe" to emphasize the irony inherent in the "homespun" actors' performance, but instead it alters the http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 9 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Shakespearean text to legitimate both the performance and the combination of swing and Shakespeare, starting immediately with the prologue. Thus, what we find in A Midsummer Night's Dream, If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should think, we come not to offend, But with good will. To show our simple skill, [. . .] The actors are at hand: and, by their show, You shall know all, that you are like to know. (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.108-17)3 becomes If we offend, it is against our will We only want to show our skill You see the actors are at hand And by their acting and their show All of you shall know, all that you are like to know. As presented in Swingin' the Dream, the lines are less equivocal and the ludicrous punctuation is gone, thereby removing the primary source of humor and suggesting that the players are sincere in telling the audience, "We only want to show our skill." The apologetic tone calls to mind the aforementioned experiences of early African American Shakespearean actors. One might even detect a note of defiance in the last line, "All of you shall know, all that you are like to know." Instead of asking the audience to embrace the mechanicals for their bumbling ineptitude, the scene asks us to accept the performance at face value. If the scene pokes fun, it does not seem to direct its jibing either towards Shakespeare or towards the mechanicals (as does A Midsummer Night's Dream), but towards a hierarchical conception of art. For example, the stage direction for Thisbe's "'Tide life" line reads, "Ala [sic] burlesque on opera." Thisbe's line — "'Tide life, 'Tide death, 'Tide death, 'Tide life, / I come, I come I come I come I come without delay, without delay" — is ridiculously exaggerated, far more extravagant than its Shakespearean source. Where Shakespeare's farcical comedy targets Ovid, Swingin' the Dream targets high culture in general. Where Shakespeare's scene is a statement regarding what he hoped not to have done in his play, here the scene becomes a positive statement of the play's goals.

"Pyramus and Thisbe" is probably the scene in which the African American performers were best able to show their skill. Immediately preceding this scene, according to Van Heusen's list of songs, came a "Jam Session" that featured Mendelssohn's and Wagner's famous wedding marches. One can assume that the musicians swung these pieces. We see this kind of playfulness recorded in 's illustration for the program cover of Swingin' the Dream, in which Armstrong and Goodman blow away on their trumpet and clarinet, while the Bard http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 10 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

jitterbugs above them in a cloud, perhaps the cloud of smoke he is kicking up, and snaps the fingers of his left hand. The illustration reminds the audience that, as the title of the play implies, Shakespeare and A Midsummer Night's Dream are being "swung." Armstrong, not surprisingly, typifies such a playful approach. Leonard Feather writes: "Louis enjoyed himself thoroughly. ('Man,' he said to me during intermission, 'if Old Shakespeare could see me now!')" (Feather 1974, 20). Almost a decade later, Armstrong recalled his fellow actor Butterfly McQueen in Swingin' the Dream (what he calls in the letter "a Shakespearean play"): "'And every night I'd wait for her to come on stage and do her act. And it would just knock me completely out. Yea, she's a great little actress'" (quoted in Berrett 1999, 132).

One of the complaints leveled at Swingin' the Dream was that the production was too reverent towards Shakespeare. Already, we have seen that the "Pyramus and Thisbe" scene foregrounds its hybridity in order to legitimate the mechanicals' performance. If by reverence the reviewers meant that the play adhered too closely to the Shakespearean text, this assessment is also contradicted by "Pyramus and Thisbe." While the scene does not "throw Shakespeare out of the window" (Atkinson 1939), it is substantially different from the one we find in A Midsummer Night's Dream. If the changes made to this scene are at all similar to those made in other scenes, the implication is that Shakespeare's presence is so insistent that, paradoxically, for the majority of reviewers the play would have to wipe Shakespeare out entirely for swing to be able to engage with him. While occasionally there appear unaltered lines, as when Thisbe laments, "O Wall, full often hast thou heard my moans," over a hundred complete lines of the Shakespearean text are cut or altered, and just over two hundred words are added (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.188).

Many of the minor changes to Shakespeare's poetry made in the script help to fit the verse lines better to their corresponding music. For example, an exchange between Pyramus and Thisbe, sung to the tune of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," is identical to Shakespeare's lines, except for the addition of the word "baby" from the song's chorus: "O kiss me thru the hole of this vile wall, Baby" and "I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all, Baby." Many of the alternating rhymes in A Midsummer Night's Dream become rhyming couplets in Swingin' the Dream, occasionally with some grasping lines ("This grisly beast, denominated Lion, / Scared Thisbe first, beneath the sign Orion"). Repetition is often employed for rhythmic purposes. There are subtle moments, as when Quince asks, "Perchance you wonder, you wonder at this show," and more emphatic cases, as when Pyramus repeats the trumpet-like, "Quail crush conclude and quell / Quail crush conclude and quell / Quail crush conclude and quell," a line that is difficult to repeat without swinging.

The most conspicuous alteration of the scene as rendered in A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, is the elimination altogether of Theseus's court. Some of the poetic changes to lines therefore do double duty, altering lines that would make little sense

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 11 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

without the court, such as Moonshine's, "This lantern should be the moon that you see, / And I the man in the moon seem to be." Unlike Shakespeare's lines, "This lanthorn doth the horn'd moon present; / Myself the man i' th' moon do seem to be" (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.244-45), this speech makes no reference to horns, since there is no need to provide an opening for Demetrius to make his obligatory cuckolding joke. The elimination of the court's derisive gaze and wry comments, like the alterations to the prologue, suggests that we are not to take the mechanicals' production here as lightly as we do in "standard" productions.

Although the court is not present in the scene, there is a "Stage Audience" that plays a minor role, acting as a chorus. Thisbe and the Stage Audience have a brief call and response. When Thisbe, before Lion frightens her off with his roar, asks, "This is cupid's statue - - - - but where is my love?" the chorus replies, "Down by the old mill stream, / He has gone to dream." When she asks again, "Do not deceive me - - - - - Where is my love?" they reply twice that "he'll be comin' round the mountain when he comes." When Thisbe asks a third time, "Do not grieve me - - - - - Where is my love?" they respond with a refrain to the tune of "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans." This section of the scene accentuates "repetition and difference," of which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes: "It is this principle of repetition and difference, this practice of intertextuality, which has been so crucial to the black vernacular form of Signifyin(g), jazz — and even its antecedents, the blues, the spirituals, and " (Gates 1988, 64). Having a chorus, rather than the mocking court members, interact with the mechanicals also further legitimates the mechanicals' performance. There is, however, a layer of irony in that, although the white, aristocratic stage audience is not present, the "mechanicals" are still performing for the apparently less responsive, and predominantly white, Center Theatre audience.

Despite the potential that one might see in this script excerpt, it is entirely possible that Swingin' the Dream was a travesty not only in the sense of being a burlesque, but also in the sense of simply being bad. I am, if it has not been clear in this essay, a fan of both Shakespeare and swing, and, therefore, may give Swingin' the Dream more than its due. I do not oppose the idea that the play did not work, but what I do oppose is the assertion, whether implicit or explicit, that the production could not have worked. While it might be going too far to say, as Kammen does of Seldes, that the "several productions designed for African-American performers on which he lavished energy were simply too far ahead of public opinion to achieve commercial success" (Kammen 1996, 98), Swingin' the Dream, it seems, was at least too optimistic about the democratizing potential of jazz.

NOTES

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 12 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

1. I delivered an early version of this paper at the University of Western Ontario's "Modernist Shakespeare and After" graduate conference in April, 2004 and am grateful to M. J. Kidnie and others who offered feedback at that time. I owe thanks to Fran Teague for introducing me to Swingin' the Dream and for her kind assistance in my research. I also would like to thank Timothy Edwards at the UCLA Music Library Special Collections, Marian and Timothy Seldes for their generous permission to reproduce the script excerpt, and the editors for their invaluable comments. 2. In Van Heusen's song list, "Flying Home" is listed beneath "Jitterburg Dance" and "Exit of the Fairies." 3. All references to A Midsummer Night's Dream are to The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al.

REFERENCES Atkinson, Brooks. 1939. Review of Swingin' the Dream. New York Times. 30 November. Benchley, Robert. 1939. Review of Swingin' the Dream. The New Yorker. 9 December, 38-40. Benny Goodman Sextet. 1999. "Flying Home." By Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton. Jazz: The Definitive Performances. Sony J2K 65807 (CD). Bergreen, Laurence. 1997. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagent Life. New York: Broadway Books. Berrett, Joshua, ed. 1999. The Louis Armstrong Companion: Eight Decades of Commentary. New York: Schirmer Books. Brown, John Mason. 1939. Review of Swingin' the Dream. New York Post. 30 November, 50. Carr, Ian, , and . 2002. Jazz: The Rough Guide: The Essential Companion to Artists and Albums. 2d ed. London: Rough Guides. Charell, Erik, and Gilbert Seldes. 1939. Swingin' the Dream. Jimmy Van Heusen Collection. UCLA Library. Clark, Andrew, ed. 2001. Riffs and Choruses: A New Jazz Anthology. London: Continuum. Ellington, Duke. 1976. Music is My Mistress. New York: Da Capo Press. Ellison, Ralph. 2001. "Ralph Ellison's Territorial Vantage." In Living With Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings, edited by Robert G. O'Meally. New York: Modern Library. 15- 33.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 13 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Evans, Nicholas M. 2000. Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s. New York: Garland. Feather, Leonard G. 1974. From Satchmo to Miles. London: Quartet Books. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gill, Glenda Eloise. 1988. White Grease Paint on Black Performers: A Study of the Federal Theatre of 1935-1939. New York: Peter Lang. Hill, Errol. 1984. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Holiday, Billie. 2002. "Darn that Dream." By Eddie De Lange and Jimmy Van Heusen. Body and Soul. Billie Holiday. Verve 589308 (CD). Hughes, Langston. 2001. "Cultural Exchange." In The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Poems: 1951-1967. Vol. 2. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 89-92. Iyengar, Sujata. 2002. "White Faces, Blackface: The Production of 'Race' in Othello." In Othello: New Critical Essays. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Routledge. 103- 31. Kammen, Michael G. 1996. The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra. 2000. "Ain't Misbehavin'." By , Thomas "Fats" Waller, and Harry Brooks. Satch Plays Fats. Columbia/Legacy CK 64927 (CD). Pavis, Patrice. 1992. "From Page to Stage: A Difficult Birth." Translated by Jilly Daugherty. In Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Translated by Loren Kruger. London: Routledge. 24-47. Review of Swingin' the Dream. 1939a. Variety. 6 December, 50. Review of Swingin' the Dream. 1939b. Time. 11 December, 50. Review of Swingin' the Dream. 1939c. Time. 18 December, 35. Review of Swingin' the Dream. 1940. Theatre Arts. February, 93. Shakespeare, William. 1997. A Midsummer Night's Dream. In The Riverside Shakespeare. 2d ed. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 256-83. Stowe, David W. 1994. Swing Changes: Big-band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 14 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Teague, Fran. 2002. "Shakespeare, Beard of Avon." In Shakespeare After Mass Media. Edited by Richard Burt. New York: Palgrave. 221-41. Van Heusen, Jimmy. Collection. UCLA Music Library. Williams, Gary Jay. 1997. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

ONLINE RESOURCES Louis Armstrong House & Archives [cited 12 March, 2005]. http://www.satchmo.net (http://www.satchmo.net) Script excerpt from Swingin' the Dream. Jimmy Van Heusen Collection [cited 25 May, 2005]. UCLA Music Library. Available online (in PDF format) through Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation at http://atropos.english.uga.edu/borrowers/files/issue1/Pyramus_and_Thisbe.pdf (/borrowers/files/issue1/Pyramus_and_Thisbe.pdf) Swingin' the Dream [cited 12 March, 2005]. Internet Broadway Database. http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=13212 (http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp? ID=13212)

PERMISSIONS The image of the Benny Goodman Sextet is reproduced from "Solo Flight: The Charlie Christian Website" at http://home.elp.rr.com/valdes/ (http://home.elp.rr.com/valdes/) and with the kind permission of Leo Valdes. The image of Louis Armstrong as Bottom in "Pyramus and Thisbe" from the Louis Armstrong House & Archives at Queens College/CUNY is used by permission. The script of the "Pyramus and Thisbe" scene in Swingin' the Dream from the Jimmy Van Heusen Collection at UCLA is reproduced by permission of Marian and Timothy Seldes.

ABSTRACT | "A HYBRID SHAKESPEAREAN SHAGEROO" | A SCRIPT EXCERPT FROM SWINGIN' THE DREAM | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 15 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781411/show Page 16 of 16 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

They Were Always Doing Shakespeare: (/current) Antebellum Southern Actresses and Shakespearean Appropriation (/previous) ROBIN O. WARREN, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA (/about)

ABSTRACT | NINETEENTH-CENTURY REPERTORY | ANTEBELLUM ACTRESSES AND (/archive) APPROPRIATION | CONCLUSION | REFERENCES

ABSTRACT Antebellum actresses performed in a wide variety of plays meant to appeal to the diversity of spectators who attended the nineteenth- century theater. Theater historians agree, though, that plays by William Shakespeare dominated standard repertory offerings. No one has recognized, however, that many of the non-Shakespearean plays actually appropriate Shakespearean plots, a phenomenon that may partly account for the popularity of these dramas. While many plays popular on Old South stages appropriated Shakespearean plots, four especially stand out for paralleling closely their early modern inspirations. Evadne (1819), by Richard Lalor Sheil, draws on Much Ado About Nothing (1600); Virginius (1820), by James Sheridan Knowles, uses Titus Andronicus (1592) as a guide; The Wife (1833), also by Knowles, follows the plot of Othello (1603); and The Honey Moon (1805), by John Tobin, corresponds to The Taming of the Shrew (1592). Evadne and Virginius stress the necessity of protecting a young, unmarried woman's purity while The Wife and The Honey Moon emphasize the importance of wifely fidelity and deference. As the experience of antebellum actresses Eliza Logan, Jane Placide, Frances Denny Drake, and Julia Dean Hayne shows, however, women

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 1 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

who performed the lead female parts in these plays did not always live up to the expectations espoused in their stage roles; instead, they often exposed the artificiality of rigidly prescribed gender roles in their daily lives by transgressing against the very norms they affirmed on stage.

In 1820, Jane Placide, a young actress from , South Carolina, debuted with Charles Gilfert's Virginia Company in John Tobin's The Honey Moon (1805), an appropriation of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (1592). The accolades that followed Placide's performance brought her to the attention of New Orleans theater manager James Caldwell, who hired her in 1821 to act as leading lady for his fledgling stock company at the Orleans Theatre. In just a few seasons, Placide won the steadfast admiration of English-speaking New Orleans playgoers for her performances in both Shakespearean and non- Shakespearean roles. An imbroglio that swirled around Placide just four years after her debut, however, reveals the gap that existed between conservative performed stage roles and the unconventional reality of performative scripts enacted by Placide and other antebellum actresses in their daily lives (Burroughs 1970, 4-6, 29; Durham 1986, 29-30; Hostetler 1964, 49; Kendall 1952, 23-24; Ludlow 1966, 216-17, 226).

In 1824, James Caldwell built a new theater on Camp Street, which he named the American Theatre, and hired the young Edwin Forrest to serve as his leading actor. Forrest and Placide co-starred in non- Shakespearean favorites such as Augustus von Kotzebue's The Stranger, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's School for Scandal, and Daniel Terry's adaptation of Walter Scott's Guy Mannering, which Charlotte Cushman later made famous for her depiction of Meg Merrilies. They also played across from one another in Shakespearean standards such as Richard III and Romeo and Juliet (Hostetler 1964, 77; Lyle 1938, 45, 53; Smither 1967, 39-44). Spending so much time with Placide on stage piqued Forrest's romantic interest, and he quickly found himself infatuated with the woman whom local critics called "Queen of the Drama in New Orleans" (Moody 1960, 44). During his second season, Forrest began to publish love poems dedicated to Placide in the Louisiana Advertiser, but he soon learned that James Caldwell also bore a keen interest in Placide. Their competition for the leading lady's attentions inevitably resulted in an explosive break between the two men. Caldwell announced a performance of Twelfth Night in which he played the Duke and Placide played Olivia; so fervidly did he deliver his lines that a few nights after the performance, Forrest challenged Caldwell to a duel. Caldwell http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 2 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

refused Forrest's dare, whereupon the hot-headed young actor posted a series of broadsides that denounced Caldwell as a "scoundrel and a coward" (Alger 1877, 137; Hostetler 1964, 91; Moody 1960, 46; Smither 1967, 44). Caldwell's paternalistic obligation to oversee the welfare of his stock company members might have motivated him to gall Forrest and put an end to the young actor's romantic overtures toward Placide. More likely, Caldwell's own feelings compelled his intervention, for he and Placide maintained an unusually close relationship for the duration of their professional association, which ended only when she died in 1835.

During the fourteen years that Placide worked for Caldwell, the two took several long trips together, and he came to serve as Placide's financial and legal advisor, a position that her brother Thomas, as her oldest male relative, should have assumed. Placide not only relied on Caldwell to manage her personal affairs during her life, but she also left her entire estate to him when she died. Had Caldwell not already been married to Maria Carter Hall Wormsley, great-granddaughter of Robert "King" Carter, an early rich planter on the James River in Virginia, his relationship with Jane Placide would not be quite so remarkable, but Caldwell's marital status called the intimacy between him and his employee into question. Cognizant of their visible public positions, Jane Placide and James Caldwell never lived together openly, but the circumstances surrounding their relationship certainly suggest that they carried on a long-term affair (Burroughs 1970, 95-97; Hostetler 1964, 22-25, 123, 133, 249-51).

While Jane Placide probably maintained a secret existence as Caldwell's mistress, she continued to play traditional stage roles that upheld the conservative social and sexual mores of the antebellum South, where a patriarchal culture dictated the chastity and obedience of unmarried and married women alike. These roles included acquiescent female characters from Shakespearean favorites, such as Queen Anne in Richard III (1592), Ophelia in Hamlet (1600), and Desdemona in Othello (1603). Many of Placide's non-Shakespearean roles appropriated parts from the early modern playwright's works and similarly emphasized feminine compliance. Juliana in John Tobin's The Honey Moon (1805), Margarita in Beaumont and Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (1624), and Virginia in James Sheridan Knowles's Virginius (1820) all were women who bowed to the demands of the men in their lives (Burroughs 1970, 45, 54-55, 68). The contrast between Jane Placide's conventional stage roles and the unconventionality of her everyday life illustrates a tension that surrounded Shakespearean plays http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 3 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

and their appropriations in the antebellum South. On the one hand, these plays affirmed the region's patriarchal ideology, which demanded faithfulness, chastity, and obedience from its white women; on the other hand, the actresses who performed these roles frequently undermined this ideology through the performative roles they played in their daily lives.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY REPERTORY The plays that Jane Placide and other southern actresses performed were part of a wide-ranging repertory that theater managers such as James Caldwell scheduled to appeal to the variety of playgoers who attended their theaters. Americans of every class, race, and sex attended the theater in the first half of the nineteenth century, and appealing to this diversity meant that theater managers had to offer a variety of entertainment. Theatrical offerings in the South paralleled those in other parts of the country: ribald farces, circus acts, music recitals, burlesques, and equestrian spectacles shared the stage with Shakespearean dramas and plays by contemporary European and English dramatists. An evening's entertainment generally featured one full-length, "legitimate" play and an assortment of the shorter variety acts that preceded, followed, and sometimes even punctuated the main offering. While adaptations of works by contemporary French and German writers such as Victor Hugo and Augustus von Kotzebue were popular, so too were plays by late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century British writers such as Oliver Goldsmith, James Sheridan Knowles, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richard Lalor Sheil, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and John Tobin. A few native playwrights also wrote for the stage; John Augustus Stone wrote Metamora, the wildly popular play that secured actor Edwin Forrest's fame, and theater managers Dion Boucicault and Augustin Daly both wrote and produced a string of popular dramas that theaters throughout the country staged (Dormon 1967, 252-280; Levine 1988, 21-23; Meserve 1986, 17, 117-18, 225; Meserve 1994, 50; Wilson 1973, 126).

Theater historians agree, though, that plays by William Shakespeare dominated standard repertory offerings. Theater historian and Shakespearean scholar Gary Taylor explains that the successive publication of affordable editions of Shakespeare's complete plays in the eighteenth century helped enshrine him as England's finest playwright. Famous performers also cultivated particular Shakespearean roles, with which audiences came to associate them over time, further entrenching dramas by the early modern playwright in the popular repertory of the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 4 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

day (Taylor 1989, 114-119). Local stock companies had to make sure that their performers could play the necessary supporting roles when the touring stars visited. When American actors and actresses began to rise to star status, they followed in the tradition of their English forebears. For instance, in the eighteenth century, English actress Sarah Siddons became known for her Lady Macbeth, while her niece Fanny Kemble thrilled American audiences with her characterizations of Juliet, Portia, and Beatrice when she toured the country in 1835 (Clinton 2000, 47-63; Shattuck 1976, 102-3). Later in the decade, American actress Charlotte Cushman, garnered fame for Lady Macbeth and for her breeches portrayal of Romeo (Shattuck 1976, 87-95). Similarly, southern stars Frances Denny Drake and her niece Julia Dean Hayne both benefited from the associations they made in playing the witty Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (Bailey 1934, 71; Blackburn 1927, Appendix B; Dietz 1921, 54; Duggar 1941, 31; Koon 1989, 122; Margretts 1959, 254).

Shakespeare also maintained a following in part because audiences saw cut versions of some plays, and these revised forms presented simpler, shorter plots that spectators could follow more easily. The altered dramas also underscored thematic dichotomies that shored up current political and sexual ideology. For example, Colley Cibber's Richard the Third streamlines the cast and diminishes the corruption of the title character's peers, thereby turning Richard into the main site of evil in the play (Shattuck 1976, xi). Patriotic Americans could attend Cibber's version and leave feeling smug that they had vanquished such self- serving, aristocratic monarchs. Similarly, by deleting the frame story of Christopher Sly that begins The Taming of the Shrew, David Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio draws more focused attention to the process of enfolding the recalcitrant Kate into the established patriarchy.

Managers modified full-length plays according to the taste of their clientele, as well. Though David Garrick's version of Romeo and Juliet ends tragically, many nineteenth-century companies gave the play their own happy surprise ending until William Charles Macready and Charlotte Cushman restored the tragic finale (Shattuck 1976, xi, 92, 139). Theater historian David Grimsted notes, as well, that some managers followed the example of the Royal Patent Theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden and eliminated explicit sexual allusions or softened offensive words such as "whore," which became "wench." Juliet sometimes refused a kiss from Romeo at their first meeting, and Hamlet often failed to harass Ophelia about her wantonness. These rhetorical alterations helped to associate Shakespeare with morality, but http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 5 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

the notoriety and gentility already affiliated with his name brought the same recognition to his plays that might not always suffer from drastic plot modifications. Thus, theatergoers could ostensibly bolster their moral codes and raise their class status simply by attending a Shakespearean production (Grimsted 1987, 112-23).

American theaters could easily follow the example of the English patent theaters in part because John Philip Kemble had tenaciously published his own acting versions of the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays he produced at the Drury Lane Theatre when he was manager between 1783 and 1802. Then, when he moved to Covent Garden, he published his reworked repertory in 1808. Theater managers in England and America saw Kemble as "the high-priest of Shakespeare" and wanted to model their productions after his (Shakespeare 1974, xiv). Later editors of acting editions, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and William Oxberry, even reprinted some of his texts verbatim (Shakespeare 1974, ix-xxi). The early nineteenth-century American reading public, on the other hand, probably knew Bell's Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (1773), as this single-volume edition was the first one of Shakespeare's plays published in the United States. Available by 1795, this text used Samuel Johnson's 1765 edition as its basis. Readers might also have owned multi-volume copies of individual plays imported from England and edited by Thomas Hanmer in 1744 or Alexander Pope in 1725. All of these editions differed from the staged versions, retaining many of those altered and cut words and phrases that theater managers deemed inappropriate for public performance (Taylor 1989, 127-29).

Judith Fisher and Stephen Watt recognize this trend in When They Weren't Doing Shakespeare, an anthology of essays treating non- Shakespearean repertory selections in nineteenth-century British and American theaters. The valorization of Shakespearean drama has resulted in a dearth of criticism treating plays by other authors, a lack that Fisher and Watt's volume helps to correct (Fisher and Watt 1989, xiii-xxii). Recent scholarship has rarely recognized, however, that many of the non-Shakespearean plays actually appropriate Shakespearean plots, a phenomenon that may partly account for the popularity of these dramas.

Repertory in the antebellum South differed little from that in other regions of the country, but, as Jean Marsden points out, different audiences bring a variety of interpretations and understandings to the dramatic productions that they watch, and for the last four centuries, Shakespearean plays have engendered particularly diverse responses

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 6 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

(Dormon 1967, 256; Marsden 1991, 1). Christy Desmet agrees, but she contends that a more deliberate exchange takes place as performers, spectators, and even new dramatists appropriate and circulate the signifier "Shakespeare," which in turn amasses and bestows "symbolic value on cultural projects" (Desmet 1999, 5; Marsden 1991, 1). For playgoers in the Old South, Shakespearean plays and their appropriations functioned in part to shore up the region's conservative patriarchal ideology. As historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown explains, southern families, like the English aristocracy that they emulated, wished to pass on intact their wealth to the next generation. Men needed the guarantee of chaste wives to ensure a line of legitimate offspring who could inherit and hand on their assets; hence, raising virtuous daughters who guarded their virginity and revered male authority was of paramount importance, especially to the wealthy (Wyatt-Brown 1986, 85-89). Since many Shakespearean plays and their appropriations emphasize the importance of female fidelity, they found a permanent place on the region's stages.

The cultural capital associated with Shakespeare's name also ensured the production of his plays and their appropriations in the urban antebellum South. Lawrence Levine, Michael Bristol, and Thomas Cartelli have all written about the central place that Shakespeare occupied within nineteenth-century American culture, but Levine and Bristol see his popularity as resulting from reverence, while Cartelli contends that appropriations in the form of burlesques and farces reveal an irreverence that bolstered the emerging democratic ethos (Bristol 1990, 123-30; Cartelli 1999, 29; Levine 1988, 21). Cartelli does concede, however, that appropriations can also enrich or thicken a narrative, and he agrees that serious re-readings can draw on the cultural capital of the original creator to gain clout and to encourage the author's institutionalization (Cartelli 1999, 18). Given the respect for white male authority in the Old South, the popularity of Shakespeare makes more sense in the latter terms.

Southerners, like Americans in other regions of the country, also associated Shakespeare with morality and gentility. Appropriations of the early modern playwright's works also received plenty of attention, as they drew on the celebrity and cachet associated with Shakespeare's name. While many plays popular on Old South stages appropriated Shakespearean plots, four stand out especially as paralleling closely their early modern inspirations. Evadne (1819), by Richard Lalor Sheil, draws on Much Ado About Nothing (1600); Virginius (1820), by James Sheridan Knowles, uses Titus Andronicus (1592) as a guide; The Wife http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 7 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

(1833), also by Knowles, follows the plot of Othello (1603); and The Honey Moon (1805), by John Tobin, corresponds to The Taming of the Shrew (1592).

Knowles was a devotee of Shakespeare and often borrowed the early modern playwright's plots and stylistic devices. Like Shakespeare, Knowles wrote in verse, rather than prose, and he favored a five-act play structure peppered with multiple plots. He featured soliloquies and wordplay, as well as syntactical inversion and some Elizabethan phrasing. Indeed, Knowles's imitative style quickly gained him a reputation with nineteenth-century critics as "a modern Shakespeare" (Murray 1986, 164). John Tobin's ability to mimic Shakespeare also brought him great acclaim. When The Honey Moon debuted at the Drury Lane Theatre in London on January 11, 1805, reviewers praised the drama for its similarities to Shrew and commended Tobin for his ability to model his drama on England's finest playwright (Cumberland's British Theatre 1826, 6, quoted in Smith, J. 1977, 15). Scholars have not remarked on Sheil's use of Shakespeare, but the plot of Evadne follows Much Ado too closely for us to discount the similarities between the plays. Since nineteenth-century critics appreciated successful imitations, Sheil likely borrowed from Shakespeare to endow his dramatic endeavor with esteem (Introduction to Foulkes 1986, 1-9, especially p. 1). Nevertheless, Sheil's awareness of the parallels between his text and Much Ado becomes immaterial in light of theorist Roland Barthes's argument that "as soon as a fact is narrated . . . [a] disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, [and] writing begins" (Barthes 1995, 125). Sheil himself ceases to matter, while his text becomes the bearer of a variety of possible meaning(s). Because spectators and readers in both England and America revered Shakespeare's name, however, Evadne's association with the early modern playwright assured the play of an enthusiastic following in both countries.

Antebellum southern spectators enjoyed the appropriations played out on their stages as much as theatergoers in other parts of the country, especially when their themes buttressed the region's moral codes and values. Evadne and Virginius stress the necessity of protecting a young, unmarried woman's purity, while The Wife and The Honey Moon emphasize the importance of wifely fidelity and deference. Though these emphases would have found approval in the North, they particularly resonated in the antebellum South, where the economy depended on the subordination of women and slaves. As Jane Placide's experience shows, however, the actresses who performed the lead http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 8 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

female parts in these plays did not always live up to the expectations established by their stage roles. When Eliza Logan Wood, Frances Denny Drake, and Julia Dean Hayne played Evadne, Virginia, Julia, or Juliana, they exposed the artificiality of rigidly prescribed gender roles in their daily lives by transgressing against the very norms they affirmed on stage.

ANTEBELLUM ACTRESSES AND APPROPRIATION Eliza Logan Wood, a favorite with antebellum theatrical companies throughout the 1840s and 50s, commanded a large repertory, but she particularly favored Sheil's Evadne, a drama about a maligned woman proven true (Yeomans 1952, 52). Announcing Eliza's arrival for a star appearance in 1854 at The New Orleans St. Charles Theatre, the Daily Picayune encouraged playgoers to turn out for her performance of Evadne, "one of Miss Logan's most successful parts" ("St. Charles Theatre" 1854). Like Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Evadne finds herself wrongly accused of cheating on her betrothed. The villainous Ludovico, like Don John in Shakespeare's play, defames Evadne in order to hurt his political rival and her fiance, Vicentio. Since a woman's honor reflected that of her father or husband in Renaissance Italy, the setting for both Evadne and Much Ado About Nothing, Ludovico can strike at Vicentio by damaging his promised bride's reputation. As does Hero, Evadne strongly protests the charges brought against her, but false ocular proof — a painted miniature of her supposed lover, the King of Naples — convinces Vicentio that she has betrayed him by sleeping with their sovereign. Incensed by Ludovico's shenanigans and the threat to Evadne's reputation, her old and revered family name, and Vicentio's honor, the king agrees to help by faking his own death. As expected, Ludovico then tries to install himself as ruler and simultaneously claim Evadne as his own lover. The king suddenly reappears, condemns Ludovico, and clears Evadne's name.

Evadne follows Much Ado closely until the end, but a slight difference in the resolution of the two plays is key to understanding the appeal of both plays to antebellum audiences. Each play champions 's duty to protect her virginity. (Indeed, nineteenth-century stage versions of Much Ado played down the sexually explicit language in the accusations leveled at Hero by eliminating such lines as "She knows the heat of a luxurious bed" [see Shakespeare 1974, 4.1.33, 45]). Evadne, however, also lauds filial devotion and loyalty. While Hero acquiesces to her father's wishes and pretends to die rather than live as a reputedly fallen woman, she escapes condemnation by a series of coincidences —

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 9 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

not by professing concern for her father's slandered name. Borachio confesses to defaming her for pay from Don John, and Dogberry, the oafish constable, realizes that he can procure political clout for himself when he overhears Borachio and turns him in to Hero's father. In contrast, Evadne actively seeks retribution by articulately reminding the king of her late father's honorable standing: defiling the daughter, she chides, means tarnishing the father's memory. Concerned for Evadne's familial honor, the king turns on Ludovico, rights Evadne's reputation, and restores her to Vicentio (Sheil 1994, 5.1.349-95, pp. 73-74 of 80). The associations of Sheil's play with Shakespeare's Much Ado assured Evadne an enthusiastic following in nineteenth-century America, but the drama's consistency with southern cultural mores embedded it even further in the repertory of the Old South, where a strongly entrenched patriarchy made the honoring of fathers paramount for children. While Evadne stands up to the preeminent masculine power figure by insisting on her innocence, she also endorses the patriarchal structure by lauding her father and placing concern for his good name ahead of her own reputation.

Eliza Logan Wood, who so often played Evadne, enjoyed a close relationship with her father, Cornelius Logan, a comic actor and playwright who served as her manager, but she also defied the stereotype of a dependent daughter. After Cornelius died in 1853, Eliza continued traveling and performing on her own, but even before his death, she occupied a liminal space. On the one hand, she depended upon her father's business expertise to book engagements and make travel arrangements, but on the other hand, she occupied a public position far different from the private, domestic realm that most southern women then occupied. After Cornelius died, Eliza initially assumed a demure persona and asked manager Sol Smith to help her obtain performance positions "with the most favorable terms possible." She soon gained confidence in making specific requests, however, for within a year, she crowed to Smith, "you would scarcely believe what a little business woman I am" (Eliza Logan to Sol Smith, 1 April, 1853, and 11 February, 1854, Sol Smith Collection, Box 5 of 6, Missouri Historical Society). Her boast was not empty, either, for Logan procured lucrative engagements in Savannah, Columbus, Memphis, and St. Louis until she married and went into semi-retirement in 1855 (Blackburn 1927, Appendix C; Keller 1957, 117-125, 136; Langley 1937, 58-60, 76- 77; Yeomans 1952, 52, 124-27, 139-40).

Eliza Logan got her start in the North, but she made her career in the antebellum South. Born in in 1830, Eliza was fortunate http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 10 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

enough to attend a private academy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for her elementary education. She and her five sisters did not go on to finishing school, then the equivalent of higher education for young women, even though their two brothers trained for the legal and medical professions. Instead, Cornelius Logan encouraged his daughters to cultivate theatrical careers, but initially only Eliza followed his example. Her younger sister Olive later took up acting in addition to newspaper reporting and public speaking, but Eliza first attracted the most attention for her stage talent. She debuted at the Chestnut Theatre in Philadelphia at the age of eleven. When she and her father began touring together two years later, they found their largest and most enthusiastic houses in the South. Between 1843 and 1849, Eliza and Cornelius worked as stock company members for Noah Ludlow and Sol Smith in Mobile, New Orleans, and St. Louis, but by 1850, Eliza had gained such popularity that the partners began to feature her as a star. In addition to playing the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 11 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

heroine in Sheil's Evadne, Logan often enacted the lead roles in Knowles's The Hunchback, Bulwer-Lytton's Lady of Lyons, and Benjamin Thompson's adaptation of Kotzebue's The Stranger. Though non-Shakespearean roles largely dominated her repertory, Logan did include Juliet, Hero, and Cordelia in her offerings. She appeared at the St. Louis Theater more than any other star in the 1850s, but Ludlow and Smith also booked her in their New Orleans and Mobile theaters (Blackburn 1927, Appendices B and C; Duggar 1941, 179; Keller 1957, 119, 121, 125, 136; Langley 1937, 76-77; Marston 1856, 3-4; Meserve 1986, 90; Wills 1971, 21-28; Yeomans 1952, 52, 124-27, 139-40). In 1859, Eliza married George Woods, who had just begun to manage The People's Theater in St. Louis. Noah Ludlow notes that Eliza's expertise, gained from years of acting, helped George immeasurably; after they married, she continued to act, but she also worked alongside her husband as co-manager, "furnishing him with a practical knowledge of theatrical matters in which he otherwise would have been deficient" (Ludlow 1966, 730).

Like Eliza Logan, Jane Placide defied the retiring female stereotypes she often played on stage; in addition to the Shakespearean roles that she played across from Edwin Forrest in 1825, she also acted in James Sheridan Knowles's Virginius. While southern theatrical companies did not stage Titus Andronicus, the apparent model for Knowles's play, they frequently scheduled performances of Virginius, which probably appealed more to audiences than would Titus because of its paucity of gore (on the similarities between the two plots, see Murray 1986, 164- 67). Shakespeare wrote Titus early in his career, and the play included many conventions of the bloody revenge tragedies then the rage on early modern stages. The drama takes place in ancient Rome, and its plot swirls around a political rivalry. The events also feature the gang rape and murder of an innocent young woman in addition to human sacrifice, bodily mutilation, and mother-son cannibalism (Maus 1997, 371). Antebellum southerners fancied themselves as genteel and cultured, and they undoubtedly found the rawness of Titus repugnant, even though many could ignore the horrors inflicted on the African American slave population in their midst.

In contrast, Virginius found a standard place in the region's repertory; the play's popularity probably stemmed from its streamlined focus on the defamation of the lead female character and the revenge extracted by her father for the damage done to her name and that of their family. This plot, like that of Evadne, would have resonated with antebellum southerners who so highly prized the purity and honor of their single http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 12 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

white women. A retelling of a Roman story that became one of several sources for Shakespeare's Titus, the drama traces Virginius's agonizing decision to kill his daughter Virginia after Appius Claudius has compromised her sexual honor. Before Claudius has even seen and desired Virginia, however, her father has vouched for her innocence and virtue. Presenting her to Icilius, her betrothed, Virginius boasts that she is My daughter truly filial — both in word And act — yet even more in act than word; And — for the man who hopes to win her hand — A virgin, from whose lips a soul as pure Exhales, as e'er responded to the blessing Breathed in a parent's kiss. (Knowles 1994a, 2.2.50-55, p. 28 of 95) Virginius's pride in his daughter derives not only from her chastity, but also from her obedience and filial devotion to him. Called to speak with her father about her future in act 1, for example, she quickly comes into his chambers and immediately asks, "Well, father, what is your will?" (Knowles 1994a, 1.2.53, p. 17 of 95). For southern playgoers, Virginia would have represented the ideal antebellum daughter: she has internalized an allegiance to patriarchal ideals and accepted for herself a submissive and dutiful role.

While Jane Placide played the meek and retiring Virginia on stage, she hardly displayed those qualities in her own life. In addition to violating the South's social and sexual norms through her unusually close relationship with James Caldwell, she breached antebellum decorum by leaving her extended family and moving to a distant city, where she lived on her own and established a successful career in the public sphere. Jane's parents, Alexander and Charlotte Placide, introduced all five of their children to the theater as young children, and they encouraged them to pursue dramatic careers as young adults. Alexander was an actor and pantomime artist who had immigrated to America from France in 1791; he first played in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston but then moved south to Charleston, South Carolina, where he rose to become manager of the English theater in 1800. Charlotte Wrighten Placide, an English actress, met Alexander while she was performing in Charleston during the 1796 season. The two fell in love and married the same year. Born in 1804, Jane was the Placide's third child; she began performing bit parts at four, and she debuted in her first adult role at sixteen. Over the course of her fifteen-year career, Jane Placide not only performed for New Orleans audiences, but she also traveled to New http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 13 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

York City and to London, where she was well received. She helped Caldwell recruit performers for the St. Charles Theatre in both cities, and in New Orleans, she entered with him into several real estate investment ventures. In short, Jane Placide carved out a place for herself as a sophisticated businesswoman and a talented actress in a world that otherwise offered very few, circumscribed roles to its women.

Frances Denny Drake and her niece, Julia Dean Hayne, also challenged the status quo in their personal lives, but played stage roles that undergirded the retiring positions that married women in the Old South were supposed to occupy. Both women, for example, regularly included Sheridan's The Wife and Tobin's The Honey Moon in their stock repertory. The two plays follow their Shakespearean models, Othello and The Taming of the Shrew, by calling for wifely fidelity and obedience, characteristics that Drake and Hayne eschewed when they left abusive husbands and initiated divorces. Wise to the source of their income, however, the two actresses continued to perform in The Wife and The Honey Moon, as well as their Shakespearean counterparts, for the dramas all drew appreciative audiences in the antebellum South.

Unlike many appropriations which draw on their sources implicitly, Knowles's The Wife explicitly borrows from Othello. In an epilogue added by Charles Lamb for the play's opening performance at Covent Garden in 1833, the lead female character, Mariana, who was first played by Ellen Tree, recognizes these close parallels even as she acknowledges some differences between the two plays. Mariana declares, "I dream'd each night, I should be Desdemona'd . . . . But my Othello, to his vows more zealous / Twenty Iagos could not make him jealous" (Knowles 1994b, epilogue, ll. 23, 30-31). Her lines show that Mariana, like Desdemona, has fallen prey to a scheming, jealous, and power-hungry villain intent on tarnishing her spotless reputation and ruining her marriage. Ferrardo, Iago's counterpart, gets St. Pierre drunk and brings him to Mariana's room, where he leaves his scarf; like the handkerchief planted on Cassio in Othello, the scarf serves as ocular proof of Mariana's supposed indiscretion. Unlike Othello, however, Mariana's husband Leonardo never doubts his wife's chastity; instead, he ferrets out the culprit and restores her good name (Knowles 1994b).

The Wife further differs from Othello by evading the complications of race and class posed by Shakespeare's play. Leonardo, a prince of Mantua, is hardly equal in status to Othello, no matter how distinguished an army career Shakespeare's Moor had built for himself. Knowles's high-born protagonist undoubtedly appealed to elite southerners who

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 14 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

fancied themselves the equivalent of English aristocrats and to middle- class southerners who had aspirations of upward mobility. Similarly, the play might have attracted playgoers who recoiled from the specter of a free black man marrying a young white woman. James Dormon follows this logic when he asserts that Othello found an audience in the South because most theatergoers probably saw the drama as a warning against mixed-race relationships (Dormon 1967, 276). Historian Bertram Wyatt- Brown's analysis of miscegenation in the Old South lends credence to Dormon's argument. Wyatt-Brown explains that southerners cast a blind eye to relations between white men and black women, but in order to preserve the racial purity and legitimacy of white heirs, relations between white women and black men were taboo (Wyatt-Brown 1986, 105-15). A review of Aristotle's Poetics recalls that tragedy compels in part because it dramatizes the abhorrent; hence, white audiences could have enjoyed the play for its portrayal of a relationship that they found loathsome (Aristotle 1997, 22).

The play might also have been popular as a producer of white and black racial identity, for the actors and actresses who played in Othello enacted ideas of blackness and whiteness that affirmed and established norms for both groups. When antebellum actresses played white women such as Desdemona across from white actors who were enacting black men such as Othello, the whiteness of the actresses was heightened. As Toni Morrison explains in Playing in the Dark, "the fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive," deflecting back onto white characters their own fears and desires and allowing them to define themselves as what they are not (Morrison 1992, 17). Following this line of thought, the colorlessness that film scholar Richard Dyer ascribes to whiteness finds its actual multi-colored content solely in contrast to blackness. Whiteness comes into existence only when the nonwhite is there in the background (Dyer 1988, 44-64, especially pp. 48-49).

Whether or not Othello appeared to playgoers as sooty black, tawny and bronze, or just lightly tanned depended upon which actor played the part and perhaps when he played the role, but any contrasting shade created the duality necessary to establish Desdemona's whiteness (and thereby her sexual vulnerability). Historians James Dormon and Tilden Edelstein claim that actors who played Othello throughout the antebellum period lightened their skin tone more and more so that by the 1850s, southerners would have watched a performer who was hardly black at all.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 15 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Edmund Kean as Othello Dormon and Edelstein trace the careers of several famous actors who played Othello and contend that their considerable influence in the acting world would have caused widespread imitation. English actor Edmund Kean initiated the trend for altering Othello's appearance in the 1820s when he began playing the part with bronze-colored skin, an exotic turban, a flowing robe, and metal wrist-bands, a costume that made him look more like an Arab from than a man with black skin from the heart of Africa. Edwin Forrest, whose name became synonymous with Metamora, the fictional Native American dramatic hero that he made famous, not surprisingly gave his Othello an Indian look when he further lightened the character in the 1830s and 40s. Finally, Edwin Booth, who played Othello for the first time in 1849, became the lightest Othello ever, wearing just the slightest touch of tan

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 16 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

makeup along with sumptuous Persian robes that transformed him into an aristocratic Oriental suitor (Dormon 1967, 276-77; Edelstein 1982, 183-86).

In 1827, when Thomas Abthorpe Cooper played Othello at the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans across from leading stock actress Jane Placide, he did not follow the trend to lighten his makeup begun by Edmund Kean earlier in the decade. Cooper prided himself on his traditional acting techniques and disdained Kean's willingness to experiment with new dramatic approaches. In contrast, the young Junius Brutus Booth greatly admired Kean and had emulated his stage manner in England before making his way to America in 1821. Hence, when Booth performed with Placide in Othello at the St. Charles Theatre in March of 1829, his skin tone might have appeared more swarthy than black, even though he had played the Moor as black-skinned in an 1822 Savannah performance. Edwin Forrest's skin certainly looked tawny rather than coal-black when he starred opposite Placide just a month later and again when he returned to New Orleans in 1839, playing Othello to Mary Ann Duff's Desdemona. By the time Julia Dean was playing Desdemona in the early 1850s, Edwin Booth was carefully holding his body so that his thinly applied beige makeup did not besmirch the whiteness of the actresses who performed with him in Othello, and in an 1852 performance, a strolling player in Macon, Georgia had to play the lead role "nearly white" so as not to displease the citizens. By 1860, actor James Wallack backed out of playing Othello in Mobile when the play disagreed with playgoers' sense of propriety (Burroughs 1970, 68; Dormon 1967, 277; Edelstein 1982, 186; Hostetler 1964; Koon 1994, 83-84; Shattuck 1976, 22-25, 42-50; St. Charles Theatre Advertisement 1839).

Literary scholar Charles Lower counters the views of Dormon and Edelstein, contending instead that southerners would not have allowed racial views or politics to contaminate their appreciation of great art. He cites numerous stage productions of the play throughout the antebellum period, ranging from Charleston to Memphis to New Orleans, and he quotes several sympathetic play reviews that never mention Othello's race. Such evidence, Lower says, shows that southerners would not have objected to watching a black Othello and discredits the notion that playgoers would have seen the play as an anti-miscegenation drama. Indeed, he asserts that reviews excising explicit discussion of Othello's color but referring to him as the "Moor" implicitly affirmed southerners' preference for his portrayal as a black man, thereby emphasizing the distinction between art and life. Of course, reviewers may not have been http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 17 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

troubled by a lighter-hued Othello, either. Lower does concede that Edmund Kean lightened his skin tone and that makeup instructions, memoirs, paintings, and lithographs "provide considerable evidence of tawny Othellos," but he maintains that a preponderance of black-skinned Moors also peopled the stage. His list includes William Charles Macready and Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, who did favor darker tones, but he also names Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth, who were both known for their lighter-skinned portrayals of Othello (Lower 1983, 205). Virginia Mason Vaughan similarly observes that William Charles Macready elicited no negative reactions from his slave-owning audiences in the South on his antebellum tours throughout the region, and she goes on to note a trend for whitening post-bellum Othellos, a tradition that reflected the heightened racial tensions and the increasingly rigid sexual taboos between races.

Proving Lower and Vaughan or Dormon and Edelstein right finally becomes a rather futile task, for as Lower asserts, historians can too easily simplify the view from afar just to prove a certain set of rigid assumptions. By focusing instead on the complexity of Othello's shifting representations, greater insights into antebellum race relations, particularly attitudes toward miscegenation, can be gained. Edelstein says that for three centuries, Othello has essentially become "a forum" for Americans to work out their feelings toward race in their culture (Edelstein 1982, 194). Philip Kolin agrees. He calls the play a "cultural seismograph" and notes that Othello has been interpreted as a white Venetian, an Arab, a blackamoor, a Spaniard, and a sub-Saharan African, depending on how various actors and audiences have used his character to respond to the upheavals of gender, race, and class concurrently at work in their culture (Kolin 2002, 1). Playgoers who attended the play in the Old South, then, might have seen lighter or darker skinned actors performing the part of the Moor, but any hue would have contrasted with the whiteness of the actress' skin who played Desdemona. Viewers, who were already attuned to the slightest subtleties of skin variation in their racially stratified society, would have been very sensitive to staged portrayals of skin tone, particularly as the Civil War approached and racial tension increased.

However antebellum playgoers interpreted Othello, they probably welcomed the comparative simplicity of The Wife's appropriated but streamlined plot. In particular, the play's emphasis on wifely fidelity would have resonated with most audience members. Before Leonardo has vindicated Mariana, for example, their family priest, who clearly doubts Mariana's innocence, cautions her to cultivate modesty and virtue http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 18 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

in her person. He warns: A woman hath in every state Most need of circumspection; — most of all When she becomes a wife! — She is a spring Must not be doubted; if she is, no oath That earth can utter will so purge the stream That men will think it pure! (Knowles 1994b, 3.4.68-74, p. 58 of 94) In the same way that Othello calls Desdemona "a weed" that attracts summer flies and "a cunning whore," Mariana's priest implies that his parishioner has become a permanently polluted stream. Southern readers would have known the brutal terms that the Moor employed from their Shakespearean texts, but theater managers most likely softened his abusive language for the stage by replacing terms such as "whore" with "strumpet," since most stage versions cut explicitly sexual references. (Actor William Charles Macready began this trend for chaste versions of Othello [see Vaughan 1994, 146, 135-53; for Shakespeare quotations see Shakespeare 1969a, 4.9.50, 76, p. 250; Shakespeare 1969b, 4.9.50, 76, pp. 562-63; Shakespeare 1974, 4.2.75, p. 62].) The didactic purpose of this name-calling might have mitigated its harshness for southerners who relied on married white women to uphold and reproduce the patriarchal ideology of the region.

The Taming of the Shrew and John Tobin's appropriation, The Honey Moon, focus not only on ensuring marital fidelity, but also on inculcating wifely submission and obedience. Antebellum audiences knew David Garrick's shortened version of Shakespeare's Shrew, Catharine and Petruchio (1756), which excises the frame story of Christopher Sly and focuses entirely on the conflict between the title characters. Garrick's rendition played to great acclaim on Old South stages, but Tobin's play received even more approbation. Soon after the play's successful London debut in 1805, Philadelphia's Park Theatre scheduled a performance, and American audiences reacted with similar appreciation. Samuel Drake's company included The Honey Moon in its repertory as the troupe traveled west in 1815, and the drama became a favorite with Noah Ludlow, who was then a fledgling actor with the troupe. When Ludlow struck out on his own, he frequently staged the play on opening night. As a result, the drama quickly became a standard season opener for many southern theatrical companies (Dormon 1967, 260; Smith, J. 1977, 14).

In the same way that Garrick's version of Shakespeare's Petruchio sets http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 19 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

about to tame Catharine's scolding tongue and teach her docility, so too does Tobin's Duke of Aranza work on reforming Juliana's willfulness and pride. Intent on showing his manly prowess, Petruchio boasts to his friends Grumio and Gremio that he has heard lions roar and thunder rumble like artillery, so a "little din" such as a woman's chatter will not daunt him. Furthermore, Petruchio assures them, because he has overcome "pitched battle" midst "loud larums, neighing steeds, and [clanging] ," vanquishing the shrewish Catharine will hardly be a test for him (Garrick 1981, pp. 187-220, 1.1.48, 52-53, p. 194). Both Catharine and Juliana stand up admirably to the browbeating they receive from their husbands, but eventually each caves in and repents of her assertiveness. The contrition that the two express verbally would have buttressed antebellum southerners' belief in a wife's duty to submit to her husband, but as a 1976 American Conservatory Theatre production directed by William Ball shows, facial expressions and body language can undermine and dismantle this message (Rothwell and Melzer 1990, item 602). If the actress playing Catharine uses a sarcastic tone when she reminds her sister, "Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, [and] thy sovereign," she can show scorn for the words she mouths (Garrick 1981, 3.1.250-51, p. 219). Similarly, if Juliana rolls her eyes or looks disgusted, she can call into question her assertion That modesty, in deed, in word, and in thought, Is the prime grace of woman; and with that, More than by frowning looks and saucy speeches She may persuade the man that rightly loves her, Whom she was ne'er intended to command. (Tobin 1994, 5.1.114-19, p. 89 of 104) Nonetheless, actresses who risked undercutting the sentiments expressed by Catharine and Juliana with body language or intonation could have endangered their careers. Audience disapproval, combined with poor press reviews, could keep playgoers from attending future performances as well as deter theater managers from re-engaging such transgressive performers.

Had Frances Denny Drake and Julia Dean Hayne played Catharine and Juliana as independent-minded women who only complied reticently with their husband's wishes, it is likely that neither would have attracted such large audiences or received as many contracts from theater managers. Nor would local newspapers have raved so approvingly about their demure but compelling stage performances. Despite the conservative personae that they portrayed on stage, however, Drake and http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 20 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Hayne did cultivate autonomous performative roles in their personal lives. Both women terminated unhappy marriages even though they risked public censure, and they subsequently juggled the demands of career and single motherhood with great success.

Frances Denny grew up in Albany, New York, but she joined Samuel Drake's theatrical company in 1815 and accompanied them on a tour of the South, where she ended up making her career. Denny performed with the Drakes in Lexington, Louisville, and Frankfort, where they established a permanent circuit, but she also traveled throughout the South, playing in starring roles across from such well-known actors as Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Forrest, and Thomas Abthorpe Cooper. Denny became known as "the Siddons of the West" for her portrayal of tragic Shakespearean heroines, especially Juliet and Desdemona. She could also play comic parts with aplomb. Hero, in Much Ado About Nothing, and Catharine, in the Garrick adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, were two favorites (Bailey 1934, 71; Dietz 1921, 16, 36, 52; Duggar 1941, 31; Ludlow 1966, 91, 100; Meek 1930, 76; Smith, S. 1868, 13; Smither 1967, 67-68). In 1823, Frances married one of the Drake sons, Alexander, a comic actor who never quite matched his wife's stage skills or public renown. When Alexander died suddenly in 1830, he left Frances to raise their four children on her own (Ludlow 1966, 367). Extended family helped with child-care so that Frances could continue acting, and over the next twenty years, she solidified the acclaim she had begun to cultivate in the first fifteen years of her career.

Frances Denny Drake's niece, Julia Dean Hayne, also attained great fame as a star in the South. Born in 1830 to actors Edwin Dean and Julia Drake Fosdick Dean, the daughter of Samuel Drake, Julia Dean Hayne spent the first eleven years of her life with her paternal grandparents in Dutchess County, New York. Her mother died when she was only two, and her father felt inadequate to the demands of raising a toddler, so he enlisted the aid of his parents. Apparently, the needs of a pre-teen did not seem quite as daunting, however, for Edwin Dean resumed custody of Julia when she turned eleven. He immediately began training her for the stage, and by 1843, he had procured positions for himself and Julia with Ludlow's stock company in Mobile. She made quite a sensation there according to actor Joseph Jefferson, who recalled working with her that year in his autobiography. He asserted that Julia's beauty, confidence, and stage presence dazzled her Alabama audiences and held them spellbound. Over the next two years, she and her father went on to play stock roles in Nashville, Cincinnati, and Louisville.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 21 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

By the time Julia turned fifteen, her father was seeking starring positions for her. Like her contemporary, Eliza Logan, she gained a reputation for her representations of the lead roles in non-Shakespearean favorites such as Evadne, The Lady of Lyons, and The Stranger, but she also cultivated her reputation as a budding Shakespearean actress. In addition to gaining renown for her depiction of Hero in Much Ado, Julia Dean became known for her portrayals of Juliet, Ophelia,

Desdemona, and Catharine. In a March 1846 letter to Sol Smith, Dean touted Julia's popularity and successful reception, as evidenced by many laudatory newspaper articles, which he assured Smith were "entirely unsought" on his part. He went on to boast that his daughter exhibited "an extraordinary degree of talent" and urged Smith to engage her in New Orleans before the end of the 1846 season (Edwin Dean to Sol Smith, 15 March, 1846, Sol Smith Collection, Box 4 of 6, Missouri Historical Society). Smith had already booked the remainder of the season, but Dean's words did not fall on deaf ears, for Smith and Ludlow featured Julia Dean during their 1847-48 season, and thereafter she http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 22 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

became a regular star in their theaters and many others throughout the Southeast (clipping from the Mobile Sunday Times, March 1868, Julia Dean Hayne Theater Papers, Theatrical Collection, 1823-1890, Box 1 of 2, Missouri Historical Society; Craig 1963, 167-68; Dietz 1921, 42-44; Duggar 1941, 150, 164; Jefferson 1890, 147-48; Koon 1994, 83; Ludlow 1966, 665-67; Smith, S. 1868, 206).

In 1854, when Julia was playing in Charleston, South Carolina, she met and fell in love with Arthur Hayne, the son of a well-to-do coastal family. The two married, but Julia soon found to her dismay that her new husband was an abusive drunk. At first, their union seemed to promise great happiness. Julia's father, Edwin Dean, crowed to Sol Smith in February 1855 about Arthur Hayne's fine South Carolina family connections and his long-standing love for Julia (Edwin Dean to Sol Smith, 1 February, 1855, Sol Smith Collection, Box 4 of 6, Missouri Historical Society). By July, however, Dean's tune had changed: he noted that Smith's "aversion" to Hayne upon their first meeting was well founded, for "his cruel treatment . . . will destroy her health . . . and break her heart." Dean went on to assert, "I am convinced that she cannot long live with him" (Edwin Dean to Sol Smith, 11 July, 1855, Sol Smith Collection, Box 4 of 6, Missouri Historical Society). Later the same month, Dean admitted to Smith that Hayne abused Julia when he was drunk, but "to everybody else, he is extremely complaisant" (Edwin Dean to Sol Smith, 20 July, 1855, Sol Smith Collection, Box 4 of 6, Missouri Historical Society). Arthur Hayne might have turned to drink to drown feelings of inadequacy, for, as Noah Ludlow noted, he had failed to measure up to his elite Charleston family's standards of worldly success (Ludlow 1966, 711-12). His father was Robert Y. Hayne, a South Carolina senator, and though Arthur trained for a career in medicine, Edwin Dean conceded to Sol Smith in February, 1855 that Arthur was still living at home off of his family's means when he was thirty-one (Edwin Dean to Sol Smith, 1 February, 1855, Sol Smith Collection, Box 4 of 6, Missouri Historical Society). Julia Dean became Arthur's ticket to attaining independence from his family, but resentment over the contrast between her professional success and his failure manifested itself in an ugly brutality that ultimately drove Julia to sue for divorce in 1865 (Bill for Divorce, filed by Julia Dean Hayne in Probate Court, Territory of Utah, Great Salt Lake City County, 20 December, 1865).

Obtaining a divorce in nineteenth-century America was difficult, but southern states made the procedure nearly impossible. Laura Edwards and Suzanne Lebsock write that southerners found divorce anathema http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 23 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

because it threatened to unravel the social and economic fabric of the region: if white men could lose authority over their wives, they could also lose control of their slaves. Hence, most southern states reinforced husbands' power by requiring a special legislative act to secure a divorce, but lawmakers did not acquiesce lightly. A plea of abandonment, wifely adultery, or impotence might attain legal severance of a marriage, but rarely did charges of abuse or irreconcilable differences sway a legislative body to grant a divorce (Edwards 2000, 24-26; Lebsock 1984, 34-35, 68-69). Victoria Bynum recognizes the irony in lawmakers' reluctance: on the one hand, southerners venerated marriage as an ideal institution that provided love, honor, and protection to women, but on the other hand, their governing bodies refused to protect unfortunate women caught in abusive or degrading marriages that existed far outside the ideal (Bynum 1992, 2).

Sally McMillen notes that frontier states were the first to relax divorce laws, and this liberality might have been a factor that led Julia Dean Hayne to file her suit in Utah (McMillen 2002, 54). She was also touring the West at the time, and her decision might have simply coincided with where she was performing. Regardless, the court ruled in her favor; Arthur's intemperance, coupled with his neglect of Julia and their three children, swayed the legal decision, for she received full legal custody and total control of her financial and material assets (Divorce Decree, No. 25, Filed by Hon. Elias Smith in Probate Court, Great Salt Lake City County, Territory of Utah, 27 August, 1866). Julia Dean Hayne's upstanding reputation and popular reception with western audiences might also have worked in her favor, for historian George Rable remarks that a female plaintiff would not succeed unless she could establish unquestioned respectability (Rable 1989, 11).

Even when divorced women maintained impeccable reputations, they usually endured severe social disapproval. The threat of rejection could not outweigh the misery that drove many women to petition for divorce, but possessing a skill that promised actresses the ability to support themselves may have made them more willing to leave their husbands and seek legal redress. Julia Dean Hayne banked on her professional skills and continued to play to enthusiastic houses in the West and South. Frances Denny Drake's example might have provided the courage that her niece needed to pursue her divorce, for Frances had herself divorced her second husband, George Washington Cutter, whom she had married in 1840, ten years after Alexander's early demise. Like Arthur Hayne, Cutter was a drunk, and his intemperance drove Frances to leave him and sue for divorce within just a few months. She resumed her first http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 24 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

married name and continued to act until her retirement in 1850 (Dietz 1921, 36; Ludlow 1966, 367; Swain 1970, 181-82, 190-91).

CONCLUSION The Shakespearean plays and their appropriations that dominated the repertory of nineteenth-century American theaters were especially popular in the Old South, for these dramas reflected the weight that antebellum southerners put on establishing a clearly defined male lineage and training their sons and daughters to occupy distinct positions within the private and public spheres. Many of these plays emphasize the importance of a woman's filial duty and marital fidelity, and they celebrate women's occupation of the domestic realm. Yet the independence that actresses such as Frances Denny Drake, Julia Dean Hayne, Eliza Logan, and Jane Placide exhibited in their personal lives stands at odds with the submissive roles that they frequently played on stage. Indeed, these women flouted the region's conventions simply by performing in public, but they also transgressed against antebellum mores when they arranged their own acting and travel schedules, when they negotiated their own financial dealings, or more dramatically, when they initiated divorces from abusive and non-supportive husbands or carried on affairs with married men. The gap between actresses' on-stage experiences and the realities of their lives not only reveals the hypocrisy and inequity inherent in the powerful patriarchal social structure that governed the Old South, but also lays bare the artificiality and malleability of prescribed gender roles and deflates the ostensible divide between private and civic life.

REFERENCES Alger, William R. 1877. The Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Aristotle. 1997. Poetics. Mineola, New York: Dover. Bailey, Frances Margaret. 1934. "A History of the Stage in Mobile, Alabama from 1824-1850." Master's thesis, State University of Iowa. Barthes, Roland. 1995. "The Death of the Author." In Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Edited by Sean Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 125-30.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 25 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Blackburn, Margaret. 1927. "The Stage in St. Louis, Missouri After 1850." Master's thesis, State University of Iowa. Bristol, Michael. 1990. Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Burroughs, Patricia L. 1970. "The Theatrical Career of Jane Placide in New Orleans." Master's thesis, Louisiana State University. Bynum, Victoria E. 1992. Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Cartelli, Thomas. 1999. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriation. London: Routledge. Clinton, Catherine. 2000. Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster. Craig, William Scott. 1963. "The Theatrical Management of Sol Smith: Organization, Operation, and Techniques." Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois. Cumberland's British Theatre. 1826. London: John Cumberland. Desmet, Christy and Robert Sawyer, eds. 1999. Shakespeare and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Dietz, Mary Martha. 1921. "A History of the Theatre in Louisville." Master's thesis, University of Louisville. Dormon, James H. 1967. Theater in the Ante Bellum South: 1815-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Duggar, Mary Morgan. 1941. "The Theatre in Mobile: 1822-1860." Master's thesis, University of Alabama. Durham, Weldon B. 1986. American Theatre Companies: 1749-1887. New York: Greenwood Press. Dyer, Richard. 1988. "White." Screen 29.4: 44-64. Edelstein, Tilden G. 1982. "Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage." In Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 179-97. Edwards, Laura F. 2000. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 26 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Fisher, Judith L., and Stephen Watt, eds. 1989. When They Weren't Doing Shakespeare: Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Foulkes, Richard, ed. 1986. Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garrick, David. 1981. Catharine and Petruchio (1756). In The Plays of David Garrick. Edited by William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Grimsted, David. 1987. Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hayne, Julia Dean. Theater Papers. Theatrical Collection. Missouri Historical Society. Hostetler, Paul Smith. 1964. "James H. Caldwell: Theatre Manager." Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University. Jefferson, Joseph. 1890. The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson. New York: The Century Company. Keller, Helen Barker. 1957. "The History of the Theater in Columbus, Georgia from 1828 to 1865." Master's thesis, University of Georgia. Kendall, John S. 1952. The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theater. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Knowles, James Sheridan. 1994a. Virginius (1820). Reprinted in The Dramatic Works of James Sheridan Knowles. London: Routledge, Warnes, and Routledge, 1859, in Literature Online, 1994 [cited 5 September 2002]. Available from GALILEO online database at http://galileo.usg.edu (http://galileo.usg.edu). Knowles, James Sheridan. 1994b. The Wife (1833). Reprinted in The Dramatic Works of James Sheridan Knowles. London: Routledge, Warnes, and Routledge, 1859, in Literature Online, 1994 [cited 5 September, 2002]. Available from GALILEO online database at http://galileo.usg.edu (http://galileo.usg.edu). Kolin, Philip. 2002. "Blackness Made Visible: A Survey of Othello in Criticism, On Stage, and On Screen." In Othello: New Critical Essays. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Routledge. 1-88. Koon, Helene Wickham. 1989. How Shakespeare Won the West. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 27 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Koon, Helene Wickham. 1994. Gold Rush Performers. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company. Langley, William Osler. 1937. "The Theatre in Columbus, Georgia from 1828 to 1878." Master's thesis, Alabama Polytechnic Institute. Lebsock, Suzanne. 1984. The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860. New York: Norton. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lower, Charles B. 1983. "Othello as Black on Southern Stages, Then and Now." In Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 199-228. Ludlow, Noah M. 1966. Dramatic Life As I Found It. St. Louis, 1880. Reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom. Lyle, Beverly. 1938. "A Detailed Survey of the New Orleans Theatre from 1800 to 1825." Master's thesis, Louisiana State University. Margretts, Ralph Elliott. 1959. "A Study of the Theatrical Career of Julia Dean Hayne." Ph.D. diss., University of Utah. Marsden, Jean I. 1991. The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post- Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth. New York: St. Martin's. Marston, J. Westland. 1856. The Patrician's Daughter: A Tragedy in Five Acts and A Memoir of Miss E. Logan. Boston: William V. Spencer. Maus, Katharine, ed. 1997. "Introduction to Titus Andronicus (1592)." In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. 371-78. McMillen, Sally G. 2002. Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson. Meek, Beryl. 1930. "A Record of the Theatre in Lexington, Kentucky from 1799-1850." Master's thesis, State University of Iowa. Meserve, Walter J. 1986. Heralds of Promise: The Drama of the American People During the Age of Jackson, 1829-1849. New York: Greenwood. Meserve, Walter J. 1994. An Outline History of American Drama. New York: Feedback Theatrebooks and Prospero Press.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 28 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Moody, Richard. 1960. Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Murray, Christopher. 1986. "James Sheridan Knowles: The Victorian Shakespeare." In Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage. Edited by Richard Foulkes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 165-79. Rable, George C. 1989. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rothwell, Kenneth S., and Annabelle Henkin Melzer. 1990. Shakespeare on Screen: An International Filmography. New York: Neal-Schuman. Shakespeare, William. 1968. Othello (1603). In The Plays of William Shakespeare. Edited by Samuel Johnson. Reprint, New York: AMS. Shakespeare, William. 1969a. Othello (1603). In The Plays of Mr. William Shakespear. Edited by Thomas Hanmer. Reprint, New York: AMS. Shakespeare, William. 1969b. Othello (1603). The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Edited by Alexander Pope. Reprint, New York: AMS. Shakespeare, William. 1974. Much Ado About Nothing (1598). In John Philip Kemble Promptbooks. Edited by Charles H. Shattuck. Reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Shattuck, Charles. 1976. Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth. Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library. Sheil, Richard Lalor. 1994. Evadne. London: W. Clowes, 1819. Reprinted in Literature Online, 1994 [cited 5 September 2002]. Available from GALILEO online database at http://galileo.usg.edu (http://galileo.usg.edu). Smith, Joe E. 1977. The Honeymoon. In Players: The Magazine of American Theatre 52.1: 14-17. Smith, Sol. Collection. Missouri Historical Society. Smith, Sol. 1868. Theatrical Management in the West and South for Thirty Years. New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers. Smither, Nelle. 1967. A History of the English Theatre in New Orleans. New York: Benjamin Blom. "St. Charles Theatre." 1854. The Daily Picayune. 21 November.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 29 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

St. Charles Theatre Advertisement. 1839. The Daily Picayune. 6 April. Swain, James W. 1970. "Mrs. Alexander Drake: A Biographical Study." Ph.D. diss., Tulane University. Taylor, Gary. 1989. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. New York: Grove Press. Tobin, John. 1994. The Honey Moon. London: T. Davison, 1805. Reprinted in Literature Online, 1994 [cited 3 September 2002]. Available from GALILEO online database at http://galileo.usg.edu (http://galileo.usg.edu). Vaughan, Virginia Mason. 1994. Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wills, J. Robert. 1971. "The Riddle of Olive Logan." Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University. Wilson, Garff B. 1973. Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. 1986. Honor and Violence in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press. Yeomans, Gordon Allan. 1952. "The Contributions of William Henry Crisp to the Southern Antebellum Theatre." Master's thesis, Louisiana State University.

ABSTRACT | NINETEENTH-CENTURY REPERTORY | ANTEBELLUM ACTRESSES AND APPROPRIATION | CONCLUSION | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 30 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781416/show Page 31 of 31 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

The Old and New South: Shakespeare in (/current) Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind

DARLENE CIRAULO, CENTRAL MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | MONUMENTALIST SHAKESPEARE | TOMORROW AND TOMORROW | (/about) UNSEXING SCARLETT | NOTES | REFERENCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT This essay looks at the influence of Shakespeare in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, arguing that Mitchell uses Shakespeare to represent both Old South idealism and New South enterprise. As a symbol of western culture, Shakespeare stands for the lost ideal of the Old South. This ideal is based on the myth of antebellum chivalry and refinement. Paradoxically, however, the planter aristocracy associates a knowledge of Shakespeare with cavalier gentility. Mitchell also draws on Shakespearean characterization, specifically the figure of Lady Macbeth, to indicate the spirit of the New South. Scarlett O'Hara's ambition and "unsexing" are aligned with New South industry.

All my "classical" reading, if you could call it that, was done before I was twelve years old. Mother used to give me a nickel for each of Shakespear's plays. — Margaret Mitchell

Although, as a child, Margaret Mitchell enjoyed rugged tales of romance and adventure, her dramatic imagination was also strongly influenced by her early "classical" readings in Shakespeare. Educated in

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 1 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

a private school for young women in Atlanta, Washington Seminary, Mitchell focused her creative talent on drama, excelling as an actor and playwright in the theater group. By adolescence, Mitchell had written a score of romantic stories — mostly plays — with titles such as "A Darktown Tragedy" and, more exotically, "In My Harem." As a society girl, it was Peggy who entertained friends from the Yacht Club with humorous, short plays (A. Edwards 1983, 38, 41, 79). Indeed, when at twenty-seven Mitchell began to write Gone With the Wind (1936), she drew on her knowledge and predilection for drama, including Shakespeare. In the novel, Shakespeare appears intermittently within the context of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Melanie Wilkes, for example, shepherds the postbellum Shakespeare Reading Circle, while Scarlett O'Hara's ambition is characterized by analogy to the "unsexing" of Lady Macbeth. These allusions to Shakespeare provide glimpses into the conflict between Old and New South ideologies that underpin the postwar experience of defeat and survival. It is the tension between these opposed perspectives on the South that gives shape to Mitchell's appropriation of Shakespeare in Gone With the Wind.

The use of Shakespeare in Mitchell's novel can be appreciated more fully by outlining briefly the philosophical division that developed between Old and New South ideologies. In his essay "The 'Simple Story' 's Ideology: Gone With the Wind and the New South Creed," Richard King identifies two modes of historical consciousness that took root in Southern intellectual life during the early and mid-twentieth centuries. Nietzschean "monumentalism" refers to the nostalgic valorization of a past that is both aesthetically and ethically superior to the present time. "Liberal modernization" views the artifacts and traditions of the past as secondary and inferior to the more urgent and gripping problems of the present (King 1983, 168-73). The monumentalists of the Old South envision the aristocratic plantation class as heroic survivors, staving off the encroachment of the North's predatory economics and social liberalism.1 Alternatively, the modernizers of the New South, although by no means unified, contend that the postbellum South needs social renovation and economic diversification; many criticize as well southern backwater politics and racial prejudice, championing instead social advancement and industrial growth.2 King asserts that Mitchell's novel, neither conservative nor reactionary, combines the spirit of "Old South tradition" and "New South promise" (King 1983, 170). Mitchell's invocation of Shakespeare, I argue, is suggestive of both prewar idealism and postwar enterprise.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 2 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

MONUMENTALIST SHAKESPEARE In Gone With the Wind, Shakespeare is frequently associated with the myth of the Old South plantation and with the past as a locus of traditional values. The two characters in the novel who are aligned most closely with Shakespeare and the planter aristocracy are Ashley Wilkes and his cousin-wife, Melanie. It is a discerning Scarlett, for example, who purchases for them "a complete set of Shakespeare" when on honeymoon in New Orleans with Rhett Butler (Mitchell 1988, 831). By contrast, Scarlett gives frivolous souvenirs to relatives and servants: jewelry for Ella and Aunt Pitty; costly clothing for Uncle Peter, Dilcey and Cookie; a St. Bernard puppy and Persian kitten for little Wade and Beau. The "highbrow" gift of Shakespeare is the expected present for the litterateur, symbolizing the gentility, sophistication, and refinement of the planter aristocracy.

Before the war, the Wilkes family, as proprietors of Twelve Oaks plantation in Clayton County, with its white-columned house "like a Greek temple" (Mitchell 1988, 27), are repeatedly connected with the classical and humanist culture of belles lettres. Curiously, the Irish immigrant Gerald O'Hara evinces a disdain for Old South literary culture. He asks his daughter Scarlett, "do you understand [Ashley's] folderol about books and poetry and music and oil paintings and such foolishness?" (36). Although the O'Hara family belongs to the southern elite (Scarlett's mother comes from the well-born Robillards of Savannah), Gerald O'Hara's anti-intellectualism reflects upstart roots and a pragmatic privileging of hard work over book learning: "Look at the way [the Wilkes] go tearing up to New York and Boston to hear operas and see oil paintings. And ordering French and German books by the crate from the Yankees!" (37). The Wilkes's cosmopolitan pursuit of music, painting, and literature appears to Gerald O'Hara unorthodox and non-southern ("proper" men should spend their time "hunting and playing poker" [37]). In essence, Gerald O'Hara's contempt for the patrician society of Shakespeare and the arts reveals his estrangement from the educated members of the planter gentry.

Critical commentary on the Old South has evaluated the relationship between Shakespeare and the golden age of antebellum society. In "The Glory that was the South," Howard W. Odum notes that a knowledge of Shakespeare went hand in hand with the myth of the planter aristocracy. As signs of this myth, Odum cites not only the romanticized images of slave-based plantation life (the colonnaded houses, happy "darkies" singing spirituals, the abundant food and exotic flora), but also the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 3 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

presence of "volumes of Shakespeare" and of Shakespearean productions that premiered in the South "before ever they were given in New York or Boston or Philadelphia" (Odum 1947, 124). Furthermore, as Clement Eaton remarks in The Mind of the Old South, the cavalier spirit of the gilded past was conspicuously marked by an admiration of Shakespeare, as well as of reading in other classical and romantic books (Eaton 1964, 185-86). Although recent studies of early and mid- nineteenth-century theater in America have found that Shakespeare — performed in shortened farces, afterpieces, and divertissements — attracted both "high" and "low" audiences (Levine 1988; Goodson 2002), an appreciation of Shakespeare also flourished in the antebellum South because his works were part of the traditional canon and considered to be "moral" (Dormon 1967). Some southern poets and writers, such as William Gilmore Simms, thoroughly venerated the playwright. Simms, "the most representative man of letters of the antebellum South," edited Shakespeare's apocryphal plays, reviewed performances, and appropriated in his novels an array of Shakespearean characters, including Othello and Hamlet (Watson 1985, 13). Henry Timrod, the "Laureate of the Confederacy," even saw in Shakespeare a paradigm of war-torn Dixie and the loss of Old South ideals (Murphy 1985). From this monumentalist perspective, the Bard of Avon functions as a cultural signpost of Old South custom, history, and civility.

In Gone With the Wind, the planter aristocracy, affiliated with the older families of Virginia, coastal Georgia, and South Carolina (the Wilkes are originally from Virginia), possesses the leisure time to dabble in Shakespeare and the arts. This dilettantism coincides with the antebellum myth of cavalier gallantry, worldliness, and urbane decorum. Even the Charleston-born Rhett Butler knows his Shakespeare. Educated at West Point (though expelled for drunkenness), Rhett displays an easy and smooth familiarity with the playwright. When Scarlett momentarily regrets her unscrupulous conduct — her dogged determination to run a profitable lumber mill in Atlanta by double-dealing, trafficking with Yankees, and using convict labor — Rhett does not mollify her guilt-ridden conscience: "And I fear that when you can afford to fish up the honour and virtue and kindness you've thrown overboard, you'll find they have suffered a sea change and not, I fear, into something rich and strange" (Mitchell 1988, 759). This allusion to Ariel's song in The Tempest perhaps falls on deaf ears. In the novel, Mitchell consistently emphasizes Scarlett's dislike of books and schooling in spite of her upper-class breeding: "books and music and poetry [were] things that interested her not at all" (28). Yet http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 4 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Rhett's ability to commandeer Shakespeare indicates his silk-stocking upbringing in the planter caste of coastal Carolina, despite the fact that he roguishly rebuilds the Butler fortune by gambling and wartime blockade-running.3

The novel further identifies Shakespeare with antebellum tradition in its representation of the turbulent years of Reconstruction. Epitomizing the Old South, the Wilkes emerge as leaders of the Lost Cause. Ashley and Melanie's shabby brick house on Ivy Street in Atlanta becomes the nucleus of a "new society" (Mitchell 1988, 718), which is, paradoxically, based on prewar values — a world devoid of carpetbaggers, freed slaves, Yankee garrisons, and brash Republicans. Although Ashley feels betrayed by the empty platitudes of war ("'King Cotton, , States' Rights, Damn' Yankees'" [207]), he also mourns the poetic elegance of bygone years: the magnolias, the moon, the roses at Twelve Oaks (208). The patriotic Melanie not only supervises various social clubs — such as the Saturday Night Music Circle, the Beautification of the Graves of Our Glorious Dead, and the Sewing Circle for the Widows and Orphans of the Confederacy — but she also plays an integral part in the Shakespeare Reading Circle: It was she who cast the deciding vote at the Shakespeare Reading Circle that the bard's works should be varied with those of Mr. Dickens and Mr. Bulwer-Lytton and not the poems of Lord Byron, as had been suggested by a young, and, Melanie privately feared, very fast bachelor member of the Circle. (721) Melanie upholds standards of decency and propriety primarily by valorizing Shakespeare, as well as Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton, and simultaneously disdaining Byron's racy and exotic verse. More than mere entertainment, Shakespeare represents noble and immutable truths. This idealism characterizes as well Ashley's belief that the Old South possesses an aesthetic principle of excellence: "before the war, life was beautiful. There was a glamour to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art" (515). Arguably, the work of Shakespeare both transcends the bleak realities of Reconstruction and evokes a sugar-coated return to the glamour and perfection of the Confederacy.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW As Gone With the Wind progresses, the Shakespeare Reading Circle serves not only to support, but also to undermine, the fable of the Old South. At one gathering of the Reading Circle, Dr. Meade, an ex-

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 5 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Confederate physician, "acquitted himself nobly in reading the part of Macbeth" (Mitchell 1988, 722). Macbeth was one of the most popular Shakespearean plays performed in the Old South, second only to Richard III (Dormon 1967, 256). Given that many antebellum playgoers deemed Shakespeare a moral playwright, these same audiences probably interpreted the Scottish play as a didactic study in tyranny. Lawrence W. Levine writes that Abraham Lincoln himself regarded the play as a superlative example of the "'problems of tyranny and murder'" (Levine 1988, 39). It is unclear, however, whether this reference to Macbeth in Gone With the Wind reflects ironically on the values of the Yankees or of the Old South. Dr. Meade, using the same voice in which he formerly celebrated "Our Glorious Cause," declares that the tyranny of the North has ravaged and laid waste to the families and traditions of the South, quelling their happiness and livelihood: "They have taken the flower of our manhood and the laughter of our young women. They have broken our health, uprooted our lives and unsettled our habits [ . . . ] But we will build back" (Mitchell 1988, 722). On one level, Dr. Meade reads from Macbeth expressly because the play accommodates the idea that tyranny will succumb to justice and right will prevail over oppression. Yet on another level, Gone With the Wind uses Macbeth to critique the sentimentalization of Dixie, especially of its history of racial discrimination and abuse.

Mitchell originally called her novel "Tomorrow is Another Day," but had to abandon the title since it was already in print (A. Edwards 1983, 182). One of her alternative titles, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow," recalls Macbeth's famous speech outside the walls of Dunsinane. (Seven years earlier, the southern novelist William Faulkner had mined this same speech for the title of The Sound and the Fury [1929].) Macbeth's words summon up a picture of devastation and apocalyptic ruin:4 Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. (Macbeth, 5.5.18-22) More existentially, the passage underlines the futility and meaninglessness of life itself. Overpowered by the North, the beaten Confederacy faces the enormous task of rebuilding itself "day to day." While this speech is not cited directly in Gone With the Wind, it resonates strongly with the novel's narrative of war, defeat, and survival, as Mitchell herself stated: "[my mother told me that] my own world was going to explode under me, some day, and God help me if I http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 6 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

didn't have some weapon to meet the new world" (Mitchell 1976, 38). In the context of postwar Georgia, Macbeth's words evoke the senseless devastation incited by the "Glorious Cause." Shakespeare's lines — perhaps the very lines that Dr. Meade recites — also imply a yearning for "yesterdays," and the hope persists, in antiquated groups such as the Shakespeare Reading Circle, that the old way of living will return.

But the old way of the South promotes its own brand of tyranny. The "new society," as typified by the Shakespeare Reading Circle, inflicts a new reign of terror in order to subjugate and retaliate against the newly- emancipated slaves. The Atlanta Klu Klux Klan and its supporters — even Rhett — largely come from the Wilkes's coterie. The new society's involvement in the Klan comes to light when Scarlett is assaulted in Shantytown by a white man and a black man. Even though Scarlett opposes the Klan for her own selfish reasons, the Klan avenges her attack, with the female members of the Wilkes's circle showing their full-hearted complicity. To Scarlett's shock, Ashley and Melanie's house quickly materializes as the hub of a clandestine operation of revenge and murder. When Yankee officers search the Wilkes's home for the culprits, the Klan immediately plays its part in the coverup, with Melanie directing the action: "[Scarlett] realized she was witnessing a play, a desperate play on which lives hinged [ . . . ] they were tossing cues to one another like actors in an oft-rehearsed drama" (Mitchell 1988, 785). In this event, even Old Merriwether and Uncle Henry appear as "two great actors" (793).5 The cues shot back and forth in this scene remind us of Lady Macbeth's coded warnings to Macbeth to conceal the murder of Banquo during the banquet episode in 3.4. Yet Scarlett's rejection of such theatrical "Shakespeare-speak," along with her refusal to embrace the Bard as a representative of the Old South, illustrate the ways in which Shakespeare, as will be shown, becomes a changing cultural signifier in the New South.

UNSEXING SCARLETT We have seen that Shakespeare, as a canonical figure in Gone With the Wind, embodies Old South values. Equally significant, however, is Mitchell's appropriation of Shakespeare to convey the idea of the New South: the entrepreneurial spirit of postwar Atlanta is embodied in the ambition and "unsexing" of Scarlett. Louis Rubin, Jr. states that "Margaret Mitchell went to considerable length to identify Scarlett O'Hara with the city of Atlanta" (Rubin 1983, 90). Christened in the same year as Atlanta was founded, Scarlett personifies the city's headstrong resolve to triumph and thrive after the war: "I'm like

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 7 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Atlanta," Scarlett says. "It takes more than Yankees or a burning to keep me down" (Mitchell 1988, 470). The heroine's ambition, symbolized by lack of interest in her "Shakespeare-reading friends" (857), shares affinities with the attitudes behind New South modernization: "Atlanta was of [Scarlett's] own generation, crude with the crudities of youth and as headstrong and impetuous as herself" (139).

In his study of the New South, James Michael Russell discusses Atlanta's economic resurgence in the very midst of postbellum poverty and widespread destruction. As Russell indicates in his chapter "The Phoenix City," rebuilt Atlanta rejected the attitudes of the Old South, looking instead to Yankee-based laissez-faire capitalism as a means to foster industrial progress (Russell 1988, 117-45). One editor of the Atlanta Constitution went so far as to describe the "Atlanta Spirit" as "forceful, aggressive, intelligent, harmonious, with an abundance of that requisite indispensable in man or city — sleepless initiative" (quoted by Doyle 1990, 158). In Gone With the Wind, the newly-regenerated South is mirrored in the restless, "sleepless initiative" of Scarlett, who, like Lady Macbeth, defies social custom and mores.

During Reconstruction, Scarlett invests in and runs a lumber mill. Her brilliance with numbers confounds Frank Kennedy, her second husband, who is astounded by his wife's extraordinary ability to calculate sums with lightning speed. Consequently, Frank thinks Scarlett's business acumen and enterprise "unwomanly" (Mitchell 1988, 622): All of his life, Frank had been under the domination of the phrase "What will the neighbours say?" and he was defenceless against the shocks of his wife's repeated disregard of the proprieties. He felt that everyone disapproved of Scarlett and was contemptuous of him for permitting her to "unsex herself." (625) Scarlett's "unsexing" parallels Lady Macbeth's calling forth of murderous spirits to infuse her with defiant courage: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here And fill me from the crown to the toe topfull Of direst cruelty. (Macbeth, 1.5.38-41) Lady Macbeth's cruel ambition resembles Scarlett's brazen entrepreneurism. Seeking income to pay the Yankee-imposed taxes on Tara, Scarlett's desire for "a stout levee of cash" turns ruthless (652). She privileges profit over human welfare by employing cheaply-paid convicts and overlooking their starvation, sickness, and maltreatment. http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 8 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Additionally, she demands loan repayments from destitute, penniless friends. Scarlett's unsexing makes her a social outcast from Old South society, "the subdued, church-going, Shakespeare-reading friends of her earlier Atlanta days" (857). Scarlett's single-minded determination, "what drove her like a mad woman," hides a deep-grounded fear of losing Tara (652).

Steeped as she would have been in nineteenth-century character criticism, Mitchell might have drawn on an ongoing debate about Lady Macbeth's character for her portrayal of Scarlett. In his lectures on Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge says dogmatically that Lady Macbeth possesses only "mock fortitude," is "deluded by ambition," and demonstrates absolutely "no womanly life, no wifely joy" (quoted by Furness 1915, 472). By contrast, Anna Jameson's Characteristics of Women (1833) rejects the normative critique of Lady Macbeth by assigning to her character compassion, complexity, and femininity: "in Lady Macbeth's concentrated, strong-nerved ambition, the ruling passion of her mind, there is yet a touch of womanhood: she is ambitious less for herself than for her husband" (quoted by Furness 1915, 477).6 Such sensitivity to the motives of Lady Macbeth carried over as well to the nineteenth-century stage. Theater star Charlotte Cushman — majestic and fierce — famously infused into the role of the murdering queen "attributes of humanity" (Winter 1969, 500). The Victorian actresses Ellen Terry and Helena Faucit (Lady Martin) breathed not only humanity into the part of Lady Macbeth, but also wifely femininity. Their performances downplayed the queen's bold masculinity by emphasizing her compassion, seductiveness, and charm (512-14). Coleridge, by contrast, sees little femininity in Lady Macbeth's "consummate art," merely an artful manipulative guile (quoted by Furness 1915, 472). In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett combines feminine charm with artful guile to further her ambition. Scarlett's "art," her ability to charm and influence with "studied artistry and consummate skill" (Mitchell 1988, 155), corresponds to a clever, Machiavellian practicality. But while Lady Macbeth's ambition destroys her, Scarlett's ensures her survival. Her self-reliance and gumption fit squarely into the New South ethos: "the self-willed and vigorous new" (141).

Scarlett learns the consummate art of femininity from the upper-crust culture into which her aristocratic mother, Ellen Robillard, was born: "the mothers of all her girl friends impressed on their daughters the necessity of being helpless, clinging, doe-eyed creatures. Really, it took a lot of sense to cultivate and hold such a pose" (Mitchell 1988, 81). http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 9 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

This learned posturing is an integral aspect of the social niceties of the Old South. Ladies, especially those seeking a husband, should behave in a passive and dependent manner: "It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant" (155). Scarlett, however, recognizes gender subordination as a charade and exploits it. The art of feminine obsequience and submissiveness, this putting on of "doe-eyed" helplessness, is in Scarlett merely the veneer of gentility, and behind its facade lurks the crude reality of her "headstrong and impetuous" sensibility (139). Her unwillingness to adopt fully the "happy feminine conspiracy" of antebellum conduct, that institutionalized servility, allows her to manipulate the opposite sex by drawing on her womanly charm.

Scarlett wears the disguise of the delicate and defenseless southern belle in order to secure her interests, which include giving Ashley work at the mill and stockpiling money for her family, including Aunt Eulalie in Charleston. At one point in the story, when Scarlett is pregnant and married to Frank Kennedy, she hides her apprehension that the Reconstruction government will confiscate her capital and property by comporting herself in Old South fashion. Scarlett hides — but only just — a simmering anger and fury: "The rôle she enacted was that of a refined sweet Southern lady in distress. With an air of dignified reserve she was able to keep her victims at their proper distance, but there was nevertheless a graciousness in her manner which left a certain warmth in the Yankee officers' memories of Mrs. Kennedy" (653). Like Lady Macbeth as well, Scarlett expresses an aversion to motherhood: "no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it" (Mitchell 1988, 605). Nonetheless, Scarlett uses her condition of motherly respectability for her own ends. Her delicate state does not prevent Scarlett from transacting business on the streets, making savvy deals with Yankees, and swindling her competitors. Not unexpectedly, the old Atlanta society — her Shakespeare-reading friends — deems the pregnant businesswoman "indecent" (652).

Rhett Butler sees through Scarlett's art because he shares her same crude opportunism: "we are both scoundrels, Scarlett, and nothing is beyond us when we want something" (Mitchell 1988, 916-17). Even the possibility of becoming Rhett's mistress does little to distract Scarlett from getting at his purse strings. To accomplish this, she plays the role of a naive coquette. Outfitted in a velvet green dress (made from curtains) and looking like the fashionable women on the "Rue de la Paix" (559), Scarlett tries hard to charm and move Rhett: "She shut her eyes tightly, trying to squeeze out tears, but remembered to turn her face http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 10 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

up slightly so he could kiss her with no difficulty" (562). Rhett, however, is enticed by her artistry rather than by her efforts at flirtation. In essence, he values the rough-and-tumble of Scarlett's ambition, which is antithetical to the ineffectual ideals of the Old South, including Shakespeare, virtue, and truth: "he, like her, saw truth as truth, unobstructed by impractical notions of honour, sacrifice, or high belief in human nature" (996). Rhett respects Scarlett's cunning and fortitude, her weapons of survival in the face of Confederate defeat and New South reconstruction. Rhett is not the only one who admires her ambition; Melanie herself, the embodiment of Old South propriety, defends Scarlett's ambition as being consistent with womanhood. As she says to Scarlett, "I don't mean you've ever been unwomanly or unsexed yourself, as lots of folks have said" (925, my emphasis).

Atlanta's newly-defeated planter aristocracy does not, however, consider Scarlett's ambition acceptable even though under Reconstruction, women were entering the workplace. During this time of radical social change and prosperity, these women dispelled the myth that women had to rely on husbands or male relatives for income (Scott 1970, 133).7Gone With the Wind illustrates the economic battle facing women who, like Scarlett, have left behind a chivalric past: "the still forest paths under frosty autumn stars, the barbecues, the fish-fries, the quiet of moonlight nights" (Mitchell 1988, 210). As we have seen, Ashley and Melanie, who speak of "books and dreams and moonrays and star-dust" (516), epitomize Old South monumentalism. But this upper-class utopia comes at a human cost: the plantation ethos is built on the "happy feminine conspiracy" (155) that supports gender subordination and racial bondage. Scarlett's ambition hardly fits into the idealization of the Old South, one reified by a cultural apotheosis of Shakespeare. In fact, she doesn't understand "music and poetry and books or anything that isn't dollars and cents" (916). Mitchell evokes Lady Macbeth's defiant ambition to suggest Scarlett's relationship to New South modernization. Both Scarlett and Lady Macbeth are seduced by the male-dominated sphere of power and its trappings. Yet if Scarlett symbolizes an industrious New South, her industry promotes self- interest over ethical responsibility. With Rhett gone, her child dead, and Melanie dying, Scarlett has, unlike Lady Macbeth, the possibility of another tomorrow.

NOTES

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 11 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

1. I would like to thank Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Robin Warren for their helpful suggestions in the revision of this essay. For studies that explore the Old South in relation to the social and historical realities and myths of antebellum culture, see the following discussions: John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972); Chalmers Gatson Davidson, The Last Foray (1971); Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South (1941); Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South (1949); Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South (1987); William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (1961); George B. Tindall, "Mythology: A New Frontier in Southern History," in The Idea of the South, ed. Frank E. Vandiver (1964); Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South (1975); and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (1982). 2. For studies that diversely explore the social/historical realities and myths of the New South, see the following studies: Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South (1990); Paul Gatson, The New South Creed (1970); William C. Holley, Ellen Winston, and T. J. Woofter, Jr., The Plantation South, 1934-1937 (1971); John C. McKinney and Edgar T. Thompson, eds., The South in Continuity and Change (1965); I. A. Newby, Plain Folk in the New South (1989); James Michael Russell, Atlanta, 1847-1890 (1988); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1965); Tom E. Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch, eds., Such as Us (1978); Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South (1979); and C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877- 1913 (1951). 3. In Mitchell's own life, a knowledge of Shakespeare was a sign of cosmopolitan polish and sophistication. According to her biographer, Margaret's first love, a Harvard man from New York, dazzled her by reading poetry and quoting Shakespeare (A. Edwards 1983, 47). And later as a published writer, Margaret alludes glibly and facilely to Shakespeare. She writes, for instance, that "I know a number of Southern authors who had dreadful criticisms of their first books. These authors put a buckler between them and the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'" (Mitchell 1976, 227). One of Mitchell's favorite borrowings, it seems, derives from Ariel's "Full Fathom Five": "I found that a number of our good Southern idioms had suffered delightful ." Once again, she writes, "I am appalled to think what a sea change my book has suffered!" (Mitchell 1976, 292, 312). That a "sea change" carries negative implications harks back to Rhett Butler's skepticism that Scarlett has the capability to transform positively "into something rich and strange" (Mitchell 1988, 759).

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 12 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

4. All references to Macbeth are to the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition, edited by A. R. Braunmuller. 5. Mitchell's depiction of the Klan in the novel is ambiguous. For instance, Mitchell has Ashley play a central role in the revenge of Scarlett's attack, but later Rhett informs Scarlett that Ashley had opposed the Klan: "Ashley never believed in the Klan because he's against violence of any sort" (Mitchell 1988, 959). Rhett doesn't support the Klan because it's "damned foolishness" (959), but earlier, he had killed a black man for disrespecting a white woman. 6. For further discussions of Anna Jameson's analysis of Shakespeare's female characters, see Christy Desmet, "'Intercepting the Dew-Drop': Female Readers and Readings in Anna Jameson's Shakespearean Criticism" (1990); and Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (1996). 7. For studies that analyze the social and cultural realities and roles of women in the Old South and the New South, see the following discussions: Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress (1982); Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore (2000); Elizabeth Fox- Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988); Sally G. McMillen, Southern Women (1992); George C. Rable, Civil Wars (1989); and Francis Butler Simkins and James Welch Patton, The Women of the Confederacy (1936).

REFERENCES Blassingame, John W. 1972. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press. Clinton, Catherine. 1982. The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books. Davidson, Chalmers Gatson. 1971. The Last Foray: The South Carolina Planters of 1860: A Sociological Study. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner. 1941. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Desmet, Christy. 1990. "'Intercepting the Dew-Drop': Female Readers and Readings in Anna Jameson's Shakespearean Criticism." In Women's Re- Visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and Others. Edited by Marianne Novy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 41-57. http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 13 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Dormon, James H., Jr. 1967. Theater in the Ante Bellum South, 1815-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Doyle, Don H. 1990. New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Eaton, Clement. 1949. A History of the Old South. New York: Macmillan. Eaton, Clement. 1964. The Mind of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Edwards, Anne. 1983. Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell. New York: Dell. Edwards, Laura. 2000. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. 1988. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Furness, Horace Howard, ed. 1915. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: "Macbeth." 1873; reprint Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Company. Gatson, Paul. 1970. The New South Creed. New York: Knopf. Goodson, Steve. 2002. Highbrows, Hillbillies, and Hellfire: Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880-1930. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Holley, William C., Ellen Winston, and T. J. Woofter, Jr. 1971. The Plantation South, 1934-1937. 1940; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press. King, Richard. 1983. "The 'Simple Story's' Ideology: Gone With the Wind and the New South Creed." In Recasting: "Gone With the Wind" in American Culture. Edited by Darden Asbury Pryon. Miami: University Presses of Florida. 167-83. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lootens, Tricia. 1996. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 14 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

McKinney, John C., and Edgar T. Thompson, eds. 1965. The South in Continuity and Change. Durham: Duke University Press. McMillen, Sally G. 1992. Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson. Mitchell, Margaret. 1976. Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" Letters, 1936-1949. New York: Macmillan. Mitchell, Margaret. 1988. Gone With the Wind. 1936; London: Macmillan. Murphy, Christina. 1985. "The Artistic Design of Societal Commitment: Shakespeare and the Poetry of Henry Timrod." In Shakespeare and Southern Writers: A Study in Influence. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 29-47. Newby, I. A. 1989. Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence, 1880-1915. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. Odum, Howard W. 1947. The Way of the South: Toward the Regional Balance of America. New York: Macmillan. Rable, George C. 1989. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Rubin, Louis, Jr. 1983. "Scarlett O'Hara and the Two Quentin Compsons." In Recasting: "Gone With the Wind" in American Culture. Ed. Darden Asbury Pyron. Miami: University Presses of Florida. 81-103. Russell, James Michael. 1988. Atlanta, 1847-1890: City Building in the Old South and the New. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Macbeth. Ed. A. R. Braunmuller. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Anne Firor. 1970. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Simkins, Francis Butler, and James Welch Patton. 1936. The Women of the Confederacy. Richmond and New York: Garrett and Massie. Stampp, Kenneth. 1965. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877. New York: Knopf. Stowe, Steven M. 1987. Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 15 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Taylor, William R. 1961. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. New York: George Braziller. Terrill, Tom E. and Jerrold Hirsch. 1978. Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thompson, Edgar T. 1975. Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South: The Regimentation of Populations. Durham: Duke University Press. Tindall, George B. 1964. "Mythology: A New Frontier in Southern History." In The Idea of the South: Pursuit of a Central Theme. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1-15. Watson, Charles S. 1985. "Simms's Use of Shakespearean Characters." In Shakespeare and the Southern Writers: A Study of Influence. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 13-28. Wiener, Jonathan M. 1978. Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. Winter, William. 1969. Shakespeare on the Stage. First Series. 1911; New York and London: Benjamin Blom. Woodward, C. Vann. 1951. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. 1982. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ABSTRACT | MONUMENTALIST SHAKESPEARE | TOMORROW AND TOMORROW | UNSEXING SCARLETT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 16 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781418/show Page 17 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Confession; or, the Blind Heart: An Antebellum Othello

(/current) CHRISTY DESMET, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

ABSTRACT | OTHELLO ON THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN STAGE | "CALOYA"; OR, A POLYRACIAL (/previous) OTHELLO | CONFESSION; OR, THE BLIND HEART AS AN ANTEBELLUM OTHELLO | ON WHITENESS | CODA: 1856 AND 1864 | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) William Gilmore Simms was a novelist, poet, and literary editor from antebellum Charleston. He was also a Shakespearean enthusiast and editor of the apocryphal plays. Although Simms described himself ironically as scribbling compulsively in the margins of his Shakespeare text, his knowledge of the plays, their plots, and their language was broad and deep. Simms was also active in both the American literary world and Southern politics, defending slavery at the same time as he argued for a national American literature. For all of these reasons, his Shakespearean appropriations offer valuable insights into the American South's understanding of Shakespeare and his cultural function. This essay offers a perspective on Shakespeare in the American South shortly before, during, and after the Civil War through the example of Simms's short story, "Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver" (1841) and his novel Confession; or, the Blind Heart (1841). Both works claim Othello as their source, and in different ways, both address contemporary issues of race and color through strategies of displacement and acknowledgment. In these texts, Simms's appropriation of Othello examines how "whiteness," as a system of social privilege, is produced.

Even a quick look at Peter Rawlings's recent edited collection, Americans on Shakespeare, 1776- 1914 (1999), will show that the southern United States plays virtually no role in the anthology's construction of Shakespeare as an American poet. The Northeast dominates this collection, which ranges from Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper to Henry James, by way of Emerson, Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The entries are also remarkably free from reference to events and ideologies leading up to the Civil War and their influence on the performance and perception of Shakespeare's plays. A single poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 1 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

entitled "Shakspeare: April 23, 1864," offers Shakespeare as a remedy for the sorrows of war:

War-wasted, haggard, panting from the strife, We turn to other days and far-off lands, Live o'er in dreams the Poet's faded life, Come with fresh lilies in our fevered hands To wreathe his bust, and scatter purple flowers,— Not his the need, but ours! (Holmes 1864, reprinted in Rawlings 1999, 242)

A final excerpt from Ashley Thorndike's "Shakespeare in America," the 1927 Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, mentions the Civil War only as a disruption in the forward march of American letters. Thorndike proclaims that Americans have always enjoyed a "close kinship" with the "Elizabethan joy of experience" (Thorndike 1933, 27; reprinted in Rawlings 1999, 626). Now that "we have healed the wounds made by our Lost Cause," he says, we are inattentive to the laments over others — we are not greatly moved by the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or even by Paradise Lost. We have sought in literature a buoyancy and optimism, for an uplifting beauty, for an enlarged and fortified courage. In Shakespeare, whether in the tortures of Hamlet and Lear or in the triumphs of Rosalind and Prospero, we have found what we sought, a renewing of our faith in man and his works. (27; reprinted in Rawlings 1999, 526) Such a history tells only part of the story; it elides the South's role in disseminating and refashioning Shakespeare's plots and plays, and it leaves unexamined the ongoing use of "Shakespeare" in that place as a shorthand for or site of debates over personal, regional, and national character.

Despite its evocation of vexed and volatile cultural issues for Americans, Othello remained throughout the nineteenth century a popular play on the American stage, and nowhere more so than in the South (Edelstein 1982, 183). Tilden G. Edelstein has argued that for Americans, Othello is pre-eminently a drama of racial intermarriage: a site where, historically, a "negative color consciousness" could develop fully into a racist theory of human relations through the trope of marriage (181).1 While Edelstein traces America's fears of miscegenation through theatrical representations of Othello, his essay does not consider the role played by this national discourse of color and race in appropriations of Othello. Furthermore, because he addresses fear of miscegenation as a national rather than a regional issue, Edelstein describes a continuity of racial and sexual attitudes in both North and South between 1850 and 1880 that perforce overrides changes in attitude that might have occurred in the period immediately before and after the Civil War. Nevertheless, his essay provides a starting point for more local readings, in terms of both time and place, of Othello's cultural role in Shakespearean appropriations for the American South.

This essay offers a perspective on Shakespeare's social and literary function in the American South shortly before, during, and after the Civil War through the example of Charleston writer http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 2 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

William Gilmore Simms, a man deeply attached to both Shakespeare and the South. In the Southern Literary Journal, Simms writes that "in my desk copy of Shakespeare, I find I have made just as free as a thousand other commentators, and covered the pages of the immortal Bard, with notes of quite as little value as theirs" (1838a, 184). But he was also a serious scholar, editing and introducing Shakespeare's apocryphal plays for a volume that was issued as a Supplement to the Plays of William Shakespeare (1848); and Simms's broad and deep knowledge of the Shakespearean texts themselves, which he quoted and alluded to liberally in novels and letters throughout his life, make his appropriations of Shakespeare especially rewarding to study. Simms felt a particularly strong resonance with both Othello and Othello, which he used as literary models for the novel Confession; or, the Blind Heart (first published in 1841 and reissued in a revised edition several times) and for his controversial short story, "Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver" (also first published in 1841). In the contradictory perspectives on Othello's character offered by these two texts, we can see an interplay among denial, displacement, and acknowledgment in their construction of literary race and identity at a particularly volatile moment in American history.

OTHELLO ON THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN STAGE The issue of Othello's racial identity has been vexed ever since Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked this question: Can we suppose [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth? . . . No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated. (Coleridge 1959, 169) James Andreas has persuasively traced many deployments of Shakespeare's African character, particularly in America, to the sentiments of this passage and its racist assumptions (1992; 1999). Denial or evasion of Othello's race and color, on the other hand, does not necessarily signify a simple alignment with Coleridge's implied position during the nineteenth century. Fanny Kemble, the English actress, criticized the institution of slavery in her Journal on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-39 (1863) — a document that was taken up by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic — but maintained a conviction that Othello was neither African nor black. Lois Potter also comments that Frederick Douglass quotes from Othello without linking the character's trajectory to his own life (2002, 111). Finally, and more extremely, as Potter mentions, African American actor Ira Aldridge developed a Jim Crow performance at exactly the same time that he was playing the Duke to a white Othello (111).

Another complicating factor is the portrayal of Othello on the nineteenth-century stage generally and on southern American stages in particular. Ruth Cowhig (1979; 1985) has suggested that Othello's race had not been much of an issue before the end of the eighteenth century (although

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 3 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Edelstein offers examples of "color consciousness" in the 1780s); but after that, racial politics influenced heavily the portrayal of both character and play, even as few black actors (except for Ira Aldridge and possibly Ignatius Sancho) were awarded or took on the role until the twentieth century.2 A further complication involves what the audience actually "saw" in Othello's countenance. Charles Lower (1983) has argued, for instance, against the assumption that southern audiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would not tolerate a black Othello; like most audiences, he suggests, they expected to see in Othello a black man of African heritage. Against a European tradition of tawny Othellos, Lower suggests, the audience brought a common-sense understanding of Shakespeare's plot that overrides local ideologies and racial politics.3

What Simms saw when he attended performances of Othello is an even more complex question. Charleston, Simms's home town, often played host to the same performers and performances that were seen in New York City and welcomed, as well, distinguished actors from England.4 In Charleston between 1800 through the closing of the theaters in 1860, Othello was performed more times than any Shakespearean play except Hamlet (Holbein 1983, 89) and performed more frequently than in any other southern city (Edelstein 1982, 183; Dormon 1967, 276; Grimsted 1987, 252). Othello also played at theaters in Natchez, New Orleans, Mobile, and smaller locales such as Macon, Georgia. Simms himself not only attended, but also reviewed Shakespearean performances by such actors as Charles Kean, Thomas Cooper, and Edwin Forrest. On a trip to New Orleans in 1831, he saw Edmund Kean as Othello Charles Kean in the role of Othello (Watson 1985, 15; Simms 1952-56, 1: 34-38); Kean also played Othello opposite James Hackett's Iago in Charleston in 1832 (Shillingsburg 1971, 131, n.13). William Gilmore Simms was particularly interested in Edwin Forrest, referring to his performances and extracurricular exploits in letters to James Lawson that span a decade, and is generally aware of theatrical events in New York and abroad.5 A satiric portrait of a would-be Shakespearean actor from Border Beagles (1840) — he "gave imitations of Kean, excelling in the spasmodic hoarseness of his utterance," then modulated into http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 4 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

"the lugubrious whinings of Cooper" and the "guttural growl of Forrest" — shows that Simms shared with many nineteenth-century spectators an interest in the fine points of different actors' deliveries and, presumably, in their general ethos (Simms 1996, 64).

The Othellos that Simms saw on stage in America, including those of Charles Kean and Edwin Forrest, undoubtedly would have been whitened somewhat by stage tradition, which by the 1830s and 1840s definitely favored Othellos of lighter skin color. Charles's father Edmund, the first of the "tawny" Othellos, appears in a widely disseminated image with curly hair and bare arms, sporting exotic plumed headgear, a decorated toga of vaguely Roman sort, arm bracelets, rope, chains, and a curved sword like a scimitar (Shattuck, p. 41, illustration 26; for a similar image, see Robin O. Warren's essay (/cocoon/borrowers/request?id=116104) in this issue). Colored versions of this image, in particular, paint Kean's skin as glossy black, possibly to contrast with his gold- leaf ornaments. While the actor's hair is curled, his exoticism and military presence, rather than color or racial identity, give the portrait its distinctive look. Othello's color seems almost ornamental rather than intrinsic. In another representation, the actor is swarthy rather than black, with dark, brooding brows, and something of a hook nose. This Othello wears a turban, a loose tunic adorned by some kind of star ornament, and sandals; he carries a sharp dagger and a "light" straight out of the Arabian Nights. Even more so than the previous image of Kean, this Othello is orientalized. Edwin Forrest's Othello is even more thoroughly oriental. Sporting Forrest's trademark mustache, plus a goatee, he wears a cone-shaped cap like that of Kean, is wrapped in flowing robes, and holds in front of him a menacing sword, apparently left over from the Crusades (Shattuck, p. 74, illustration 52).

Another feature of Kean's and Forrest's American personae that may bear on Simms's grasp of Othello in 1841 was an overlap between the oriental ethos that they projected onto Shakespeare's Moor and their alignment with Native Americans in the public imagination. In Canada during one of his North American tours, Edmund Kean was "made an honorary chieftain in the Huron tribe http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 5 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

of Indians. His Indian name was Alanienouidet" (Shattuck 43, illustration 27). For his part, Forrest solicited, relished, and was closely associated with the role of Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, the hero of the play by American playwright John Augustus Stone (figure 4; Shattuck 71).6 Both a general tendency towards ethnic slippage and the opposition between blacks and Indians are relevant to Simms's fictionalizations of Othello.

"CALOYA"; OR, A POLYRACIAL OTHELLO That William Gilmore Simms was capable of seeing Othello as a person of color — if not exactly as a black man — is suggested by his story "Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver," which is contemporaneous with Confession. Here the Othello and Desdemona are Native American, the Iago a black slave, and the deus ex machina a young, just, intelligent, white plantation master. A closer look at the story, however, complicates this neat allegory, as the narratological complex governing human relations in Simms's story renders impossible any clear racial valuations. The principal characters are a young Catawba wife (Caloya), who is married to an old, ridiculous, degraded, and alcoholic Catawba chief whom the narrator identifies by his Englished name as "Richard Knuckles"; and the black "driver" Mingo, who by profession functions on the plantation "as a sort of sergeant to the overseer": "He gets the troops in line, divides them into squads, sees to their equipments, and prepares them for the management Edmund Kean as an Honorary Huron Chieftain and command of the superiors" (Simms 1856, 366). Mingo's public role, however, belies his truly anarchic and "irresponsible" nature. A wayward dandy by avocation, Mingo is moved to seduce Caloya. Knuckles, fueled by a "native" or racially determined anti-feminism and weakness for alcohol, is hoodwinked by Mingo until the driver insults Knuckles by confidently offering to buy what the Indian carelessly calls his "dog" — that is, his wife. Simms portrays Caloya as Desdemona, a paragon of wifely obedience: "Caloya, it may be added, yielded, without a murmur, to the caprices of her lord, to whom she had been given

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 6 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

by her father. She was as dutiful as if she had loved him; and, if conduct alone could be suffered to test the quality of virtue, her affection for him was quite as earnest, pure and eager, as that of the most devoted woman" (Simms 1856, 379).

Caloya, however, also has other talents that are linked to her racial identity. More resourceful by cultural training and much luckier than Desdemona, she steals away to petition in person the young master, who perceives the virtue beneath Caloya's beauty and, reluctantly abandoning his loyalty to the driver whom he has trusted, vows to make all right. In a vaudeville showdown, Knuckles — whose jealousy has been rekindled but by now is hiccuping uncontrollably from excess liquor — attacks Mingo with a hatchet. Mingo, nearly blinded by blood from his surface wound, takes down his ancient foe, but then Caloya, who has been cowering in a corner hoping that both men would overlook her, comes loyally to her husband's rescue. At this moment, in rushes Mingo's "lawfully-wedded" wife, the ironically named Diana. A large, raucous, and violently jealous Bianca, Diana flays her "rival"'s face and, without the timely intervention of the young master, might have plucked out her eyes. He sends Knuckles home to die, returns Caloya to her people with generous gifts, and demotes the driver. In the tale's postlude, the Catawba nation returns to the plantation to take up their peaceful tradition of producing pots for sale. At this time, Caloya pays a courtesy visit to the young master, introducing him to her new husband Chickawaw, who had been the original object of Knuckles's incorrigible jealousy, and demonstrating manifestly her health and new-found happiness.

Regarded as an act of Shakespearean appropriation, "Caloya" works by multiple character assignments. The elderly husband Knuckles is, quite clearly, the Othello figure in this short story. Mingo is Iago, replicating the Shakespearean villain's moral "blackness" with the hue of his skin. Mingo is, additionally, the overseer's "ancient." But at some level Mingo is also Cassio, since he dresses well and has a way with the ladies. In Caloya's world, apparently, no higher being exists to fulfill the role of Cassio (unless it be the late-appearing Chickawaw, a man much better suited to Caloya than either Knuckles or Mingo in terms of age and moral fiber). At the same time Knuckles, with his weakness for drink, is also Cassio. We are told (but not exactly shown) that Negro slaves also succumb readily to alcohol, so that Mingo can be analogous to Cassio in a second way. The white planter, however, has no real counterpart in Shakespeare's play. Is he a more savvy Brabantio, the patriarch of his moated grange? Montano, the rational deputy from Venice? Or is young Gillison, the planter, another sleek, protected, and successful Cassio, he who brings Venice from chaos to order once again? "Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver" undermines any sense of a stable racial hierarchy by virtue of the fact that most characters can fill several roles within the Shakespearean master plot. In "Caloya," we experience a polyracial Othello and a polyvocal appropriation of Shakespeare's play.

"Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver" met with a cool reception. In a "Letter to the Editor" of the Magnolia from "the Author of 'The Loves of the Driver,'" Simms defends the story from charges of immorality by its kinship with Shakespeare and his universal themes. The story, because it represents Indians and black slaves, admittedly deals with "low life" (Simms 2001, 249), Simms says, but the passions depicted there and the moral are "very much the same" as those of

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 7 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

"Shakespeare's Othello; one of the most noble of all dramatic moralities. The passions are in exercise precisely — the same pursuit of lust; — passions the most demoniac; lusts the least qualified and scrupulous" (Simms 1856, 249). Caloya, however, is perfection personified: a pattern of natural and human morality, her carriage and conduct might well be studied with respect and sympathy, by the purest daughter in the land. She is true to duty — the highest idea of virtue that we have — as if she had been taught in the temple; and she fulfills all its requisitions in spite of scorn, and wrong, and ill-treatment, with a spirit as unyielding and patient as if Earth had never known sorrow, and the peace of Eden, with all its privileges, was yet within her allotment. She bears her burden without faltering and complaint, endures the buffets and abuse of the very person to whom she had a right to look for love, honor, and protection; scorns the artifices of the seducer; spurns his temptations; and in the most trying event in her life, manages her conduct in such a manner as, finally, while maintaining her virtue, to prevent strife and murder. I am incapable, I confess, of conceiving a higher idea of morality apart from manners, and intellect, than I have embodied in this Indian woman. (Simms 2001, 251) But while Simms paints Caloya as the noble Indian, she is the exception that proves the rule in Simms's racial hierarchy.

In the manner of Shakespeare's comic heroines, Caloya escapes the senex without any help from a romantic lead.7 Her rival Diana, by way of insult, thinks of Indian women as "dingy squaws," "whose colour, neither white nor black, was of that sort, which, according to Diana in her jealous mood, neither gods nor men ought to endure" (Simms 1856, 415) . By demonstrating a degree of feminine guile — a characteristic Iago associates falsely with Desdemona — Caloya demonstrates that although she is morally superior to Knuckles and Mingo, she is not exactly "white." The truly honorable figure in Simms's fugue on themes from Othello is the shadowy figure of the young planter. An unmarried orphan, Col. Gillison achieves the status of patriarch at the expense of the Indian woman's characterological integrity; he blesses her second union with Chickawaw, which absolves him from the outrages done to her character and sanity under his regime when she was married to Knuckles and besieged by Mingo. Furthermore, the young planter, in aiding Caloya, prevents his Desdemona from being forced into a miscegenistic sexual union.

Simms's identity politics within this story are mercurial, just as the characters enjoy multiple alignments with their Shakespearean counterparts. Both Indians and negroes are shifty and degraded, poaching chickens from the master's plantation. Knuckles, Mingo, and Diana also speak in thick dialect. Simms dramatizes Mingo's more totalizing cupidity — he talks incessantly of "my horse, my land, my ox, and my ass, and all http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 8 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

that is mine", — with unexpected echoes from The Taming of the Shrew (Simms 1856, 368 (mis)quoting The Taming of the Shrew, 4.1.103). Within this racial economy, however, Indians generally have more nobility than negroes. In a jarring editorial digression, Simms contrasts "negro slaves" unfavorably with both the "North American Indian" and poor whites. Unlike these two groups, "a negro slave not only has his own dwelling, but he keeps a plentiful fire within it for which he pays no taxes. That he lives upon the fat of the land you may readily believe, since he is proverbially much fatter himself than the people of any other class." And unlike the Indian, in particular, the negro's "race is prolific," spreading "sin" throughout the land as its original inhabitants dwindle (1856, 411).8

This long aside, although consistent with the short story's satiric tone, also resonates with Simms's public stance on slavery. In 1838, Simms had published Slavery in America, a rebuttal of Harriet Martineau's critique of life in the South, and she is named again in the digression from "Caloya." In Slavery in America and in general, Simms's political philosophy rests on a combination of paternalism and populist democracy that reflects his own double position as dispossessed outsider (by birth and self-conception) and gentleman planter (by virtue of his second marriage; see Gray 1986, 46-47). Perhaps not incidentally, Simms's defense of slavery draws authority from Ulysses's speech on degree from Troilus and Cressida (Simms 1838b, 62-63). Democracy should reign and merit rewarded, but only within the bounds of a moral and intellectual hierarchy. Because African Americans are at the bottom of that great chain of being, the institution of slavery is justified by the moral imperatives of white stewardship: http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 9 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

The slaveholders of the South, having the moral and animal guardianship of an ignorant and irresponsible people under their control, are the great moral conservators, in one powerful interest, of the entire world. Assuming slavery to be a denial of justice to the negro, there is no sort of propriety in the application of the name of slave to the servile of the south. He is under no despotic power. There are laws which protect him, in his place, as inflexible as those which his proprietor is required to obey, in his place. Providence has placed him in our hands, for his good, and has paid us from his labor for our guardianship. (Simms 1838b, 82- 83; excerpt reprinted in Simms 2001, 246-47, italics in original).9 Within this paternalistic logic, however, the Native American occupies a pivotal place that allies her "naturally" with the white slaveholders as their honorary ancestor.

Caloya's tribe is on the wane, having been displaced from the land to white imagination to become what Renée Bergland terms the "national uncanny" (2000). The narrator places the tale during his boyhood, when the Catawbas had been "reduced to a pitiful remnant of some four hundred persons" (Simms 1856, 361). By the late 1830s, furthermore, their numbers had dwindled to twelve men, thirty-six women, and forty children (Hudson 1966, 64). Simms was finishing "Caloya" in the summer of 1840; earlier that year, the Treaty of Nation Ford had been signed, in which the state of South Carolina offered the tribe money for their land and the Catawba moved temporarily to North Carolina. They returned to a much smaller parcel of South Carolina lands only in 1850.10 Absent, depleted, relegated to the past, the Catawba become symbolic ancestors for the young planter and the narrator, the whites who by order or nature succeed them; Caloya's presence in the story justifies the social structure as it currently exists, with the negro slave supposedly living off the fat of the land while being justly relegated to slavery. According to the story's logic, Caloya, as a Native American woman, is the ghost whose shadowy virtues prove that whatever is, is right.

CONFESSION; OR, THE BLIND HEART AS AN ANTEBELLUM OTHELLO As Shakespearean appropriation, Confession is more loosely constructed and more parsimonious in direct citation than is "Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver." While Simms's short story declared its Shakespearean pretensions on the very first page, Confession really does not bring its references to the foreground until the novel is nearly one-third over. Simms himself likens the novel and its hero to William Godwin's Caleb Williams; the influence of Goethe and Sir Walter Scott can also be seen. Within the novel as well, Simms makes equally self-conscious allusions to Paradise Lost, the plot that Ashley Thorndyke claimed no longer fascinated Americans after the Civil War. Confession's events and characters, finally, resonate occasionally with other Shakespearean plays.

The introduction to Confession alludes to Othello's famous stories, but only to deny that this "domestic novel" will offer conventional adventures: "It has its 'disastrous chances'; but with few of those 'moving accidents by flood and field' — those 'hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach' — which so richly garnish in general the tales of" popular writers (Simms 1970, 8, citing Othello, 1.3.153-55 and passim). Instead, Simms's novel concerns the hero's domestic trials, http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 10 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

which are caused by "diseased sensibilities" — where the "passions, exciting and erring, develop themselves in faults, vices, and weaknesses, rather than in crimes; and where, even when crime occurs motiveless as crime, and purposed not as crime, but under a blind judgment, as justice simply" (8-9).

Confession starts out quite unlike Othello. Its hero, Edward Clifford, begins life more as a Heathcliff in a shabby Dickensian world: "I was not merely an orphan. I was poor, and was felt as burdensome by those connections whom a dread of public opinion, rather than a sense of duty and affection, persuaded to take me to their homes" (Simms 1970, 12). There is an almost embarrassingly autobiographical cast to Clifford's characterization. Simms's mother came from a substantial family that had moved from Virginia to Charleston (Guilds 1992, 5). His father was an Irish immigrant who, after the death of his wife in childbirth, consigned young Simms to the care of his maternal grandmother and left Charleston for the Southwest. In a letter to James Lawson, Simms refers to himself as an "orphan," although technically his father not only lived, but later sought unsuccessfully to regain custody of his son (Guilds 1992, 6; Simms 1952-56, 1: 164). Edward Clifford, like Simms himself, has to fight to become educated but eventually achieves a degree in law. (For the fictional Clifford, the struggle is much more dramatic; denied any aid from his parsimonious and sneering uncle, Edward has to study law on his own while supporting himself with a day job.) Edward Clifford, like Simms himself, was also ambivalent toward Charleston and its citizens and eventually Clifford — as Simms had done in youth when visiting his father — heads for the Western frontier.

In the novel, Edward becomes a kind of illegitimate brother to the sickly heir Edgar Clifford who, failing to live up to his Shakespearean name, dies and so draws down on Edward even more enmity from his psychologically abusive foster parents. According to Edward's self-assessment, he is plagued from the beginning with a "nameless jealousy" that "rose unbidden to his heart" at times, "when, in truth, there was no obvious cause" (Simms 1970, 19). This is the condition that Edward Clifford identifies mysteriously as his "blind heart": pathological jealousy, a spiritual corruption that springs from love, or sometimes merely self-interest, and that leads inevitably to tragedy and death. Yet, despite his material situation and the "blind heart" that lurks within him, our hero achieves several close friends, plus a patron and substitute father who provides moral and material support, financial success at law, and access to community respect.

At this point, the structural counterpoint with Othello finally takes hold. Edward Clifford has fallen in love with his pure but delicate cousin, Julia, with whom he was raised and who shares none of her family's crudity and unworthy sentiments. While the aunt and uncle work hard to keep the two separated, despite the fact that Julia fades away before their eyes, Julia finally confesses her love to Edward. Her mother, in the meantime, has been engineering a marriage to Perkins, an unsuitable fop. Perkins's credo, a pastiche of Iago's favorite key words, is "make money — honestly, if you can, but — make money!" (Simms 1970, 76, quoting Othello, 1.4.33-39, 345-46, 354). The grotesque mother — one of those "miserably silly women" who are "born, according to Iago," to "suckle fools and chronicle small beer" (Simms 1970, 75, quoting Othello, 2.1.162) — attempts to force through abruptly Julia's marriage to Perkins. Julia, with an uncharacteristic

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 11 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

passion borrowed from Shakespeare's Juliet, tells Mr. Perkins that she would "sooner marry the grave and the winding-sheet than be your wife!" (Simms 1970, 102; with allusions to Romeo and Juliet, 2.1.132; 3.5.140). When Mrs. Clifford sets the nuptials for Thursday next — the same day chosen by Juliet's father — Edward and Julia elope, with the help of Julia's doctor and a female relative, who stand in for Romeo and Juliet's Friar and Nurse. (A negro named "Peter" also plays a role, his name alluding to the Nurse's servant in Shakespeare's play.)

Shakespearean criticism has worried the question of whether Desdemona and Othello ever consummate their marriage. Simms's domestic tragedy, by contrast, insists on the fact that they have done so. Edward spirits away Julia to the house of the sympathetic aunt, while Edward's bluff friend Kingsley distracts her mother under the pretense that he is a Kentucky trader who has come to buy slaves. Mrs. Clifford finds the couple, "[but] she came too late for anything but abuse. Julia was irrevocably mine" (Simms 1970, 114). In a most un- Shakespearean sequel, the grotesque mother, along with her increasingly imbecile and destitute husband, storm the bridal chamber and are beaten back by the victorious husband. The fair bride faints, but awakes to beg her exasperated spouse to admit Mrs. Clifford to the chamber, appalled that any dutiful daughter would make her mother wait out-of- doors. What can one make of this scene? It is not a rape in the manner of Rhett Butler and Scarlett. It is not the absent primal scene of Shakespeare's Othello. Nor does Simms conform completely to the decorum of romance. In effect, the scene becomes low comedy.

At this very moment, paradoxically, Simms evokes Julia and Edward Clifford in Confession his tragic Shakespearean model. Although the bride's father dies (after a long physical and mental decline), the happy couple retires to a cottage, where Edward returns to marital bliss after hard days at law and Julia enjoys sketching and painting; here, the two enjoy "brief Eden moments of security and peace" (Simms 1970, 126). Poised as he is finally on the brink of happiness, in a most self-conscious manner our hero Edward nevertheless digresses about the "evil principle" that poisons his heart and will soon destroy his marital bliss — "the serpent in the garden which is to spoil Eden. Wo, beyond all other woes, that this serpent should be engendered in one's own heart, producing its blindness, and finally working its bane" (130). Here he takes on fully and solemnly the role of Othello. His nature, says Edward, was "ardent" and "impetuous," just as the Romantics said of Othello. Frustrated by circumstance, the lack of parents and fortune, Edward becomes both suspicious and shy. Julia's love temporarily allows his feelings, "like a mountain-stream long pent up" (133), to pour forth all in one direction — presumably like the Hellespont to the Pontic sea http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 12 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

(Othello, 3.3.356-59). The imagery, authentic to Shakespeare's play, segues into a Romantic apologia for Othello, in contrast to the narrator: Mine was eminently a jealous heart! On this subject of jealousy, men rarely judge correctly. They speak of Othello as jealous — Othello, one of the least jealous of all human natures! Jealously is a quality that needs no cause. It makes its own cause. It will find or make occasion for its exercise, in the most innocent circumstances. The proofs that made Othello wretched and revengeful, were sufficient to have deceived any jury under the sun. . . . [N]ever was human character less marked by a jealous mood than that of Othello. His great self-esteem was, of itself, a sufficient security against jealousy. Mine might have been, had it not been so terribly diseased by ill-training. (Simms 1970, 135-36) In a subtle maneuver, Edward Clifford depicts himself as both more passionate and less logical than Othello; for this reason, he is also at once more and less culpable than Othello, a detail that will figure strongly in the novel's upbeat, un-Shakespearean denouement.

The remainder of the novel details what might have happened had Othello acted less decisively when faced with the specter of Desdemona's infidelity, or, from Clifford's own perspective, had he been faced with less damning proofs. William Edgerton, Edward's childhood friend and son to his patron, develops a mad passion for Julia, inspired apparently by her virtue and their mutual love of painting. As Edward grows colder, more disaffected, and absent from his home, and Julia simply suffers, Edgerton haunts their house and her studio beyond the bounds of propriety.

In an bathetic reversal of Othello's plot, the widowed mother of Julia then marries a younger man, a drunk and abusive, if at times charming, Irishman. Matters come to a crisis at their wedding. Taking on the role of Iago with unbecoming relish — she actually believes that her daughter could be unchaste — Mrs. Clifford orchestrates a scene in which Edgerton dances a racy waltz with Julia. Employing one of Iago's most powerful arguments, Mrs. Clifford gloats to Edward, "I know where the shoe pinches, but what did you expect? Were you simple enough to imagine that a woman would true to her husband, who was false to her own mother?" (Simms 1970, 19, alluding to Othello, 1.3.291-92 and 3.3.210-12). "Fiend!" is Clifford's reply. After Edward leaves in a jealous rage, Mrs. Clifford arranges for Edgerton to take home the abandoned Julia; in the carriage, he assaults her. Edward, meanwhile, wanders the streets of Charleston and in a diversionary subplot, helps his friend Kingsley, the same man who had participated in the elopement, to foil card sharks who have cheated Kingsley out of his wealth. ("Put money in thy purse, Clifford," is http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 13 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Kingsley's command to Edward.) The card shark is exposed, grapples with Kingsley, and narrowly escapes out of a window. Despite this bracing infusion of male violence, however, things go from bad to worse. Julia, left alone by her husband, suffers a miscarriage from her mistreatment at Edgerton's hands and nearly dies. In a bedside colloquy with her husband, Julia's language is replete with haunting echoes of Othello's murder scene: "Do not look so harshly upon me. What have I done?" she asks. "Do not kill me with cruel looks; with words, that, if cruel from you, would sooner kill than the knife in savage hands. Tell me in what I have offended? What is it you think? For what am I to blame? What do you doubt — suspect?" (Simms 1970, 245, echoing Othello, 5.2.21, 262-63).

In desperation, Edward removes Julia to the frontier state of Alabama, where temporarily their happiness is restored and their marriage flourishes. But Edgerton follows them, and bound by an oath to the father, Edward Clifford again tolerates his presence until Edgerton commits an even worse outrage on Julia's person while she is nursing him, at her husband's request, in their home. Unable to take any more, Clifford challenges Edgerton to a duel and poisons Julia with prussic acid, making the crime look like an accidental overdose. In an ironic fulfillment of Othello's fractured muttering, "First to be hanged, and then to confess" (Othello, 4.1.37), Edgerton commits suicide, absolving Julia from all blame with a letter that confesses his own misdeeds. Too late, Edward also finds the long missive left behind by his wife, explaining all of Edgerton's behavior and confirming her abiding love for Edward. As in Othello's case, the "confession" that Clifford receives from his wife is a justification that brings him little psychic relief.

Although officially Julia's death is blamed on "apoplexy," Edward vows to give himself up to justice. But Kingsley, who has not played an altogether constructive role in the episode, convinces Edward that he acted justly and that he must live to atone for his crime or sin — the novel is not quite sure which term applies to a context where Othello's crime has been defined as a wild kind of "justice" as well as a character fault. Accordingly, Edward banishes himself to Texas, lighting out for this new territory in order to cultivate that rich but neglected paradise. It is here that Edward achieves "atonement" (Simms 1970, 398). As one who loved not wisely but too well, Edward Clifford suffers exile rather than suicide; and the potential richness of his new abode makes it clear that Eden has not been completely lost to him.

ON WHITENESS In the all-European context of Confession, Edward Clifford is shielded from the paradoxes of race and color that haunt the polyracial domestic drama of "Caloya." The racial composition of Othello in Simms's novel is more complex, however, than the novel's studied avoidance of the subject might suggest. Edward is more passionate, and therefore more Shakespearean, than Othello himself. To this extent, his character is "whitened." At the same time, he has less motive and rationale for his jealousy and therefore demonstrates a certain kinship with Iago that "blackens" his character. Edward's kinship with Heathcliff suggests another "coloring" for this hero's trajectory that moves outside the (African) black / (European) white binary. He becomes the Irish

11 http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 14 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

other. Edward Clifford and Heathcliff, like Simms himself, can be characterized as "black" Irish.11 Clifford, following the narrative path of Heathcliff before him and perhaps Rhett Butler after him, is an orphan who never finds comfort in his adoptive family, although Simms's hero insists on his status as a blood relation rather than a . Julia Clifford accepts him as a proper husband and, with a romantic gesture of self-immolation, crosses the class barrier that, according to her parents, makes Edward unworthy of her. But while Edward's self-identification with Othello disrupts the black / white binary of southern identity, it does not release him altogether from racial and color hierarchies.

Like Heathcliff and some other "dark" nineteenth-century English heroes, Edward is moved by passions beyond the ken of European manhood, but these passions are oriental and perhaps also Native American. As Elsie Michie points out, in Shirley Charlotte Brontë depicts the Irish character Malone as having a "high-featured, North-American-Indian sort of visage, which belongs to a certain class of Irish gentry, and has a petrified and proud look, better suited to the owner of an estate of slaves, than to the landlord of a free peasantry" (quoted on p.128). As in the case of Brontë's character, in Simms's imaginary America the Irish / Indian Edward Clifford is transformed into a beneficent (white) landlord whose freely dependent (white) wife absolves him from charges of slavish appetite and makes him the "landlord of a free peasantry."

Imagine Edward Clifford dressed in the oriental costume of Edwin Forrest's Othello, as he might have appeared on the Charleston stage. Shift the perspective a little, and imagine Edward as Metamora, a Native American alter ego for the Englished-oriental Othello. And beneath both costumes, imagine the transatlantic actor, whose whiteness reconciles these multiple identities in the stable gentility of Anglo-Saxon racial purity. It is ironic that only the actor, whose with the stage and his makeup, becomes finally the paradigm for and guarantor of white racial privilege. The actor's position as this paradigm indicates finally how fragile, mutable, and "murky" the identity of whiteness is within the ideological matrix of Confession.

Within Simms's novel, of course, we never see Edward Clifford either take on or remove the symbolic trappings that constitute his changing identity. Instead, Confession addresses issues of race through strategies of displacement.12 The novel's relationship to Othello, like that of "Caloya," is on one level de-stabilized by the free circulation of Shakespearean quotations and vocabulary; virtually anyone can speak in Iago's proverbial vein, and good as well as bad characters voice his sentiments about making money. On another level, it is complicated by multiple character identifications. Mrs. Clifford, for instance, is at once Brabantio the thwarted father figure and Iago the tempter. Iago, furthermore, exists first and finally within the breast of Edward Clifford. And, on the broadest structural level, the hero evades racial classification by the contrast between him and stock characters who appear at key points in the novel. He cannot be black because, unlike the slave Peter, Clifford is noble, well-spoken, industrious, and by Peter's own admission, naturally superior. (As they plot the elopement, Peter asks Clifford if he would buy him, appealing to the lawyer's sense of "stewardship.") If Edward is not African American, neither is he completely Irish when viewed against the stereotyped figure of Mr. Delaney, the young bon vivant — charming, lazy, drunk, and physically abusive — whom Mrs. Clifford 13 http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 15 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

marries after the death of Julia's father.13 Clifford finally becomes white by virtue of who he is not.

In Whiteness Visible, Valerie Babb proposes that "whiteness is more than an appearance; it is a system of privileges accorded to those with white skin" (1998, 9). In Confession, this system of privileges is at first denied, then granted to Edward Clifford as he takes Julia / Desdemona for his bride. But in appropriating Othello as his model, Edward / Simms not only achieves an elevation in class for himself, but also looks both backward to past conflations of skin and race, and forward to conflations of skin, race, and class within the local American culture — Charleston — in which both author and character lived. To cast Edward Clifford as Irish (in the English tradition of Brontë and Scott) and as Othello (in both the English and American contexts) is to put into play the relation of whiteness to other categories of privilege. In a place and century when whiteness was being produced rather than reproduced, Simms shows that southern writers who — it is assumed — entered the literary field with fixed notions of racial identity, were actually exploring, through Shakespearean allusions, whiteness as a category that constructs identity.14 Edward, like Othello, finds that in following his passion, he loses his "occupation" and therefore the "whiteness" that he was at such pains to achieve. His own "confession" of jealously and murder — the sins of a black race — reveals the hidden miscegenation in Clifford's marriage to Julia. He can regain the privilege of whiteness only by heading for Texas, a new Eden where Edward can reconstruct himself, in Shirley's phrase, as the "landlord of a free peasantry."

CODA: 1856 AND 1864 Having successfully disentangled both his hero and Shakespeare's from the color and race nexus that links the figures of the black African, the American negro slave, the Native American, and the Irish immigrant, Simms nevertheless would continue to question Edward Clifford's identity. 1856 saw the publication of Confession's second edition; among the additions and structural changes that Simms made to his novel appears a digressive footnote. Simms is prone to scholarly asides, even when they interrupt the climax of his action. In 1856, Simms marks the discovery of Julia's body with such a note. Unlike Shakespeare's Othello, Clifford poisons his victim, using prussic acid as his weapon of choice. When used in proper amounts, prussic acid is medicinal, but an overdose can be fatal. The doctor, however, determines that Julia Clifford died from apoplexy: "She must have had several fits. It was evident that she was conscious after the first, for she appears to have endeavored to reach the door. She was found at the entrance, lying upon the floor. When I saw her, she must have been lifeless a good hour" (Simms 1970, 381). To this, Simms the author adds: "The reader will be reminded of the melancholy details of Miss Landon — L.E.L. — whose fate is still a mystery" (381n).

In 1838, the poetess Letitia Elizabeth Landon married and moved with her husband to the Gold Coast of Africa, where within the year she had died under mysterious circumstances, probably from an overdose of prussic acid. Her husband George Maclean, it was rumored, kept a black mistress (with whom he may have had children) or even a harem of African women; either he or the mistress might have murdered Landon, or the infidelity of her husband might have pushed

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 16 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

L.E.L. to commit suicide (Blanchard 1841,1: 119, 176-81; Madden 1855, 2: 72-73 and 39-73, passim; Metcalfe 1962, 236-42).15 Landon's biographer Laman Blanchard explicitly links L.E.L.'s marriage to that of Desdemona; during their wooing, she "seriously inclines" to Maclean's stories "as the 'gentle lady' afterwards 'married to the Moor,' might hearken to the travel's history that her, and to tales of antres vast and deserts idle" (Blanchard 1841, 1: 116; see also Lootens 1999, 244-45). By 1855, when R. R. Madden's memoir was published, L.E.L.'s death had become associated with the disintegration of the English colonial project in Africa (Madden 1855, 2: 64, 49, and passim; see also Forbes 1874). For the English, Africa, with its disease, strife, and slavery, killed L.E.L.

When he added the footnote concerning L.E.L., Simms had himself experienced much death and some alienation. Between 1841 and 1856, Simms was living at Woodlands, the estate of his father-in-law. While he wrote steadily, he also worried about the farm's productivity and his family's well-being; by 1854 Simms's second wife had borne him ten children, five of whom had died (Guilds 1992, 258-59). In 1856, in what was one of Simms's most politically disastrous moves, the novelist made a lecture tour of the North in which he defended the state of South Carolina against Senator Charles Sumner's derogatory remarks about the state's role in the Revolutionary War (Guilds 1992, 124-27; Shillingsburg 1988). Whether or not the death of L.E.L. resonated with Simms's personal and political life, the sentiments about Africa, her people, and slavery that became attached to the legend of L.E.L. probably would have seemed just to the man who had written, in Slavery in America, that "murder awaits the missionary and the traveller who penetrates" Africa, where "civilization seems to be as far remote as ever from their attainment" (Simms 1838b, 74). Othello's preoccupation with race, color, and slavery — so conspicuously absent from Confession in 1841 — re-enters the novel in 1856 from the world of English letters, by way of Africa.

The 1864 edition of Confession adds a second, even darker footnote. In Chapter 28, entitled "Morals of Enterprise," Clifford's adventurous friend Kingsley envisions an American expansion into Canada, Texas, Cuba — perhaps even the West Indies — and urges Edward to pack up and join him in this pursuit of wealth and power (Simms 1970, 205-07). The movement of people and labor into Texas to grow cotton, he predicts, will also lead to changes in South Carolina and Georgia. Although the word "slavery" is not mentioned once, it is everywhere the subtext for this disquisition on America's manifest destiny. At the conclusion of Kingsley's peroration, in the 1864 edition there appears the following note: "All these speculations were written in 1840-41. I need not remark upon which have since been verified" (207). By virtue of this covert political frame, Simms's American Othello becomes finally a tale of race and slavery.

By 1864, Simms had experienced the wounding of his eldest son in the war, the death of his wife, the sack of Columbia, and the destruction of Woodlands, along with his extensive library, at the hands of stragglers from Sherman's army (Guilds 1992, 271-303). While Othello's blackness was still a taboo subject in public discourse, in his private letters Simms takes on for himself the identity of Othello and repeats, almost as a mantra, the sentiment that "Othello's occupation's gone."16 The phrase had always been a favorite of Simms. But while previously he had referred

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 17 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

straightforwardly to the solider's occupation in relation to characters from his Revolutionary War romances, in 1864 the Othello with no occupation is the author himself.17 In some places, the loss of "occupation" refers to the confiscation of Simms's copyrights and loss of that income during the war, but in others the term refers more broadly to southern life and culture. With this act of literary appropriation, the assumption of Othello's identity, Simms reclaims the Shakespearean tragic hero as a white man who stands for not the African or the Moor, but for the American Southerner in defeat. But Simms, unlike his character Edward Clifford from Confession, cannot rediscover paradise in the bracing frontier of an imaginary Texas, where he can leave behind guilt, slavery, and racial strife. Not only does Simms lack the opportunity and means to light out for this new territory in 1864, but as the footnote to his novel sadly concedes, such a place did not and never had existed. Without the system of privileges that produce and reproduce whiteness, the southern Othello's occupation was truly gone.

NOTES 1. Edelstein (1982) takes the term "color consciousness" from Winthrop Jordan (1968, 4-11). 2. On the history of black Shakespearean actors in the U.S., see Hill (1984). On the politics of race surrounding the color of Othello in production, see Iyengar (2002). 3. Although this point is not directly relevant to Simms's Confession, Virginia Mason Vaughan notes that, after the Civil War, Othello's popularity diminished, and the play's hero was whitened (1994, 160). Orientalism in the portrayal of Othello, according to Vaughan, was widespread when Salvini performed the role in the 1870s. 4. Woodrow Holbein (1983), for instance, cites appearances by a range of American and English actors, including: Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, Ellen Tree and Charles Kean, William Macready, Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, and Junius Brutus Booth. Performances of Othello, and some of the regional and racial politics attending them in the early 1800s, are discussed in Holbein 1983, 98- 101. 5. See Simms 1952-56, 1: 117; 1: 428; 2: 186. On 15 May, 1846, Simms comments on reports about the rivalry between Macready and Forrest, which had culminated recently in a bout of hostile hissing in London and Edinburgh (Simms 1952-56, 162; and 162, note 122). The rivalry and rudeness that characterized Macready and Forrest's relations, and the hissing bouts in particular, are discussed in Moody 1950, 212-34. Finally, Simms offered to Forrest a play of his own invention, entitled Norman Maurice, a Man of the People (Simms 1952-56, 2: 346), although nothing developed from the gesture. 6. Richard Moody writes that, during Forrest's tour of Edinburgh in 1846, one reviewer complained that the actor's makeup made him look "more like a Shawnee or Mohican than a Moor" (Moody 1960, quoted in Edelstein 1982, 184). 7. Another Shakespeare comedy to which Simms refers directly in this story is The Merry Wives of Windsor. In his "Letter to the Editor," Simms aligns Mingo with the old, fat, degraded, unsuccessful wooer Falstaff, who is baffled by two middle-class women, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. The analogy compliments Caloya without really elevating her class status (Simms

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 18 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

2001, 254-55). 8. The biblical language here probably alludes to the narrative of Noah's son Cham, whose children are punished with blackness for the father's disobedience against God and his own father Noah (see MacDonald 1991, 58-59). 9. On Simms's Whiggish concept of history and the balance between freedom and hierarchy within his world view, see Gray 1986. 10. The Treaty of Nation Ford was signed on 13 March, 1840 (Hudson 1966, 64). In a Memorialsent to the South Carolina legislature on 31 July, 1840, the (white) citizens who had leased Indian lands from the Catawba agreed to the treaty (Brown 1966, 307). Simms finished his story during the summer of 1840, giving the manuscript to James Lawson for placement. After being rejected by the Knickerbocker, "Caloya" was published by P. C. Pendleton in the Savannah literary journal Magnolia: or Southern Monthly, in three installments from May-July, 1841 (Notes on "Caloya," Simms 2000, 394). 11. On Heathcliff and other figures of the "simianized Irish," see Michie 1992. On Simms's identification with the Irish and their fight for independence, see Kibler 2001. I am also indebted to Celia Daileader's discussion of Othello, Heathcliff, and Rhett Butler from her forthcoming book, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Interracial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge University Press). 12. A similar strategy of displacement, replacing blackness with Celtic identity, can be seen in Diana Henderson's (2003) analysis of Walter Scott's Kenilworth as an appropriation of Othello. 13. Perhaps complicating the racial equations further, Othello parodies sometimes refashioned the Moor as an Irish character. See, for instance, "General O'Thello; Or, the Wipe and the Wiper," an English parody of an Irish Othello, in which the general's name is Christy O'Thello (Jacobs and Johnson, no. 150, p. 55). 14. Noel Ignatiev (1995) explores how the Irish became "white" in nineteenth-century America, although he focuses largely on the urban North and stresses the ways in which violence exacerbated the breach between Irish and African Americans in the cities generally and in organized labor in particular. 15. Whether Simms had in mind L.E.L.'s death when he killed off Julia Clifford with prussic acid cannot be known. The detail of death by an overdose of prussic acid, which was much discussed in L.E.L.'s case, suggests a direct connection, but is not conclusive. In an Othello travesty by comic actor Charles Mathew (1833) that precedes both L.E.L.'s demise and Confession's publication, for instance, the drunken Othello figure threatens his wife with prussic acid: "It is the shortest method of divorce — / Drink, false one, drink, and hold your peace!" (Mathew 1993, Scene 7, 57-60). 16. In an essay presented at the 2004 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Nan Morrison examines the Charleston theater reviews of Francis Warrington Dawson, an English sympathizer of the South, during Reconstruction, and finds that, despite his strong political views, Dawson remains silent on the issue of Othello's race. 17. See, for instance, Simms to James Lawson, 20 August, 1837 (Simms 1952-56, 1:113); Simms to James Henry Hammond, 14 June, 1861 (Simms 1952-56, 4: 366); Simms to William Porcher Miles, 31 January, 1862 (Simms 1952-56, 4: 396); Simms to Richard Yeadon, 27 March, 1862

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 19 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

(Simms 1952-56, 4: 399); Simms to William Porcher Miles, 10 April 1862 (Simms 1952-56, 4: 401).

REFERENCES Andreas, James. 1992. "Othello's African American Progeny." South Atlantic Review 57.4: 39-57. Andreas, James. 1999. "Signifyin' on The Tempest in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day." In Shakespeare and Appropriation. Edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. London: Routledge. 103-18. Babb, Valerie. 1998. Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. New York: New York University Press. Bergland, Renée. 2000. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Blanchard, Laman. 1841. The Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard. Brown, Douglas Summers. 1966. The Catawba Indians: The People and the River. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1959. Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare: A Selection of the Essays, Notes and Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the Poems and Plays of Shakespeare. Edited by Terence Hawkes. New York: Capricorn Books. Cowhig, Ruth. 1979. "Actors Black and Tawny in the Role of Othello." Theatre Research International 4: 133-46. Cowhig, Ruth. 1985. "Blacks in English Renaissance Drama." In The Black Presence in English Literature. Edited by David Dabydeen. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1-26. Dormon, James H., Jr. 1967. Theater in the Ante Bellum South, 1815-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Edelstein, Tilden G. 1982. " Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage." In Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson. New York: Oxford University Press. 179-97. Forbes, Archibald. 1874. "A Gold Coast Tragedy." St. Paul's. Reprint, Living Age 120 (March): 697- 701. "General O'Thello; Or, The Wipe and the Wiper." 1869. The Tomahawk: A Saturday Journal of Satire 4.100 (3 April): 154-55. Gray, Richard. 1986. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 20 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Grimsted, David. 1987. Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850. 1967; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press. Guilds, John Caldwell. 1992. Simms: A Literary Life. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Henderson, Diana E. 2003. "Othello Redux?: Scott's Kenilworth and the Trickiness of 'Race' on the Nineteenth-Century Stage." In Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2: Literature and Culture. Edited by Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole. Foreword by Nina Auerbach. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 14-29. Hill, Errol. 1984. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Holbein, Woodrow L. 1983. "Shakespeare in Charleston, 1800-1860." In Kolin, ed. 1983. 88-111. Holmes, O. W. 1864. "Shakspeare: April 23, 1864." Atlantic Monthly, 13.80 (June): 762-63. Available online from Making of America, Cornell University, at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/ (http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/). In Rawlings 1999. 242-44. Hudson, Charles M. 1970. The Catawba Nation. University of Georgia Monographs, 18. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Ignatiev, Noel. 1995. How the Irish Became White. New York and London: Routledge. Iyengar, Sujata. 2002. "White Faces, Blackface: The Production of 'Race' in Othello." In Othello: New Critical Essays. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York and London: Routledge. 103-32. Jacobs, Henry E., and Claudia D. Johnson. 1976. An Annotated Bibliography of Shakespearean Burlesques, Parodies, and Travesties. New York and London: Garland. Jordan, Winthrop. 1968. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va. Kemble, Frances Anne. 1882. Records of Later Life. New York: Henry Holt. Kibler, James. 2001. "Simms's Irish: An Address at Hibernian Society Hall, Charleston, South Carolina, 14 January 1999." Simms Review 9: 1-19. Kolin, Philip, ed. 1983. Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lootens, Tricia. 1999. "Receiving the Legend, Rethinking the Writer: Letitia Landon and the Poetess Tradition." In Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception. Edited by Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. 242-59. Lower, Charles B. 1983. "Othello as Black on Southern Stages, Then and Now." In Kolin, ed. 1983. 199-228.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 21 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Macdonald, Joyce Green. 1991. "'The Force of Imagination': The Subject of Blackness in Shakespeare, Jonson, and Ravenscroft." Renaissance Papers: 53-74. Madden, R. R. 1855. The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. Mathew, Charles. 1993. Othello, the Moor of Fleet Street (1833). Edited by Manfred Draudt. Tubingen and Basel: A. Francke Verlag. Metcalfe, G. E. 1962. Maclean of the Gold Coast: The Life and Times of George Maclean, 1801- 1847. London: Oxford University Press. Michie, Elsie. 1992. "From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference." Novel 25 (Winter): 125-40. Moody, Richard. 1960. Edwin Forrest, First Star of the American Stage. New York: Knopf. Morrison, Nan. 2004. "Theater Criticism in Charleston During Reconstruction." Paper read at the 2004 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, 8-10 April, New Orleans. Potter, Lois. 2002. Shakespeare in Performance: Othello. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Rawlings, Peter, ed. 1999. Americans on Shakespeare, 1776-1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. Shattuck, Charles. 1976. Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth. [n.p.]: The Folger Shakespeare Library. Shillingsburg, Miriam J. 1971. "Simms's Reviews of Shakespeare on the Stage." Tennessee Studies in Literature 16: 121-35. Shillingsburg, Miriam J. 1988. "Simms's Failed Lecture Tour of 1856: The Mind of the North." In "Long Years of Neglect": The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press. 183-201. Simms, William Gilmore [as "Dramaticus"]. 1838a. "Shakspeariana." Southern Literary Journal and Magazine of Arts, n. s. (September): 184-86. [Simms, William Gilmore]. 1838b. Slavery in America, being a Brief Review of Miss Martineau on that Subject, by a South Carolinian. Richmond: Thomas W. White. Simms, William Gilmore. 1856. "Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver." In The Wigwam and the Cabin. New York: W. J. Middleton. 361-429. Simms, William Gilmore 1952-56. The Letters of William Gilmore Simms. Edited by Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves. Introduction by Donald Davidson. 5 vols. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 22 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

Simms, William Gilmore. 1970. Confession; or, the Blind Heart: A Domestic Story. 1841; New and revised edition. 1885; reprint New York: AMS. Simms, William Gilmore. 1996. Border Beagles: A Tale of Mississippi. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press. Simms, William Gilmore. 2000. The Wigwam and the Cabin. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Simms, William Gilmore. 2001. The Simms Reader: Selections from the Writings of William Gilmore Simms. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Simms, William Gilmore, ed. 1848. Supplement to the Plays of William Shakespeare. First American edition. New York: George Cooledge and Brother. Thorndike, Ashley. 1933. "Shakespeare in America." In Aspects of Shakespeare, being British Academy Lectures. Edited by L. Abercrombie. Oxford: Clarendon. 108-27. Reprinted in Rawlings 1999. 512-26. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. 1994. Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, Charles S. 1985. "Simms's Use of Shakespearean Characters." In Shakespeare and Southern Writers: A Study in Influence. Edited by Philip Kolin. Foreword by Lewis P. Simpson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 13-28.

PERMISSIONS Images of Edmund Kean as Othello, Edwin Forrest as Othello, Edmund Kean as an honorary Huron chieftain, and Edwin Forrest as Metamora reproduced by kind permission of the Folger Shakespeare Libary.

ABSTRACT | OTHELLO ON THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN STAGE | "CALOYA"; OR, A POLYRACIAL OTHELLO | CONFESSION; OR, THE BLIND HEART AS AN ANTEBELLUM OTHELLO | ON WHITENESS | CODA: 1856 AND 1864 | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 23 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'50 PM

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781419/show Page 24 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

A Way of Life Worth Preserving? Identity, Place, and (/current) Commerce in Big Business and the American South

SHARON O'DAIR, UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA (/previous)

ABSTRACT | INTRODUCTION | THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY | LAND, BLOOD, AND IDENTITY | (/about) SAVED BY AN IMAGE PROBLEM | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT Rather than suggest that The Comedy of Errors explores doubling and, ultimately, the finding of identity, current criticism suggests that the play reveals identity to be malleable, and, as such, that it participates in the discourse of an early modern crisis of self-representation. In contrast, Jim Abrahams's 1988 film, Big Business, at first suggests identity to be rather more essential, strongly rooted in place and blood. But, as the film explores the identities of its sets of twins — one located in and the other in Jupiter Hollow, West Virginia — Big Business also negotiates the difficult and charged relationship between global commerce and local habituation, only to undercut its posited identification of identity with place and blood and therefore to suggest that globalization may co-exist with local habituation, that profit may co-exist with "the right thing to do," and that we still live in a time when markets remain subject to the socially derived moral imperatives. Though almost twenty years old, the film's negotiation of globalization and local habituation, and its mystification of that relationship, remains of interest in the current moment, as jobs in the United States continue to be outsourced, while rural places and natural resources are put under pressure by population growth and urban sprawl.

INTRODUCTION

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 1 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

As Jim Abrahams's Big Business (1988) edges toward its denouement, two sets of twins find themselves face-to-face in the ladies' room at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Separated at birth, some forty or so years before, and thus not knowing that each has an identical twin, the siblings undergo a recognition scene that, despite their screams and our laughter, requires them and us to reevaluate the foundations of identity and selfhood, including the importance of place, blood, community, and commerce. Big Business thus draws more than inspiration or even genre from Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, as it tackles "problems [of identity and selfhood] that haunted Shakespeare throughout his career" (Greenblatt 1997, 684) and does so, like The Comedy of Errors, by linking those problems to the individual's location in a (proper) communal or social space, space constructed and maintained through mutuality, through exchanges of recognition and acknowledgment between self and other that constitute an institutional order defining citizenship, marriage, commerce, and so on.1 As Joel Altman writes, The Comedy of Errors is "a play that has no other object of imitation than the conjectures and affirmations upon which people act" to "construct a reasonable world for themselves" (1978, 165).

Both play and film anatomize the effects on such "reasonable world[s]" when recognition and acknowledgment lose their meaning, when individuals find themselves out of their proper places, and both use an urban and commercial setting to do so — although I must emphasize that "commerce" resonates so differently in play and film that I hesitate to apply the same term to the face-to-face, transparent exchanges of merchants in early modern England and the opaque exchanges of corporations in late twentieth-century America. Certainly, and even though "money seems to bear within itself the seed of capitalism" (Agnew 1986, 44), my concern here is not to describe a continuum, much less a progression, in the ways The Comedy of Errors and Big Business construct commerce (or identity), such that, for example, Abrahams's film captures in "mature" form what Shakespeare's play captures in "nascent" form or in a moment of "historical transition" from feudalism to capitalism. Wary of approaches that account for historical experience either by "dissolv[ing] historical transition into genealogy" or by "hypostatiz[ing] feudalism and capital into pure and opposed constructions" (Holsinger and Knapp 2004, 465), I find myself drawn to practice in this essay what Douglas Bruster calls a "reckoned" rather than a "rash" criticism — specific, factual, historicist, and synchronic rather than playful, theoretical, metaphorical, and diachronic — but I do so in order to make a "rash" point (Bruster 2003). That is, the object of my analysis is, primarily, Big Business, and thus the present moment, but my quarry is a (Shakespearean) criticism that too often misses the point, perhaps because the "reckoned" critics, who have the facts, too often cede the political — a term conspicuously absent from Bruster's typology — to the "rash," who have the theory.

Before proceeding, and for those readers unfamiliar with Big Business, let me http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 2 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

provide a brief plot summary, which I will flesh out as the essay progresses. In the 1940s, a rich businessman, Hunt Shelton (played by Nicolas Coster), and his pregnant wife, Binky (played by Deborah Rush), are motoring through West Virginia, lost on their way to some friends' summer home. When Binky Shelton goes into labor unexpectedly, the Sheltons discover that the nearby hospital is a facility owned by the Hollowmade furniture factory, whose services are available only to its employees. Undaunted, Hunt Shelton buys the factory on the spot, and his wife delivers twin girls in its hospital. At the same time, impoverished local residents Garth and Iona Ratliff also rush to the hospital, where Iona, too, delivers twin girls. An elderly nurse confuses the babies, giving a mixed set to each couple, and Garth Ratliff follows Hunt Shelton in naming his girls Sadie and Rose. As a result, one Shelton twin grows up in Jupiter Hollow, as a Ratliff, and one Ratliff twin grows up in New York, as a Shelton, each feeling as an adult always and oddly out of place. The twins encounter one another again, some forty years later, when Rose and Sadie Ratliff (hereafter Country Rose and Country Sadie) travel to New York to protest the proposed sale of the Hollowmade factory by the Moramax corporation, Hunt Shelton's company, which is headquartered in Manhattan and now run by Sadie Shelton with scant help from her "wispy" sister, Rose Shelton (hereafter City Sadie and City Rose).2 Mistaken for their city siblings, Country Rose and Country Sadie are given their sisters' suite at the Plaza Hotel, after which the hotel offers City Sadie and City Rose an identical suite adjacent to it. (Country Rose Ratliff and City Rose Shelton are played by Lily Tomlin, and Country Sadie Ratliff and City Sadie Shelton are played by Bette Midler.) Both nature and nurture affect the personalities of the twins: for example, Country Rose and City Rose share the habit of hiking up their skirts or pants from the waist, and Country Sadie is a much softer version of her City twin — after meeting her in FAO Schwartz, City Sadie's ex-husband shows up at the Plaza wanting to talk to her, because, he says, she reminds him "of a girl [he] used to know." But throughout the film, the twin who is in place (City Sadie and Country Rose) dominates the sister who is out of place (City Rose and Country Sadie).

Through the problematized identities of its sets of twins, Big Business negotiates a difficult and charged relationship between globalization — represented by the financial dealings of City Sadie, who wishes to off-load the Hollowmade factory to an Italian businessman whose purpose is to strip-mine the property — and local habituation — represented by Country Rose and Country Sadie and their family and friends, who live in Jupiter Hollow, West Virginia, "ten thousand acres of the most beautiful land God ever put on this earth," and who rely either directly or indirectly on employment at Hollowmade, where, according to a scornful City Sadie, "they actually still make porch rockers." It is a relationship that remains charged today, more than fifteen years later, when manufacturing in the United States continues to decline and natural resources, specifically the coalfields of Appalachia, continue to be stripped ever more efficiently and brutally. Rumbling beneath and radiating from http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 3 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

Big Business's farcical plot line — the plan to strip-mine Jupiter Hollow is the dastardly, but arguably never really threatening threat driving the film, just as City Sadie arguably parodies rather than embodies Dynasty's villainous Alexis Carrington, suggesting that the city sisters will never run roughshod over their hillbilly siblings — is the reality of contemporary strip-mining in West Virginia and Appalachia more generally, as well as the reality of social class in America. For, in contrast to The Comedy of Errors, which adumbrates social and economic inequality at the personal level, particularly but not exclusively through the master- servant relationships of the Antipholi and their Dromios, Big Businessadumbrates social and economic inequality through social class. Country Rose and Country Sadie are not inherently inferior to their city siblings, but as the film makes clear and as I shall conclude below, only dumb luck, movie-magic, and public relations make it possible for Country Rose to stop Moramax from selling Hollowmade.

THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY An "apocalyptic form" of strip-mining (Vollers 1999), mountaintop removal accomplishes what it says. 3 At huge mining sites, some approaching 25,000 acres,

Burchton Curve Valley Fill. Photograph by Vivian Stockman, Oct. 19, 2003 mining companies blast and raze up to five hundred feet of rock, using the same explosive Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City, only ten times as much, over and over and over again (Reece 2005, 54). Huge electric shovels,4 — some of them http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 4 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

twenty stories high, with "high-lift scoops as long as a football field," — can then extract multiple, thin layers of valuable low-sulphur coal, which is a "resource the whole world craves" and one essential to reducing acid rain in the United States, a goal mandated by the 1990 Clean Air Act (Loeb 1997, 29; see also Vollers 1999; Mitchell 1988). Having extracted the coal, miners wield their enormous shovels to off-load tons of leftover rock and debris into the river valleys below, creating "valley fill" and choking streams and river headwaters, often with toxic pollutants, whose effects on wildlife are unknown.

Appalachia's topography is being permanently altered; shorter and deforested, some writers think the land "looks . . . like Kansas" or "the big-sky West" or even "the Southwest, a harsh tableland interrupted by steep mesas" (Loeb 1997, 35; Mitchell 1988, 82, 96; Reece 2005, 41). Maryanne Vollers thinks "it looks more like western Nebraska," since "what used to be forested ridges now resemble flat-topped buttes crusted over with rough grass and a few stunted trees" (see also Clines 1999; Janofsky 1998). According to attorney Tom Galloway, who has worked with conservation groups to slow down the pace of strip-mining in the region, many of the "reclaimed" acres have been designated as pastureland: "You'd think there was a cattle boom in Appalachia" (Williams 1992, 50-1). Perhaps somewhat less cynically, John Mitchell observes that reclamation produces, as if by magic, "a capital investment, a flat piece of real estate in an up-and-down country where flatness commands the topmost dollar" (82), pieces of real estate where, in fact, "several dozen buildings, including four schools and three jails, have been built — so far" (Loeb 1997, 29). But if jails are easily filled, one wonders how these schools will find students since, as many, many journalists have reported, "mountaintop removal is killing a way of life in West-Virginia's hollows. Explosions shower dust and rocks down on people who live below the mountaintop mines. The foundations of their houses crack and their wells dry up. Whole towns are disappearing as people sell their homes and move away" (Vollers 1999; see also Clines 1999; Janofsky 1998; Loeb 1997; Williams 1992; Franklin 1987; Pollack 1984; Reece 2005).5

Ways of living are at issue, too, in Big Business. From the outset, the film problematizes identity by relentlessly contrasting the spaces and ways of life associated with the city and the country. The opening scenes, which chronicle the births of the twins in Jupiter Hollow, juxtapose the twins' parents, the Sheltons, of New York, and the Ratliffs, of Jupiter Hollow. Binky Shelton is established as an effete and mercenary woman, who must be bribed by her husband, Hunt, to reproduce, since the very idea of childbirth fills her with disgust, a feeling that wasn't altered at all by the birth of the twins. Relaxing in her hospital bed, while re- affixing her earrings, Binky says to her husband, "that was the messiest, ickiest, most unbearably primitive experience I've ever had." Iona Ratliff, in contrast, is established as a thoroughly earthbound woman, who accepts, as her own and http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 5 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

therefore with some dignity, a life of childbirth and poverty. (After the Sheltons leave the Ratliff's homestead, where they have stopped, briefly and impatiently, to ask Garth Ratliff for directions to a hospital, Iona emerges from their battered, unkempt home, with a baby on her hip and patting her enormous belly. To her husband, she says, softly, "Garth, it's time agin." Four other children, dirty and dusty, watch their parents as the Sheltons speed away.) Less noble, perhaps, than his wife, Garth is resigned to a life of powerlessness and poverty, made worse by an unrelenting stream of children. When the physician brings news of the sets of twins, Hunt Shelton responds with joy and hope — "Wonderful!," he says, and after all, he has just been given two children for the price of one — but Garth responds with a firm but quiet "Damn!," revealing an awareness that his burdens have just become very much heavier.

Leaving behind the rural and poverty-stricken West Virginia of the twins' births, Big Business cuts to contemporary New York — fast, focused, and gleaming — where we discover City Sadie Shelton to be both the city's and her mother's daughter: she sweeps into Moramax, and as she does, the workplace changes; employees tighten up and brace, hiding their coffees and pastries, their newspapers and magazines, all to avoid the attentions of the "bitch goddess who spits out orders" (Corliss 1988), of the "lusty shrew [with] a taste for power" (Kael 1988, 69). Moments later, City Rose Shelton enters the Moramax headquarters, vaguely, aimlessly, with a stray dog in tow. She is late for a meeting with her sister, City Sadie, and the corporation's board. After much comic business with the dog, the elevator, and her own shoes, City Rose passes the receptionist, Judy (played by Mary Gross), and explains to her, "I'm just not myself today." To which Judy responds quietly, in a tone of amusement and wonder, "Or any other day." In the few minutes remaining before the board meeting, City Rose explains to City Sadie that she's "not grounded, not centered in the way I should be" because she and her boyfriend, the physician Jay Marshall (played by Michael Gross) had broken up the night before, after City Rose: I started talking about getting married and having kids and maybe a goat and some ducks. And a little garden with some fresh veggies. You know how I love to chop. City Sadie: You are so completely out of sync. You're dreaming about growing old in the country while other women your age — City Rose: Our age — City Sadie: Don't interrupt — are thinking about tummy tucks. I tell you it's not normal. Now stop it. Stop it . . . Why can't you focus? Rose is herself, is normal, and can focus in Jupiter Hollow — Country Rose Ratliff, that is. "Miss guts and gumption . . . Miss no-nonsense herself," Country Rose is, according to the Mayor, "more than a match for Moramax." Leading the town's fight

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 6 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

to save Hollowmade, Country Rose urges a crowd of her neighbors to resist whatever Moramax plans for the Hollowmade site — "No tellin' what they got up their designer sleeves. Could be condos. A ski resort. Strip mining's one sure thing that comes to mind" — in order to save "our factory . . . our jobs . . . our way of life."6 In contrast, Country Sadie Ratliff is a reluctant though hysterically funny activist, who follows her sister on stage at the rally to "Save Hollowmade . . . Axe Moramax." She sings the town's praises, and her sister's, while milking a cow, a moment that provides the lead for Pauline Kael's review of the film: In 1938, when I was a student at Berkeley, I laughed so hard at Harry Ritz playing a hillbilly in that I fell off the theatre seat. (My date said he would take me to anything else but never to another movie. He became a judge.) I think I might have fallen off my seat again at Big Business when Bette Midler appeared as a hillbilly girl in a frilly short skirt and petticoats, milking a cow and yodeling, if the damn-fool moviemakers hadn't cut away in the middle of her song. (Kael 1988, 68).7 Following the song, which does rally the crowd, Country Sadie confesses to her sister that her heart wasn't in it: "I know it's small of me, Rose, but this doesn't strike me as a way of life much worth preserving."

At this Country Rose gasps, and stops for a moment in front of a quilters' booth. Pulling out a handmade quilt, she asks her sister, "How can you say this is a way of life not much worth preserving . . . just look at this. How can you not just love this place?" Country Sadie replies, Oh God, Rose, I wish I knew. I, I feel like the real me is just cooped up inside, you know? And I want so many things. I want designer clothes. I want to see the world. I want a penthouse in the sky and a maid to pick up after me. I want to say things like, "Keep the change." Huh. God, sometimes I get so bored I find myself just praying for a UFO sighting. I'd stand here and say, "Come and get me! Come and get me!"

In these lines, Country Sadie establishes a principal point of contrast in the film's evocation of the city and the country. Country Sadie wants things, many things, commodities she associates with the city and with wealth, which she cannot obtain in Jupiter Hollow. That her image of the city is partial and heavily influenced by the television she watches — in particular, the prime-time , Dynasty, some of whose episodes she's seen "a thousand times," according to Country Rose, is both relevant and irrelevant. It is irrelevant because Country Sadie is correct to infer that the city does offer vastly more commodities than does Jupiter Hollow, even to those who are not Joan Collins.8 But it is relevant in that the film assiduously evades the class politics it actively exploits, in this case, for example, by making a joke of Country Sadie's devotion to Dynasty, which may be seen to symbolize the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 7 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

complicated and contradictory possibilities associated with television-viewing by the poor and marginalized. For Country Sadie's admiration of Dynasty reinforces her own innate dissatisfaction with who she is and the life she leads (since television offers a vision of the material circumstances of Americans that is far from realistic, suggesting that our material lives are or, perhaps more accurately, should be more opulent than in fact they are and causing, therefore, many persons to engage in financially unwise behavior). At the same time, however, Country Sadie's devotion to Dynasty is a principal means by which she learns to be other than who she is — learning how to walk and speak like someone who wields power and authority, like her biological sister, City Sadie (whose own character, as I've already suggested, arguably parodies Alexis Carrington's). This training thus has important consequences for Jupiter Hollow when, in the film's denouement at the Moramax stockholders' meeting, City Sadie is unable to preside as she always does, because her sisters have locked her in a janitor's closet. Country Sadie must impersonate City Sadie, a feat the latter thinks she will never be able to pull off. She does, but only barely; able to ape a CEO's mannerisms, she is not able to command her knowledge, and City Rose must step in when Country Sadie fails to move beyond the script she learned from Alexis Carrington.

If the city is nothing but glitz and glamor for Country Sadie, for Country Rose the city is "A dangerous, dirty, low-down place" characterized by "noise . . . smog . . . crowds . . . muggers, sex fiends, white slavers, [and] politicians." Country Rose has "about as much use for it as a toad has for spit curls." In contrast, Jupiter Hollow is, for Country Rose, a place to love. Associated in the film with the natural and with people who are organically related to the natural — Country Rose, in particular, uses metaphors drawn from nature ("Oh, you got a heart the size of an unsoaked pinto bean"; "Is a frog's ass watertight?"; "I'm mad as a wet wasp"; "You can't out- snake me.") — Jupiter Hollow offers a life relatively free from commodification, a fact that is symbolized in the quilts produced by the women of the hollow. One of these quilts shows up in New York in the duffel bag of Roone Dimmick (played by Fred Ward), Country Rose's suitor, who follows "the girls" to New York when he finds they have gone there to protest Moramax's plan for Hollowmade, thus abandoning in mid-tournament his chance to win the "Mini-Masters," a professional miniature golf tournament televised by ESPN. For Roone the quilt is functional, something to keep him warm; in New York, it becomes a commodifiable object to be admired for its artisanal quality, as is the case for two Moramax executives, stereotyped homosexuals both, who come upon it while rifling through Roone's luggage in hopes of discovering his identity. Says Graham Sherbourne (played by Edward Herrmann) to his co-worker and lover, Chuck (played by Daniel Gerroll), "Will you look at this quilt?" Chuck does, and exclaims, "The workmanship!"

If Jupiter Hollow offers its people a life relatively free from commodification, it also offers treasures that are immaterial, as Roone makes clear when he finds http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 8 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

himself dining at the Plaza's sushi bar with City Rose, whom he has mistaken for Country Rose, and Graham and Chuck, who have mistaken Roone for a Ratliff. Wistfully, Roone says, "I only been out of Jupiter Hollow one day, but I sure do miss it." Incredulous, Chuck asks, "What do you miss about it?" Roone, who "manages to be both the essence of rube and a forthright, attractive fellow" (Kael 1988, 69), explains: Well, uh, my porch for one thing. Nothing like rockin' on your porch around twilight time. Your bones just go as limp as a willow tree. The shadow from the mountain makes its way up my steps like a, well, like an old friend coming to visit. And the stars . . . I mean that's about the only thing that's crowded about Jupiter Hollow. Right now, the sky'd be plum full of stars. You know, kids playin' in the schoolyard. Doors with no locks. Folks who'll look you straight in the eye and smile . . . When Mother Nature looks through her winda, Jupiter Hollow is the view that she loves best. Graham and Chuck are struck dumb by these words. City Rose is enchanted.

LAND, BLOOD, AND IDENTITY To Henry Caudill, a lawyer, activist, and writer whose family has lived in the Kentucky mountains since 1792, it is a plain fact that "land and people are inseparable . . . [and] if the one becomes poor, the other 'will sink with it into dusty oblivion'" (Mitchell 1988, 82-83, 88). Big Business agrees, initially, although with the codicil that sometimes people find themselves on the wrong land.9 When the Ratliffs and the Sheltons find themselves on the same patch of ground in Manhattan, in adjoining suites at the Plaza, they are able, finally, to find their selves, although only after confusing, à la The Comedy of Errors, almost every character in the film. Indeed, a running joke in the film is the effort of a homeless man to warn new arrivals to the hotel that something is amiss: "If you stand here long enough, you see yourself come out . . . there's two of everybody in there."10 Eventually, of course, in the ladies' room, and as a result of "an old mirror-image routine that Midler essays . . . lifted from Silent Comedian Max Linder and the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup" (Corliss 1988), we and the characters learn that the homeless man is right, or nearly right. As the sisters emerge from the ladies' room, their dialogue focuses on identity: Country Rose: Rosie, Rosie, my sister Rosie? We gotta figure out who's who here. I sure hope I'm still me. Country Sadie: Rose, there's a chance I could be her. City Sadie: (Gasps.) [Undecipherable comment] Country Sadie: Isn't she divine? City Rose: Damn. I know for a fact, I'm not me.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 9 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

Country Rose: I just gotta be me. Rosie, wait for me. In the elevator, as the four sisters make their way to the stockholders' meeting, City Rose gushes, All my life, I've felt like I was out of place, like I didn't belong. And I didn't. I hate my job. I hate shopping. I hate New York in June. How about you? Country Sadie: I hate grits. And I hate men who smell like beer and bean-dip. And I hate making love in the back of recreational vehicles. Am I rich now?

Flush with excitement at their discovery, the twins reiterate what we — and they — already know, what we've known since the film's first half-hour — City Rose and Country Sadie have lived their lives out of place, on the wrong land, and do not know who they are. Country Rose and City Sadie have lived their lives in place, on the right land, and know exactly who they are. Country Rose has perhaps been shaken by what has befallen her in New York, but she is determined to "be me." Nary a moment later, she says, "We got a meeting to get to." City Sadie may be perturbed by what has unfolded around her, but she makes a point of not letting this show. She says nothing during this part of the scene, merely gasps in horror at Country Sadie's suggestion that "I could be her"; she is much too busy to be giddy. Aware of the implications of this discovery for Moramax, and particularly for the sale of Hollowmade, she is planning what to do next. She, like Country Rose, knows "We got a meeting to get to."

Until this point, until this scene of recognition, Big Business has posited a strong connection between land, blood, and identity; if "land and people are inseparable" in the hollows of Appalachia, what binds them together is blood, the peoples' blood, the tight networks of kinship that persist to this day in the mountains.11 The film emphasizes this connection for both sets of sisters, fairly early on and rather obliquely for the City twins, and some minutes before the recognition scene and explicitly for the Country twins. Upon seeing Moramax's new annual report, which features a photograph of the sisters, City Sadie says, Oh my god. How did I get so fat? I look like a wall-eyed salmon. What, did he use a wide-angle lens? City Rose: No, he didn't. See, I look thin. I mean . . . . City Sadie: I know what you mean. I don't understand how it is that you, my own sister, can stuff your face and nothing happens. And I subsist on sixty calories a day or else blow up like a Macy's day float!

When Country Sadie, standing in the lobby of the Plaza, is given some money intended for City Sadie, she of course tells her sister about it. Country Rose infers, incorrectly, that they are being bribed by Moramax. Country Sadie wants to keep

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 10 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

the money so that she can buy a new dress and justifies her desire by saying, "Well, just 'cuz we take a bribe, doesn't mean we have to do what they say." Disgusted, Country Rose replies, "Sadie Ratliff, sometimes I wonder if we got the same blood. My own sister. Damn!" But as the recognition scene develops, this tight connection between land, blood, and identity is stretched to its limit, and, in fact, beyond this limit. In the interests of comedy and, no doubt, mystification, the connection frays into incoherence: Country Sadie: . . . Am I rich now? City Rose: We're all rich. Country Rose: Oh to hell with that. We got a meeting to get to. City Rose: We're all on the same side, now that we're sisters? Country Rose: Right. City Rose: Right. City Sadie: Of course. The meeting's already started. Now we can't all of us go in there, because the spectacle of all this seems to upset people. So Rose, you take them sightseeing and I'll go in, call off the sale, and then we'll all go to Elaine's for lunch. Country Sadie: Elaine's?! Country Rose: Elaine who? . . . . How do we know that you're going to call off that sale? City Rose (softly): Oh, no. Don't. City Sadie: Well of course I will. Country Rose: Are you sure? That while we're out there looking at the Statue of Liberty you won't be in there voting so that Italian fellow can strip-mine Jupiter Hollow? City Rose: Strip-mine? Country Rose: Yes. City Rose: You lied to me? City Sadie: Would I strip-mine our birthplace?

The unspoken answer to City Sadie's question is "yes," and as the two Roses nod in agreement, Country Rose begins to struggle with City Sadie, pinning her against a wall. But City Sadie begins to wriggle free, and Country Rose asks her city sister for help. City Sadie warns her sister, "Don't you dare," but City Rose says, "Sadie, I just have to," leaving City Sadie to exclaim, "How can you do this to your own http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 11 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

sister?" Then, in a telling move — perhaps Sadie Shelton recognizes for the first time that Rose is not her "own sister" — City Sadie looks to her actual twin and says, Sadie, don't let them do this. I'll share it all with you. Join me in this and I'll show you a life that'll make your head spin. I'll introduce you to the most glamorous people in the world! Country Sadie: Joan Collins? City Sadie: Yes! Country Rose: Sadie, no, I know you're shallow but you're not heartless. You don't want to help do in Jupiter Hollow. City Sadie: You're not one of them. You're me! We've even got the same taste in clothes! Come on, Sadie, who needs these dumb old hayseeds anyway? Suspense has been building throughout this struggle and this scene of temptation, and it continues to build, as Country Sadie briefly ponders her twin's last question. She then replies, softly, "I do." At this, Country Sadie grabs her bolting twin by the shoulder and nearly throws her (with some help from the two Roses) into a janitor's closet, whereupon her sister, Country Rose, says to her, "Ah, I knew you were a Ratliff deep down inside. I knew you were." Sadie warns her, "Don't push it."

But Country Rose is pushing it, because Country Sadie is not a Ratliff. She is a Shelton. By rights, by the expectation built into the film's script, by, perhaps, even the Shakespearean notion that "nobility will out," Country Sadie should succumb to the claim of blood, to her identical twin's temptation, her offer of money and power: "Who needs these dumb old hayseeds anyway?" But she does not, and while her decision may be thoroughly satisfying emotionally, setting the stage, as it does, for Hollywood's requisite happy ending, it also undercuts the notion that identity and selfhood are linked essentially to place and blood, which the film has posited throughout. That is, Country Sadie's upbringing, her nurture, in Jupiter Hollow has given her the milk of human kindness, which allows her to overcome the material temptation offered by her identical twin. This undercutting is furthered in the film's final scenes, in which the twins pair off with suitors, a thoroughly Shakespearean move suggesting that Country Rose, like her sister, Country Sadie, will remain in the city. Indeed, the pairings are disturbingly weird here: the two Roses switch partners and Country Sadie is paired with City Sadie's ex-husband. Only City Sadie is paired with someone from, as it were, the outside, the Italian businessman, Fabio Alberici (played by Michele Placido), and only City Rose appears to be headed to Jupiter Hollow. The effect would be similar, perhaps, in The Comedy of Errors if, at the end, Shakespeare had paired Antipholus of Syracuse with Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus with Luciana. Perhaps the effect is similar to that in Twelfth Night, when Sebastian marries Olivia on a whim, and Olivia discovers she has http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 12 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

married someone she's never known.

SAVED BY AN IMAGE PROBLEM In any event, the film's denouement, which undercuts its posited understanding of selfhood and identity, proceeds too quickly and too confusedly for me to conclude that the film is, at that point, modifying its understanding in a way that offers a coherent reading of identity and selfhood. That is, had the film's explorations of identity and selfhood stopped with Country Sadie's decision to join forces with the two Roses to thwart City Sadie and save Jupiter Hollow, we might say the film appropriately and uncontroversially reveals "nurture" to be as important to identity and selfhood as "nature." But the drive toward marriage (or, shall we say, partnering), and specifically the weird pairings of the two Roses and of Country Sadie, edges the film awkwardly toward the conclusion Douglas Lanier proposes for Shakespearean farce in general and for The Comedy of Errors in particular — the "unsettling possibility that character is perhaps never more (and no 'deeper') than a well-managed stage spectacle, a function of theatricality and the logic of marks" (Lanier 1997, 326) — and thus leaves the viewer either to suspend disbelief or to conclude that the film lacks a coherent point of view about one of its principal themes.

Furthermore, and more importantly for my purposes here, Country Sadie's decision to join forces with the two Roses also undercuts her own pressing judgment that the ways of Jupiter Hollow are not "much worth preserving," for they must be worth saving if they have allowed Sadie to overcome the temptation of blood, the temptation of money and power. A retrospective glow appears around Jupiter Hollow and its denizens, or more accurately, it is at this point in the film that one realizes how burnished, how partial, were the scenes set in contemporary West Virginia. The dirt and poverty of the film's opening vision of Jupiter Hollow give way to fresh faces, bright gingham dresses, and the sprightly sounds of a country fair; even the guys wrestling hogs somehow don't seem to be getting dirty in contemporary Jupiter Hollow. One realizes how ripe the people and the place are for the fate that awaits them, as window-dressing in Moramax's (and Disney's) drive for good public relations. For indeed, the reason to spare Jupiter Hollow, as City Rose explains to the assembled stockholders, is "the terrible image problem we've been facing." Rising to the occasion of speaking publicly and authoritatively, City Rose urges the shareholders to remember that Moramax has the image problem of . . . of a . . . of a pit bull! Yes, look, everyone hates us, and now we're going to put five hundred hardworking, decent Americans out of work? Ladies and gentlemen, we're asking you to please say "no" to this sale, not just because it's going to spare five hundred jobs, not just because it's going to save ten thousand acres of the most beautiful land God ever put on this earth, and certainly not just because it's the right http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 13 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

thing to do, no, we appeal to you as businesspeople. We appeal to your basic business instinct. Not missing a beat, Country Sadie adds, "Yes, to save your own asses!" But City Rose's plea, the film's denouement, is telling, is no joke; or, it is not only a joke.

Jupiter Hollow is to be saved because of a technicality, the fact that Moramax cannot afford another public relations disaster (earlier in the film, we are told that City Sadie had fired 300 Santa Clauses at Christmastime or, as Country Rose tells her folk, "300 Santy Clauses"). As a result, and certainly as part of its happy ending,

Mountaintop Removal and Small Community in W. Va. Photograph by Vivian Stockman the film is able to suggest that globalization may co-exist with local habituation, that profit — basic business instinct — may co-exist with "the right thing to do," that, in effect, we still inhabit a time when "the market economy [is] subject to socially determined moral restraints" (Genovese 1994, 98; see also Agnew 1986). But in other circumstances — if the corporation had been able to afford some bad public relations, or if low sulphur coal had been so valuable that even residents of the hollows, like Patricia Bragg of Pigeon Creek, West Virginia, could recognize its value to "the progress of the country" (Janofsky 1998) — a place like Jupiter Hollow would find no corporate defenders. And since such circumstances had already arrived when Big Business was in production during the late 1980s, the filmmakers arguably chose to finesse this fact — to mystify the relationship between globalized corporate control and local habituation and folkways — rather

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 14 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

than to use the film to intervene on behalf of the real residents of West Virginia's real hollows, whose way of life at that moment was being devastated and would be continue to be devastated throughout the 1990s, as a by-product of strip-mining and mountaintop removal. In this, however, Big Business is, one might say, no guiltier than is The Comedy of Errors if, that is, one thinks Stephen Greenblatt persuasive about the play, which is, he claims, cannily alert to social inequities — an innocent merchant is condemned to death for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; a husband is "master of his liberty," while a wife must "practise to obey" (2.1.7, 29); one set of twins is destined through poverty to be the servants, casually beaten and abused, of the other set — but it does not mount a strenuous protest or imagine a radical transformation. In the midst of the farcical confusions, characters repeatedly long for greater justice, equality, and emotional fulfillment, but The Comedy of Errors does not encourage us to believe that such an existence can be realized. There may be a happy resolution, but there is no escape from the pervasive, fundamentally inequitable social order and from the mercantile world based on credit, trade, exchange, bond, and debt. (1997, 687)

Furthermore, Big Business is hardly more guilty in this than are the rest of us, if we did nothing ourselves. Patricia Bragg pointed out in 1997 that if the hollows must be sacrificed to the progress of the country, the hollows' residents alone are paying the price: "people raise millions to save whales and walruses and birds, but the state doesn't lift a hand to save the most precious thing in the world, a person's way of life" (Janofsky 1998). Of course, a person's way of life has no legal standing, but evidence suggests that people dropped the ball, lost interest in the environmental problems of the hollows. In 1990, journalist Ted Williams observed that once the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 became law, "environmentalists caroused wildly; then most of them rode off on the spoor of different dragons" (1992, 48). Says Cindy Rank, of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, "the megalopolises [seemed to have] more glitzy issues — toxic waste dumps, garbage washing into the ocean" (quoted in Williams 1992, 48). In the 1980s, no one or, more accurately, many fewer people minded the store of enforcement, and under the watch of James Watt and the Reagan administration, enough tinkering was done, according to John Mitchell, "to fix the law so it couldn't work" (1988, 92). And needless to say, as Erik Reece documented in 2005, the law does not work to this day. Under the Bush administration, Reece says, enforcement of the law has become Kafkaesque: "a drama of grand futility" (2005, 55).

Perhaps, then, it is time to return to Country Sadie's judgment about life in Jupiter Hollow — "this doesn't strike me as a way of life much worth preserving" — a judgment that, I have argued, is undercut, indeed reversed, by the mystification ensured in the happy ending of Big Business. At the outset of this essay, I stated that

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 15 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

Big Business draws more than inspiration or genre from The Comedy of Errors, in particular its thematic concern for the problem of identity or selfhood and the ways both are rooted in communal or social space, a thematic concern that finds expression in The Comedy of Errors in its urban and commercial setting. Without asserting or even suggesting a continuum or a progression in the ways The Comedy of Errors and Big Business construct identity or selfhood and the individual's relationship to communal space, I would like to point out that when the film fudges its position on whether life in Jupiter Hollow is worth saving, it brings to our attention a question that also concerned Shakespeare — and Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Burke and John C. Calhoun and Karl Marx and scores of others — the question of how society controls a market economy, or whether, in fact, it should. Are there areas of social life that should not be subject to or affected by the pressures of a competitive and impersonal market, where money should not be the coin of the realm? (The university, perhaps? Health care? Churches?)

CONCLUSION I would like to conclude this essay with a brief and rough discussion of this question, for our judgments about it are central to debate about development and the environment throughout the country and perhaps especially in the underdeveloped South, whether in Appalachia, the Black Belt of Alabama, almost all of Mississippi, or the suburbs of Atlanta. Needless to say, I hope, it is easy to confirm that, say, we "oppose the attempt to substitute the market for society itself" or that "in searching for solutions to problems plaguing West Virginia . . . [we must] include considerations of poor women" (Genovese 1994, 98; Barry 2001, 117). But if we agree that the market should be kept in its place or that solutions should be found, it is much less easy to determine how to do so or what the solutions should be, particularly in a time when viable alternatives to capitalism do not exist, and when our political life is dominated by politicians who claim to defend traditional values and at the same time promote laissez-faire economic policies, policies that are the very solvent of those values — a point that was clear to Marx, who applauded the bourgeoisie and capitalism's cash-nexus, precisely because of their ability to dissolve traditional social orders, traditional social relations.

Even an intriguing attempt to rethink anticapitalism in light of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concomitant collapse of socialist hope — Eugene Genovese's The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism — acknowledges (and, some might argue, founders in the face of) the difficulties inherent in reversing the market's penetration into moral, educational, and political life (cf. 6-9, 39, 40, 98-103). But the value of the ideas forwarded in The Southern Tradition lies less in their likelihood of immediate applicability than in the challenge those ideas present to the Left to rethink "first principles," in particular its dream of achieving "a radically egalitarian society of free and

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 16 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

autonomous individuals" (37, 36); in their bold attempt to link the radical egalitarianism of the Left and the radical egalitarianism of the free-market Right (35-36, 40); and in their brazen attempt to recuperate "the achievements of the white people of the South" (including a faith in hierarchy and a Christian moral culture) by separating out those achievements from a racist history, all in the name of a critique of egalitarianism, capitalism, and modernization (xi).12 Much in this challenging work is itself worth challenging, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to do so; for my purposes here, the value of Genovese's work is that it bases a critique of capitalism in an acknowledgment of the "historic achievements of capitalism — not the least of which has been an economic performance that has expanded the possibilities for individual freedom and political democracy for enormous numbers of people throughout the world" (37). Thus, like the Southern conservatives he celebrates (and like Marx and Pope John Paul II), Genovese does not "attack markets [or capitalism] per se" but the transformation of markets into the market, into the sole "arbiter of our moral, spiritual, and political life" (15, 38). Like any excellent solvent, Genovese implies, capitalism should be used carefully.

What all this suggests is that in the new millennium, how best to protect nature and how best to improve the lives of people requires thinking outside boxes traditionally wrapped left or right. These are complicated and difficult questions, but they are now mainly political, not ideological ones, and cannot be understood or solved through mystification or doctrine, whether through the enforced happy ending of Big Business or the facile invocation of an impossible egalitarianism. This is why we need a "reckoned" criticism that is itself political, that can use its specific and factual analysis to assess the implications of policy on a variety of constituents, some of whose interests may conflict, and conflict badly. The need for such thinking was brought home in the spring of 2004 to the nation's leading environmental group, in a hotly contested election for the board of directors of the Sierra Club. As reported in the press, the election centered on whether the Sierra Club should return to a prior policy supporting population control and even population reduction (and thus strict controls on immigration), as a practical way to inhibit degradation of the environment, both rural and urban, in the United States. Standing in the election was an anti-immigration slate of candidates that included former Governor Richard Lamm, Democrat of Colorado, and Frank Morris, an African American who was, in the mid-1980s, the executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and who believes that legal and especially illegal immigration drives down wages for working-class Americans, particularly African Americans. Those opposed to Lamm, Morris, and the others, such as current board member Robert Cox, argued to members of the Sierra Club that an anti-immigration stance likely would prove politically disastrous: "we have partnerships with progressive groups, with labor, with organizations representing people of color . . . an anti-immigration message would send a shock through many of our existing allies and divert us from our core conservation mission" (Martin 2004). Clearly, this conflict revolved around http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 17 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

policies supported by many committed environmentalists that threatened the political alliances of other committed environmentalists. I do not suggest an easy answer exists for the Sierra Club, or for any of us, but this explosion in the genteel and mainstream environmental organization, with its intimations of conflict between the interests of African Americans and Latinos, does indicate that in the future progressive choices may not be as clear cut as they have been, or have seemed to be, in the past. It has been my contention here that Big Business indicates the same. The environmental health of northeastern cities — cleaner electricity, a reduction in acid rain — requires the environmental degradation of West Virginia and the personal degradation of its people. So, whose way of life is "worth preserving"? The country's, or the city's, or the suburb's? And whose mountain or symphony hall or shopping mall must we level in order to preserve it?

NOTES 1. Shakespeareans traditionally read character in The Comedy of Errors as representing a process in which persons lose and then find themselves, begin as incomplete and find completion, or some combination thereof (in 1971, Richard Henze argued that "the major themes of the play are the finding of one's self by losing one's self and the freeing of one's self by binding one's self" [35]); more recently, most have stopped positing a notion of essential personal interiority in order to see character as constructed through the expression and interpretation of superficial and external signs, a function of the self's interactions with others. For a history of critical approaches to the play, see Robert S. Miola's "The Play and the Critics." 2. All quotations are my transcriptions of the film's dialogue. 3. A "straightforward name," reports Penny Loeb in a 1997 article for U.S. News and World Report (28). Mountaintop removal has a long history in Appalachia, though it was an unusual practice in the 1960s and 1970s, and ironically, it was encouraged in the landmark environmental legislation of 1977, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. The SMCRA included an exemption from one of its "toughest reclamation rules" — that, after mining, slopes must be returned to their approximate original contour, no more highwalls, no more scalplocks. "The exemption, of course, dictated the method, for there is only one way to strip-mine in mountain country without leaving a highwall or returning the slope to its approximate original contour, and that is to turn a mountain into a mesa by removing its head" (Mitchell 95-96, see also Franklin 1987, Galouska 1997, Loeb 1997). As noted below, the practice was further encouraged by the 1990 Clean Air Act, which made demand for low-sulphur coal even greater. 4. The machines indeed are electric. Loeb reports that "an enormous extension cord feeds [each one] up to $50,000 of electricity a month" (34).

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 18 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

5. The destruction of rural life is not restricted to the specific areas where mining takes place. Reece documents the dispersion of pollution associated with mining in Appalachia to other areas of the country: one working-class woman agitated against the dumping of toxic waste in her town of Dayhoit, Kentucky, and after many years, and with the help of many others, she gained from the EPA a designation for the town as a Superfund site. As Reece comments, "the EPA excavated 5,000 tons of contaminated soil . . . then trucked it to Alabama, where it was stored next to a poor African American community" (47). 6. When Country Rose and Country Sadie leave Jupiter Hollow for New York, their vehicle receding into the distance, an image of a working strip mine enters the frame and fills it briefly. Ominous music pervades the background. 7. To be fair, the filmmakers do allow Midler to conclude the song, although perhaps it is but a truncated version of a song, just one verse. 8. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explain part of the allure of the fair in early modern England similarly: "Part of the transgressive excitement of the fair for the subordinate classes was not its 'otherness' to official discourse, but rather the disruption of provincial habits and local tradition by the introduction of a certain cosmopolitanism, arousing desires and excitements for exotic and strange commodities" (37). See also Agnew 1986. 9. In the scene with City Rose at the Plaza's sushi bar, Roone tells City Rose, "I know you'd do fine whatever spot on Earth they dropped you on. It's just Rose, I know you. You don't belong in New York City. That's in your eyes. It's all over your face. You don't belong in . . . that suit. I mean all this Moramax stuff is just bleedin' the heart right out of ya. You know you want a whole other kind of life than this." City Rose, almost overcome and certainly amazed, replies, "I've never told that to a living soul. How did you know?" 10. At the very end of the film, the homeless man's own double arrives, a well-to-do businessman. 11. In his essay on the life and work of Henry Caudill, Mitchell notes that a Caudill became the area's first resident in 1792, and so "it is proper and fitting that the name Caudill should appear 206 times in the slim nocal (sic) Letcher county, Kentucky, telephone directory, where Smiths and Browns tend to get outnumbered by Combses, Cornetts, and Campbells, and Caudills outnumber them all" (88). 12. Genovese summarizes the contemporary versions of that achievement as follows: opposition to finance capitalism and, more broadly, to the attempt to substitute the market for society itself; opposition to the radical individualism that is today sweeping America; support for broad property ownership and a market economy subject to socially determined moral restraints; adherence to a Christian individualism that condemns personal license and demands submission to a moral consensus rooted in elementary piety; and an insistence that every people must develop its own genius, based upon its special history, and must reject siren calls to an internationalism — or rather, a

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 19 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

cosmopolitanism — that would eradicate local and national cultures and standards of personal conduct by reducing morals and all else to commodities. (98)

REFERENCES Agnew, Jean-Christophe. 1986. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo- American Thought, 1550-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Altman, Joel B. 1978. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barry, Joyce. 2001. "Mountaineers Are Always Free: An Examination of the Effects of Mountaintop Removal in West Virginia. " Women's Studies Quarterly 29: 116-130. Big Business. 1988. Dir. Jim Abrahams. Touchstone Films. Performers Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin. Bruster, Douglas. 2003. "On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare." In Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism. Edited by Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 67-95. Clines, Francis X. 1999. "Last Stand in Defense of a Hollow's History." New York Times. November 7, A17. Corliss, Richard. 1988. "Country Girls vs. Manhattan Ladies." Time. June 13th, 77. Franklin, Ben A. 1987. "Mine Law; the Scars and Gains." New York Times. June 7, A13. Galouska, Peter. 1997. "Strip-Mining on Steroids." Business Week. November 17, 70. Genovese, Eugene. 1994. The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1997. The Comedy of Errors. In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. 683-689. Henze, Richard. 1971. "The Comedy of Errors: A Freely Binding Chain." Shakespeare Quarterly 22: 35-41. Holsinger, Bruce, and Ethan Knapp. 2004. "The Marxist Premodern." The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34: 463-471. Janofsky, Michael. 1998. "As Hills Fill Hollows, Some West Virginia Residents Are Fighting King Coal." New York Times. May 7, A24. Kael, Pauline. 1988. Review of Big Business. New Yorker. June 27, 68-69.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 20 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

Loeb, Penny. 1997. "Shear Madness." U.S. News and World Report. August 11, 26-36. Lanier, Douglas. 1997."'Stigmatical in Making': The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors." In The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. Edited by Robert S. Miola. New York: Garland. 299-334. Martin, Glen. 2004. "Board Election divides Sierra Club: Environmentalists renew bitter fight over controlling U. S. immigration." Chronicle. February 11, A1. Miola, Robert S. 1997. "The Play And The Critics." In The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. Edited by Robert S. Miola. New York: Garland. 3-51. Mitchell, John G. 1988. "The Mountains, the Miners, and Mister Caudill." Audubon 90 (November): 78-103. Pollack, Roger. 1984. "Hill People Find a Voice." The Progressive 48 (May): 17. Reece, Erik. 2005. "Death of a Mountain: Radical Strip-Mining and the Leveling of Appalachia." Harper's. April. 41-60. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vollers, Maryanne. 1999. "Razing Appalachia." Mother Jones 24 (July/August). http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1999/07/mountaintop.html (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1999/07/mountaintop.html) Williams, Ted. 1992. "Strip-Mine Shell Game. " Audubon 94 (November/December): 48-55.

ONLINE RESOURCES Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (Huntington, West Virginia). http://www.ohvec.org/index.html (http://www.ohvec.org/index.html) Big Business. Internet Movie Database [cited 9 March 2006]. Available online at http://imdb.com/title/tt0094739/ (http://imdb.com/title/tt0094739/)

PERMISSIONS Photographs by kind permission of Vivian Stockman.

ABSTRACT | INTRODUCTION | THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY | LAND, BLOOD, AND IDENTITY | SAVED BY AN IMAGE PROBLEM | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 21 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'51 PM

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781421/show Page 22 of 22 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Country Matters: Shakespeare and Music in the (/current) American South

ROBERT SAWYER, EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | ROMEO AND JULIET | USE OF SHAKESPEARE'S NAME: HANK AND WILLIE | (/about) PLAYING WITH SHAKESPEARE | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT While paradoxical, the connection between and Shakespeare can help us to understand the role of a "highbrow" signifier in an allegedly "lowbrow" genre of art. This essay examines cultural citations, biographical mythmaking, and parodic performances and concludes that although Shakespeare is used to validate country music as an art form, Shakespearean references are also used ironically to claim a separate ethos for country and its performers and perhaps to encourage a more democratic participation in artistic culture.

Let's begin with a quick quiz. Which of the word groups does not fit in the following list: battered pick-up trucks, blue-tick hounds, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, and the Bard of Avon. Most folks would pick the playwright, of course. Yet what appears to be the anomaly in this list may not prove to be so. Drawing on Lawrence Levine's work in Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988) and Michael Bristol's Big-Time Shakespeare (1996), I will extend and expand their work by examining the numerous references, allusions, and uses of "Shakespeare" in music of the American South. Both Levine and Bristol generally ignore the South. While Levine devotes extensive research to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, he only mentions one

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 1 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

southern city, New Orleans, and only in relation to opera; Bristol's book also concentrates on the northeast.1 By failing to consider the southern region of the United States, both critics fall into the cultural trap against which their books warn, that is, the viewing of "culture" in a stereotypical manner by making assumptions about regional sources of entertainment, both elite and popular. Although perhaps paradoxical, the connection between Shakespeare and country music seen in songs from this region may help us to understand the role of "Shakespeare" as a signifier even in an allegedly "lowbrow" genre of music.2

While difficult to define, country music encompasses everything from Appalachian folk ballads to cowboy tunes, from traditional southern gospel to Ozark hillbilly songs, from honky-tonk specials to black spirituals. Above all, the music is distinctly American and "rural-oriented," calling to mind the red clay roads and plentiful pine fields of the southern landscape (Price 1974, 16). The origins of country music are debated, but most scholars agree that the first recordings occurred in the 1920s. In 1922, two fiddlers fresh from a Confederate reunion in Richmond, Virginia headed for New York and camped on the doorstep of RCA Victor's studio door until they were admitted for a formal recording. Five years later, the famous Bristol Sessions took place in a remodeled hat factory in Bristol, Virginia (about twenty miles from my current university). Often referred to as the Big Bang of country music, these sessions first captured on tape country greats such as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family.

By putting Shakespeare side-by-side with country music and by not privileging one over the other, perhaps we may come to a better

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 2 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

understanding of both. As Levine reminds us, it is often arbitrary to draw lines between popular culture and more elite entertainment. By removing the binaries that make us "see culture on a vertical plane" (Levine 1988, 30) and therefore separate country music from Shakespearean poetry and drama, I will look instead at their potential for dynamic interchange, dividing my investigation into three parts. The first section will consider allusions to Shakespeare's plays in country songs. These cultural citations, particularly to Romeo and Juliet, function as a type of cultural capital. As Bristol argues, "Shakespeare is fully negotiable in all financial markets," including the mammoth music industry; but to "convert a limited stock of cultural capital into a generous cash flow," as these songs do, "requires complicated forms of leverage" (Bristol 1996, 91). The second section moves beyond the plays to show how Shakespeare's name has also become a commodity, serving as an extra-textual signifier that may confer prestige and authority on the recipient. Again, Bristol helps our understanding of this concept when he claims that "Shakespeare" is a term that now refers to a large output of "cultural products and services, almost like a trademark or corporate brand name" (x). In this section, I will show how the media have used this "brand name" in descriptions of 's music and explanations of his appeal, even http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 3 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

though Williams himself resisted such a categorization. The final section moves beyond the binaries of high and low by examining country artists who perform Shakespeare or Shakespearean parodies, complicating the use of "Shakespeare" as a trademark. These performances show potential for disruption, and I will argue that instead of reinforcing sedimented social divisions, these parodic instances may instead "widen and enhance democratic participation in our public culture" (xii).

ROMEO AND JULIET The Shakespearean connection found most often in country songs should come as no surprise, as allusions to the love affair between Romeo and Juliet have been a staple of pop and rock music lyrics for years. Cynthia Marshall, for example, discusses the ways in which song versions of the star-crossed lovers can be used in the classroom. According to Marshall, this is "the one play by Shakespeare that virtually every student has read before college," so that the "characters and plot are already familiar" (Marshall 2000, 98). It makes sense that one of the best known Shakespeare plays would also be referred to often in country music. This type of appropriation, one that I have characterized as a "seizure often without permission" (Sawyer 2003, 16), may bother more traditional critics of the Bard; I would agree with Hans Robert Jauss, however, who argues that texts can only "continue to have an effect" if there are other artists who want "to imitate, outdo, or refute" the original work (Jauss 1989, 1201). In these cultural citations to Romeo and Juliet, we see just such instances of appropriation.

John Michael Montgomery, a native of Danville, Kentucky, has written two songs with allusions to Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers: "Ain't Got Nothin' on Us" (1996) and "I Can Love You Like That" (1995). In the first of these two songs, the speaker compares his love to other wonders of the world, both natural and literary. The song begins with Montgomery's admission that "the Grand Canyon is a sight to see" but, he continues, "it's just a big ditch next to you and me," followed by the refrain: "Ooo baby ain't got nothin' on us." In the third verse, Montgomery turns his attention to the lovers of Shakespeare: Well I've read about Romeo and Juliet Wish I could tell Shakespeare I ain't impressed Ooo baby ain't got nothin' on us I'm telling you baby Ain't got nothing on us. Interestingly, Montgomery does not claim that he actually has read Shakespeare, but perhaps, like many in his audience, merely "read about" the lovers. Yet, even this second-hand knowledge is enough for the speaker to feel that his love is superior to that of Shakespeare's pair, so much so that he wants to tell the Bard to

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 4 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

his face.

Another Montgomery song, "I Can Love You Like That," details the hopes and dreams of the singer's female beloved, who has romantic notions based on the great lovers of literature and fairy tales. In the opening stanza, Montgomery sings, They read you Cinderella You hoped it would come true That one day your Prince Charming Would come rescue you. The song goes on to catalogue the woman's fantasies about other great lovers until the list reaches Shakespeare's pair, with an allusion to a cinematic Romeo and Juliet (track 1): You like romantic movies You never will forget The way you felt when Romeo kissed Juliet All this time that you've been waiting You don't have to wait no more I can love you like that.

mp3 TRACK 1: John Montgomery, "I Can Love You Like That"

Both of Montgomery's songs consider "Romeo and Juliet" as a barometer of superior love, but also as a benchmark that the songwriter's lovers can surpass. But is this the only comparison being made? Montgomery the songwriter may also be playing one-upmanship with Shakespeare the poet, another writer who gave voice to the hopes and dreams of young lovers.

Dolly Parton, who has been "dubbed the of Country and the Marilyn Monroe of the mountains" (Tichi 1994, 17), began her career in East Tennessee, in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains; now she is an international star of music, movies, and media. Although Parton's early, semi-autobiographical songs, such as "My Tennessee Mountain Home" and "Appalachian Memories," appealed to a regional audience, her fame and presence now have spread so much that in 1993 she sold out for a concert entitled "Country Takes Manhattan."

The same year as the Carnegie Hall concert, Parton released the song "Romeo" (1993), co-written with a number of other artists, including Mary Chapin Carpenter, and performed with Billy Ray Cyrus. Not only did the song reach the Top Ten on the Country charts, but it also (perhaps regrettably) inspired a line dance bearing the same name. Detailing Romeo's good looks and sexual swagger, http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 5 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

the first verse focuses on his entrance into a local juke joint: A cross between a movie star And a hero in a book Romeo comes struttin' in And everybody looks 'Cause he's just got that special thang That everybody needs And everybody wants him But not as bad as me. Conflating celluloid stars and literary heroes, the song goes on to depict a slightly deep-fried Romeo. In the second verse, the singer alludes to the lover of Shakespeare's drama and also incorporates fragments of the play's language (track 2): Hey, Romeo, where art thou Get out here on the floor I want to dance [with] you darlin' 'Till you forget wherefore Let's two step to a new step We'll keep it all in line And we'll call this the Romeo 'Cause you so mighty fine. (italics mine)

mp3 TRACK 2: et al, "Romeo"

Bits of archaic language — the "thou" and "wherefore" — provide the listener with just enough dissonance to suggest Elizabethan language, and, therefore, vaguely to echo the Shakespeare learned in school. Parton concludes the song with her hopes for getting the boy: "Romeo, Romeo, / I just know I'll get you yet / Romeo, Romeo," and Billy Ray replies, "Won't you be my Juliet." As the song fades out, we hear female voices commenting on Romeo's physical features: he is called a "sexy little thing" with a "magic wand," and one voice claims that "Shakespeare would roll over in his grave" if he saw such sexuality. I would suggest that these comments not only purposely reverse the standard objectification of women by men, but may also call to mind Parton's own proto- feminist endeavors, which include managing her own business affairs and selecting her own songs.

Patty Loveless, another queen of country, has also invoked the Romeo and Juliet story in her music. Born in Kentucky and now residing in Nashville, Loveless is an actual coal miner's daughter; she was even called on to replace

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 6 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

when, in 1973, Lynn had stepped down as the lead vocalist for the Wilburn Brothers. Loveless's solo career bloomed in the mid-eighties: she has had seven number-one hits, and in 1996 was named "Female Vocalist of the Year" by the Academy of Country Music.

Loveless's song "I'm That Kind of Girl" (2001) has a speaker who talks about a lover outside "in a Stetson hat, howlin' like an alley cat / Sayin', 'Baby, put on something hot, meet me in the parking lot.'" His lack of romance, however, disturbs the singer, and she's "feelin' that he's never read Romeo and Juliet." Tired of such lovers and "one night stands," the singer declares to the man, "if you wanna make a real romance / I'm that kind of girl," a cross between the "women in red" and the "girl next door." The last verse focuses on her longing for "sensitivity" and a "love-sick fool / The kind that carries all your books in school." The speaker's desired Romeo is, in many ways, the opposite of Parton's — all Keats and no Byron.

One of the cleverest allusions, however, is found in Diamond Rio's song, "This Romeo Ain't Got Julie Yet" (1992). After declaring his problems with his lover's parents — her "mamma," who thinks he's "lazy," and a "daddy" who "runs down" his name — the singer reminds his lover of her promise: "But you said you'd love me, / Come sunshine or come rain." He predicts better things ahead, and perhaps forgetting the conclusion to Shakespeare's play, he declares, "This story has a happy ending." He then leads into the chorus, which alludes to Shakespeare's tragic lovers, but also to Margaret Mitchell's famous pair (track 3): This Romeo ain't got Julie yet I love you so and you can bet I'd follow you to Timbuktu Like Scarlett followed Rhett But this Romeo ain't got Julie yet.

mp3 TRACK 3: Diamond Rio, "This Romeo Ain't Got Julie Yet"

Interestingly, the male speaker puts himself in the female position of Scarlett, reversing the stereotype in which the man is followed by a lovelorn female.3 It seems that the speaker is also ignorant of the tragic consequences suffered by Mitchell's and Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers. Not unlike Bart Simpson's pal Milhouse, who described his brief fling with a girlfriend as a story that began like "Romeo and Juliet," but ended as a tragedy, this country pair ignores the last act of Shakespeare's play.

Less love-oriented and somewhat more literary references to Shakespeare can be found in alternative county music. In "Little Angel, Little Brother" (1992), for http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 7 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

example, describes the love that she feels for her younger sibling. She chronicles the brother's affection for "R&B records" and "music books," but she also notes his "passion for Shakespeare and your paperbacks / Your chess pieces and your wisecracks." Although Williams's use of Shakespeare is less stereotyped than that of the writers mentioned previously, her juxtaposition of "Shakespeare" with "chess pieces" functions as a quick signifier of intelligence, cultural awareness, and literacy. Other alternative country performers include Steve Earle, who is working on producing a theater company in Nashville, tentatively entitled "Shakespeare for White Trash." In an interview, Earle said, "the idea is you take all the seats out, sell hot dogs and beer. If you can't make the average person understand Shakespeare," according to Earle, "you're not staging it right" (Earle, 2000). Although purists might cringe at Earle's description, he is merely repeating a traditionalist claim that Shakespeare is a common possession of Western culture.

USE OF SHAKESPEARE'S NAME: HANK AND WILLIE Shakespeare's name also serves as a cultural signifier in country music, just as it often does in more elite works. Hank Williams, Sr. was known as both the "Hillbilly Shakespeare" and "The Shakespeare of the Common Man." The comparison fuels the myth of Hank Williams by drawing on Shakespeare's well- established reputation. As Bristol reminds us, "Shakespeare is a term with extraordinary currency in a wide range of discursive practices as a complex symbol of cultural value," a value that often may "signify privilege, exclusion, and cultural pretension" (Bristol 1996, ix). Comparisons between Hank Williams and Shakespeare not only deconstruct the difference between high and low — hillbilly on the one hand, and Shakespeare on the other — but also serve as oxymoronic public relations tags. At the same time, the comparison between these two artists may actually have historical validity.

Although a number of regional radio stations broadcast the country sound in the 1930s and 1940s — specifically WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia — it was not until the aftermath of World War II that the music, epitomized by the lonesome wail of Hank Williams, swept across the country. Williams's plaintive songs echoed the zeitgeist of the disenfranchised, many of whom were not privy to the material rewards of the new and upwardly-mobile middle class. While the standard view depicts America in the 1950s as a place of buoyant optimism and halcyon happy days, his dark lyrics contradict such a rosy view. Of the fifty songs written by Williams, explains Kent Blaser, almost one-third involve desertion by a loved one, while others recount dissipated desire by both parties (11%) or "a failure to find love or unrequited love" (14%). There are also "evil woman" songs that "describe a love-hate relationship with a woman who treats the singer badly" (16%) (Blaser 1985, 23). While there are a few novelty songs

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 8 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

and drinking songs, in sum, there are only three songs in the entire Williams oeuvre that "deal in a reasonably positive way with love and the prospects for future happiness" (23). One of Hank Williams's favorite sayings, which he used as a farewell phrase at many of his concert appearances as well as a line in one of his songs, was "don't worry about nothin', cause it ain't gonna be all right no how."

Part of this pessimism sprung from the historical milieu in which Williams wrote. According to Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz, Williams's music "expressed the contradictions of his historical moment — post Second World War America — a time when diverse currents of resistance to class, race and gender oppressions flowed together to form a contradictory, but nonetheless real, unity of opposites" (Leppert and Lipsitz 1993, 22). While his recording career only spanned about seven years (1946-1953), during this time Williams came to represent the tragic fatalism that would become a trademark of traditional country music. Williams wrote at a moment when older conceptions of the family, gender, and parental roles were being contested, just as they were in Shakespeare's time. These changes included many aftershocks from the Great Depression fifteen years earlier, particularly in rural areas of the South: debilitating poverty, scarcity of housing, lack of food, and unemployed fathers who deserted their children in search of a better life in a distant location were commonplace.

Biographies of Williams and a group of recent biographies on Shakespeare tell a surprisingly similar story about their social origins and emerging personalities. Both Hank and Shakespeare had problematic relationships with their fathers, who struggled painfully to make something of themselves in these emerging market economies. Although Hank's great-grandfather was a farmer, his daddy sought a different path. Poor and uneducated, Hank's father Lon was, in Chet Flippo's description, "tough Southern white trash, absolute bottom rung of the ladder" (Flippo 1985, 15). Dropping out of school after the sixth grade to become a water boy in the local lumber camps, Lon eventually "worked his way up to sawing logs and driving oxen, then to running the locomotives that haul the logs to the sawmills" (Williams 1981, 5). During this time he met Lillian Skipper, and in 1918, they were married. Although he was soon shipped off to World War I, when he returned to Alabama, Lon attempted to support the family by beginning a number of businesses, working intermittently in the local lumber yards, opening a store with Lillie, and even trying "the strawberry business on land burned out with cotton" (Koon 1983, 7).

Shakespeare's grandfather also worked the land — in his case it was in Snitterfield, just outside Stratford — and Will's father also turned from land to trade. Perhaps equally as uneducated as Lon Williams, John Shakespeare worked

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 9 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

to establish himself in the local economy, first as a glover, then as a wool-dealer and money-lender. Unlike Lon, however, John was "ambitious in worldly ways" and "angled for office in the village corporation," rising from ale-taster to alderman, and finally, in 1568, to bailiff, the highest civic position in town (Fraser 1988, 19).

The most significant similarity between Hank and Willie, however, is that both their fathers experienced financial and emotional setbacks while their sons were still in their formative years. Lonnie had a nervous breakdown from "shell- shock" and in late 1929, when Hank was only seven years old, Lon was admitted to the first of many VA (Veterans Administration) Hospitals. It would be ten years before father and son saw each other, and one biographer argues that from the moment of his father's institutionalization, Hank became "virtually fatherless for the rest of his life" (Caress 1979, 10). Lon's "nervous" problem was exacerbated by his fondness for drinking; a jug of whisky, according to most biographers, was never far from his side. This disruption in the family would have an enormous impact on Hank's own life, as well as his art. Similarly, Shakespeare's father had a fall from economic grace that would have repercussions for his son. Around 1576, when Will was twelve, John Shakespeare began to miss council meetings, and in 1586 he was replaced on the council because "he doth not come to the halls when [he] be warned nor hath not done of a long time," according to local records; most critics attribute this behavior to the "crippling debt" he had accumulated (Duncan-Jones 2001, 14). He was also charged with being a Warwickshire recusant and was written up for failing to attend local church services, probably "for fear of process of debt" (Dobson and Wells 2001, 418). As the bills accumulated, John Shakespeare would have been forced to mortgage a number of family properties, "losing some of it for good" (Fraser 1988, 47). Drinking may have been a contributing factor in John's case, as well. By the late 1570s, Will was almost certainly removed from the local grammar school; Hank dropped out of Sidney Lanier High School in his sophomore year.

Hank Williams's work includes at least three songs with troubling references to father figures; we will consider two. In "My Son Calls Another Man Daddy" (1950), the speaker laments how much he is hurting, as his wife "shares a new love" because "she couldn't stand" her husband's "disgrace"; the boy, meanwhile, "longs for the love" that the stand-in father "can't replace" (track 4): mp3 TRACK 4: Hank Williams, "My Son Calls Another Man Daddy"

In an earlier song, "I'm a Long Gone Daddy" (1947), the speaker uses the image of a father deserting his child as a metaphor for a man leaving his quarrelsome lover: "I'm leaving you now / I'm a long gone daddy, I don't need you anyhow." http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 10 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

While this song does not directly address parental desertion, the metaphor succinctly and perhaps unconsciously captures Williams's sentiment toward father figures in general. It is a commonplace that Shakespeare was also haunted by the specter of a failed father. As many writers have noted, the only fathers in Shakespeare, at least until The Tempest, are wrongheaded, weak, wicked, or dead.4 We only need to think of the rashness of Titus Andronicus, the platitudinousness of Polonius, the overbearingness of Egeus, or the haunting ghost of King Hamlet to remind us of this point. Yet Shakespeare did not shy away from these parental portraits, for, as Lynda Boose notes, father-son relationships appear in twenty-three of the dramas (Boose 1982, 325).

Both Hank Williams and William Shakespeare also challenged standard definitions of masculinity in their art. Perhaps as a result of his relationship with his own mother, the overbearing but always available Lilly, Williams "remain[ed] in dialogue with all the significant women in his life, and [this] led him away from the dominant 'heroic' image of masculinity" (Leppert and Lipsitz 1993, 30). In a psychoanalytical reading of Williams's life, Jay Caress argues that the singer never made the normal childhood transference from "dependent mother-love to assertive, independent (father-emulating) mother love" (Caress 1979, 12). While this Freudian reading is dated, it may help to explain Hank's love-hate relationship with both his mother and his first wife. In spite of the pain, both writers seem to have been drawn to women. Leppert and Lipsitz make this clear in a point that could also apply to Shakespeare: "In an age of resurgent patriarchy," Williams "lamented the schisms between men and women, resisted the dominant oedipal narrative and sought closer connections to women" (Leppert and Lipsitz 1993, 34). The interesting point here is that like Shakespeare's mother's family — the Ardens — the Skipper family held a higher social position in the community than did the Williams family, and biographers who have spent time in the area still encounter the same distinction: "A visitor asking about Hank Williams is invariably told, 'His mother was a Skipper,'" and they remain a fairly prominent family in the Georgiana, Alabama, area even today (Caress 1979, 6). Similarly, the Ardens were landed gentry, and while not as well off as some, certainly "better [off] than the Shakespeares" (Fraser 1988, 19). This awareness of matriarchal power could not have failed to have an impact on both boys and their future artistic endeavors.5

Hank Williams's songs tend to cross "gender lines into emotional ground more commonly occupied by women" (Leppert and Lipsitz 30; 32); when we think of the most popular songs by Williams, we think of ones about adultery and unrequited love. What we may forget is that at the time of their composition this topic was female territory, most often described in the plaintive voices of singers such as Billie Holiday, , and . In "Your Cheatin' Heart" (1952), the best-known example, Williams's speaker not only admits that his wife http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 11 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

has been deceitful, but also confesses that he shares her intense insomnia and debilitating pain: "You'll walk the floor, / The way I do / Your cheatin' heart will tell on you." The speaker's tears flow "like falling rain" in a display of sensitivity usually associated with women (track 5): mp3 TRACK 5: Hank Williams, "Your Cheatin' Heart"

In "Cold, Cold Heart" (1950), Williams laments the agony of a love that is painfully one-sided. In this song, the singer describes a woman who is "shackled to a memory" of her former lover, one who made her "heart sad and blue." As a result, the speaker is "paying" for things he "didn't do." Ironically, the more his love grows for the woman, the more they "drift apart"; his desire to melt her "cold, cold heart" will never be realized (track 6): mp3 TRACK 6: Hank Williams, "Cold, Cold Heart"

Titles of Hank Williams songs that echo similar concerns include "I Can't Get You Off My Mind" (1947), "Why Don't You Love Me?" (1950), and most famously, "I Can't Help It If I'm Still in Love With You" (1951).

Shakespeare's sonnets to the dark lady also recount the anguish of disappointed love. David Bevington suggests that the poems often sound like "cries from the heart, voicing at times fears of rejection, self-hatred, and humiliation" (Shakespeare 2002, 854).6 In Sonnet 147, for instance, the speaker claims that his "love is a fever, longing still / . . . feeding on that which doth preserve the ill" (1, 3). Like Williams, Shakespeare equates love with mortality, admitting he is now "past cure" and succumbing to the shocking realization that "Desire is death" (9, 8). Not unlike Williams's betrayed lover in "Your Cheatin' Heart," the speaker of Sonnet 151 considers the impact of woman's infidelity. Indeed, the lady is addressed as a "gentle cheater" (3) who has deceived the speaker; the speaker also chastises himself for allowing the deception and therefore "betray[ing his] nobler part" (5-6). Like Williams, Shakespeare seems preoccupied with the love- hate relationship between men and women.

Critics argue that part of Hank Williams's appeal lay in his ability to allow the "diverse currents" of his time to "flow through him" (Leppert and Lipsitz 1993, 22), a sense of selflessness that is also attributed to Shakespeare, specifically in Keats's famous formulation of his "negative capability." As Murray Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn have observed, as a "dramatist of opposites, gaps and identities," Shakespeare "seems to have made his identity of the question of identity, and so, paradoxically, he seems an absent author himself" (1980, xiv). Shakespeare alludes to the possibility of poetic annihilation in Sonnet 111: "And almost thence

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 12 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer's hand" (6-7), a metaphor invoked by W. H. Auden and others to characterize Shakespeare's art. Both Hank and Shakespeare, therefore, function metaphorically as conduits through which the tensions and contradictions of their times are channeled.

The images of Hank Williams and William Shakespeare described here have been carefully constructed to suggest that as artists, they have a power of empathy not found in ordinary mortals, as well as an ability to achieve a Wordsworthian spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. A story often repeated in Williams's biographies will clarify this point. Jimmy Rule, a long- time Nashville songwriter claims to have been with Williams as he wrote the song, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (1949). According to Rule, Hank initially "scribbl[ed] the song on a piece of paper. He looked up, kind of in despair, and asked [Rule], 'D'you think people will understand what I'm tryin' to say?'" (quoted in Williams 1981, 105). Rule looked at the lines, Hear that lonesome whippoorwill, He sounds too blue to fly. The midnight train is whining low I'm so lonesome I could cry, and assured Hank, "They'll understand." (105). As the song reaches the second stanza, the speaker looks at the suffering moon and identifies with the celestial object retreating "behind a cloud / To hide its face and cry." By the third stanza the singer asks, "Did you ever hear a robin weep / When leaves begin to die? / That means he's lost the will to live"; he concludes with the sentiment that he, like the robin, the whippoorwill, and the moon, is so lonely he "could cry."

Mitch Miller, the goateed composer who worked with Williams in the early 1950s, also participated in this image-shaping by ranking Williams's genius with that of Stephen Foster's. When asked to explain Hank's appeal, Miller offered this response: "He had a way of reaching your guts and your head at the same time. No matter who you were, a country person or a sophisticate, the language hit home. Nobody I knew could use basic English so effectively. Every song socks you in the gut" (quoted in Williams 1981, 106). In fact, Miller, who was head of popular music at , bought the rights to Hank's song "Cold, Cold Heart" in 1951 and placed the song with an unknown, but up and coming, pop singer named ; the song sold over a million copies, and Hank's place as a songwriter beyond the hillbilly genre was guaranteed.

Most biographers agree that Hank Williams would probably have resented being called a "poet." In fact, Hank himself associated poetry with difficult language and hard to decipher meanings. The story goes that whenever Hank heard or read lyrics he thought were too difficult, too wordy, or too haughty, he would claim

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 13 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

that it sounded "like Shakespeare," and he would advise the writer to tone it down (Caress 1979, 85). What even Hank failed to realize, of course, is that Shakespeare's language was very accessible for his intended audience and that Shakespeare's words also had a way of reaching head and gut at the same time.

PLAYING WITH SHAKESPEARE While few country musicians have actually performed Shakespeare, two artists have participated in playful but important re-creations of the Bard: in 1968 and Garth Brooks in 1996. Both of these performances call on Shakespeare's star status and both appeal to a diverse audience by blending Shakespeare with popular culture. As Bristol has argued, celebrity "big-time" only requires "striking and colorful forms of public visibility," adding that even a "small amount of Shakespeare" can be leveraged "into a generous cash flow" (Bristol 1996, 90-91). Larger audiences, in other words, almost always equal larger box-office receipts. Moreover, this "cross-over" appeal, which combines popular and elite forms of culture, is not unique to the late twentieth century, for it has been articulately detected in the Elizabethan period by Robert Weimann, as well as by Levine in nineteenth-century America.7

Jerry Lee Lewis, a native of New Orleans, is best known as a rockabilly and country artist who moved back and forth between more traditional rock, with songs like "Great Balls of Fire," and country numbers, such as "Once More with Feeling." Most people do not know that in 1968, he also starred as Iago in a rock musical version of Othello, entitled Catch My Soul, at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. Lewis stood through much of the show, playing his piano just as he normally did in concert. Lewis was also the only actor who had completely memorized his lines by the time of the first rehearsal; and when asked about the author of the play, he replied: "This Shakespeare was really somethin'. I wonder what he woulda thought about my records" (Tosches 1998, 200). Ultimately, Lewis left the cast when his first comeback hit on the country charts appeared the same year, the memorably titled, "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)."

Jerry Lee Lewis's challenge to canonical Shakespeare met with a conflicted response. Cecil Smith, a well-known West Coast theater critic, penned a mixed review of Catch My Soul that appeared in the on Thursday, March 7, 1968. Smith criticized the musical as a "pop music concert encircling a shredded edition of the great tragedy"; he proclaimed that the music of Lewis and the poetry of Shakespeare "are miles apart and never the twain do meet." Yet he went on to confess an "inescapable feeling" that what was occurring on stage was "interesting" because it went "beyond the routine shock" and tried to "do something." Ultimately, Smith concluded that the performance was "a creative

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 14 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

effort" where "juices flow" and "there's life involved." Smith had nothing but praise for Jerry Lee's Iago, claiming that when the musician "tells a wiggling chorine" to "'Shake it and break it and wrap it up and take it,'" it fits the play better than "'O, mistress, villainy hath made mocks with love!"' At the end of the review, he praises the music, "notably the pounding blues that Lewis sang." He also admires the overall effect of Lewis's portrayal: "Lewis, clad in scarlet in the first act with a Mephistophelean beard from which his long cigar jutted and an evil grin to match, played Shakespeare's motiveless arch villain to mock the role and garble the lines with his southern drawl, which was exactly the intent" (Smith 1968). Later, according to a posting by Robert Cohen on the SHAKSPER listserv, Smith called the event one of the "most memorable things he had witnessed" (Cohen 1995).

Another article from 1995 tracing Lewis's career offered this comment on the production: "What may have been [Lewis's] finest hour never officially made it to record bins," when he played Iago as "the slitheriest of the slithery, a sly, sex- obsessed, mutably vicious orderly in the Venetian army. . . . He ladled his oily cracker bonhomie over the Elizabethan verse and the made the show's trained actors sound like furniture" (Meyerowitz 1995, 2). Even The Christian Science Monitor praised Lewis as a "Louisiana-born genius" and a "unique Iago" (quoted in Tosches 1998, 200). Catch My Soul was also performed in London in 1971, and another SHAKSPER post recalls that this production, set in the Louisiana bayous, was a "fairly tatty production, with a dancing chorus woefully inadequate" (Scheeder 1995). In 1973, the play was made into a rock movie, with Ritchie Havens as Othello and Lance Le Gault replacing Lewis as Iago. The movie soundtrack also boasted a stellar cast, including White, as well as Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett, a duo who often performed with . Both the stage version and film versions, which were produced by Jack Good, have been dismissed as a "kind of Shakespearean Jesus Christ Superstar" (Rockwell 1995).

More recent, and more aligned with new country music, is Garth Brooks's appearance on The Muppets Tonight! Parodies of Shakespeare may tell us as much, if not more, about Shakespeare's status in the second half of the twentieth century than do serious representations of his work.8 More important, the Muppets sketch brings together the varieties of Shakespearean appropriation that I have been tracing throughout this essay: through its cultural citations of Romeo and Juliet, its use of Shakespeare as a trademark, and a parodic effect that complicates the distinction between high and popular culture.

The running joke from The Muppets Tonight! episode is that Brooks wants to do something different from his usual riding-and-roping routine. After Muppet Clifford introduces the singer "as you've never seen him before," Brooks enters

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 15 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

wearing a puffy shirt, tights, and loud bloomers. Deciding to do the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet with Miss Piggy, Brooks watches as she puts on her reading glasses; she still manages, however, to flub her lines. At this point, Andy and Randy Pig enter, clothed in vaguely Elizabethan garb and loudly introduce themselves as the "two gentlemen from Bologna." At the close of the scene, the balcony falls, and Statler says to Waldorf, "Shakespeare would have hated that," to which Waldorf replies, "You should know, you dated his sister." After much laughter, Statler concludes, "Boy, was she ugly." Brooks goes on to play in a science fiction parody and to sing "If I Were a Rich Man" while dressed as Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. When the "Head of the Network" muppet complains that "I thought you said he was going to do a country song," Rizzo replies, "Yeah, but he didn't say what country." By referring to Shakespeare as well as to classic Broadway plays, Brooks begins to break down the stereotypes with which he has come to be associated; but by staging this act on a humorous children's show, he also avoids alienating any of his core country audience. Like Jerry Lee Lewis, with his Shakespearean parody Garth Brooks accomplishes two things simultaneously: he gains cultural currency by showing knowledge of Shakespeare, but also may expand his audience by proving his versatility as an artist.

This overview of the connections between "Shakespeare" and the world of country music shows that popular culture often calls on "highbrow" signifiers to provide cultural capital for artists and the works they perform. Perhaps, as the tangible comparisons between William Shakespeare and Hank Williams suggest, the two worlds are not and have never been all that far apart. Like the barbed fences that separate the livestock from the farmland so often evoked in songs from the American South, arbitrary barriers between country music and Shakespeare are constantly being overrun, torn down, and rendered useless.

NOTES 1. Levine's work contains over fifty references to New York, thirteen to Boston, ten to Philadelphia, and seven to Baltimore. New Orleans, the only southern city mentioned in his book, is cited just five times. Bristol is even less concerned with the South, focusing on the northeastern United States and Canada. 2. For an introduction to the use of the "signifier," see David Richter, who explains that many poststructuralist theorists have attempted to see literature as the "free play of signifiers," with words often "detached" from their original uses (Richter 1989, 8). Instead of words or names "expressing the personality (or impersonality) of the author," they now function more as utterances with multiple meanings (8). As Michel Foucault has argued, writing today is "an interplay of

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 16 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

signs" and signifiers, and writing "unfolds like a game . . . that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits" (Foucault 1989, 978).This playfulness is an important element of the use of "Shakespeare" in country music. 3. I want to thank Karen Cajka for this observation following a presentation of this paper at East Tennessee State University. I would also like to acknowledge the help of other ETSU colleagues and students on this project: Michael Cody, Ron Giles, Alan Holmes, Judy Slagle, Bridget Garland, Beth Steffey, Carol Fox and Jim Sledge (photo), and Luke Wade. 4. See, for example, the following works: Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare by Diane Dreher (1986); "Fathers and Sons in Hamlet" by Eric Rasmussen (1984); and Lawrence Danson's "Shakespeare and the Misrecognition of Fathers and Sons "(1999). 5. Williams's many matriarchal songs include "I Heard My Mother Praying For Me" (1948), "I've Just Told Mama Goodbye" (1949), "," and "Mother is Gone" (no recorded dates). On Shakespeare and mothers, see Janet Adelman's Suffocating Mothers (1992). 6. Introduction to the Sonnets, in The Necessary Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington (Shakespeare 2002). All references to the Sonnets are from this edition. The homoeroticism of the poems is carefully examined by Richard Halpern's Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (2002) and Joseph Pequigney's Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1985). 7. See both Weimann's Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978) and "Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre" (1988). In the latter article, Weimann claims that the space of the London theater was a "hodge-podge of social interests" combining aristocratic with popular traditions (Weimann 1988, 404). 8. Televison parodies of Shakespeare include episodes of Happy Days, Gilligan's Island, The Andy Griffith Show, and Moonlighting. For parodies in the Victorian period, see Richard Schoch's Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (2002) and Victorian Theatrical Burlesques (2003).

REFERENCES Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest." New York and London: Routledge. Blaser, Kent. 1985. "'Pictures from Life's Other Side': Hank Williams, Country Music, and Popular Culture in America." South Atlantic Quarterly 84.1: 12-26. Boose, Lynda. 1982. "The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare." PMLA 97.3: 325- 47. http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 17 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Bristol, Michael D. 1996. Big-Time Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. Caress, Jay. 1979. Hank Williams: Country Music's Tragic King. New York: Stein and Day. Cohen, Robert. 1995. SHAKSPER Listserv. 21 March. Danson, Lawrence. 1999. "Shakespeare and the Misrecognition of Fathers and Sons." In Paternity and Fatherhood: Myths and Realities. Edited by Lieve Spaas. New York: St. Martin's. Diamond Rio. 1992. "This Romeo Ain't Got Julie Yet." Jimmy Olander/Eric Silver. Close to the Edge. Arista #18656. Dobson, Michael and Stanley Wells, eds. 2001. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dreher, Diane. 1986. Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 2001. Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life. London: Thomson Learning. Earle, Steve. 2000. Interview. Esquire. [cited 6 March, 2005]. 1 June. Available at: http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Esquire/2000/06/01/171975?extID=10026 (http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Esquire/2000/06/01/171975?extID=10026). Flippo, Chet. 1985. Your Cheatin' Heart: A Biography of Hank Williams. New York: Doubleday. Foucault, Michel. 1989. "What is an Author?" In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Edited by David H. Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. 978-88. Fraser, Russell. 1988. Young Shakespeare. New York: Press. Halpern, Richard. 2002. Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1989. "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory." In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Edited by David H. Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. 1197-1218. Koon, George William. 1983. Hank Williams: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Lenker, Lagretta. 2001. Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare and Shaw. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 18 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Leppert, Richard and George Lipsitz. 1993. "Age, the Body and Experience in the Music of Hank Williams." In All that Glitters: Country Music in America. Edited by George H. Lewis. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. 22-37. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Loveless, Patty. 1990. "I'm That Kind of Girl." Matraca Berg/Ronald Santaniello. Down the Line. Universal #6401. Marshall, Cynthia. 2000. "'Who Wrote the Book of Love?' Teaching 'Romeo and Juliet' with Early Rock Music." In Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." Edited by Maurice Hunt. New York: MLA. 98-107. Meyerowitz, Robert. 1995. "Flamejob: The Fiery Career and Devilish Genius of Jerry Lee Lewis." Phoenix New Times. 24 August. Montgomery, John Michael. 1995. "I Can Love You Like That." Steve Diamond, Maribeth Derry, and Jennifer Kimball. John Michael Montgomery. Atlantic #82728. Montgomery, John Michael. 1996. "Ain't Got Nothin' On Us." Wendell Mobley/Jim Robinson. What I Do Best. Atlantic # 82947. Parton, Dolly, with Billy Ray Cyrus, Tanya Tucker, Mary Chapin Carpenter. 1993. "Romeo." Kathy Mattea and Pam Tillis. Slow Dancing with the Moon. Sony #53199. Pequigney, Joseph. 1985. Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Price, Steven D. 1974. Take Me Home: The Rise of Country and Western Music. New York and Washington: Praeger. Rasmussen, Eric. 1984. "Fathers and Sons in 'Hamlet.'" Shakespeare Quarterly 35.4: 463. Richter, David H., ed. 1989. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. Rockwell, Kenneth S. 1995. SHAKSPER Listserv. 20 March. Sawyer, Robert. 2003. Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Scheeder, Louis. 1995. SHAKSPER Listserv. 20 March.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 19 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Schoch, Richard. 2002. Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schoch, Richard. 2003. Victorian Theatrical Burlesques. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate. Schwartz, Murray, and Coppelia Kahn, eds. 1980. Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytical Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shakespeare, William, 2002. The Necessary Shakespeare. Edited by David Bevington. New York: AddisonWesley Educational Publishers. Smith, Cecil. 1968. Review of Catch My Soul. Los Angeles Times. March 7. Tichi, Cecelia. 1994. High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tosches, Nick. 1998. Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story. Emeryville, Calif.: Grove Press. Weimann, Robert. 1978. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Weimann, Robert. 1988. "Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre." Shakespeare Quarterly 39: 401-18. Willliams, Hank. 1991. "My Son Calls Another Man Daddy." The Original Singles Collection. Mercury Nashville #847194. Willliams, Hank. 2002a. "Cold, Cold Heart." The Ultimate Collection. Mercury Nashville #170268. Willliams, Hank. 2002b. "I'm A Long Gone Daddy." The Ultimate Collection. Mercury Nashville #170268. Willliams, Hank. 2002c. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." The Ultimate Collection. Mercury Nashville #170268. Willliams, Hank. 2002d. "Your Cheatin' Heart." The Ultimate Collection. Mercury Nashville #170268. Williams, Lucinda. 1992. "Little Angel, Little Brother." Sweet Old World. Chameleon Records #61351. Williams, Roger. 1981. Sing a Sad Song: The Life of Hank Williams. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

ONLINE RESOURCES Muppets Tonight! Episode # 1.2. 15 March 1996. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115279/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115279/). http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 20 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Brown, T. Erik [cited 7 March, 2005]. "Muppets Tonight! Episode Summaries." http://vr.ncsa.uiuc.edu/BS/Muppets/MT!/summaries.html (http://vr.ncsa.uiuc.edu/BS/Muppets/MT!/summaries.html).

ABSTRACT | ROMEO AND JULIET | USE OF SHAKESPEARE'S NAME: HANK AND WILLIE | PLAYING WITH SHAKESPEARE | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781423/show Page 21 of 21 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

The Sun Looking with a Southward Eye upon Us: (/current) Shakespeare in South Florida

KEVIN CRAWFORD, UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA (/previous)

ABSTRACT | "AND WHAT'S HER HISTORY?": THE PALM BEACH SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL | THE (/about) ECOLOGY OF EARLY MODERN DRAMA IN SOUTH FLORIDA | HOMELESS NIGHT WATCHMEN AND VERY LOUD DUCKS | A CHICKEN WITH A HEADACHE | PLAYING IN THE RAIN | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES (/archive)

ABSTRACT Since 1990, the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival (PBSF) has operated out of Jupiter's Carlin Park, a mere two hundred yards' walk from the now-dilapidated Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre. PBSF's successes and failures are likely to resemble the experiences of many theater companies, big or small, Shakespearean or community. I focus, though, on what might be the most Floridian, or South Floridian, conditions under which the festival works. Based on years of local press support and criticism, interviews with co-founder and producing artistic director Kermit Christman and English actor Paul Prescott, and my own testimony as a PBSF founding company member and Associate Artist and Director, I examine how PBSF has survived in a sometimes hostile cultural and theatrical environment.

David's going to help me produce my one-man Hamlet off-Broadway and the world is going to rediscover a major talent! . . . I'm not going back to Florida, noooo how! You try playing Willy Loman in front of a bunch of old farts eating meatloaf, chewing and slurping and spitting out their pits, every night listening to them coughing and hocking and retching. I was in HELL! — Soapdish

In the pouring rain stands The Opa-Locka Theatre; below its name, in neon, blinks http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 1 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

"Florida's Finest Steak House." Every five seconds, "Steak" flashes to "Play," and tropical birds and palms illuminated underneath the marquee confirm that the establishment would certainly be consigned to the lowest circles of a thespian's

Senate Scene from PBSF Othello, 2004 Inferno. Tonight, former soap opera star Jeffery Anderson is giving his Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Inside, fluorescent pink flamingos and larger palms line the back of the stage. Patrons (all of whom are octogenarians) come and go in motorized wheelchairs, glasses and silverware clink and rattle, snores punctuate the sounds of dishwashers humming in the kitchen, waiters collide and trays crash to the floor, and hearing aids fail. When a coffee cup is overturned, an audience member frantically calls for a server and is silenced only when Anderson — barely managing to stay in character but still delivering his lines — steps off the stage and wipes the table himself. The woman leans forward, pats Anderson on the hand, and with an accent that suggests she has spent many years in New Jersey says, "You're doing so well up there." After the performance, in his dressing room a dejected, vodka-swilling Anderson removes his Willy wig and tosses it onto a bronze bust of William Shakespeare.

This scene from Soapdish (1991) is a disturbingly accurate picture of a large slice of south Floridian theater, particularly during the years 1980-1990, when both ends of Palm Beach County were home to and theatrically dominated by two long-running dinner theaters: the Royal Palm in Boca Raton and the Burt Reynolds in Jupiter, quite literally on the county's southern and northern borders, respectively. The only

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 2 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

minor inaccuracy in Soapdish's hilarious send-up is show choice. As a lad, I saw Vincent Gardenia play Willy Loman at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater, but by 1980 there were no other "classics," modern or early modern, offered from either company. By 1990, neither theater would have dreamed of putting a remotely "serious" play on their stages; "serious," by then, meant "non-musical." Instead, one could see the entire Rogers and Hammerstein canon performed regularly (interrupted only by dashes of Hello, Dolly! and Gypsy) and, if one alternated theaters, Fiddler on the Roof annually.

Obviously, dinner theaters do not often include in their seasons plays that keep audiences from being happy, and I am not suggesting that they should. But Soapdish says a great deal about the void between "bad" and "good" theater, and it says even more about Florida theater. Anderson nightly reminds himself of an exalted theatrical world elsewhere as he drinks his way into costume and makeup under the stony gaze of Shakespeare's bust. One night, the hotshot New York producer of The Sun Also Sets (the soap opera from which Anderson was fired many years ago) arrives backstage and identifies himself. Anderson moans that his performance that evening was especially awful, but the producer reassures him, "I've seen dinner theater before. I know real talent when I see it." The producer offers Anderson a second chance at television stardom; amazingly, the actor's first response is not to negotiate salary, screen time, script approval, magazine covers, or dressing room space, but to fantasize about a one-man Hamlet project that he longs to bring to the New York stage. The Hamlet is, in fact, his only condition; "thing is though . . . I'd need time to develop that," he says cautiously. Back in the studio, Anderson attacks old enemies with the tirade that is this paper's epigraph. He decorates his new apartment with an RSC poster of Ian McKellen in Romeo and Juliet. The fact that Anderson is played by Kevin Kline, a Tony- and Academy-Award-winning actor who has many notches on his Shakespearean bedpost (including two Broadway Hamlets, one of which was televised on PBS) provides a final and delicious irony.

Soapdish's onstage spoofs do not necessarily reflect all dinner theaters (though they certainly nail South Floridian audience demographics). They do, however, reflect the comforts that many South Florida audiences require — playwright, frequency of dance numbers, and free dessert — in the face of artists who sometimes would rather be doing "real" performance work. The cliches are impossible to deny or ignore: Florida is a tropical retirement home and a cultural wasteland, it's always raining, dinner theater is what represents "drama," no "major talent" is ever discovered or rediscovered there, and even though television is where actors make or break their careers and establish their financial well-being, Shakespeare is where the "serious" acting happens.

"AND WHAT'S HER HISTORY?": THE PALM BEACH SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 3 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Since 1990, the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival (PBSF) has operated out of Jupiter's Carlin Park, a mere two hundred yards' walk from the once-flourishing Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater, which became the ultimately bankrupted Jupiter Theatre, which became the Dilapidated Empty Theatre, which finally became the newly- christened Maltz Jupiter Theatre. I am interested in documenting how PBSF has produced Shakespeare in its home environment. True, PBSF's successes and failures, its trials and tribulations, are likely to be the experiences of many theater companies, big or small, Shakespearean or community. I hope to focus, though, on the specifically Floridian, or South Floridian, conditions under which the festival works. My examination uses support and criticism from the local press, interviews with co- founder and producing artistic director Kermit Christman and Palm Beach Post theater critic Hap Erstein, and my own testimony as a PBSF founding company member and Associate Artist and Director to explore how PBSF has survived in a sometimes hostile cultural and theatrical environment.

From 1988-1990, PBSF co-founders Christman and Jacqueline Siegel produced events in association with the Chamber Theatre of the Palm Beaches and Young Audiences of Palm Beach County. Their success led to the incorporation of PBSF, in January 1990, as a "not-for-profit, 501.C3 arts and education theatrical organization,"

PBSF's sign with Paul Prescott the "first and only professional company in Palm Beach County to produce the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 4 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

works of William Shakespeare on an annual basis" ("PBSF Mission Statement" 2005). Having seen my Orsino in a collegiate Twelfth Night, Christman asked me to join the original company, which I did eagerly. Most of us were professional or semi- professional actors who just wanted to do Shakespeare. (I had worked at the Royal Palm Dinner Theatre since the age of nine, and had played as many newsboys in knickers and tap shoes as I could stand.)

Following an inaugural 1990 indoor Macbeth, PBSF premiered Twelfth Night in its outdoor home, Carlin Park. After three successful, if rustic, years there, the Palm Beach County Commission and the Palm Beach County Department of Parks and Recreation designated the park a "North County Cultural Site" and built a "natural" amphitheater that PBSF opened in January of 1996. The amphitheater is a large, bowl shaped hill that slopes down to the park's lakeshore. There are no concrete terraces, and there is no permanent stage or bandshell. Stages are sometimes put in, and a few shows have played on the grass itself. Hamlet (2000) had a six-foot-high scaffolding stage with three levels; Much Ado About Nothing (1999) brought in truckloads of beach sand to create a Mediterranean shoreline, with a shipwrecked pirate's galleon rising out of it. After the Carlin Park Amphitheater opened, PBSF produced Shakespeare there annually and continued to work indoors throughout the community and across the country. For nine years, from 1991-2000, PBSF presented the feature theatrical event at the annual literary festival Bookfest of the Palm Beaches, including the modern world premiere of "Shakespeare's Cardenio" (Crawford 2003; Erstein 1995).

THE ECOLOGY OF EARLY MODERN DRAMA IN SOUTH FLORIDA Until 1990, there were few non-collegiate productions of Shakespeare in Palm Beach County. Smaller rep companies, such as Actor's Rep or Florida Repertory Theatre, were doing critically acclaimed work — tragical-comical-musical-tropical — but financial woes kept those companies from operating a full decade. The longest running professional companies in the county now are the Caldwell in Boca Raton (who have, with their consistent good work, built a huge subscription base and found lots of Boca money) and Florida Stage, located in inconvenient Manalapan (and originally backed by the money of Lois Pope, the National Enquirer heiress). Both theaters do probing, sometimes controversial contemporary work, but studiously avoid almost anything written before A Streetcar Named Desire. Each summer they mount musical revues, which usually consist of nothing more than six performers around a piano singing the songs of whatever composer was picked that year. These revues, of course, sell out for a month and a half and finance most of the following season.

The Caldwell does not do early modern drama. Artistic director Michael Hall has voiced his concerns for doing "anything English" for South Florida audiences, noting

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 5 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

that they "aren't good listeners" (Erstein 2004c). The Florida Stage, likewise, does so rarely. Indeed, we have only two offerings from Florida Stage to indicate how their producers view the classical theater scene in Palm Beach County, in spite of the audience numbers PBSF manages to attract. PBSF's first season in Carlin Park presented a September Twelfth Night and The Tempest in March. Both were well received by critics, and each played to crowds averaging 1,000 a night over the course of a four-night weekend run. One month after PBSF's Tempest, Florida Stage produced The Taming of the Shrew. Performed at the newly ground-broken site of the Palm Beach County School of the Arts, it was billed as supporting and representing the "future" of Palm Beach County theater. It was staged one block from the multi- million dollar Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, which, as the home of the Palm Beach Opera and Ballet Florida, loomed over the production as another stamp of cultural "authority." Pope's money fueled the project, an entire Equity cast and crew were assembled, a respected regional director was flown in, and it played to huge crowds for a month. I saw it, and left more in sorrow than in anger (no doubt stoked by the "excess of wine" that Hal mentions).

I love adaptations and appropriations, but Florida Stage put up a Shrew blatantly tailored to a predominately dinner theater-going crowd and threw in heaping spoonfuls of sugar to help audiences get the playwright down without gagging. Petruccio arrived in Padua in a 1920s roadster, which could only move about ten feet because of set design and stage dimension, but that was enough to produce cries of pleasure. The early bartering for Bianca in 1.1 had Baptista blithely driving golf balls off the stage into a neighboring construction site, which at least got the men in the audience clapping for nice shots, but Baptista's constant teeing up completely undercut what is surely at the very least a minor sense of frustration and urgency in that scene. (PGA National is barely twenty miles away, though, and there are at least five courses in between, so I suppose it might have seemed negligent not to have golf in the show.) Peter Smith, writing for the Palm Beach Post, delighted in the production's constant Hollywood allusions to non-Shakespearean, palatable fare: "You can see the movie-based casting through the show, and it all works: Gordon McConnell's -styled Hortensio and Warren Kelley's uncanny takeoff as Grumio are especially funny. Curt Becker does a sharp Maxie Rosenbloom take as Biondello and Michael George Owen plays Gremio as an aging Edward Everett Horton" (Smith 1991b). The no-turning-back-dinner-theater moment: during Kate and Petruccio's first scene together, right after he had pondered the technicalities of his tongue in her tail, they burst into a full-fledged song and dance number — Gershwin's "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off."

Critical press was very supportive of both shows. Of PBSF's effort, Smith wrote that "Shakespeare By The Sea is presenting a chopped and channeled version of The Tempest at Carlin Park this weekend, and like their past production of Twelfth Night, it's not only great fun, but it's minute for minute the best entertainment bargain in http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 6 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

town . . . miss it at your own risk" (Smith 1991c). For Florida Stage's Shrew, he remarked that for "the eminently reasonable price of nothing you can go to a big field next to the Kravis and catch the wildest, most frenetic production of Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew it has ever been my good fortune to witness" (Smith 1991b). I know that, logically, Kate and Pete have every right to debate the pronunciation of "tomato," and that this kind of musical tinkering is not uncommon in the history of Shakespearean comedy on stage. I couldn't help but wince, though, when I heard audience members say at the interval, "Well, that play in Jupiter about the storm was nice, but this is so much more fun."

In December 1992, Christman and I directed , which played to thousands and which was named by the Palm Beach Post as one of the "Top Ten Plays" of the year that "lit our imaginations" (Smith 1993). Two years later, Florida Stage did a musical version of As You Like It, set in Brazil. All I remember are lots of fruit baskets on the women's heads, even more maracas, the world's only cheerful Jacques (how could he not be?), and an opening parade that won't be found in any edition of the play: "In addition to such existing poetry as 'Under the greenwood tree,' which he set to music, New York composer Sid Cherry also came up with a completely original opening number. The song, titled Sa Oyu Keli Ti, is written in a mock Portuguese based on anagrams of the play's title. 'I created a gibberish language for the number that sort of sounds like Portuguese,' says Cherry. 'I wrote an original lyric in English, and I scrambled it up'" (Erstein 1997). I protest that my minor grumbling is not based on territorial disputes or personal rivalry. Both of Florida Stage's Shakespeares used PBSF actors, and PBSF has regularly employed Florida Stage talent; I was a high school intern with Florida Stage's first incarnation, the Theatre Club. I am also not complaining about high-concept productions. Headlines have both praised and damned PBSF for a "Heavy Metal Hamlet" that was a "Prince of a Play," a "Night's Dream" that "dared" a "perverse, complicated twist," and a "Shakespeare in Future Shock" for its Road Warrior-esque Richard III; we have not done a show without a concept (Erstein 2000a; Smith 1991a; Stemle 1992). I do not ask, either, "Why do it at all, if it's going to be altered so radically?" because I have always found that question to be myopic (we wouldn't have Throne of Blood, Kiss Me Kate, or even Shakespeare in Love if that question were posed to the wrong director). But one of the most accomplished professional companies in the county twice chose to accentuate and encourage stereotypes of South Florida theater and patronizingly told audiences that they could not handle the real deal without extra- textual songs, vaudeville percussion for slapstick violence, tap shoes, pineapples, or a nine iron to reassure them that they were still safely at home. Polished though the productions were, they did not embody the sense of trusting Shakespeare with which PBSF had embarked.

For PBSF's premiere season, Macbeth was produced indoors in the Watson B. Duncan Theater at Palm Beach Community College's (PBCC) main campus. The late http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 7 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Duncan was a local legend, having taught literature at PBCC for nearly forty years; Burt Reynolds often credits Duncan as the inspiration behind his pursuit of a film career. Christman dedicated the season to Duncan, which prompted Reynolds to send a warm press release, graciously encouraging us to use his message as a frontispiece and offering to serve as Honorary Chairman for the season: "I have always envisioned a Shakespearean theatre in Palm Beach County that would bring classical drama to audiences of all ages. Join me in believing that Shakespeare has come alive in Palm Beach County." This Macbeth, with eleventh-century costumes and bare stage, played for one extended weekend, sold well, and closed. Strangely, it seemed then, there was no statement by or attendance from Reynolds — protestations of both notwithstanding — and no indication that PBCC was considering any future theatrical relations with PBSF. (It would later become clear that Reynolds's initial good wishes were overshadowed by fear for his own theater's stability.) 1

HOMELESS NIGHT WATCHMEN AND VERY LOUD DUCKS Undeterred, Christman turned his sights to Jupiter, the northernmost point of the county and, then at least, very much in the sticks.2 The draw was virtually unused

Set Shell for PBSF Romeo and Juliet, 2003 Carlin Park, situated on the Atlantic Ocean. Straddling the beachside highway A1A, the park's ocean side consisted of picnic pavilions, snack bars, and softball fields. Across the road, there were twenty acres of overgrown scrub and trees, and no http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 8 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

running water or electricity. Palm Beach County's Department of Parks and Recreation, under whose auspices the park's events were controlled, liked the idea of an outdoor festival, and essentially granted PBSF the space as a co-sponsor. Christman wanted to perform in the park's undeveloped west grounds, on the banks of a shallow lake. Parks and Recreation provided the park and garbage services, but left everything else to us — including police and sheriff fees for traffic control, power, waste management, portable toilets, insurance for alcohol consumption, power, and so on. We needed lots of extension cords.

Space does not permit a show-by-show history of PBSF's seasons, and for the purposes of this account, I will move to the broader issues with which PBSF has concerned itself in South Florida and Palm Beach County. Until the amphitheater was built, there were floods, fire ants, exploding generators, fire trucks, drunk and disorderly audiences (and actors), tripped-over extension cords that plunged scenes into darkness, stolen equipment, deputized homeless night watchmen, and very loud ducks. After a first-year loss of some lighting equipment, Christman gave me a stack of five-dollar bills to distribute among the few homeless men who camped in the woods on the park's borders. In the course of three years, they thwarted two robbery attempts by running across the street to a phone and calling the county sheriff's office as trucks backed into the park in the middle of the night. Now, there are locked gates to prevent that from happening. The amphitheater now provides road access, gated security, bathrooms, running water, power, and better audience sightlines. Phase Three, as the county is calling it, will spend another two million dollars next year and put in a permanent multi-leveled and covered stage, underground dressing rooms, more power, and a much larger amphitheater bowl.

Producing outdoor Shakespeare in tropical South Florida necessarily involves a number of meteorological concerns. In 1990, Carlin Park was simply a large dusty field surrounded by trees. No one wanted to use it for anything, so we could produce whenever we wanted. From 1990-1993, PBSF put up productions in September, March, August, May, and December. After the amphitheater was built and opened in 1996, Parks and Recreation understandably felt that they had more of a vested interest and began suggesting that plays be done in early season, preferably October or November. PBSF respects and seriously considers every request that comes from the municipal body that gives us our home, and we chose to follow the wishes of Parks and Recreation. Those years of fall shows from 1996-1998, though, created major problems that should have been foreseen by both parties.

The attraction of potential seasonal audiences is more than understandable, but Parks and Recreation ignored the fact that there is a lot going on during the season. The largest county in Florida, Palm Beach is home to just over 1.1 million residents year- round, and nearly 125,000 seasonal residents. The Palm Beach Tourism Development Council estimates that during the fiscal year 2002-2003, there were 2.2

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 9 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

million hotel guests and 4.4 million visitors to the county (Palm Beach County Tourist Development Council 2005). Three-quarters of those travelers arrived between October and April. During that period, PBSF is not the only group aware of those numbers and vying for the attention of potential audiences. Visitors and residents can choose from all kinds of diversions, including ballet, opera, smaller community theater, countless movie complexes, gambling cruises, and dining. PBSF's shows during those years still charged a minimal entrance fee to the Park (never more than $8, once as low as $3.25; shows have been free since 1998). Cheap, but still a haul north for many audiences, when so much was at hand locally. In its early years, PBSF's May and September shows played to large audiences because there was comparatively little going on anywhere else in the county, especially for a few bucks. PBSF should have been more firm with Parks and Recreation and backed up its arguments to avoid heart-of-season production work with hard numbers. Advertising budgets shoot through the roof during seasonal campaigns, because non- seasonal shows require less press and yield more audience. Seasonal audience numbers did not dwindle that badly, and time has healed the wounded pride that came from playing in front of 800 instead of 1,000 people. There was, however, a more devastating seasonal problem that Parks and Recreation, having dealt with it before, should have been worried about: mosquitoes.

A CHICKEN WITH A HEADACHE Considering the theater-closing plagues that afflicted early modern companies, I should be thankful. But pestilence has, as Pistol would say, played the huswife with PBSF more than once. Rarely a year goes by in which Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties are not under medical alerts for all mosquito-borne diseases, particularly different strains of encephalitis, which mosquitoes spread after feeding on the blood of infected birds. West Nile virus, which causes brain swelling, is rare, but eastern equine and St. Louis encephalitis, different forms of the disease, are relatively common in Florida (thankfully, they cannot be spread from ). All three encephalitis strains produce the same symptoms: fatigue, headache, dizziness, fever, light sensitivity, and confusion. Only about one of every two hundred people infected shows those symptoms, and babies and the elderly are most at risk; eastern equine encephalitis is the most fatal of the three, St. Louis encephalitis the least. Depending on the year and on age demographics, fatality rates may be anywhere between three and thirty percent. St. Louis encephalitis has historically been the major threat in South Florida, and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that from 1964-1998, 375 cases were reported in Florida. Large outbreaks are rare but can be severe, a reality many take seriously when reflecting on 1977's 110 cases, or, during our premiere season of 1990, the 223 reported incidents. Why do I know all this? Because in South Florida mosquitoes thrive in the early morning and late evening hours, especially from late summer through October or November. Because when Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation controls a theater company's land,

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 10 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

that land has on it a shallow and nearly stagnant lake, and the county's Department of Health announces that all evening and night-time activities will be suspended indefinitely until the mosquitoes are dead, The Winter's Tale does not open.

In 1990, PBSF's September Twelfth Night closed successfully and was awarded a nice grant from Mobil Land Development for the express purpose of bringing it to northern Martin County, thirty miles up the coast, the following month. After a technical crew had moved the stage and lighting and sound equipment, and right after we had finished our brush-up rehearsals, two days of heavy rains flooded the park in which we were now ready to perform. Standing water is, of course, where disease-ridden insects gather, so Martin County allowed our production to go up with the proviso that we do only matinees. Since Mobil had paid for it all, we proposed waiting one week to let the area drain and to talk their health department into letting us go at night. They agreed; the following Wednesday, it poured again. The budget would not sustain another week's waiting, so under a blazing weekend sun, on we went at two in the afternoon, to crowds of forty or fifty uncomfortable people who gamely tried to sit on the muddy ground with their blankets and picnics, the traffic of U.S. Highway One roaring by about fifty feet behind us (for evening performances, those blocks would have been detoured; the volume of daytime beach-going traffic eliminated that option). No money loss, but disheartening.3

The bugs left us alone for a while, and our jumping all around the calendar kept us out of the danger zone for some years. In 1997 — one of our "fall-show-only" years — the bugs were back on a mission, and after I had just finished blocking Act One of The Winter's Tale, Parks and Recreation called. A bird was ill in Pahokee, far away and on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, with encephalitis symptoms. Another night ban was proclaimed, and as we looked ahead to the cooler months, which kill the mosquitoes, the only slot open in Carlin Park was Super Bowl weekend.

For reasons that I still don't understand (I was only directing it and playing Leontes), producers and backers decided to go ahead and attempt a Sunday matinee. The Palm Beach Post offered its usual pre-show support, recalling that "a funny thing happened on the way" to Carlin Park that year, pointing to our encephalitis snag in an attempt to justify what many found to be a misguided "show-must-go-on" decision (Erstein 1998b). A running joke during press meetings was that men could barely be dragged to see Shakespeare when there is nothing on television. Shakespeare vs. Super Bowl XXXII? The Broncos did better that weekend than we did. One headline roared, "Group's Shakespeare production a 'Winter' of discontent," and the accompanying review noted that the supporting cast "seem[ed] at sea with an [sic] iambic pentameter" (Erstein 1998a). I could blame the production's failure on the decision to cut Autolycus entirely after the encephalitis postponement caused an actor to jump ship (my fault) or a very weak performance from Perdita (her fault). But I just know those mosquitoes had something to do with it.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 11 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

The bugs and seasonal competition were major factors in PBSF's and Parks and Recreation's joint decision to reschedule permanently the festival's outdoor season. Since 1998, productions have been put up in June or July, when there is virtually nothing happening on the rest of the county's stages. Crowds are huge, sometimes 1,200 people a night; the amphitheater can barely contain them, and announcements encouraging audiences to "move their blankets and chairs closer together" are common. There are a few mosquitoes, but no encephalitis scares. Ninety-five-degree temperatures are a drawback, although mostly for the actors; there is usually a wonderful breeze coming off the ocean, but the configuration of the bowl allows only the audience to benefit from it. Aeolus is not the only force of nature that conspires to keep PBSF actors drenched, however.

PLAYING IN THE RAIN All outdoor festivals contend with the elements. PBSF's 1998 decision to produce its outdoor Shakespeare in June or July, though, was a hubristic act of defiance in the face of Florida's rain gods. Palm Beach County's rainy season runs from June through October, although flooding can and does occur year round, contributing to an average annual rainfall of 61.7 inches. Moreover, as a flat, low lying, heavily developed coastal county that experiences frequent, intense rains and periodic tropical storms, Palm Beach County is especially prone to flooding.4 I wish I had a penny for each time I have stood in Carlin Park and watched audiences scramble to pack up their picnics and beach chairs as it rained down on them. Rain though it did, there was at first no official "rain delay policy." For nearly ten years, we have had an annual conversation in which Christman wants to cancel and I argue for "waiting to see what the clouds will do." The rain problem is a peculiar psychological game that PBSF plays with summer weather. It never rains during the day in June or July; clouds start forming in the west, like clockwork, at 3 pm. They may move eastward and pour for an hour or two, but it is nearly impossible to determine when and for how long.

The ambiguity of not knowing and the frustrations of preparing the grounds for an outdoor performance in a rain that the crew hopes will stop in time for things to dry, has led us to cancel performances that could and should have gone on despite a network of resources, including an undercover connection to high-tech meteorological equipment. Sometime PBSF performer Alan Gerstel happens to be a top-rated newscaster in the area for Palm Beach County's CBS affiliate, and he makes inside calls to Channel Twelve's "Weather Center" for ongoing "Doppler 12000" updates.

Foolishly, PBSF has also underestimated the resilience of South Florida audiences. They know it's going to rain, and they know it will stop sometime; if they want to go see free Shakespeare in a park, they'll go, rain or shine. Before the first Sunday

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 12 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

evening performance of Hamlet in 2000, it began drizzling at 7:30. By 8:00, crowds were still arriving, and no one had left. Announcements were made that the company needed to wait for the rain to stop and for the stage to be dried for safety reasons, and the audience sat there until we started at 8:45 (the crew got a huge ovation as they were mopping the stage). Nevertheless, the following year we called off a show at 7 pm because it was raining steadily, even though audiences were already filing in. The skies were clear by 8:15. PBSF's official policy now is that cast and crew arrive and prepare even if they have to drive through a tropical storm, and no decisions are made until 8:00.

CONCLUSION Where are things headed now on stages in Palm Beach County and down the block from PBSF? Todd Alan Price, one-time associate producer at Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse, spent ten years acquiring the former Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre and turning it into a not-for-profit company to "rival" the efforts of the Caldwell and Florida Stage (Erstein 2004b). His aspirations were realized when the newly christened Maltz Jupiter Theatre opened in February 2004 with My Fair Lady. Grand opening events clearly yearned to successfully transport audiences to the dinner theater hey-day of the 1980s; summer 2004 audiences were given Golf: The Musical (Erstein 2004a). Downtown West Palm Beach, about thirty miles south of Carlin Park, has seen an immeasurable period of development in the past ten years, and new theaters are moving in. Palm Beach Dramaworks has entered its fifth season, Actor's Rep has reopened for acting and directing classes and will present an as-yet- undetermined season of four plays next year, and the city is wooing Louis Tyrell from Florida Stage to join its ranks. Mayor Lois Frankel hopes that "the more theaters we have here, it gives people another reason to be here. It would be great if we had our own little mini-Broadway" (Erstein 2004b).

PBSF will continue to produce Shakespeare in Carlin Park and work indoors at the Eissey Theatre. Phase Three will hopefully see not only additions to the existing amphitheater, Christman hopes, but even more financial support from the county and Parks and Recreation. He and I both look forward to the summer that we can afford to put two shows in rep in the park. That will really confuse and bugs.

The climax of Soapdish wraps up the film's on- and off-camera soap opera antics with a live broadcast that includes brain transplants, actors going off script, mutes recovering the power of speech, and Anderson improvising to his soon-to-be- lobotomized lover, "Good night, sweet princess." The broadcast climaxes with a revelation that Montana Moorehead, the soap's buxom and villainous nurse, was born Milton Moorehead. A high school annual is produced, on national television, to confirm that viewers have been afforded the opportunity to enjoy Montana's wicked machinations only after Milton went through what must have been a series of

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 13 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

expensive operations. Moorehead screams and runs off the set as drop and costumers faint. Then follows a pleasant, if formulaic, denouement, replete with daytime , families reuniting, and renewed high ratings for the soap. The film's final shot, however, is of the Opa-Locka, on which it continues to rain. The dinner theater is still producing Death of a Salesman, only there has been a slight cast change. Tonight, Milton Moorehead, banished from The Sun Also Sets, is giving his Willy Loman.

NOTES 1. After PBSF's third Carlin Park show, the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre artistic director Richard Akins attended a Jupiter Town Council meeting, and accused Kermit Christman of trying to "shut down" the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre, urging the town to charge PBSF park rental fees that were comparable to his mortgage payments (Christman 2004). 2. The Town of Jupiter's population has exploded since PBSF first performed in Carlin Park. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of year-round residents increased from 25,000 to 40,000. By 2002, the number had reached just over 42,000, and the county projects that by 2010, there will be more than 61,000 residents in Jupiter. For these and all other statistics, I include a series of pertinent Websites in the Related Online Resources. 3. The cancellations do buy volumes of free press, though. See Sommerville 1990 for a representative account. 4. The county's weather service notes: "virtually the whole county has proven to be susceptible to short term localized flooding . . . Palm Beach County likely surpasses the national average of 25% of flooding occurring outside National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) designated Special Flood Hazard Areas" ("Flood Facts" 2005).

REFERENCES Crawford, Kevin. 2003. "'All his intents are contrary to man': Softened Masculinity and Staging in Thomas Middleton's 'The Lady's Tragedy.'" Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 16: 101-29. Christman, Kermit. 2004. Telephone interview. 18 February. Erstein, Hap. 1995. "'Cardenio' fast-paced, full of sex, violence." Review of Cardenio, by William Shakespeare. Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival. Old School Square Theater, Delray Beach, Fla. Palm Beach Post. 19 February, 10B. Erstein, Hap. 1997. "Bard With a Beat: As You Like It Meets Carnival in Pope Theatre Production." Palm Beach Post. 4 April, TGIF 25. http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 14 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Erstein, Hap. 1998a. "Group's Shakespeare production a 'Winter' of discontent." Review of The Winter's Tale, by William Shakespeare. Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival. Carlin Park Amphitheater, Jupiter, Fla. Palm Beach Post. 25 January, 4B. Erstein, Hap. 1998b. "'Winter's Tale' returns to Jupiter after delay." Palm Beach Post. 16 January, TGIF 21. Erstein, Hap. 2000a. "Heavy metal 'Hamlet' prince of a play." Review of Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival. Carlin Park Amphitheater, Jupiter, Fla. Palm Beach Post. 19 July, 3D. Erstein, Hap. 2004a. "Only performers save this musical slice of golf from the hook." Review of Golf: The Musical, by Michael Roberts. Maltz Jupiter Theatre, Jupiter, Fla. Palm Beach Post. 13 July, 4E. Erstein, Hap. 2004b. "Playhouse surge gives county new role: Theater district." Palm Beach Post. 21 February, 1A. Erstein, Hap. 2004c. Telephone interview. 25 February. "Flood Facts: Palm Beach County's History" [cited 17 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.co.palm- beach.fl.us/pubsafety/eoc/floodawareness/main/pbc_flood_potential.htm. (http://www.co.palm- beach.fl.us/pubsafety/eoc/floodawareness/main/pbc_flood_potential.htm). "Palm Beach County Tourist Development Council" [cited 17 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us/PubInf/TDC/ (http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us/PubInf/TDC/). Parks and Recreation Online: Carlin Park [cited 21 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us/parks/locations/north/carlin.htm (http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us/parks/locations/north/carlin.htm). "PBSF Mission Statement" [cited 21 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.pbshakespeare.org/sponsorship.html (http://www.pbshakespeare.org/sponsorship.htm). Smith, Peter. 1991a. "'Night's Dream' dares perverse, complicated twist." Review of A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare. Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival. Carlin Park, Jupiter, Fla. Palm Beach Post. 8 September, 2B. Smith, Peter. 1991b. "'Shrew' fun, and the price is right, too." Palm Beach Post. 10 April, 3D. Smith, Peter. 1991c. "'The Tempest' Plays to Jupiter to Quick, Light, Wistful Beat." Palm Beach Post. 8 March, 2B.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 15 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

Smith, Peter. 1993. "Top ten plays of the year lit our imaginations." Palm Beach Post. 1 January, TGIF 19. Soapdish. 1991. Directed by Michael Hoffman. Performers Kevin Kline, , Robert Downey, Jr., Cathy Moriarty. Paramount Pictures. Sommerville, Sean. 1990. "Martin Curtails Night Events." Palm Beach Post, Martin County Edition. 5 October, 1A. Stemle, Lisa. 1992. "Shakespeare in future shock: Classical tragedy 'Richard III' adapted and set in the year 2010." Sun-Sentinel. 8 May, Palm Beach Plus 8.

ONLINE RESOURCES "Chart: Confirmed and Probable St. Louis Encephalitis Cases, Human, United States, 1964-2000, by State." Center for Disease Control [cited 17 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/arbor/cases-sle-1964-2000.htm (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/arbor/cases-sle-1964-2000.htm). "Culture has found its place in the sun." Palm Beach Cultural Council [cited 17 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.pbccc.org (http://www.pbccc.org). "Eastern Equine Encephalitis Fact Sheet." Center for Disease Control [cited 17 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/arbor/eeefact.htm (http://www.pbccc.org). "Florida Stage" [cited 17 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.floridastage.org (http://www.floridastage.org) "Palm Beach County: The Best of Everything" [cited 17 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us (http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us.). "Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival" [cited 17 February 2005]. Available online at http://www.pbshakespeare.org (http://www.pbshakespeare.org)/. Photographs from PBSF's production of Othello, 2004. http://atropos.english.uga.edu/cocoon/borrorwers/request?id=118286 (request? id=118286) Soapdish. Internet Movie Database [cited 3 March 2005]. Available online at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102951/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102951/).

PERMISSIONS Photographs of Beach Sign and the Shell Set for Romeo and Juliet by Kevin Crawford. Photograph of Othello by Chuck Andersen. All photographs courtesy of PBSF.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 16 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'53 PM

ABSTRACT | "AND WHAT'S HER HISTORY?": THE PALM BEACH SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL | THE ECOLOGY OF EARLY MODERN DRAMA IN SOUTH FLORIDA | HOMELESS NIGHT WATCHMEN AND VERY LOUD DUCKS | A CHICKEN WITH A HEADACHE | PLAYING IN THE RAIN | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781425/show Page 17 of 17 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

Bard in a Barn: Iconography, Appropriation, and (/current) Shakespeare at Winedale

MATT KOZUSKO, URSINUS COLLEGE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | THEATRUM MUNDI | SHAKESPEARE AT WINEDALE | COMMUNITY AND (/about) PERFORMANCE IN RURAL TEXAS | BRANDING THE SOUTHWESTERN SHAKESPEARE | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

(/archive)

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on Shakespeare and appropriation has contributed to the growing interest in the ways we "mean by" Shakespeare. Studies as wide- ranging as Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare, Michael Bristol's Big- Time Shakespeare, and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human chart the use of Shakespeare in everything from politics to colonialism to films and novels. Largely unexplored, however, is the way in which Shakespeare is used to mean in Shakespeare festivals. This essay examines one such festival, Shakespeare at Winedale, to consider how the festival's student performers and the agrarian community in which the festival is hosted come together to re-make themselves in Shakespeare's image and to re-invent the plays in the style of the rural American Southwest.

While we may acknowledge that drama gives us stories that imitate life, we may also say that drama in turn reproduces the structures that it appears merely to reflect. Drama — or, more generally, "art" — reflects life, reproducing and working through scenarios from the "real" world outside of art, but at the same time, by providing a rhetoric and a meaning on which to

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 1 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

model life, it helps to bring about those very scenarios. The rich appeal of the theatrum mundi metaphor — all the world's a stage — owes its resilience precisely to this resemblance.

THEATRUM MUNDI Insofar as life takes art as a model for understanding and producing itself, drama merits special attention as an art form whose components most obviously resemble the things they represent. Typically, the two components of a metaphor, the "tenor" and the "vehicle," are fundamentally dissimilar, and the pleasure of comparing them comes from teasing out their latent similarities: love is only like a rose when one considers beauty and joy coupled with fragility and the potential pain of thorns, and so forth. Two dissimilar things become similar when juxtaposed in metaphor. The components of the theatrum mundi metaphor, however, are already similar, as drama and life, the stage and the world, are exhaustively analogous by design. "All the world's a stage" folds the usual art-life relationship back on itself: the world works like a staged drama, which itself is The Barn at Winedale modeled on the world.1

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 2 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

The art-life relationship described by the theatrum mundi metaphor echoes throughout the study of literature, but also finds a home in anthropology. Victor Turner, in an account of his study of the Ndembu tribe in Africa, notes that "life, after all, is as much an imitation of art as the reverse" (Turner 1982, 72). By way of illustration, he offers an instance of how the Ndembu use their cultural lore as a template for behavior: Those who, as children in the Ndembu society, have listened to innumerable stories about Yala Mwaku and Luweji Ankonde, know all about "inaugural motifs" — "when the king was drunk and helpless, his sons beat and reviled him" — "transitional motifs" — "his daughter found him near death and comforted and tended him" — and "terminal motifs" — "the king gave his daughter the lukanu and excluded his sons from the royal succession." When these same Ndembu, now full-grown, wish to provoke a breach or to claim that some party has crucially disturbed the placid social order, they have a frame available to "inaugurate" a social drama, with a repertoire of "transitional" and "ending" motifs to continue the framing process and channel the subsequent agonistic developments. (72) In this argument, the energy of imitation moves back and forth between life and art, or between life and what Turner calls "genres of cultural performance," in which category staged drama falls. These stories are powerful tools of enculturation that teach the children who hear them not only how to understand conflict and resolution by rehearsing them in tales from the cultural store, but also how to go about initiating and drawing to a close actual instances of conflict. They provide a structural model — a "frame" — for inaugurating, understanding, and recreating dramatic stories in life.

Recent critical interest in the use of Shakespeare as a source of meaning in our own culture has approached the art-life exchange from several angles that seem distinct, but that share a fundamental similarity. "Meaning by Shakespeare," Shakespeare and "appropriation," Shakespeare and the "invention of the human" — each line of thought contends that Shakespeare, the source of many of our most important and potent stories, is used not only to respond to or make sense of the world around us, but also to model scenarios, values, conflicts, and resolutions.2 Perhaps the most radical and least substantiated of these positions is Harold Bloom's, which asserts that Shakespeare invented the modern human. Bloom tends toward Shakespearean character criticism and generalizations, as opposed to case studies, arguing that Shakespeare provides a cultural catalogue of people, conflicts, and resolutions that we understand as imitating our world but that in fact can be seen to configure our world. It is not we who have invented Shakespeare; it is Shakespeare who has invented us. The human dramas described in the plays, http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 3 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

from life and death to outrageous fortune to disprized love to filial duty — the list surely begins for Bloom with Hamlet, despite his affinity for Falstaff — are so many modules that we use to understand and perform our own lives. They provide the rhetoric, the lexicon, and the subject positions that we inhabit as we go about our lives in a world that ostensibly exists prior to and independent of the plays (Bloom 1998).

Bloom's argument falls somewhere between the fanciful and the absurd for many people, but it is not really as far-fetched as it may sound. Articulated in less totalizing terms, it is no different from Turner's observation about the function of stories and social dramas in the Ndembu society. Insofar as drama gives us a particularly mimetic form of art, it is least difficult with drama to accept the premise that the exchange of energy between art and life is a two- way affair. And insofar as Shakespeare's dramas are regarded with a special cultural reverence bordering on veneration, it is least difficult to credit his centrality for us among the different sets of narratives that we might use to structure our lives.

Studies of Shakespeare and appropriation take up the theatrum mundi metaphor less absolutely than Harold Bloom does, but with stakes that are equally high. If Shakespeare did not foresee and enable every contemporary human possibility, he has certainly been used to validate everything from personal struggles to local actions to global policies and ideologies. The plays have also been used as cultural touchstones and cultural anvils in individual appropriations that hammer out new territory on a Shakespearean model. When we encounter new cultural space — such as the American South — we put it into a dialogue with Shakespeare in order to investigate it in the terms that are most central to our culture. We map unmapped territory with Shakespeare, the most powerful cultural-cartographic tool we have; we find a way to make Shakespeare speak on behalf of the new cultural space, thereby both rendering that space familiar and validating it in terms of our most celebrated cultural (re)source.

Bound up somewhere in this process is the activity that Terence Hawkes has referred to as "meaning by Shakespeare": "The plays have the same function as, and work like, the words of which they are made. We use them in order to generate meaning. In the twentieth century, Shakespeare plays have become one of the central agencies through which our culture performs this operation. That is what they do, that is how they work, and that is what they are for. Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare" (Hawkes 1992, 3). For Bloom, the plays are the central agency, while for Hawkes, they are a central agency. The "appropriation" and "meaning by" approaches tend to locate agency in the users of the plays, while Bloom's approach locates agency in the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 4 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

plays themselves, but otherwise, the schools are quite similar. The process whereby Shakespeare — or "Shakespeare" — ended up with the cultural prominence he has is probably a more contentious affair than the generally agreed upon result: Shakespeare is our most esteemed touchstone, and he is used to explain, to explore, to validate, to sell, and so forth.

SHAKESPEARE AT WINEDALE Here, I would like to consider how one particular community in the American Southwest uses Shakespeare to "mean" in a Shakespeare festival. Certainly, communities have been known to gather around and define themselves in relation to Shakespeare festivals of various sorts, from Stratford, England, to Montgomery, Alabama, and each undoubtedly meets Shakespeare halfway, bringing as much to the playwright and the plays as the playwright and plays bring to the community. There is an exchange of influence and appropriation: early modern diction overflows the plays and spills onto T-shirts and into gift shops, sometimes with comical results ("free stuff for thou," reads an internet promotion for a production of Twelfth Night), while the plays tend to bear some sort of signature stamp of the festival's cultural heritage.

The festival that I want to discuss, Shakespeare at Winedale, is particularly interesting in that it involves not only a community audience in the rural Southwest, but also a community of student performers who are transplanted from a university setting to an isolated patch of farmland for the duration of their work with the festival. Audiences and students engage Shakespeare in a rural setting, putting "the Southwest" and "Shakespeare" into an intense,

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 5 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

interactive dialogue, while the students' work on the plays models the theatrum mundi trope and the various modes of meaning by Shakespeare discussed above. The exchange begins as students use Shakespeare to structure, model, and understand their own human and social dramas: life imitates Shakespeare. But the exchange continues as the rural setting, the rhythms of rural life, and the world of the community audience begin to inscribe themselves on Shakespeare: "Shakespeare" is re-made in the patterns and images of the American Southwest. As the festival moves to public performances, any given moment on stage can involve influence in multiple directions: Shakespeare invents the Southwest, the Southwest (re)invents Shakespeare.

Shakespeare at Winedale is actually an academic program, run out of the University of Texas. Every summer since 1971, the Shakespeare at Winedale program has selected some dozen to eighteen students, mostly but not

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 6 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

exclusively undergraduate English majors from the University of Texas, and transported them to a plot of university-owned land in the middle of the Texas hill country, where they participate in nine weeks of intensive study of Shakespeare through performance. Academic record and personal interest factor into the selection process, which involves a paper application and two brief interviews and which favors a willingness to get dirty and to take risks over experience in dramatic performance. The program's director assigns each student various roles in three plays, with the total number of lines being generally equal. Students are required to complete basic preparation, including the memorization of lines, before arriving at the festival site in early June. Line memorization is particularly important, since most students have no dramatic training and are undertaking performance for the first time — the language of Shakespeare, rather than the conventions of theater, is trusted to guide performance. Students reside in a small dormitory a short walk from the theater (a converted hay barn), effectively sequestered as a group from the outside world. For the first five weeks in residence, participants explore the plays, words first and from the ground up, through rehearsal, improvisation, generic role-play, experimentation, and so forth. They begin work early, typically before dawn, and they continue well into the evening, breaking for meals and occasionally attending community events in nearby rural towns.

Particulars vary from summer to summer, but generally, students are responsible for every aspect and facet of the play productions and of the public performances in which the program culminates. The director and support staff assign roles, oversee the rehearsal process, and coordinate the day-to-day schedule, but otherwise, students are left to shape the plays themselves. They create their own costumes, they design sets and lighting schemes, they outfit the theater space itself — a bare apron stage, a discovery space, and a balcony — and they co-direct each scene in each play as a group. They do little else. Emergencies and planned excursions aside, they do not leave the site, and interaction with the outside world is minimal. At the conclusion of the preparation period, public performances begin, six per week for four weeks, Thursday through Sunday, with each play being performed twice per week. Since the summer of 1998, students have followed the performances in Texas with a group trip to England, where they re-mount one of the summer's plays during a final week abroad. As with the preparation process, the orchestration of the performances themselves is effected almost exclusively by the students. They clean and prepare the theater space and surrounding grounds, which can involve anything from de-scaling the fans in the theater cooling system to reserving chairs to filling Gatorade and water coolers for audience members. On "off" days between performances, they maintain and repair costumes, lights, and props; they continue work on the plays; they make adjustments to scenes; they sometimes even trade roles. http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 7 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

The intensive study is meant to be demanding — physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Days are long and dirty. Not all participants finish their course of study, and when someone departs early, it is usually a matter of significant distress. Participants quickly discover that the study of Shakespeare is only one of the initiatives driving the program and its participants. In some sense, the challenge of Shakespeare and public performance — itself monumental, particularly for actors who typically have no theatrical training — is merely the pretense for a myriad of other challenges: challenges to learn, to grow, to discover, to experiment, to fail. Most students consider the experience humbling, enabling, and momentous, if not utterly transforming. The program has led to marriages, divorces, career choices, and career changes, and every graduating class adds to a network of former students. The program's alumni base is fanatic about support and patronage, and each summer class invariably features veterans of previous summers who return to find a new set of personal challenges that they feel can only be provided by, and met in, the agonizing hours of heat and toil in the Texas desert. The plays of Shakespeare might seem to recede almost to irrelevance in the larger scheme of the program.

And yet, they never do. For all the extra agendas, the plays themselves remain the vehicle for every moment of exploration and discovery. Although one divines ulterior purposes for any given activity, the sense of immersion in Shakespeare is profound. Every thought, action, impulse, and achievement is effected in Shakespearean terms, often literally. As with any sequestered community that cooperates in day-to-day life, a private language, both of camaraderie and conflict, develops and is used richly and complexly. And as with any such community, the language is constitutive and exclusive: it builds and binds its members in solidarity. But the language of Winedale student communities is unique in that it is grounded in the language of Shakespeare, itself certainly difficult, archaic in some senses, and perhaps perfectly suited to adoption by a group of people whose work and play together facilitates and requires close bonds and a private vernacular.

Through the sheer force of exposure and repetitive interaction during scenework and performances, most of the class will know most of the lines in each play by the end of the summer, and with the lines to hand, and an ample supply of circumstances to which to apply them, one begins to think very readily and immediately in Shakespeare's words, on Shakespeare's terms. One begins to see every scenario, on-stage or off, via analogous moments in Shakespeare. In 1997, John of Gaunt's "When, Harry, when?" (Richard II) and Leontes's "Shall I be heard?" (The Winter's Tale) were adopted by the students as expressions of impatience. "Horsing foot on foot" and "meeting noses," from The Winter's Tale, denoted flirtation, and the Shepherd's phrase "heavy http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 8 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

matters" was used as a label for group discussion of serious subjects. This use of language involves more than simply quoting Shakespeare at appropriate moments. "Shall I be heard?" carries a sense of Leontes's error in judgment (nobody on stage moves at his absurd command to take Hermione to prison), just as "horsing foot on foot" is implicitly illicit rather than innocent. The Shepherd's simple wisdom in 3.3, which emerges in contrast to Leontes's raging in 3.2, lends to the phrase "heavy matters" a kind of contemplative dignity. In each borrowing of Shakespearean diction, intricate connotations accompany the simple denotations. Situational quotation of Shakespeare is, of course, quite common, both inside and outside of the academy (e.g., "Ay, there's the rub" to indicate a drawback), but when such accents come to dominate group communication, and when they draw on ever more intricate and specific moments in Shakespeare, quotation becomes "meaning by Shakespeare."

Students communicating in Shakespeare appropriate not only the words, but also the larger "social dramas" of the plays in which they work. In the summer of 1995, As You Like It, the first project the class worked on, took on the rhythms and movements of day-to-day work — or rather, daily work took on the rhythms and movements of As You Like It, whose forest of Arden, bucolic if dark, seemed at any given point indistinguishable from the students' own idyllic exile. Its themes, its imagery, its syntax and rhetoric became a dynamic, organic map of every minute spent that summer, at work or at play. Hardship was celebrated as opportunity ("Sweet are the uses of adversity"); isolation was figured as invaluable fraternity (a genderless fraternity, as gender itself seemed reduced to a matter of costume); and the shepherd's life was infinitely preferable, at least for a time, to the bustling outside world the class members had left behind.

At Winedale, participants undergo complete immersion in Shakespeare, meaning always by Shakespeare, and finding themselves already meant by Shakespeare. The words tend to stay with one, too, long after the summer has come to a close. It is as if, having acquired a Shakespearean lexicon, one actively makes sense of the "outside" world via a Shakespearean grammar: there is never anything that is not like something in Shakespeare, who seems to have anticipated all possibilities. Arguments like Harold Bloom's begin to seem not only tenable, but indeed quite compelling.

This brief introduction should serve to suggest how dynamic is the process of appropriation, of meaning-making, and of invention, in the study of Shakespeare through performance at Winedale. Shakespeare becomes a sounding board for anything and everything, and participants, having for the duration of a summer relinquished day-to-day attachments to their personal

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 9 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

lives outside the program, return to the "real world" indelibly marked with Shakespeare. In terms of meaning-making via Shakespeare, the intense inhabitation of Shakespeare plays required by performance has a fairly obvious significance. Students of the plays use them actively to mean, but they invariably find themselves "already meant" at the same time.

COMMUNITY AND PERFORMANCE IN RURAL TEXAS The Shakespeare at Winedale program does involve full-scale public performance, and as a working Shakespeare festival that depends heavily on the support of the surrounding community, the way Shakespeare means and is meant involves more than the student performers at its core. Modeled in spirit on Peter Brook's work with his actors to empty them of the clutter of cultural training and assumptions by transporting them to new spaces, the Winedale experience is meant in part to remove the participants from the comfort and constraint of their personal surroundings in order to foster discovery, invention, and ensemble. Brook took his actors to Africa; Winedale takes its students to rural Texas (Brook 1968). The Winedale (re)move is nowhere near as radical as Brook's, of course, but it is analogous, allowing — requiring, in effect — participants to leave behind the expectations and limitations they perceive to enable and govern their lives back home. In this way, the rural Southwest becomes an empty space, an unfamiliar location in which preconceived notions of life or of art do not necessarily obtain. It is the un- delineated space in which discovery and invention can happen.

It is never an entirely "empty" space, of course, and in fact, the rhythms and images of rural life in the Southwest begin immediately to color the learning process. The same bucolic setting and local customs that serve to put distance between university students and their lives back home also inscribe themselves on the Shakespearean experience: early mornings and long working days are modeled on a kind of frontier spirit in which grit, determination, and innovation make anything possible. The countryside site is abundantly marked with instances of rural southwestern culture, from farmsteads to churches, and the historic landmarks on the Winedale land itself provide for a setting a kind of habitable, living museum. The Winedale Historical Center administrates a number of historic sites on the university- owned, 225-acre plot, among which are a nineteenth-century homestead and stagecoach stop and a transverse crib or "Four Square" barn, both in their original locations and both fitted with period furniture, equipment, and tools. Other nineteenth-century buildings relocated to the area — an oak cottage, a schoolhouse, and a cedar cabin — help make the site a tribute to the local cultural past on which the current community is founded. The theater itself is a converted hay barn whose timbers originally served as part of a cotton gin

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 10 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

(a wonderful echo of the first Globe's use of the old Theatre's timbers). It is complete with tiered seating, an apron stage with an upper level, dressing rooms, a light booth, and so forth, but the students know it, affectionately, as "the barn," and its original function underpins the performances, the scenework, and all other activity that takes place there.

The country setting works its way directly into the plays. Any point at which Shakespeare offers a country-simpleton character lends itself with inviting readiness to a Texas yokel portrayal: the "clown" William from As You Like It often ends up in sandals and a straw hat with a Texas drawl. Love's Labor's Lost's Costard was played to a similar effect, with great success, in 2003, and Master Ford's handlebar moustache and cowboy boots lent his otherwise Elizabethan costume some local color in the 2003 season. But these stylized and often stereotypical characterizations of "the Southwest" represent only the more superficial markings of the local community on Shakespeare. When Clayton Stromberger, a Winedale student in the 1980s, returned in 1995 to perform in a veterans' reunion production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he drew on personalities from the community to bring to Snout the Tinker a kind of genuine local color that amounts to "appropriation" in the richest sense. The Roundtop area is largely German-Texan, and Winedale itself, in Mr. Stromberger's words, is a "German-Texas immigrant agrarian community on the cusp between Central and East Texas."3 Snout's German-Texan drawl and German drinking songs led the mechanicals' ensemble, just as Shakespeare's Athens craftsmen were remade in the image of Winedale's agrarian locals. Where Shakespeare borrowed from his own rural roots, Winedale students can look to their adoptive community of locals. Appropriation here is intricate and complex: a performer is borrowing a "real life" rubric of the rural Southwest to explore a Shakespearean character. Shakespeare is appropriated to represent local culture, which thereby finds itself articulated in Shakespearean terms.

Since the program's inception, this local community has also participated directly, becoming an important part of the process and, inevitably, part of the plays. In the early decades of Shakespeare at Winedale, students arrived to a welcoming dinner prepared by locals, initiating a relationship between town and gown in which the students became honorary members of the community. Successive generations of locals and of students have seen changes in the amount of daily interaction, but the community has always been a consistent — and insistent — source of support for the program. Contributions come in all forms, from costumes and costume materials to sewing and sewing instruction to a variety of props, some of which are antiques from the blacksmithing and cabinetmaking collection housed on site. The original punched tin lanterns that have served since the 1970s as house lights in the http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 11 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

theater are the handiwork of a local tinker. Locals have been regular participants in meals, downtime, and even group improvisation exercises, lending their skills, their enthusiasm, and their creativity to the rehearsal and discovery process. Donations of community time and resources underwrite the program even during the off season and help generally to sustain the spirit of collaboration that drives work on the plays.

Other contributions find their ways directly into the performances. A storied 1975 summer production of Much Ado About Nothing began with the audience leaving their chairs and lining the dirt road leading to the theater to serve as the townspeople of Messina while first the messenger and then Don Pedro's company arrived, at full gallop, on horses borrowed from locals. Those same locals took roles in the play, and nearby Burton High School's band provided live music for every performance. Local children, their pets, and the occasional stray farm animal are regular features in the summer season, and the annual Christmas production of The Second Shepherd's Play often draws on the local population to fill out the cast. While from the outside, Shakespeare at Winedale appears to be built around its student performers, it is in large part the local population and its collaborative cultural traditions that enable the program to prosper. On the stage or behind the scenes, the influence the community has on the production of Shakespeare brings as much to the plays as the plays bring to the community.

BRANDING THE SOUTHWESTERN SHAKESPEARE The two-way traffic between Shakespeare and the Southwest, the Southwest and Shakespeare, is succinctly and brilliantly captured in an instance of iconographic appropriation: the Winedale program logo. Designed by Jimmy Longacre at the request of director James Ayres, the logo is based on the Droeshout engraving, perhaps the most easily recognized of all Shakespearean portraits. For nearly 400 years, the engraving has signified "Shakespeare," timeless poet of the West and center of the canon. Onto the familiar lines of Shakespeare's visage, however, the Winedale logo grafts a collection of equally familiar metonymies for the American Southwest: a bandana loosely tied around the neck replaces the collar; a worn cowboy hat with curled brims covers the balding crown, the wispy facial hair is exaggerated and countrified, and a piece of hay protrudes from the left corner of the mouth. Though it returns us iconically to the level of stereotypes, the image, which features on t-shirts, posters, and programs, captures simultaneously the inscription of Shakespeare on the Southwest and the Southwest on Shakespeare; it records the validating discovery of Shakespeare in the Southwest, and vice-versa. Participants and audience members are invited by the logo to identify at once with the Texas hill country and with the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 12 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

spirit of the West's most celebrated cultural figure. It is a moment of meaning by Shakespeare and being meant by Shakespeare: the icon is appropriated by the rural South, borrowing the dignity, the prestige, and the cultural validation of "Shakespeare," while the rural South in turn finds itself being meant by the plays the icon represents.

CONCLUSION The theatrum mundi trope figures the relationship between art and life in a particularly powerful way. I return to the metaphor here, in closing, to emphasize that performance stands out among acts of Shakespearean appropriation. However one wants to characterize it — Shakespearean appropriation, meaning by Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the invention of the human — the use of Shakespeare to mean is especially rich when students engage Shakespeare by performing the plays they study. Performance is at once both deeply personal and intensely social. It is high-stakes play, and it demands significant emotional, physical, and psychological investment. Any actor, professional or amateur, will recognize as much. Because it typically involves role-play (especially in drama), performance also demands that the performer inhabit — think in and speak through — a specific dramatic narrative with a (more or less) fixed text. She must allow a text to mean through her. But if Shakespeare is evermore turning up as the framework of our cultural dramas, it is because he is perfectly malleable, adaptable — appropriable — by anyone as the basic currency of cultural capital. Thus, academics, actors, and students, but also audiences of all sorts and the overlapping communities they comprise, are forever re-making Shakespeare, reinventing the social dramas of the plays even as they follow the scripts. At Winedale, all the world is a Shakespearean stage, and the people and places of the rural Southwest play their part.

NOTES 1. For more on the theatrum mundi metaphor, see Berg 1985, Playhouse and Cosmos: Shakespeare Theater as Metaphor, especially page 52. 2. Seminal studies and collections include Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (1989); Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (1992); Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, eds., Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999) and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (2002); and Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). 3. I am deeply indebted to a number of people for information about the Winedale program and the local community. Here, I quote an exchange with

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 13 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

Clayton Stromberger, a veteran student and longtime assistant and consultant of the Winedale program. I am grateful also to Professor James Loehlin, a former student and the program's current director, to Terry Galloway, former student and Winedale legend, and chiefly to Professor Jim Ayres — "Doc" — the program's architect, original director, and so much more.

REFERENCES Berg, Kent T. van den. 1985. Playhouse and Cosmos: Shakespeare Theater as Metaphor. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead. Bristol, Michael D. 1996. Big-Time Shakespeare. New York: Routledge. Brook, Peter. 1968. The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. 1999. Shakespeare and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. 2002. Harold Bloom's Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave. Hawkes, Terence. 1992. Meaning by Shakespeare. New York: Routledge. Taylor, Gary. 1989. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

ONLINE RESOURCES "Shakespeare at Winedale" [accessed 17 February, 2004]. Available online at http://www.shakespeare-winedale.org/ (http://www.shakespeare-winedale.org/). "Winedale." The Center for American History [accessed 17 February, 2004]. Available online at http://www.cah.utexas.edu/divisions/Winedale.html (http://www.cah.utexas.edu/divisions/Winedale.html).

PERMISSIONS The Shakespeare at Winedale logo is reproduced by kind permission of Jim Ayres and Jimmy Longacre.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 14 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

The image of the barn at Winedale is reproduced by kind permission of Clay Maer.

ABSTRACT | THEATRUM MUNDI | SHAKESPEARE AT WINEDALE | COMMUNITY AND PERFORMANCE IN RURAL TEXAS | BRANDING THE SOUTHWESTERN SHAKESPEARE | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781426/show Page 15 of 15 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

"NC Shakes": The North Carolina Shakespeare (/current) Festival

BETHANY SINNOTT, CATAWBA COLLEGE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | WATCH OUT FOR THE WEATHER | LOCAL HEROES | CONCLUSION | (/about) REFERENCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, founded in 1977, has flourished in High Point despite some major difficulties: a relative dearth of suitable audience members, tight budgets, and falling ticket sales. Effective cost- cutting measures and new artistic direction, however, appear to have secured the Festival's future in the area.

Founded by two enthusiastic Shakespeare partisans in 1977, The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival (NCSF) (http://www.ncshakes.org/) continues to pursue its purpose of entertaining and educating the citizens and students of North Carolina "with quality professional classic theatre productions." The Festival is located in High Point, in the North Carolina Piedmont near the larger cities of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, and enjoys the status of being the official state Shakespeare company. Nevertheless, it has struggled over the years with building its audience base and attracting the kind of government, corporate, and individual support necessary to its existence. Thus, it probably has more in common with Shakespeare companies in other regions of the United States than it has differences. The very fact that a professional theater company devoted primarily to producing Shakespeare's plays can survive for over a quarter http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 1 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

of a century in a small southern city testifies to the universality of Shakespeare's appeal. Where are the Marlowe festivals or the Tennessee Williams festivals?

Shakespeare companies across the country face the task of building and maintaining an audience, raising the money necessary to finance the operation, and fulfilling their artistic and philosophical vision. Though in 2003 Time named the Oregon Shakespeare Festival number two among the top five regional theaters in the country, most Shakespeare companies enjoy far less recognition, and many struggle in their efforts to remain viable. (It is perhaps revealing that though the Oregon Shakespeare Festival opened in 1935 with an all-Shakespeare program, the 2003 season of eleven plays featured more non-Shakespeare [six] than Shakespeare [five] plays.) A Shakespeare company in the South faces the additional challenges of certain socio-economic realities. In the twentieth century, the South's largely agricultural economy was transformed into an economy based more on manufacturing, but toward the end of the century hard times fell on many southern industries. In North Carolina, tobacco was for years a leading agricultural commodity, and cigarette manufacturers provided both jobs and a large tax base. In addition, often tobacco companies became important donors to local and state charities and artistic endeavors. When medical research revealed the extent of health problems caused by the use of tobacco products, demand for those products in this country decreased. Furthermore, large monetary settlements in lawsuits brought on behalf of cancer victims resulted in more financial hardships for the companies. The North Carolina economy understandably suffered. Textile manufacturing, a once-flourishing North Carolina industry, has fallen victim to cheap imported goods and the export of manufacturing operations to countries where lower wages prevail, and North Carolina is still reeling from the closing of such companies as Pillowtex. The furniture industry, a mainstay of High Point, the home of The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, also suffers from the effects of foreign competition. A cultural asset like a Shakespeare festival may be seen as more of a luxury than a necessity when the economy is not flourishing.

Another disadvantage of Shakespeare companies in the American South is the educational level of the population. A relatively high level of illiteracy, combined with relatively low teachers' salaries and under-funded public schools, can result in citizens less likely to choose to attend Shakespeare plays. Even North Carolina, which boasts such superb universities as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, has real deficiencies in its primary and secondary educational institutions. Thus, the audience base for "high culture" is somewhat limited. http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 2 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

WATCH OUT FOR THE WEATHER Yet despite the challenges of its location, The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival has endured for twenty-seven years and continues to bring classical theater to Piedmont North Carolina. The Festival did not originate with native North Carolinians. Stuart Brooks was stage manager of the Opera Company of Boston before he was attracted to the South by a designer at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Mark Woods had acted with companies in New York City, but came to North Carolina in search of "open air and artistic challenge." The two men met, perceived a gap in North Carolina's theatrical offerings, and founded the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, at the time the only paid Shakespeare company in the Carolinas. Both Brooks and Woods were twenty-seven years old. Their youthful enthusiasm and ambition are reflected in the planning of the early seasons of the company.

Two Shakespeare plays, The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V, and Molière's The Miser opened the first season. The July debut of the new theater company evoked an enthusiastic response not only from newspapers in the nearby cities of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, but even from the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina's largest city, nearly a hundred miles away. The Observer's headline, "High Point on Avon a Triumph," indicates the enthusiasm with which the area greeted the new theater company. Reviewer Allen Oren noted in the Observer, "All told, the festival may offer the state's best theater." He praised the company's Taming of the Shrew as a directorial tour-de-force and endorsed the modernization of the story to contemporary Italy with characters in "slicked hair and sunglasses" riding motorcycles (Oren 1977). Though Charlotte is some distance from High Point, the Observer's audience includes many readers with a particular interest in the arts, and the newspaper has continued to review NCSF productions. The Greensboro Daily News, published in a large city only fifteen miles from High Point, also hailed the inaugural performance of the Festival series as "an outstanding success," as evidenced by a full-house audience that responded warmly to the modernized Taming of the Shrew. Reviewer Joe Knox suggested that prospective audience members read the play in advance, however, because "the language of Elizabethan England is not easy to understand" (Knox 1977). Knox was not alone in cautioning audiences about Shakespeare's language. Genie Carr, reviewing that season's Henry V for the Winston-Salem Sentinel, observed, "The language, of course, is something of a problem all around for modern, American audiences" (Carr 1977), though she did admit that the ear becomes accustomed after a few scenes. One suspects that few reviewers

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 3 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

of Shakespeare productions in New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles find it necessary to warn audiences about Shakespeare's language. Carr's review introduced another rather provincial note. She observed that the drive from Winston-Salem to High Point (less than twenty miles) is "not bad," unless the driver in front goes 45 miles an hour instead of the legal limit of 55 (Carr 1977). The reluctance of potential audience members to drive out of their own towns to attend performances in a nearby town has puzzled and troubled NCSF personnel since the company's founding.

The 1977 Festival opening season included a play that was to become a mainstay of the company — Dickens's holiday favorite, A Christmas Carol. With the exception of 1981, that play has been offered every year since the company was founded, and it continues to draw large audiences. A Christmas Carol has become a holiday tradition for many families in the Piedmont Triad. Though it is produced by The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, the Dickens play, always performed in December, is not considered part of the company's regular season, which in recent years has run from August through October. Actors and technicians who participate in A Christmas Carol receive separate contracts for that production.

Buoyed by the success of the first season, Stuart Brooks and Mark Woods "ambitiously attempted too many plays" in the next four seasons, according to current management, and the company went into serious debt. In 1978 the NCSF season included two Shakespeare comedies, Much Ado about Nothing and The Merchant of Venice, and four non-Shakespearean and rather eclectic selections: Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters, Arthur Miller's All My Sons, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The 1979 season featured Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry IV, Part 1, and four non-Shakespeare plays. The company produced its first Shakespeare tragedy, Macbeth, in 1980, along with Twelfth Night and four non- Shakespeare plays. The following year, 1981, again saw six productions, this time equally divided between Shakespeare (As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, and Hamlet) and non-Shakespeare plays. By 1982 the financially strapped company was forced to reduce the season to only three plays, Shakespeare's King John and Romeo and Juliet, and Georges Feydeau's farce A in Her Ear. Though 1983 saw a brief return to the six-play schedule, from 1984-1987 NCSF settled into a four-play pattern. The seasons from 1988 to 1992 varied from three to five plays, each with one or more non-Shakespeare plays. The most non-Shakespearean season was 1989, when Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was matched with four non- Shakespeare plays. In 1993 the decision was made to launch a purely http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 4 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

Shakespearean season. The company performed The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear, and was satisfied enough with the results to stay with the Bard for the following season. Plays performed in 1994 were Much Ado about Nothing, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. A three-play season prevailed from 1993 to 2002 except for 1997, when only two plays, Richard III and As You Like It, were staged. Four of those years included at least one non-Shakespeare play, but the trend was clearly toward emphasizing Shakespeare's works. The twenty- seven year history of The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival has seen 104 plays produced, not counting the perennial A Christmas Carol. Of these, over half (fifty-nine) have been by Shakespeare. Comedy is the dominant genre; thirty-three comedies and four romances outweigh the eight histories and fourteen tragedies. For the first eight seasons of NCSF, no Shakespeare plays were repeated. Then in 1985 the company returned to The Taming of the Shrew, which had successfully opened its initial season.

Certain plays have been repeated more than others in the ensuing years. The most frequently performed plays have been the three comedies The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, each of which has been produced four times. The company has explored almost the full range of Shakespearean comedy. All's Well That Ends Well, a notably dark play, is the only comedy missing from the company's production history. Of the romances, The Tempest has been produced three times, The Winter's Tale once, and Cymbeline and Pericles not at all, perhaps not surprisingly. What may be surprising is the number of history plays the company has produced. Three of the best-known history plays (Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V, and Richard III) have appeared twice, and the company has also produced Richard II and King John, the latter a work performed relatively rarely, if at all, by most Shakespeare companies. Missing from NCSF's production schedule are only the three parts of Henry VI, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry VIII. Of the tragedies, Macbeth has been performed most frequently, four times, with Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet next at three times each. King Lear has been performed twice and Julius Caesar and Othello once each, though the latter is on the schedule for 2004. These selections are not surprising; audiences are generally more willing to attend familiar tragedies, especially those that have been taught in the public school systems. None of the omitted tragedies, with the possible exception of Antony and Cleopatra — Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus — is frequently performed by Shakespeare companies anywhere.

LOCAL HEROES http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 5 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

The State Shakespeare Festival serves North Carolina communities other than High Point by touring with one or more plays each season. The company began its touring program in 1983. In 1984 NCSF established a residency in Asheville, in the western part of the state. By 2003 the company featured not only the program "On Tour," taking major productions to other towns, but also "GlobeWorks," a compendium of Shakespeare scenes done by a small group of actors and taken to secondary and middle schools statewide. Other outreach activities include "SchoolFest," special performances of the mainstage productions offered at reduced prices during the school day for student audiences. The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival obviously takes seriously its mission to educate the state's citizenry. With an endowed lecture series, the Nancy Lyles "Classics in Context" seminars, the company arranges for area college and university professors to conduct Saturday afternoon seminars that provide an overview and discussion of the Shakespeare play to be performed that evening. Beginning with the 2004 season, NCSF will also sponsor a weekend entitled "Elizabeth's Bard," which will feature presentations on the Elizabethan world and theater, lectures on two plays, tickets to those plays, a meeting with the actors, and accommodations and meals at a local hotel a block from the theater. The educational thrust of the company has extended for some years to "AfterWords," a conversation between actors and audience after Sunday matinee performances.

From 1977's opening production of The Taming of the Shrew set in twentieth-century Italy to the 2003 Elizabethan unit set that served for both The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream, NCSF has explored a wide range of set and constume designs. One early production put the actors on roller skates, while the 1987 Midsummer Night's Dream opened with a very modern Theseus and Hippolyta basking on beach towels that featured a colorful portrait of Shakespeare and the words "To Beach or Not To Beach." Over the years the company has benefited from the presence of the furniture industry in High Point by having access to furniture and fabrics that made possible more elaborate productions. The 2002 NCSF production of Much Ado about Nothing, set in nineteenth- century Europe and utilizing French Impressionist colors and design, evoked praise from reviewers for the beauty of its sets and costumes. Certainly, no consistent attempt has been made in the company's production history to provide audiences with Shakespearean staging. The 2003 season signaled a change in direction toward a more Elizabethan style of production. Financial concerns in large part prompted the move, but the change also resulted in artistic success. The simple wooden set, utilizing lumber made available by a local veneer company, provides the framework for an Elizabethan stage: two arched entrances at the back of http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 6 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

the set separated by a recessed area, a banistered "above," and two tall wooden columns downstage, their bases surrounded by wooden benches. This unit set was easily adapted for both The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the simplicity of the staging had the effect of focusing attention on the language, the primary element in producing Shakespeare's plays.

The trend toward a more Shakespearean style of staging was already well established in the American South. Ralph Cohen's Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, founded at James Madison University in Virginia in 1988, utilized from the beginning a thrust stage, universal lighting, simple stage sets and props, and actors interacting with the audience. The company emphasizes Shakespeare's language in audience-pleasing productions; such an emphasis is less likely in lavish productions, where spectacular sets and costumes can distract the audience's attention from the language. Shenandoah now has its own venue, a reconstruction of Shakespeare's Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton, Virginia. Other southern Shakespeare companies have followed the emphasis on the language and use of simple staging. Encore! Theatre Company in Richmond tours Shakespeare plays using a handful of actors and minimal sets and props. Their focus is also on the language. The decision to adopt a more Elizabethan style of staging may prove to be a boon to NCSF not only in reducing expenses, but also in appealing to audiences.

The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival's personnel have changed over the years, of course, though several individuals have provided continuity. Lucius Houghton holds the record for longevity, having begun acting with the company in its inaugural 1977 season and having remained through the 1997 season. In those twenty years he played over seventy-three roles in fifty-three plays. Pedro Silva also joined the company in 1977, and though he left in 1993 after serving as actor, director, tour organizer, and managing director, he returned in 2001 as managing director and is currently assuming more duties since the departure in 2002 of Lou Rackoff, who had served as artistic director for fifteen years. Randell Haynes, a young actor who joined the company in 1978 and performed for six years, returned in 2003 to direct The Merchant of Venice. He had played Launcelot Gobbo in the 1978 production, and Pedro Silva had played his father. Allan Edwards joined the company in 1989 as an actor and continues in that role, but also serves as Director of Outreach. Such connections and experience contribute to the sense of ensemble in the company. Though NCSF employs actors, directors, designers, and technicians from all over the country, it gives priority to North Carolina theater professionals. The company is associated with the Actors' Equity http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 7 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

Association and employs both Equity and non-Equity performers. Several area institutions have provided a talent pool of both performers and technicians. The North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem has maintained a close connection with NCSF since co-founder Stuart Brooks established that relationship in 1977. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has a strong theater program that has often furnished employees and interns to NCSF. Because the NCSF season is relatively short (August to October in 2003), the performers and technicians must find other work during the rest of the year. This situation sometimes makes recruiting more difficult for the company; theater personnel prefer longer contracts. Nevertheless, a good number of NCSF personnel are affiliated with area institutions, where they teach or do professional work. Michael Kamtman, a twelve-year veteran of NCSF, is an adjunct faculty member of both the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Guilford Technical Community College. Two vocal/text coaches, Ben Furey and Mary Irwin, are on the faculty of the North Carolina School of the Arts. Each year several company performers are students, graduate or undergraduate, at area colleges and universities.

CONCLUSION One of the cost-cutting measures adopted by NCSF in recent years is a reduction in staff personnel. The administrative staff listed in the 1990 program numbered nineteen; by 1995 that figure fell to twelve, and only seven were listed in the 2003 program. A similar though less severe reduction is apparent in the production staff, which went from twenty-two in 1990 to twenty in 1995 and seventeen in 2003. The number of actors has remained more consistent; there is a limit to the amount of doubling that actors can do in Shakespeare plays. The large cast of twenty-five in 1990 fell to nineteen in 1995 and rose again to twenty-two in 2003, though that figure reflects more interns than were used in the three preceding seasons. The NCSF budget showed a general increase from the first year, when it was only $70,000, to a high of $1,400,000 in 2000 and 2001. Though it has fallen slightly in the last two years, it is still over $1 million. Audience figures, however, have dropped consistently. The plays were reaching 100,000 people in 1990, as estimated by the company, but the 1995 audiences shrank to 70,000. Since 2000, the numbers have fallen from 63,000 to 45,000. Clearly, the company faces the major task of building an audience. One encouraging note is that the audience of 50,000 in 2002 was for three plays, while the two plays of 2003 attracted 45,000 people. Justin Cord Hayes, in a Greensboro News and Record article entitled "New Play Schedule Helps Festival" (Hayes 2003), says that the 2003 ticket sales came within two percent of the company's goal, a definite

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 8 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

improvement over the previous five to seven years, when the festival was shy of its goal by twenty percent or more.

What lies in the future for The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival? With apparently effective cost-cutting measures, a season of successful ticket sales, and a new artistic direction, the company may well extend its history of entertaining and educating citizens of the state far into the new millenium. Advertisers in the 2003 playbill seem confident that audience members will patronize businesses not only in High Point but in Winston- Salem, Greensboro, and even Chapel Hill.

REFERENCES Carr, Genie. 1977. Review of Henry V. Winston-Salem Sentinel. 23 July. Knox, Joe. 1977. Review of The Taming of the Shrew. Greensboro Daily News. 16 July. Hayes, Justin Cord. 2003. "New Play Schedule Helps Festival." Greensboro News and Record. 28 October. North Carolina Shakespeare Festival Website [accessed 26 May, 2005]. Available online at http://www.ncshakes.org/about.cfm (http://www.ncshakes.org/about.cfm). Oren, Allen. 1977. "High Point on Avon a Triumph." Charlotte Observer. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. Tobin. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

ABSTRACT | WATCH OUT FOR THE WEATHER | LOCAL HEROES | CONCLUSION | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 9 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781428/show Page 10 of 10 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

Performing Shakespeare in the Old/New South, or What Happens When

(/current) Shakespeare Is Your Middle Name

SUSAN WILLIS, ALABAMA SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL AND AUBURN UNIVERSITY, MONTGOMERY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | HISTORY | PRODUCTION VALUES | CONCLUSION | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) This historical commentary on the development of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival compares the experience of the Festival as summer theatre in Anniston, Alabama, to its year-round embodiment in Montgomery, Alabama, its styles of production, and the factors influencing the current development of the theatre.

A man with a vision or, better yet, three men with vision — Shakespeare, Martin Platt, and Winton Blount. By 1972, Shakespeare had amassed a notable reputation. In 1972 Martin Platt, with a brand new theatre degree from Carnegie Mellon, had just begun as director of Anniston, Alabama's community theatre, an interesting cultural move for this Los Angeles native. Winton Blount, a native of Union Springs, a small town in eastern Alabama, had made a fortune from a successful family- owned construction business that transformed from local to international; as that rara avis, a lifelong Alabama Republican in the 1960s and 1970s, he also served as Postmaster General in the Nixon administration. In 1972, he owned a large estate in east Montgomery and had built a corporate art collection of (now in the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts). He was also dedicated to the growth and development of the big little town of Montgomery, the state capital, currently approaching a population of 200,000. Put these three men together and you have a sure-fire recipe for a classical theater.

HISTORY Conceived and born as a summer theater event rehearsed and performed in the gymnasium of an un-air-conditioned local high school, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was raised as the beloved child of Anniston, Alabama, an enterprising town of about 30,000 near I-20 east of Birmingham. In 1971, when plans for the Festival began, there were Shakespeare festivals across America, but none in the Old South — none between Dallas and Washington, D.C. (Volz 1986, 3-4). Founding Artistic Director Martin Platt sought to remedy that fact with an initial summer season using fifteen unpaid actors performing Hamlet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, and Hedda Gabler. Hamlet opened (after a forty-five-minute delay so that costumes could be finished) to an audience of two, but that initial season eventually garnered 3,000 theatergoers and broke even financially. The presence of Shakespeare proved increasingly enticing — by 1977 the summer audience had quintupled to 15,000 — and subsequent seasons brought much more interest: a larger budget, and expansive growth, with ASF's first Equity contract in 1976 (up to twelve by 1978); the first regional tour that reached as many or more audience members as the summer season; a New York Times review calling Martin Platt's work at ASF "brash and brilliant" (a quotation used for decades in publicity); a conservatory program for young actors; and the promise of Platt's own "midsummer night's dream" — a resident company doing classic repertory theater in Alabama.

Dreams and visions have played crucial roles not just in Shakespeare's plays but also, for our purposes, more particularly in the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781430/show Page 1 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

life of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Platt's initial vision developed, as Anniston built a new high school with a 1,000-seat auditorium — this one air-conditioned and not a gymnasium — into which ASF's custom-built thrust stage could easily fit in the summers. Yet, ultimately, this new venue also trapped ASF in a four-to-six-week summer season because performances could not overlap the school term. The financial situation alternated a year of profit with a year of loss for the first eight seasons, with a net profit until the early 1980s. Then, despite growing success, debt rose, as the quick growth of the now- professional company quickly outstripped fund-raising efforts and increasing ticket sales. Three straight seasons took the theater over $100,000 in cumulative debt, and before the next season's nearly $265,000 profit, decisions about ASF's future were made, decisions that changed it materially, geographically, and programmatically.

Enter Montgomery businessman and philanthropist Winton M. Blount, husband of ASF board member Carolyn Blount, who single-handedly saved the 1982 season with a large donation. With business-based pragmatism, he then began to discuss the pressing need for a longer performance season if the theater were to survive. His proposition involved combining the Festival's needs and his own concern for Montgomery's future by moving the festival to Montgomery and by donating most of the land on his estate to the city as a park, as well as by building a $21.5 million theater complex to be given to the state so that ASF could produce plays year-round. Such gifts are far from common; at the time, it was the largest single gift in the history of American theater.

Transplanting a theater to allow new growth can be a tricky maneuver in artistic horti-"culture"; some Anniston supporters have never recovered from the "theft" of their much-loved theater, while other Annistonians wistfully and seriously observe, "We had a choice. We could watch it die or we could let it go somewhere else. It was like a child going away to college; we raised ASF and now it's left home and has a different life and chance of success." Montgomery had been a regular stop for previous ASF tours; I have vivid memories of happily watching Arms and the Man, The Importance of Being Earnest, and the first half of a subsequently rained-out Romeo and Juliet, sitting on a blanket on a hillside at Jasmine Hill Gardens outside Montgomery. Finding enough people for one or two nights of theater on a hillside is markedly different, however, from finding subscribers for a ten-play season that would range far beyond Shakespeare. The soil into which ASF was now transplanted had not nurtured ASF; the theater was a gift, and much of the community did not realize what a professional theater could mean to the area. While one or two Montgomerians basking in the park may ask, "what do they do in that building?", my friends from Mobile and Pensacola now regularly exclaim, "You are so lucky to live in Montgomery! You have ASF!", and many, many people buttonhole me in the lobby to attest how the presence of ASF has changed their lives for the better.

ASF's new state-of-the-art theater complex opened in December 1985 with a stunning, Edwardian, open-space production of A Midsummer Night's Dream — complete with Mendelssohn melodies, Renaissance-clad fairies, and a bicycle built for two — and opening ceremonies attended by state and local dignitaries as well as by Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Flowers from the board of the Royal Shakespeare Festival, Tony Randall, and Olivia de Havilland, with fireworks as the finale. The gala event got extensive newspaper coverage, and for several years thereafter the marketing department ran into a surprising response to their efforts to sell theater tickets to locals who had seen the gala pictures, "Oh, I don't have the formal clothes to go there." Welcome to your new home in Montgomery. Eventually ASF even ran a "come in blue jeans" campaign to counteract the perceived belief by those who were not regular theatergoers that theater was strictly a black-tie affair.

In Anniston, audiences came from across the state and eventually from across the Southeast, true believers in the appeal of classical drama, theatergoers eager to share the exciting work of this increasingly talented company. Moving to Montgomery meant a larger subscription base, for Montgomery far exceeds Anniston's population, but nonetheless forty-five percent of ASF's patrons to this day come from outside the Montgomery area. There are, in fact, regular subscribers from nineteen states. The two-audience phenomenon is exacerbated in Montgomery, for the tastes and theater experience of many locals do not, by and large, match those of patrons from Atlanta or New Orleans, not to mention the Shakespeare festival-goers who travel from Oregon to Utah to Alabama to see Shakespeare seasons. Some locals might be perfectly happy with less Shakespeare while ASF's out-of-town audience consistently lobbies for more Shakespeare. And the question must be asked, what part does Shakespeare play in the current Alabama institution that bears his name in the middle?

The Anniston seasons were dominated by Shakespeare — ASF was undeniably a Shakespeare festival. Its first five seasons offered twenty-two plays, two-thirds of them by Shakespeare. The others were all classics, three Molières, an Ibsen, Machiavelli, Feydeau, and Udall. Not until 1977, with Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in a season with Hamlet, did ASF perform a twentieth-century piece. Only with the addition of a second performance space, a 100-seat store- front theater on Anniston's main street, did more contemporary and more Southern works become a part of ASF regular

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781430/show Page 2 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

offerings. Throughout its years in Anniston, over sixty percent of the main stage shows were Shakespeare, not counting Shakespeare revues such as The Hollow Crown.

In Montgomery, the ASF season expanded, as was intended, to at least a nine-month season, with a summer rotating repertory as its core. The inaugural 1985-86 season offered an ambitious eight-play repertory including Dream, Richard III, and The Merry Wives of Windsor; after that, with the exception of the 1987-88 season, which had no repertory, a six-play repertory has been standard. Shakespeare remains the heart of ASF's repertory, which usually runs from March through July, traditionally with three of the six plays being Shakespeare. But in terms of an entire nine-, ten- or eleven-play ASF season, Shakespeare is now only twenty-five to thirty percent of the theater's offerings. One of ASF's new marketing tag lines proclaimed, "Shakespeare and a whole lot more!" and what expanded with an expanded ASF season was not Shakespeare but the "whole lot more." The classic repertory — Shaw, Molière, Ibsen, Sheridan, Tennessee Williams — filled early Montgomery seasons, joined by contemporary works of American and English playwrights such as Pinter, Fugard, and Tina Howe and the North American premiere of Stoppard's Rough Crossing. Along with classic plays, a musical play or revue became a staple of an ASF season as well as that blessed theatrical cash cow, A Christmas Carol. (Several seasons ASF offered other plays as the holiday focus, but only Big River garnered an audience equivalent to that for the Dickens classic.) In terms of box office, the Shakespeares alone now attract more patrons than an entire Anniston season did, but as a rule a single production of A Christmas Carol, or Smokey Joe's Café, or Beehive, can sell at least as many tickets for ASF as a single Shakespeare can.

PRODUCTION VALUES And what kind of Shakespeare does ASF perform? There is no house style; the production choices are director-driven, yet because the artistic director over time directs many of the Shakespeare productions, his style has considerable influence on theatergoers. Some care is taken in design conferences not to set all the rep Shakespeares in the same era (as could have happened one year). Martin Platt's Shakespeare productions ranged from a Thousand-and-One-Nights Much Ado, World War I Macbeth, and rock opera As You Like It, as well as many traditional Renaissance-clad productions in Anniston, to the gorgeous and well-remembered inaugural Edwardian Dream in Montgomery, an Orientalist Tempest, a spare eighteenth-century As You Like It and a raucous eighteenth-century Shrew (with Sly). The only thoroughly Southern Shakespeare we have had was directed by a visitor: a 1989 Much Ado, set around the Battle of New Orleans, which shocked many theatergoers, as it opened with a coonskin-cap-clad woodsman yahooing from the rear of the theater and charging onstage to join a Jean Lafitte-style Benedick and an Andrew Jackson-esque Don Pedro. (Many New York actors, on first hearing of ASF in the 1980s, stereotypically responded with hayseed Bard talk. Stereotypes die hard, but as ASF's reputation grew, that response quickly changed, and the scoffers asked to audition for the company.)

When Kent Thompson assumed the artistic directorship in 1989, he began to explore Shakespeare's history plays in historical order, all in appropriate historical dress. The series petered out, however, with Henry VI, Part One, when this show, nearly sold out to subscribers, had an unusually high no-show rate (completing this series is the most frequent request of ASF's traveling patrons). His favorite periods for costuming are Napoleonic to pre-World War I (although his 1950s Shrew, with Bianca in poodle skirt and Hortensio as an Elvis knockoff, was a huge crowd-pleaser), while visiting directors and former Associate Artistic Director Kent Gash offered modern-dress interpretations of Shakespeare — a contemporary Miami Comedy of Errors, a 1930s Germanic Measure, Romeo and Juliet in polo shirts and khakis, Gash's Busby Berkeley Twelfth Night, and desert camouflage Troilus and Cressida. The overall range of Shakespeare interpretation has been gratifyingly varied.

Many vocal locals find modern-dress Shakespeare distracting, while the traveling audience usually finds them thrilling. With a nearly fifty-fifty audience split, varying the costuming keeps everyone happy for part of the time. ASF telemarketers have found that some patrons consider the nineteenth century to be comfortably "Shakespearean" (Renaissance-ish for the historically-challenged) when asked which productions they most enjoyed, perhaps because they have so often seen his work produced in that era at ASF in the past decade. More demanding production concepts, such as Ray Chambers's 2002 Hamlet, with design inspired by Columbian sculptor Doris Salcedo, proved nearly "unreadable" to some theatergoers, though if they picked up the free print materials on the show, or heard a lobby talk, they quickly realized and appreciated the brilliance and relevance of the design to the play. Thompson also dedicated ASF to completing the canon, so recent seasons have seen Antony and Cleopatra and King John, while 2004 offers Titus Andronicus, and 2005, Coriolanus, leaving only Henry VI, Parts Two and Three, Henry VIII, Timon (scheduled for 2006), and The Two Noble Kinsmen to be performed. (We'll argue later about Cardenio and Edward III. )

Another issue arising from Kent Thompson's artistic directorship has been nontraditional casting. With the Anniston http://borrowers.uga.edu/781430/show Page 3 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

conservatory program now a degree-granting MFA program associated with the University of Alabama, a number of skilled young African American actors have been trained in ASF's Professional Actor Training program, and appear in both MFA and Equity productions at ASF, especially the Shakespeares. In addition, Thompson, a Southerner by birth, and the son of a Baptist preacher, is dedicated to the principle of open casting. That has not proven an entirely welcome proposition to a very small minority of patrons. To this day, Kent Thompson gets letters about classic plays with "mixed" casting, each of which he answers, and he also gets letters of praise. Derrick Lee Weeden, an exceptionally talented Othello at ASF some years ago, commented on how many mixed-race couples he noticed in that play's audience. Thompson has also tried to cast nontraditional families in Shakespeare, as with Leonato and Hero in Much Ado or Banquo and Fleance in Macbeth, but the audience response, often subterranean, has not entirely disappeared. In a city with a changing demographic, one that will soon be more than fifty percent African American, these issues are not incidental. On the other hand, the student matinee audiences, which have a much higher proportion of African Americans than many of the adult Shakespeare performances, respond very positively to the presence of African American actors in Shakespeare and are full of questions in the post-show discussions.

Getting audiences into the theater young is essential not just for an appreciation of Shakespeare but for theater itself. I have been at AUM for twenty-six years, two decades of those with ASF in the neighborhood. Trying to teach drama in the first seven years was, let it be said, a daunting experience, because none of my students had ever seen a professional production. "Theater" simply meant more words on a page. Now that is not as often the case thanks to ASF's SchoolFest program, which offers productions to thousands of students (27,000 to 50,000 per year, depending on the schedule). If a paper assignment now takes students to the theater, they are gratified by what occurs — excited by Shakespeare and by theater. They prove far more open to the possibilities of Shakespeare than do some adult theatergoers who suffer from what I call "Shakespeare anxiety": "I won't understand it (and you can't make me)." The hard-core sufferers are probably unreachable, but those who simply feel insecure only need permission to listen and enjoy a clearly spoken and enacted performance — fortunately, the norm at ASF.

Despite its performance quality and audience loyalty, ASF sometimes experiences challenges because of its first, rather than its middle, name. As the State Theatre, ASF at one time enjoyed almost one million dollars of support from the State of Alabama with additional funds from the city and county governments of Montgomery. But, recently, the "Alabama" at the front of ASF's name has become almost virtual, amid state funding crises. First, some political infighting lopped $200,000 from the state funding; a few years later, another quarter of a million disappeared, and in the current tax crisis, the entire state allotment has been axed. Few theaters can cheerfully absorb an unexpected half-million-dollar cut in funding, especially when the cut is suffered along with simultaneous reductions in local government funding. Despite the fact that local and state officials continue to bring industrial prospects to ASF to show off what Alabama is and can do, Alabama no longer contributes funds to ASF or to any other arts or humanities organization or program. With the recent failed tax referendum, tax subsidies to the timber and other consuming industries remain unchanged, and so do tax rates, despite an alarming shortfall. Shakespeare's theater endured unexpected plague outbreaks and watchful city fathers; he would not find theater life in the New South markedly different, I suspect.

CONCLUSION Such a state crisis follows ASF's recent growth initiative from nine-month to year-round programming, as it strives to become an artistic home for a larger resident company of actors and artisans. Maintaining that commitment proves more challenging with every year, but, so far, the season structure remains intact. The ASF Board has recently accepted the challenge of maintaining the budget, and thereby the programming of the theater in its entirety. Winton Blount died in 2003, as rare a local philanthropist as Shakespeare was an artist, but his vision is now shared by many civic leaders in Montgomery. Shakespeare lives in Montgomery, the town to which Winton Blount brought the festival: a small city dedicated to park athletic leagues, Auburn and Alabama football, and to its new minor league baseball team, the Biscuits; a town giddy with the filming of Big Fish in its midst, and often aware that also in its midst is a fine, large classic repertory company performing Shakespeare and a whole lot more (Big Fish 2003).

What does Shakespeare and ASF mean to Montgomery and to theatergoers from all fifty states and sixty foreign countries who have partaken of its work? It means that, at its core, ASF is dedicated to the quality of theater that Shakespeare provides and symbolizes — compelling stories vividly told. At our recent mission statement committee meetings, the group insisted that Shakespeare was our "most important product," the star atop our tree of vital commitments. We were born and bred with Shakespeare right in the middle of our identity, and amid many other offerings, his work is still the defining element, the very heart of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781430/show Page 4 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'54 PM

REFERENCES Volz, Jim. 1986. Shakespeare Never Slept Here: The Making Of A Regional Theatre: A History Of The Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing. Big Fish. 2003. Directed by Tim Burton. Columbia Pictures. Performers Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Helena Bonham Carter.

ONLINE RESOURCES Alabama Shakespeare Festival. http://www.asf.net/ (http://www.asf.net/) Internet Movie Database Information for Big Fish. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319061/? fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8dHQ9b258ZmI9dXxwbj0wfHE9QmlnIEZpc2h8aHRtbD0xfG5tPW9u;fc=1;ft=20;fm=1 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319061/? fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8dHQ9b258ZmI9dXxwbj0wfHE9QmlnIEZpc2h8aHRtbD0xfG5tPW9u;fc=1;ft=20;fm=1)

ABSTRACT | HISTORY | PRODUCTION VALUES | CONCLUSION | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781430/show Page 5 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

Ophelia, by Douglas Huff

(/current) MARK Z. MUGGLI, LUTHER COLLEGE

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT Douglas Huff's Ophelia, expertly staged by Theaterwork (Santa Fe, New (/archive) Mexico) and its artistic director David Olson, is an effective new play that explores Reformation questions about free will, grace, and the education of women. Ophelia gains a great deal of resonance from Hamlet. But like most adaptations of Shakespeare, a large part of Ophelia's appeal lies in its attempt to clarify and improve on its Shakespearean original.

Theaterwork, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 5-21, 2004. Director/Set Designer, David Olson. Lighting/Sound, Jack Sherman. Costumes, Feleicia Martin. Properties, Richard Gonzales.

In the opening scene of Douglas Huff's Ophelia, the young Ophelia and Hamlet imagine the pan-European kingdom that they will someday rule: "Truth and justice shall reign everywhere. . . . Camelot will finally exist." Hamlet shall be its King Arthur, Ophelia its Guinevere, and because the play has a theme- shaping Reformation setting, this Camelot will be "greater than the Holy Roman Empire — but without a pope." http://borrowers.uga.edu/781437/show Page 1 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

The author, Douglas Huff, is a college philosophy professor who has had nine of his plays performed, primarily in the Midwest. Huff believes that he has written a tragedy in the Greek mode — rather than the Senecan or Shakespearean — because he emphasizes the interplay among character, situation, and choice, although I find these themes in Seneca and Shakespeare as well. But Ophelia also incorporates specifically Reformation questions about free will, grace, and forgiveness. In addition, its mixed comic/tragic tone and scenic structure are remarkably Shakespearean.

Whatever its lineage, Ophelia gains resonance from and comments on Shakespeare's Hamlet. But as the above quotations and comments suggest, Ophelia is also a new work with its own emphases. The play raises ethical questions about parent-child relations, the relative value of honesty and expediency in politics, and the varied motivations embedded in individual choice. It also concentrates on women's social roles and education. Huff's Ophelia reads widely in political theorists such as Aristotle, tries to guide a despairing, violence-driven, and sometimes laconic Hamlet, and directs her befuddled, comic father Polonius on statecraft and war. (She has concluded that "Agriculture is the key." Polonius responds that no one is interested in agriculture: "Farmers aren't even interested.")

The first half of Huff's play imagines scenes only hinted at in Hamlet. Two lengthy Wittenberg scenes mix joking references to Erasmus, Lutheranism, and rosaries with collegiate horseplay (including some very funny bawdy focused on the "petard," which the characters allude to as a stiff, hoist-like device). King Hamlet and Yorick, a skilled soldier and political tactician

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781437/show Page 2 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

Sarah Salazar, Alex Reifarth, and Elizabeth Page known at court as a "jester," discuss political marriages and the invasion of Europe. The German-born Gertrude has an imaginary conversation with her dead father — thus adding one more father-child relationship to the Hamlet story — in which she discusses the arranged marriage that brought her to the Danish throne. Her father, threatened by Danish power, had consoled her by predicting that her warlord husband would soon be killed. Alas, this medieval King Hamlet has proven to be the best soldier in Europe, so this Renaissance Gertrude finds herself trapped inside a sexless, loveless marriage while she is still young and beautiful. Gertrude fills the idle hours attending to her rich wardrobe, receiving the attentions of a courtly, civilian Claudius, and teaching Ophelia the "womanly arts" of sewing and politics. In the second half of Ophelia, Huff depends more on scenes from Hamlet, although he radically cuts and rewrites them to highlight his chosen themes. Huff's play ends with Ophelia's death, but hints at a future, final carnage like that in Hamlet.

Beyond filling in gaps in Hamlet's plot and rewriting existing scenes, Ophelia's central concern is to explore the impact of small, morally wrong choices on the individual and community. Ophelia, who exhibits a deep,

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781437/show Page 3 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

Ophelia's Death (Angela Janda) mystical commitment to Hamlet even as a young girl, compromises herself by agreeing to Claudius's and Polonius's spying. She recognizes that Polonius pressures her unfairly to betray Hamlet. But in Huff's view, her complicity with Polonius and Claudius represents a bad ethical choice that leads directly to her isolation, her moral self-recognition, and her death. As she says in a lengthy final soliloquy, "Our lives are ruined by pebbles in the road. Our virtue deserts us for a flimsy excuse. Our love becomes an apparition. And we die." In Huff's script, Ophelia's death is clearly a suicide. (His stage direction reads: "She spreads her arms wide and falls backwards into the well.") In Olson's production, Ophelia's end, a timeless entrapment in thin bars of light on a dark stage, is more ambiguous and even luminous.

Ophelia is unlikely to receive a better production anytime soon. Santa Fe, New Mexico — second in the U.S. only to New York in the dollar volume of its art sales — does not support much theater. But over the last decade, Theaterwork has filled most of the seats for its sixty- plus productions of both classics and world premieres. (See

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781437/show Page 4 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

Dan Friedman as Polonius and Angela Janda as Ophelia http://www.theaterwork.org (http://www.theaterwork.org) for a recent performance history and selected photos.) The Theaterwork Ophelia was performed in a strongly blocked, visually driven style on a simple, expressionistic stage that alluded to the sea and stone of a late medieval Denmark. The performance was grounded in nuanced, atmospheric lighting, sumptuous period costumes, and highly artful props (figure-encrusted mirrors and perfume bottles for Gertrude, and colorful Greek-lettered botanical charts and an operational small-scale water wheel that Ophelia presumably used for her agricultural studies). Especially prominent were the beautifully designed books that distinguish the intellectuals, such as Ophelia, Yorick, and Horatio, from non-readers like King Hamlet and Claudius. In sharp contrast to the Romantic view that Prince Hamlet's deep intellect causes his inaction, Huff's Prince is subject to impulsive action and despair precisely because he wants to be an intellectual, but cannot quite focus on the intricate pathways of complex ideas.

In a newspaper interview, Huff has insisted that he did not intend to "improve" on Shakespeare. But many of the responses that I heard in my role as Ophelia dramaturg suggested that a modern adaptation of Shakespeare is often perceived to be in competition with the original, and that in many cases the adaptation wins precisely because it is clearer. A

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781437/show Page 5 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

sampling of comments:

"Ophelia explains some things that Shakespeare leaves muddy."— an Ophelia actor; "Ophelia provides the back-story that Shakespeare's plays seldom include, especially for women characters." — a retired actress at a public discussion; "If ever a character was underdeveloped in a play and left to kill herself with little motivation, it's Ophelia in Hamlet." — a Santa Fe New Mexican reviewer; "Everyone thinks of Hamlet as one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, but construction-wise it has a lot of problems."— the same Santa Fe New Mexican reviewer, in an interview with the dramatist; "[Shakespeare's] Ophelia is an interesting character, but she is so dramatically underwritten in Shakespeare's play." — the author Douglas Huff, in an interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican; "I've never liked Hamlet because it is too long and too confusing. Ophelia made sense." — a participant in a College of Santa Fe mini- course for senior citizens. In Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt argues that one of Shakespeare's distinctive achievements was "a new technique of radical excision. . . . The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity" (Greenblatt 2004, 323-24). Tom Stoppard's brilliant move in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was intentionally to add opacity to one element of Shakespeare's play. Like all good art, Ophelia also creates its own new complexities.1 But finally, the greatest pleasure that Ophelia offers is — to reverse Greenblatt's phrase — "strategic clarity," through its presentation of a consistent, fully realized dramatic portrait of what is, in Shakespeare's Danish house of strings, a secondary, sometimes shadowy figure.

NOTES 1. I have not read the two-dozen published and unpublished plays centered on Ophelia, but it is a fair guess that most of them have similar aims. (For what is probably a partial listing of other "Ophelia" plays, see Thomas Larque's bibliography (http://shakespearean.org.uk/ophbib1.htm).)

REFERENCES

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781437/show Page 6 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton. Nott, Robert. 2004a. "And in other news, in Denmark . . . " Review of Ophelia, by Douglas Huff, performed by Theaterwork. Pasatiempo: The [Santa Fe] New Mexican's Weekly Magazine of Arts, Entertainment & Culture. November 12-18, 12. Nott, Robert. 2004b. "Woe is he, to write what he wrote." Interview with Douglas Huff. Pasatiempo: The [Santa Fe] New Mexican's Weekly Magazine of Arts, Entertainment & Culture. November 5-11, 44-46.

ONLINE RESOURCES Thomas Larque, Ophelia Bibliography [accessed 25 May, 2005]. Available online at http://shakespearean.org.uk/ophbib1.htm (http://shakespearean.org.uk/ophbib1.htm) Theaterwork Web site [accessed 25 May, 2005]. Available online at http://www.theaterwork.org (http://www.theaterwork.org)

PERMISSIONS Photographs of the Theaterwork production of Douglas Huff's Ophelia reproduced by permission of Theaterwork.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781437/show Page 7 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

Hamlet, Revenge of a King, by Herbert Newsome

(/current) ALAN F. HICKMAN, UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT PINE BLUFF

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT Herbert Newsome's Hamlet, Revenge of a King, a musical updating of (/archive) Shakespeare's tragedy, was directed by Stephen Broadnax and produced on November 17-19, 2004 at the Hathaway-Howard Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. The object, according to Newsome, was to make Shakespeare relevant to the hip-hop generation. In his rewriting, New York City substitutes for Denmark, the murder of Hamlet Senior is politically motivated, and Afi Parker (Ophelia) not only sleeps with Hamilton (Hamlet), but also aborts their unborn child. The Bard's soliloquies, furthermore, are replaced by rap arias set to a hip-hop beat.

Hathaway-Howard Fine Arts Center, The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. November 17-19, 2004. Director, Stephen Broadnax. Set Director, Brian T. Williams. Lighting, Melanie Morgan and Cynthia Talley.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781880/show Page 1 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

Marjorie Garber begins Shakespeare After All with the claim that "every age creates its own Shakespeare" (Garber 2004, 3). Thus, it should come as no surprise that, in an age of "gangsta" rap and sampling, Shakespeare should catch the ear of hip-hop artists. Indeed, a hip-hop version of the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, attributed to Jeff Rasmussen, has been posted on the Internet. It reads, in part: Livin large or 86 it? that's got me wack: How to best represent my own self: When da Mans in my lunch, Go medieval on the candy-ass sucka, and pop a cap in him? (Rasmussen 2005) It's only a small step from rewriting a soliloquy to rewriting the whole play,

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781880/show Page 2 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

and that is exactly what Herbert Newsome has done in Hamlet, Revenge of a King. In this musical updating of Shakespeare's tragedy, directed by Stephen Broadnax and produced on November 17-19 at the Hathaway-Howard Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (http://www.uapb.edu/), Hamlet (or Hamilton L. King, as he is called here) has moved to the 'hood, but he still lives on Denmark Avenue, where gangsters and politicians mix with rappers in skullcaps and baggies.

The object, according to Newsome, was to make Shakespeare relevant to the hip-hop generation. In his rewriting, New York City substitutes for Denmark, the murder of Hamlet Senior is politically motivated, and Afi Parker (Ophelia) not only sleeps with Hamilton, but also aborts their unborn child. Hamilton has been to New York Community College rather than to Wittenberg. He aspires to escape the 'hood, but family, and other forces, keep (to paraphrase another anti-hero) pulling him back in. The Bard's soliloquies are replaced by rap arias set to a hip-hop beat. The Ghost is still the catalyst for the revenge plot, but the narrative is limned by a new kid on the block, DJ Jive (of Radio WGAB), who, in her capacity as Greek tragic chorus, provides a running commentary on the play's action and supplies the epilogue. Instead of a play-within-a-play, we get a kind of rap face-off, in the course of which Hamilton's uncle Jean Claude confesses to murder.

The production's updating of Hamlet extends also to staging and stage design. The climactic duel between Hamilton and Lee Parker (Laertes) involves both fisticuffs and poison-tipped shivs, with predictably bloody results. When Hamilton swings his fist at Lee, he does so in slow motion (in an obvious cinematic homage to the Matrix franchise), the action picking up at normal speed once the blow connects. On stage, the focal point is a colorfully spray-painted BMW, the tires of which are either flat or resting on cinder blocks. The car is flanked by scaffolding that, on the one side, serves as DJ Jive's music booth and, on the other, as Afi's bedroom. The stage is used imaginatively, with a bleak cityscape painted on a brick wall above the BMW and the words "Denmark Ave." on a street sign. The action is fast- paced and edgy, and although dialogue is sometimes lost behind the music, the actors are all first-rate, with James Royce Massengill, Jr. a standout as Hamilton.

The young people in the audience (mostly students and family members of the cast) appeared to be having a good time; they laughed at appropriate moments and jumped when gunshots were fired. I asked students in my English Literature I class to respond to the production and received several replies. Everyone agreed that politicians make effective villains (one student claimed that Jean Claude's death "felt like justice"), several commented that

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781880/show Page 3 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

the abortion plot helped to explain the complex relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia — er, Hamilton and Afi — and no one felt that the play suffered in any way from modernization, although one student complained that the music was too loud.

Newsome has not entirely broken with the past. Hamilton, or Hamlet, emerges with his famous neuroses intact. As the program synopsis reads: "Hamilton longs for death and is disgusted with life, which he not only sees as the drive behind his mother's sin, but the force that inevitably produces more life and more evil. His disgust for life turns into revulsion for sex, the very thing that led to his mother's adultery. The tragedy deals with death and sex and with the psychological and social tension from these basic facts of life." Who would have it any other way?

I began with a hip-hop version of Hamlet's most famous soliloquy; for his play, however, Newsome decided, in this one instance, to retain Shakespeare's language, with only a modicum of tinkering. It seems that age cannot wither nor custom stale the Bard's essential message. Stephen Greenblatt calls the "To be, or not to be" speech "the play's key moment of psychological revelation — the moment that virtually everyone remembers" (Greenblatt 2004, 307). Admittedly, it is hard to imagine any version of the play without it. Greenblatt also claims that Shakespeare introduces more than six hundred new words to the English language in Hamlet and that it marks a "new way of writing" (308). Perhaps it is, at least in part, this very spirit of newfangledness that has kept the play fresh for succeeding generations of theatergoers.

Whether "Shakespeare meets the streets" (the play's advertising catch phrase) is a compelling formulation for the hip-hop generation, I can't rightly say. Hip-hop itself, however, appears to be here to stay, and Steve Broadnax, the director of Hamlet, Revenge of a King, has certainly found it a lucrative field to mine. He is now taking his "Hip Hop Project II: The Remix," which is described as "a high octane theatrical experience that insights the hip-hop nation using music, dance, and spoken word" ("Theatre Program" 2004). Later this year, he and his students will compete nationally at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (http://kcactf.org/%20).

In Looking for Sex in Shakespeare, Stanley Wells tends to dismiss the notion that new wine is superior to old, especially in the case of Shakespeare. He remarks: It may be fascinating to overlay Hamlet with images of Communist Romania and the Ceausescus, as in a Romanian production of 1989, and to see how the tenor reacts with the vehicle, but no one could claim that http://borrowers.uga.edu/781880/show Page 4 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

the latter day significances had been available to Shakespeare as he wrote, or to early audiences as they saw the plays performed. (Wells 2004, 67) Wells concedes that the "areas of psychological subtext, of personal and specifically sexual relationships in the plays . . . are less tied down to local and temporal circumstances" (67). Hamlet's sexual angst may be universal; his fashion sense is not. But if not his fashion sense, what then does account for Shakespeare's continuing appeal?

In the last decade alone, I have seen at least five film versions of Hamlet. The most successful have been those, such as Kenneth Branagh's monumental effort, that stick closest to "Shakespeare." The least successful appropriations of Hamlet have been those, such as Stacy Title's Let the Devil Wear Black (1999) and Michael Almereyda's MTV-influenced curiosity (2000), that either jettison the poetry or sacrifice it to other concerns. In spite of, or maybe because of such tampering, Hamlet may well prove to be the most enduring of all Shakespeare's plays. If, as Harold Bloom insists, William Shakespeare invented the "modern," then surely the most modern of heroes is Hamlet, the Western hero of consciousness (Bloom 1998, 409). Like the playwright, he is "not for an age, but for all time." The kids seem to dig it, and, besides, they can sometimes even dance to it. Herbert Newsome's Hamlet, Revenge of a King makes that pleasingly obvious point once more.

REFERENCES Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. Garber, Marjorie. 2004. Shakespeare After All. New York: Pantheon. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton. Rasmussen, Jeff. 2005. "Modern English Translation Hamlet's Soliloquy" [cited 28 January 2005]. http://www.symynet.com/tao_te_ching/modern-translation- hamlet-soliloquy.htm# (link now dysfunctional). "Theatre Program Makes Second Debut with the Hip Hop Project 2: The Remix." 2004. The Golden Letter. Mass Communication Newsletter. University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. November.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781880/show Page 5 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

Wells, Stanley. 2004. Looking for Sex in Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ONLINE RESOURCES Internet Movie Database Information for Let the Devil Wear Black. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151331/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151331/) Internet Movie Database Information for Michael Almereyda, Hamlet. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171359/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171359/)

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781880/show Page 6 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

REBECCA DE HAAS, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

(/current) REFERENCES

Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen (/previous)Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xii + 221 pp. + 17 illus. ISBN 0-521-82935-6. $65.00 US.

(/about) Pascale Aebischer's Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance is an interesting, well-written monograph on four Shakespeare plays that have enjoyed recent popularity in stage and film (/archive) adaptations: Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. In each chapter, she discusses the bodies that appear on the stage and how the staging of these bodies (in most cases mutilated or dead) affect a viewer's interpretation of both the play and the adaptation. While her study does touch on some theoretical issues, such as feminist theory, subjectivity, "otherness," and semiotics, it is not exclusively theoretical, nor does one need to have a firm grounding in these approaches to understand her arguments. Though the plays and their dead bodies are indeed disparate, the book is still a unified whole, as Aebischer remarks: Looking at Shakespeare's violated bodies in performance — at representations of the rape, mutilation and murder of silenced Lavinia, the walking dead that people the court of Elsinore, the racially stigmatised bodies of Aaron and Othello, the stifled voice of Desdemona and the vilified and displaced female bodies that make way for the all overwhelming suffering of Lear and Gloucester — allows me to return to language these silenced, objectified, stereotyped bodies by restoring them to the realm of discourse. (13) As one can see, this study is indeed quite wide-ranging in its selections of texts and topics, but well-organized in its treatment of them, as she strives to give the more marginalized characters a new voice in the

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781438/show Page 1 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

discourses of stage and film.

Aebischer's study begins with "Titus Andronicus: Spectacular Obscenities," a discussion of Lavinia's rape and the ensuing violence of revenge in Titus Andronicus. In this chapter, the most interesting in the book, she addresses the physical silencing, but also the eventual silent speech of Lavinia in both Shakespeare's play and subsequent adaptations. Some of the more prominent adaptations she studies are Peter Brook's 1955 version, Trevor Nunn's 1972 RSC production, and Julie Taymor's recent movie Titus (1999). In the case of each adaptation, Aebischer discusses the presentation of Lavinia's rape and how the audience first sees Lavinia onstage after her mutilation. In almost all cases, the staged violence perpetrated against Lavinia leaves the audience wanting more violence against the rapists/mutilators. In fact, Aebischer relates the anecdote of two young women who, about to leave a performance because of the violence, decide to remain when they learn that the rapists will die. In addition, Lavinia is the first character to break out of her prescribed role of silence, which makes Lavinia's "silence" come through loud and clear. Despite the presence of Lavinia's "speech," though, most performances emphasize her death at Titus'S hand.

Aebischer's second chapter, "'Not dead? Not yet quite dead?': Hamlet's Unruly Corpses," addresses the dead bodies that appear in Hamlet; the chapter's segments focus on the Ghost, Ophelia, Polonius, and Yorick. A few of the major productions she discusses are Matthew Warchus's 1997 RSC production, Kenneth Branagh's In the Bleak Midwinter (1995) and Hamlet (1996), and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000). Continuing the discussion of revenge from the previous chapter, Aebischer comments: The relatively straightforward movement from physical evidence to action in The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus is portrayed in Hamlet as a mediated relationship via remembrance and faith that must compensate for the lack of physical evidence and consequent doubts of the hero. (75) The second half of the chapter discusses Yorick's skull both on stage and screen; Aebischer argues that "if Yorick's skull is disturbingly polysemous on the page and the stage, it can be equally promiscuous in its signification on screen". On stage, the skull symbolizes both Yorick and Ophelia, while onscreen, close-ups can create new relationships and significance for Yorick's skull.

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781438/show Page 2 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

The third and longest chapter, "Murderous Male Moors: Gazing at Race in Titus Andronicus and Othello," provides a discussion of both Othello's racial marginalization (linked to that of Aaron) and Desdemona's silencing (linked to that of Lavinia) in Othello. In this chapter, some of the more influential productions that Aebischer discusses are Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), Oliver Parker's 1995 Othello, and the Jonathan Miller/Anthony Hopkins 1981 version of Othello. The first half of this chapter addresses the marginalization of both Othello and Aaron; both the play's text and the staging mark them, as male Moors of color, as different/other. Much of Aebischer's discussion involves how the audience gaze is directed to these two characters, either by skin color or costuming. In addition, she quotes Paromita Chakravarti's statement that "while a white actor can be thought able to represent Othello's blackness, a black or Asiatic actor is considered capable only of demonstrating his own negritude" (cited by Aebischer 110), so she ponders the question of whether or not Othello and Aaron should be played by black actors. The second half of the third chapter addresses Othello's voyeurism and silencing of Desdemona. Othello gazes on Desdemona and sees "a white, smooth, translucent surface which he is afraid to pierce." That he cannot shed her blood shows that Othello cannot accept "the full implications of his voyeuristic gaze." Like Lavinia, Desdemona is killed (silenced), but then comes back to life — "she has insisted throughout on having the last word and does so again".

"En-gendering Violence and Suffering in King Lear," the fourth chapter, provides a discussion of Goneril's, Reagan's, Lear's, and Gloucester's onstage suffering. In this chapter, Aebischer studies, among others, two influential performances: Adrian Noble's 1993 RSC production and Nicholas Hytner's 1990 RSC production. Her comment on the suffering of Lear and his daughters is particularly astute. Writing of Gloucester's blinding by Lear's daughters, she writes that "the violence engendered by Lear's actions in the opening scene is engendered by his daughters' actions at the centre of the tragedy". Aebischer then observes that "the blinding thus becomes the pivot of the play as well as the central point at which the play demands that the audience take sides;" in this case, they "inevitably" side with the "oppressed and violated old men" rather than the "cruel younger women." In Lear, the men's suffering clearly takes precedence over that of the women.

Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance will probably be most attractive to and useful for those studying film and/or http://borrowers.uga.edu/781438/show Page 3 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

stage adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, for its focus is indeed on productions rather than on critical interpretations of the texts themselves. A beneficial segment is the appendix of main productions cited in the book, which is a valuable resource for anyone studying adaptations of these four plays. For each entry, Aebischer lists the title, director, principal cast (both the roles and the actors who played them), place of performance or filming, production company, year, and archival materials consulted. The chapters themselves, which are rich with detail of the more ephemeral stage productions, should be helpful for directors and actors who are considering staging new productions of Shakespeare's plays. Other helpful and interesting additions are the seventeen illustrations of some of the productions to which Aebischer refers and a thorough index. Pascale Aebischer's book is a welcome addition to the scholarly discussion about adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, especially since the canon has expanded to treat stage and film productions as texts in their own right.

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale. 2004. Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chakravarti, Paromita. 2003. "Modernity, Post-Coloniality and Othello: The Case of Saptapadi." In Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres and Cultures. Edited by Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche, and Nigel Wheale. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 39-56.

REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781438/show Page 4 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781438/show Page 5 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

SCOTT G. REED, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

(/current) REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, eds. Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema. Madison, N.J: Fairleigh Dickinson (/previous)University Press, 2002. 243 pp. ISBN 0-838-63910-0 Editors Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks have assembled a collection designed to speak to one of the great symptoms of academic work (/about) in our time: the destabilization of the once-hallowed status of the Author. From the theoretical advances of Barthes, Foucault, and the poststructuralist school to the ongoing debate over "true" authorship, even Shakespeare himself has not been immune to the slings and arrows of postmodern circumstance. In no other arena is this more prevalent or noticeable than in film adaptations of Shakespeare's work, wherein the (/archive) play text must be placed into conversation with not only the visual medium of film, but also with other (sometimes complementary, sometimes competing) "authorial" voices: those of director, actor, and screenwriter. By engaging fruitfully with the theories that have thrown authorship itself into doubt, and by assembling texts from a variety of perspectives to address the explosion of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation over the past twenty years, editors Lehmann and Starks have put together a collection that is robust, readable, and highly useful to scholars at all levels.

Divided into three parts, Spectacular Shakespeare approaches Shakespearean film from a variety of critical perspectives. The first section, "Appropriating Culture, Race, and Authority," considers from a postcolonial perspective how "images, identities, and even countries become objects of conquest in the name of Shakespeare" (13). Marguerite Hailey Rippy begins by tracing the image of Othello through a couple of rather obscure instantiations: a 1940s George Cukor film named A Double Life, and an episode of Cheers. Using Žižek and theorists of African American identity, she builds a larger case for how popular re-readings of Othello implicitly privilege the construction of white male identities, relegating Othello himself to little more than a "symbolic referent to the aspects of white male consciousness that American society perceives as dark, foreign, and primitive" (41). Alfredo Michel Modenessi's "(Un)doing the Book 'Without Verona Walls'" focuses on the cultural politics of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), painstakingly re-reading the film's kitschy deployment of Mexican iconography. Less of an attempt at demonstrating the reinterpretation of the Shakespearean source material, than a consideration of the film as a visual artifact, full of ideologically loaded icons, Modenessi's effective cultural reading looks at the film in its own terms, (re)thinking it as cultural capital rather than placing the film in the service of Shakespearean studies.

The second section, "Reframing Romance: Sex, Love, and Subjectivity," shifts to the subjective dimensions of Shakespeare to consider such concepts as sexuality and identity-formation. Laurie Osborne's "Cutting Up Characters" offers a highly detailed look at Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, which is set against a strong reading of the original text, in an effort to consider the tensions and ambiguities between twentieth-century demands for gender equality and Viola's own ideology of romantic love. Samuel Crowl's "The Marriage of Shakespeare and Hollywood" zeroes in on Much Ado About Nothing, initiating the book's second-half focus on the controversial auteur-figure of Kenneth Branagh. Crowl's analysis does an excellent job of attending to the gender roles imbricated in both film and text and considering Branagh's use of film as a medium. Like the collection itself, this essay strikes a delicate balance between the film tradition (here, the "screwball" comedies of the 1940s) and the Shakespearean tradition. Courtney Lehmann's "Shakespeare in Love: Romancing the Author, Mastering the Body" returns to yet another figure of Viola, this time from Shakespeare in Love (1998). In one of the collection's more ambitious pieces, Lehmann painstakingly analyzes the adaptation of Shakespeare: not just the film's reprocessing of Romeo and Juliet, but also its re-presentation of Shakespeare's own body. Through a combination of gender criticism and School cultural critique, she details the film's highly complex economy of work and pleasure, reading the mystique of Shakespeare's author-ity in conjunction with our own "critical desire" (141). As if to help answer the question that she and her co-editor Lisa Starks pose in their introduction, "Are We In Love With Shakespeare?," Lehmann demonstrates how Shakespeare in Love both presents and mystifies what Deleuze and Guattari might have called the "desiring-machine" of the authorial corpus; popular culture's "dismemberment" and "resurrection" of Shakespeare as "an authorial body-in-pleasure" plays out not only an imaginary version of "feel-good capitalism," but also the "inexhaustibility of enjoyment" inherent to the text (125, 141). Theoretically dense yet accessible in its detailed reading, Lehmann's essay perhaps more than any other typifies the "pleasure" presented by this collection.

The third section of the book, "The Politics of the Popular: From Class to Classroom" offers excursions into the modern cultural dynamics of Shakesperean reception, from considerations of the "dumbing-down" of these plays in popular cinema to considerations of their pedagogical value. More particularly, what all three essays seem to have in common is that they are all equally haunted by the specter of Kenneth Branagh, particularly his still-controversial rendition of Hamlet. In many ways, Hamlet becomes the test-case for considering the efficacy of Shakespearean film; it presents an interpretive fulcrum where Elizabethan textuality meets Hollywood presentation-value. This tension is http://borrowers.uga.edu/781440/show Page 1 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

explicitly played out in Douglas Lanier's "'Art Thou Base, Common, and Popular?'," which examines Branagh's entire body of work in order to spell out a very particular tension: Branagh's desire to resurrect the Golden Age of Shakespearean actors is fundamentally at odds with his desire to popularize the Bard and bring him to the masses. Elizabeth Dietchman also examines Hamlet as an interface for the culture's understanding of Shakespeare by studying several Hollywood films of the mid- to late-1990s that explicitly cite the Shakespearean text. These popular films use Shakespeare less as material for adaptation rather than as raw material for inventions of their own design: Hamlet becomes both a figure of high-cultural capital and an action hero. She ultimately gestures toward a pedagogical enterprise that would not emphasize "what Shakespeare means," but rather what we might "mean by Shakespeare" (184). Annalisa Castaldo rounds out the section with the most overtly pedagogical of the three essays, "The Film's The Thing." Engaging with the materiality of film, Castaldo develops a pedagogical model devoted to studying the cuts and collages that movies use to reinterpret the text. Looking at Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet from the perspective of Levi-Strauss's bricoleur, she suggests that we should dislodge centralized "correct" readings of the text, and recommends instead that we read the plays alongside the films to understand more clearly how each interprets the other. Of all the essays in the collection, Castaldo's is perhaps the one most devoted to considering the pedagogical possibilities inherent in adaptation.

The book concludes with a whirlwind of an essay from Richard Burt, entitled "Te(e)n Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High." Recoursing wildly through some fifteen films from the late Nineties, Burt tracks down not only full-on adaptations of the plays, but also small Shakespearean references that many researchers in Shakespearean appropriation are content either to miss or to ignore. Despite its breadth, the article offers detailed analyses of four films that place Shakespeare in the service of complicated and often contradictory notions of feminism and empowerment, including 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed. Taken as conflicts between the "good girls" and the "hotties" or "bad girls," all four films place Shakespeare in the service of complicated gender dynamics. Burt argues, however, that despite their seeming to offer liberated feminist re-visions of Shakespearean heroines, the films' deployment of "teensploitation" stereotypes have the ultimate effect of producing only safe, sterilized, feminine figures. Burt layers his analysis densely with abundant evidence from the films, and intercuts references to other popular films throughout. With this essay positioned strategically at the end of the book, one must wonder if Lehmann and Starks are throwing down some sort of interpretive gauntlet. Is the challenge for Shakespeare Studies after the Death of the Author to follow Shakespeare in all of his textual disseminations into territory regarded by most scholars as at best unfamiliar and at worst hostile?

Spectacular Shakespeare poses this question and more, and does so through a collection of essays that are usefully varied in their approaches and choices of texts. Certainly valuable for scholars of Shakespearean adaptation, Spectacular Shakespeare is also a terrific potential resource for students. Its use of current films makes the book approachable and readable, and the various essays' treatment of critical and postmodern theories are well-explained and very accessible. Upper-division students who lack extensive exposure to theory would stand to gain a great deal. Its only negative quality, in terms of its usability, has nothing to do with the book itself. Published in 2002, Spectacular Shakespeare was poised at the crest of a huge wave, at the height of a decade-long Shakespearean renaissance in the cinema. Over the past three years, though, the New Wave of Bardolatry seems to have faded a bit. Kenneth Branagh's last attempt was 2000's unevenly received Love's Labour's Lost, and the last Hollywood production to attempt a full-on adaptation of a full Shakespearean text was the semi-disastrous Almereyda Hamlet, starring Ethan Hawke. We may ask in retrospect if the various spectacular excesses of Branagh and Lurhmann did not cause the "movement" to collapse on itself like so many "heaps of fragments." Still, despite the slight waning, the Shakespearean cinematic revolution is bound to keep moving on. According to the Internet Movie Database, Branagh has As You Like It slated for release in 2006, and popular and scholarly interest in Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriation is continuing to develop new methods for seeing and performing the text in fresh ways.

REFERENCES Lehmann, Courtney, and Lisa S. Starks, eds. 2002. Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

ONLINE RESOURCES Internet Movie Database Information for Kenneth Branagh, As You Like It [cited June 1, 2005].http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450972/? fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8dHQ9b258ZmI9dXxwbj0wfHE9QXMgWW91IExpa2UgSXR8aHRtbD0xfG5tPW9u;fc=12;ft=20;fm=1 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450972/? fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8dHQ9b258ZmI9dXxwbj0wfHE9QXMgWW91IExpa2UgSXR8aHRtbD0xfG5tPW9u;fc=12;ft=20;fm=1) Internet Movie Database Information for Michael Almereyda, Hamlet[cited June 1, 2005]. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171359/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171359/)

REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781440/show Page 2 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'55 PM

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781440/show Page 3 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'56 PM

Contributors

(/current)

Stephen M. Buhler is Professor of English at the University of (/previous)Nebraska-Lincoln. His recent publications include: "Textual and Sexual Anxiety in Michael Hoffman's Film of A Midsummer Night's Dream" for Shakespeare Bulletin (2004); "Shakespeare and Company: The Lion (/about) King and the Disneyfication of Hamlet" in The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom, ed. Brenda Ayres (2003); and Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof (2002). He is currently (/archive) working on studies of Milton and music and Shakespeare and the forms of popular music.

Darlene Ciraulo is Assistant Professor of English at Central Missouri State University. She has published articles on Shakespeare and romance, Shakespearean appropriation, and early modern prose narratives. She is currently working on a study of Hellenistic romance in Shakespeare's late plays.

Alan Corrigan has completed his M. A. in English Literature at the University of Western Ontario. He is now a first-year doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, focusing on Early Modern drama.

Kevin Crawford has just defended his PhD this spring as a Hudson Strode Fellow of Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, where he has worked under the direction of Gary Taylor; he was previously a Lecturer in English and Literature at Florida Atlantic University. His academic work has appeared in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Journal X, and Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts. He also serves as Vice-President and Co-founding Associate Artist for the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, for which he most recently directed and performed in Othello for the company's fourteenth season; this summer he will direct and appear as Falstaff in

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781605/show Page 1 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'56 PM

The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Rebecca De Haas is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia. She is currently working on her dissertation, a discussion of women and censorship in early modern England. Her research interests include early modern women's literature, including Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, Dorothy Osborne, and Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford, as well as John Donne, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton.

Christy Desmet is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992) and, with Robert Sawyer, co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999) and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (2002).

Terence Hawkes is Emeritus Professor of English at Cardiff University. He is the General Editor of the Accents on Shakespeare series, and of the New Accents series. He is also the author of Metaphor (1972), Structuralism and Semiotics (1977, 2003), Shakespeare and the Reason (1964, 2005), Shakespeare's Talking Animals (1973), That Shakespeherian Rag (1986, 2005), Meaning By Shakespeare (1992), Shakespeare: King Lear (1995) and Shakespeare in the Present (2002).

Alan F. Hickman is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in composition and literature. He is a published poet and essayist who has also taught in Germany and Thailand. In 2004, he participated in an NEH Summer Institute entitled "Shakespeare's Playhouses Inside and Out," in Staunton, Virginia, and London, England.

Matt Kozusko is Assistant Professor at Ursinus College, where he teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature. He is currently working on a re-evaluation of the place and function of popular theater in early modern London. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of The Bedlam Faction theater company and works extensively with Shakespeare in performance.

Douglas Lanier is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He has published widely on Shakespeare on film and in popular culture, as well as articles on Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, the Jacobean masque, and literary pedagogy. His book, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, was published in 2002 in the Oxford http://borrowers.uga.edu/781605/show Page 2 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'56 PM

University Press Shakespeare Topics series. In addition to his continuing work on Shakespeare and popular culture, he is currently working on a book-length study of cultural stratification in early modern British drama.

Mark Z. Muggli joined the Luther College (Decorah, Iowa) faculty in 1978. He is Professor of English, has taught in a wide range of interdisciplinary courses, and has served as an Associate Dean and as Director of Interdisciplinary Studies. His published articles have focused on Renaissance drama, literary journalism, and journalism history. He has been involved in theater as an actor, dramaturg, and playwright.

Sharon O'Dair is Professor of English at the University of Alabama and interim Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. She co-edited The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Cornell 1994) and is author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (Michigan 2000). She has published essays on Shakespeare, literary theory, and the profession of English studies, and currently is working on two manuscripts, Elitist Equality: Class Paradoxes in the Profession of English and The Eco-Bard: The Greening of Shakespeare in Contemporary Film.

Scott G. Reed is a PhD student at the University of Georgia, specializing in Rhetoric/Composition and New Media studies. While not a Shakespearean, he does find it interesting that media-theory guru Marshall McLuhan devotes the first chapter of The Gutenberg Galaxy to King Lear. Coincidence?

Robert Sawyer is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair for Graduate Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare and co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare. His most recent work is "Epilogues and Prologues: Performing Shakespearean Criticism in the Restoration" which will appear in a new collection of essays, Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-Raisers and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (forthcoming Delaware Press 2005).

Bethany Sinnott is Professor of English and Department Chair at Catawba College, North Carolina.

Fran Teague is Josiah Meigs Professor of English at the University of Georgia. She has published widely on performance history and theory and is finishing a study of Shakespeare's presence in popular American http://borrowers.uga.edu/781605/show Page 3 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'56 PM

theater. Books include The Curious History of Bartholomew Fair, Shakespeare's Speaking Properties, and Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning, while her articles have appeared in such journals as Comparative Drama, Renaissance Drama, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare Survey.

Robin Warren has just finished her Ph.D. in English at the University of Georgia under the direction of Christy Desmet and Frances Teague. Her essay, "They Were Always Doing Shakespeare: Antebellum Southern Actresses and Shakespearean Appropriation," has developed from her dissertation, "Acting Feminine on the South's Antebellum and Civil War Stages." She has published articles on Native American Shakespearean appropriation in nineteenth-century Florida and on the early modern women playwrights Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Kate Chopin.

Susan Willis, educated at Emory University and the University of Virginia, is Professor of English at Auburn University, Montgomery, author of The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon, and dramaturg and a resident director at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where she has recently directed main-stage productions of Steel Magnolias and The Taming of the Shrew, the world premiere of Fair and Tender Ladies, as well as many MFA studio workshops of Greek and Shakespeare plays.

| TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781605/show Page 4 of 5 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11/21/19, 12'56 PM

http://borrowers.uga.edu/781605/show Page 5 of 5