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E D I T E D B Y (/about) C h r i s t y D e s m e t a n d S u j a t a (/archive) I y e n g a r

C O N T E N T S

The Postfeminist Mystique: Feminism and Shakespearean Jennifer Adaptation in 10 Things I Hate About You and She's the Man Clement (/781814/show) (pdf) (/781814/pdf)

Transnational Shakespeare: Salman Rushdie and Intertextual Parmita Appropriation (/781652/show) (pdf) (/781652/pdf) Kapadia

Dream Loops and Short-Circuited Nightmares: Post-Brechtian Kirilka Tempests in Post-Communist Bulgaria (/781864/show) (pdf) Stavreva (/781864/pdf)

Charles Appropriate This (/781730/show) (pdf) (/781730/pdf) Whitney

Queer Appropriations: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Dickinson's Paraic Love Poems (/781869/show) (pdf) (/781869/pdf) Finnerty

Erotic Politics Reconsidered: Desdemona's Challenge to Othello Elizabeth (/781790/show) (pdf) (/781790/pdf) Gruber

The Greening of Will Shakespeare (/781872/show) (pdf) Jonathan (/781872/pdf) Baldo

K E N N E T H B R A N A G H ' S A S Y O U L I K E I T : A R E V I E W C L U S T E R

E D I T E D B Y M A T T K O Z U S K O

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Dreaming of Orientalism in Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It Elizabeth (/781856/show) (pdf) (/781856/pdf) Klett

Setting As You Like It: Shakespearean Appropriation for the Cable Rachel Television Market (/781867/show) (pdf) (/781867/pdf) Wifall

The Lionesses and Olive Trees of Meiji-Era Japan: A Consideration Scott of Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It (/781870/show) (pdf) Hollifield (/781870/pdf)

A P P R O P R I A T I O N S I N P E R F O R M A N C E

Lumping in Fargo, book/lyrics by Bryan Reynolds, music by Michael Kent R. Hooker (/781862/show) (pdf) (/781862/pdf) Lehnhof

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Contributors (/781842/show) (pdf) (/781842/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

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The Postfeminist Mystique: Feminism and Shakespearean

(/current) Adaptation in 10 Things I Hate About You and She's the Man

JENNIFER CLEMENT, UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | KATFIGHTING | ABSENT MOTHERS, FRIGHTENED FATHERS | ". . . GIRLS WHO CAN'T PLAY THEIR (/about) INSTRUMENTS" | "GIRLS CAN'T BEAT BOYS" | SHE'S THE WOMAN | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT

"The Postfeminist Mystique: Feminism and Shakespearean Adaptation in 10 Things I Hate About You and She's the Man" focuses on two recent teen adaptations of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, respectively. While I agree with those critics who read these films as conservative appropriations of Shakespeare's cultural capital, I focus specifically on how both movies exploit the generational divide between second and third-wave feminism in order to discredit feminism in general. As I show, 10 Things I Hate About You associates feminism with unproductive anger, absent or threatening older women, and the inability to form or maintain close relationships, while the more recent She's the Man suggests that the second-wave victory of Title IX is no longer necessary, since the really good female players can play with the "guys" and the others will not want to play, anyway. In other words, both movies flatten out the complex and often disturbing patterns of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's plays to authorize a "postfeminist" view of society and to suggest that feminism is outdated, irrelevant, and even harmful.

In 10 Things I Hate About You, the 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Katherine the shrew becomes Kat, the strident teen feminist who learns how to relax her feminism, help her sister, and fall in love. More recently, in She's the Man,1 the 2006 adaptation of Twelfth Night, Viola becomes a tomboy who poses as her brother in order to try out for the boys' soccer team at his school, Illyria, and assert her right to play sports. Both movies invoke Shakespeare's cultural authority through character and place names and basic plot similarities, and both use feminism to suggest that they endorse the freedoms of modern girls to shape their own futures. As I will show, this is far from being the case. Rather, 10 Things and She's the Man should be read as postfeminist movies that advance a conservative view of gender and identity. More specifically, I argue that both movies exploit the generational divide between second and third-wave feminism in order to ridicule both forms of feminism and to suggest that feminism in general is outdated, irrelevant, and even harmful.

Postfeminism has come into general use as a term used to describe the world after feminism — sometimes in line with third-wave feminism, but more usually to imply that feminism is no longer necessary. As Angela McRobbie puts it, postfeminism describes the conservative backlash that "positively draws on and www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 1/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation invokes feminism . . . to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasize that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force" (2004, 255). Here, McRobbie highlights the postfeminist gesture as a kind of cultural shorthand that enables the death of feminism to be taken for granted. In 10 Things and in She's the Man, this postfeminist shorthand is used to stereotype second and third-wave feminisms: In 10 Things, older women are threatening or absent, and for younger women, feminism becomes a barrier to establishing close relationships with other people, especially romantically and within the family circle; in She's the Man, third-wave feminism, and specifically the movement towards "girl power," also drives its story of a girl who poses as her brother to prove that she can play soccer on the boys' team at an exclusive private school. But the film negates the second-wave achievement of Title IX by suggesting that only exceptional girls really want to play sports, and that kind of girl can find a place on boys' teams.

Media representations of feminism are starting to gain increasing attention from feminist analysts, who argue that we need to acknowledge the power of those representations and the ways in which they shape current perceptions of feminism.2 One of the most significant developments in the feminist movement in the last fifteen years — Rebecca Walker's declaration that "We are the third wave" in 1992 — has aroused considerable media attention, often in the context of hopeful inquiries such as that of Time magazine in 1998: "Is Feminism Dead?" In fact, many feminists are now arguing that the unreflecting distinction between generational waves of feminism primarily serves the interests of conservative postfeminists. For example, Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake have argued that to accept the binary opposition between second and third-wave feminists is to endorse conservative postfeminist arguments and to oversimplify grossly the complex and often contradictory relationships among different kinds of feminisms (Heywood and Drake 1997, 1-8), while the editors of the essay collection Third Wave Feminism note how "the third wave has been overly eager to define itself as something 'different' from previous feminisms" (Gillis, Howie, and Munford 2004, 2). While few current feminist writers completely reject "wave terminology" and continue to find distinctions between second and third-wave feminism useful, they also express concern about the extent to which that terminology perpetuates media stereotypes. As Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier put it, "This emphasis on intergenerational conflict has certainly captured the media's attention: Typically, the media describe one generation as the victim and the other as the perpetrator, with frequent role reversals, depending on the cultural climate. Though there's not denying that this makes a good story, it's really just the latest incarnation of the feminist catfight" (2003, 15).

KATFIGHTING I start here by examining the "Katfight" in 10 Things, a movie that has received much recent attention from film and literature critics,3 who in general agree that it tends towards a conservative view of gender and identity, although they do not pay the kind of detailed attention to wave terminology that I do. However, Michael D. Friedman dissents from this view, arguing in a recent article, "The Feminist as Shrew in 10 Things I Hate About You," that the film shows us a Kat who moves from second-wave feminism to third- wave, and that this move is progressive: "By my assessment, Kat evolves from a second-wave feminist, a follower of the old-school feminism of the 1970s, to a third-wave feminist, one who embraces the contradictions and personal empowerment fostered by the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s" (Friedman 2006, 46). Friedman's identification of second-wave feminism as "old-school," implicitly outdated and outworn, echoes "postfeminist" relegations of second-wavers to the dusty past, and his reliance on the movie's screenplay to prove the more rigorously third-wave feminist intentions of the screenwriters ignores the fact that the cultural influence of the movie rises out of what viewers actually saw — that is, the final product on the screen, not what the screenwriters originally wrote.

While I find his overall argument unconvincing, I do find Friedman's article significant because as far as I can tell, it is the first to introduce the wave terminology typical of public debates over feminism into an www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 2/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation analysis of 10 Things. But this movie is far more concerned with critiquing feminism than it is in making genuine distinctions among feminists with different concerns. Although 10 Things allows some space for considerations of sisterhood and female community, it nevertheless uses damaging stereotypes of both second and third-wave feminism to discredit and trivialize feminism in general. In my analysis of the movie, I examine Ms. Perky and Kat and Bianca's absent mother as figures who represent the damaging effects of second-wave feminism upon men and upon the girls and young women of the next generations and then show how the film's stereotypes of third-wave feminism fail to engage in any significant way with the issues of class, race, and sexuality that inform actual third-wave activism.

As Gillis, Howie, and Munford show, the "generational wave paradigm" overly stresses differences between the generations and also elides differences within generations, relying on a simplistic and distorting model based on birth date: "The historical narrative, underlying the generational account of stages of feminist theory and practice, overly simplifies the range of debates and arguments preceding the stipulated 'era,' and appears to be meshed in a sororal anxiety relating to inheritance" (Gillis, Howie, and Munford 2004, 4, 3). 10 Things exploits this "sororal anxiety" by representing older women as absent or potentially abusive and their legacy as one of highly problematic and outdated concerns with sex, independence, and workplace equality. In fact, there are no positive adult female role models in the movie. The only grown woman who appears is Ms. Perky, the guidance counselor who stocks her office bookcase with romance novels and who is more interested in writing her own (heterosexual) erotic romance novel than in providing guidance. Though the second-wave women's movement is, admittedly, more usually accused today of downplaying or erasing sex as a feminist issue, Jane Gerhard has shown how the "blending of sexual freedom, broadly defined, and women's liberation was the characteristic feature of second-wave feminism" (2001, 194). The emphasis on sexual freedom typical of early second-wave feminism aroused considerable anxiety about women's sexual behavior, and as Janice Radway points out, some of that anxiety focused on the increasing popularity of romance novels: "To a traditionally patriarchal culture, it appeared as threatening evidence of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s upon respectable women" (1999, 397).

Overly sexed and independent of male control, Ms. Perky also evokes "ball-busting" female characters such as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987), Isabelle de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct (1992), and Carolyn Burnham in American Beauty (1999). Like these characters, Ms. Perky is in control of her sexuality, yet frighteningly resistant to male restraint, and in 10 Things, she represents a threat to the healthy development of adolescents. Ms. Perky's obsession with erotica associates her with unrestrained sexuality and even goes so far as to suggest the possibility of her sexual predation on the students she is meant to be counseling. When Patrick is sent to her to be chastised for teasing the "lunch lady" with a bratwurst, pretending it is his penis, Ms. Perky looks suggestively at his crotch and says sarcastically, "Aren't we the optimist?" She sends him away briskly, but then sits down to her computer and writes in "bratwurst" instead of "member."

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Ms. Perky at Work While Ms. Perky controls the situation — she rejects Patrick's attempt at humor when he suggests that he enjoys "these little moments together," i.e., his frequent visits to her office to be disciplined for bad behavior — her control is sexualized by exchanges such as the above. Since this conversation with Patrick — a student — suggests the substitution of words in Ms. Perky's erotica, the film implies her inappropriate sexual interest in the attractive male teenagers with whom she works.

Moreover, Ms. Perky's interest in romance and sex inspires disdain in Kat, who is able to supply her with further metaphors for penile erection, but who clearly despises Ms. Perky's lack of intellectual depth. Although Richard Burt identifies Kat's friend Mandella and Bianca's friend Chastity as "bifurcated" aspects of the Widow in Shrew (Burt 2002, 212), I believe that Ms. Perky takes on this role. Like the Widow, whose rudeness to Katherine is blatant,4 Ms. Perky brusquely calls Kat a bitch to her face and suggests that she needs to modify her behavior. Also like the Widow, Ms. Perky is "lusty," or lustful (4.2.50) and is not submissive to male authority. In early modern society, widows were often depicted as frightening women whose sexual instincts had been awakened but contained during their marriage, but who were now free to indulge their desires at will. Jennifer Panek has argued that the figure of the lusty widow actually assuaged male anxieties, since she could be assigned the "feminized" sexual passion that was "dangerously demeaning when aroused in men" (2004, 82). The excessive, uncontrollable female sexual passion associated with widows in the early modern period is associated in 10 Things with Ms. Perky through the feminized, erotic romance novel genre, precisely as a means of deflating and mocking the threat aroused by second-wave assertions of sexual freedom for women.

ABSENT MOTHERS, FRIGHTENED FATHERS The only other significant adult female role in 10 Things is that of the absent wife and mother, who left Kat and Bianca's father at some point prior to the film's beginning, who has no role or evident interest in her daughters' lives, and who, by her absence, stands for that most negative of female stereotypes, the "bad www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 4/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation mother." Both Shrew and 10 Things feature absent mothers and domineering fathers. In Shrew, the mother is gone, presumably dead, and while Katherine and Bianca's father Baptista acts affectionately to Bianca, he regards Katherine with resignation, tempered by the desire to get her off his hands as soon as possible. His desire to marry off Katherine leads him to keep Bianca imprisoned within his house until the older sister is married,5 a tactic Dr. Stratford employs for a rather different purpose in 10 Things.

The OBGYN as Father As an ob-gyn specialist, Stratford claims to "be up to my elbows in placenta" delivering the babies of what Bianca, in a highly class-inflected moment, calls "crack whores." However, though Stratford's response to his position as single father is to restrict closely the social lives of his daughters for fear they might become pregnant, his desire to control his daughters is represented in the film as a sincere, albeit extreme, concern for their well-being. Given the difficulties single mothers face, it hardly seems unreasonable to want one's teenage daughters to avoid pregnancy. Stratford's intentions are not mercenary or malicious, and the absence of his divorced wife implies that he is merely overcompensating for the lack of trust in responsible female behavior with which his wife's departure left him.

Through its sympathetic portrayal of Stratford, the film suggests that he has been victimized by the effects of second-wave feminism, which has implicitly made divorce more prevalent and has undermined his ability to control his own life, even ruining his job. He acts as an abandoned husband doing his best to care for unruly daughters and to protect them from a world in which unrestricted female sexual freedom leads to pain and unwanted pregnancies. One could also trace the conservative anxiety about feminism and the canon here through Stratford as a stand-in for the patriarchal authority of Shakespeare himself. A common complaint from conservative "protectors" of the canon is that if schools start to include works from women and people of color, there will be no room for Shakespeare. Stratford's victimization by the after- effects of feminist empowerment suggests that the same could happen to Shakespeare. Just as Courtney Lehmann notes with regard to the 1999 film William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, 10 Things reminds us that not only are women hurt by feminism's false promises of "having it all," but also "that the true victims of . . . feminism, are not today's women, but rather today's men" (Lehmann 2002, 6). www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 5/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation What Stratford does not know is that Kat has already had sexual intercourse one time, with the boy now pursuing Bianca — the arrogant Joey Donner. The bedroom scene in which Kat reveals this secret to Bianca is crucial to any feminist account of 10 Things. It is also the only scene in which the two sisters are alone together. Bianca is cross because she can only go to the prom if Kat goes, and Kat refuses to go. Bianca lies moodily on her bed, watching The Real World on TV — a none-too-subtle indication of her frustration of being shut out of the "real world" of dating and heterosexual relationships. Kat knocks on the door, entering at Bianca's "come in." Finding its music a distraction, Kat shuts off the TV, a significant departure from the standard teen-movie template, which usually relies on music quite heavily in order to cue an emotional response.6 In contrast, this scene is played with no music whatsoever, suggesting the seriousness of what Kat has to tell Bianca — that she had sex with Joey in ninth grade.

Kat finally tells Bianca what happened by saying, "Joey never told you we went out, did he?" Bianca reacts to this incredulously, as well she should, since Kat obviously despises Joey. Kat says, "In ninth — for a month." Though Kat can't bring herself to say they had sex, her sidelong, uncomfortable glance makes what happened clear to Bianca. Significantly, Kat places this event as occurring "right after Mom left. Everyone was doing it — so I did it. After, I decided I wasn't ready . . . he got mad and dumped me." When Bianca asks Kat why she didn't tell her about this, Kat says, "I wanted you to make up your own mind about him." Bianca says, "Then why did you help Daddy hold me hostage?" Kat replies, "I guess I thought I was protecting you." Bianca's justifiably angry answer is, "By not letting me experience anything for myself?" This scene is unlike anything in Shakespeare's play, which, if anything, establishes an acute dislike between Katherine and Bianca. The one scene in Shrew where Katherine and Bianca are alone together shows Bianca submissive to her older sister's demand that she tell which man she likes best. Katherine, however, does not believe Bianca's statement that "of all the men alive, / I never yet beheld that special face / Which I could fancy more than any other" (2.1.10-12) and hits her. It is a very short incident, but hardly implies affection between the two sisters. Bianca will promise anything to get Katherine off her back, and Katherine is bitterly jealous of Bianca and of Baptista's affection for her younger sister.

In the film, however, Kat seems to really care for Bianca and to be worried about her welfare. For example, Kat chooses to attend Bogey Lowenstein's party because she wants to please Bianca, and she gets drunk because she cannot seem to prevent Bianca from succumbing to Joey's advances. Instead, it is Bianca who distrusts Kat. Kat's worry has made her buy into the patriarchal system of silent control; as Burt points out, instead of giving Bianca the information she needs to make a rational judgment, she has cooperated with their father's attempt to keep Bianca in ignorance (2002, 215). Bianca's hostility towards Kat comes largely from this cooperation — what Bianca wants is guidance, not isolation. The root of the sisters' problems appears to be their lack of a mother, a lack that also characterizes Shrew. In 10 Things, however, the lack of a mother is played out differently. Far from acting as a role model — a woman who has accepted her own role in the patriarchal order leading her daughters through the process of growing up — Kat and Bianca's mother has abandoned them, and, partly because of this, Kat has had sex too early and with the wrong person. Though Kat has decided to stop sleeping with Joey, asserting her right to choose how and when to have sex (a central focus of both second and third-wave feminism), that choice has led to her bitterness and alienation from everyone around her, a change from her prior popularity that Bianca, in an earlier scene, describes as an "unsolved mystery."

The film's brief suggestions of Kat and Bianca's negative maternal heritage strongly suggest that Kat needs to commit what Astrid Henry, drawing on second-wave feminist Phyllis Chesler's Letters to a Young Feminist , calls "psychological matricide" — a matricide that allows third-wave feminists to disavow their connections to second-wave feminism and "ensures that we listen to our peers, not our mothers" (Henry 2004, 10). In Henry's analysis, this psychological matricide is a complex and contradictory force that enables third-wave feminists both to identify themselves as daughters, and, paradoxically, to resist that identification as they reject the second-wave feminist mother. In the film, this dynamic plays out in a far more simplified form. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 6/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation As long as Kat adheres to second-wave feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, the film suggests, she will be unable to form close relationships with her peers and, most importantly, with her sister, because she will be identifying with her mother's generation of feminists. Kat needs to sever her attachment to the maternal and accept patriarchal standards of behavior, which will then enable her to relate to her peers and, especially, her sister.

Where Henry invokes "psychological matricide" to help explain how third-wave feminists often set themselves in opposition to second-wave feminists, even as they rely on the principles and advances made by those feminists, the film frames Kat's choices as far more limited. Kat must symbolically kill the mother, but instead of portraying third-wave feminism as a viable alternative to second-wave feminism, the film eliminates this option by depicting second-wave feminism as largely middle-class and obsessed with style, not substance. Heywood and Drake point out that third-wave feminists "grew up with equity feminism, got gender feminism in college, along with poststructuralism, and are now hard at work on a feminism that strategically combines elements of these feminisms, along with black feminism, women-of-color feminism, working-class feminism, pro-sex feminism, and so on" (1997, 3). These multiple strands of feminist activism never appear in 10 Things as serious preoccupations, and certainly not as issues of which Kat takes much notice. The English teacher Mr. Morgan points out this limitation when Kat suggests that their English courses expand to include such female writers as de Beauvoir and Charlotte Bronte, sarcastically telling Kat, "The next time you white girls meet to complain about the lunch meat, or whatever . . . ask why the school can't buy a book by a black man!"

Ask why the school can't buy a book by a black man! But far from suggesting that Kat devote some time to studying, for example, bell hooks, Mr. Morgan marginalizes women of color and suggests that women's rights are trivial compared to racial prejudice, as if the two were somehow opposed; if you work towards one, you can't work towards the other. His words suggest, in fact, that all men need equality before women's issues can be addressed, a point emphasized by two of the male, "wanna be" white Rasta students, who, as one of the main characters says, "think they're black." The "Rastas" rise up to support Mr. Morgan by cheering, whereupon the teacher says, "Don't get www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 7/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation me started on you two!" Like the white "Rastas" and their adoption of a disempowered identity for which they are ludicrously unsuited, Kat's feminism appears as an oppositional identity without any grounding in her actual status as a privileged white woman from the upper middle classes.

Likewise, Kat's parroting of Marxist jargon merely earns her Bianca's and her friend Chastity's mocking takeover of her lines as they finish her critique of Bogey Lowenstein's party as an excuse for teens to drink and have sex to distract themselves from their "meaningless, consumer-driven lives." Kat's only response to the mockery of the younger girls is a mock-grin and a "hah," suggesting that in fact she has no adequate response because she is merely rattling off phrases she has learned by rote. As Melissa J. Jones notes, Bianca's "mockery suggests that such ideological criticism is predictable, empty, and quite frankly, boring" (2004, 142), a suggestion reinforced by the setting and camera position. In a medium shot, Kat is confined between her father on one side and Chastity and Bianca on the other in a hallway that is, like the rest of her home, expensively decorated and clearly reflects upper-middle class status.

Kat Confined Such surroundings only intensify the silliness of her words and her lack of any complex understanding of Marxist theory.

Kat's politics seem flimsy and outdated, and more seriously, they isolate her from everyone else. Kat has only one friend, Mandella, who considers herself to be romantically "involved" with Shakespeare, and who is also white, heterosexual, and, apparently, upper-middle class. Mandella does not entirely agree with Kat's feminism and does not accompany Kat to the supposed Riot Grrrl show at Club Skunk, the film's most self-conscious reference to third-wave "girl power" feminism. She would like to go to the prom, and when Kat says that by staying home they are making a statement, Mandella mockingly retorts, "Oh, goody! Something new and different for us." Mandella's romantic desire for Shakespeare certainly makes her rather odd — she even has his picture up in her locker — but she still conforms to traditional ideals of female identity that the movie associates with Shakespeare's cultural authority. Her relationship with the geeky, but self-confident, Michael begins and grows because he is able to quote Shakespeare to her, and she can www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 8/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation respond. His invitation to the prom is signed "William S." Michael not only dresses in Elizabethan doublet and hose himself, but he also includes a "Renaissance" gown with the invitation, and Mandella is delighted with this dictation of her sartorial choices. A rather marginal character, Mandella appears more frequently as Michael's love interest than as Kat's friend or as a feminist herself. In fact, Mandella, who accepts Shakespeare as the authority on love, correspondingly rejects Kat's feminism as far too radical a mode of being.

". . . GIRLS WHO CAN'T PLAY THEIR INSTRUMENTS" Kat's isolation presents a curious contrast to second and third-wave feminism's emphasis on community, especially in the context of a film designed to appeal to young women. Feminists such as Meenakshi Gigi Durham stress the shared experience of girlhood as a space in which resistance to patriarchal and sexist portrayals of adolescent girls may take root (Durham 1999, 216). 10 Things, however, gives Kat no such shared space. For example, one of the few moments in which Kat appears among other young women is when she goes to Club Skunk to see a Riot Grrrl show. However, the band playing is also the band most frequently seen and heard in the film, Letters to Cleo (http://letterstocleo.net/), which hardly qualifies as the "angry girl music" cited as typical of Kat's tastes. Certainly, this is a band with a prominent female lead singer, but the rest of the band — the ones who actually play the instruments — are male. Letters to Cleo — a band that, earlier in the 1990s, had appeared on the popular show "Beverly Hills, 90210" to play at the Peach Pit (not quite a Riot Grrrl credential) — fits into the far more culturally acceptable category of male bands with a charismatic female singer exemplified by 10,000 Maniacs, the Cranberries, Garbage, and No Doubt (to name but a few).7

The band's unthreatening image is matched by the women in the club, the vast majority of whom are white, middle-class, thin, and, by and large, well-dressed in body-revealing and fashionable, not Riot Grrrl punk, clothes. Though Kat usually appears at school in pants and a tight shirt, here she is wearing a tube top and skirt with a bead necklace, a very feminine look that strongly resembles her more formal outfit for the prom later in the movie.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 9/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation The Prom Kat speaks only briefly to the woman dancing next to her, and the only other person she interacts with is Patrick, who, by a casual reference to Bikini Kill (http://www.tigerbomb.net/pages/bkpages/bikintro.html) and the Raincoats (http://www.comnet.ca/~rina/raincoats.html) (a Riot Grrrl band and early punk band, respectively) grabs Kat's attention sufficiently that she follows him through the club. When he clumsily remarks that "I was watching you up there [dancing] before. I've never seen you look so sexy" as the music stops — arousing considerable laughter — Kat laughs too, but also seems quite flattered. Because the focus here is definitely on the evolution of Kat's relationship to Patrick, third-wave Riot Grrrl feminism is invoked only superficially and without connecting Kat in any significant way to its principles or its activism. Instead, Patrick's Riot Grrrl references enable Kat to relax her "feminazi" pose long enough to start falling for him.

Because Kat never engages with other feminists and because the film so frequently conveys her feminism through musical references that water down actual Riot Grrrl punk performances, Kat's feminism seems purely a matter of style, and thus typical of the stereotype of the publicity-obsessed third-wave feminist promoted by the media, often with the support of second-wave feminists. As I mentioned earlier, one famous example of this kind of skepticism was the 1998 Time issue of June 29, which featured the cover headline "Is Feminism Dead?" and included an article by Gina Bellafante that mocked "girl power" feminism as "that sassy, don't-mess-with-me adolescent spirit that Madison Avenue carefully caters to" (1998). In the same issue, Nadya Labi argued that "The bustier-busting sloganeering" typical of bands like the Spice Girls "is the touchstone for much of what passes for commercial feminism nowadays, especially the kind marketed to the demographic group the Spices are proudly empowering: preteen and teenage girls. Or 'grrrls,' as that tiresome battle growl goes" (1998). While aspects of these critiques have some merit — certainly, "girl power" as represented by the Spice Girls seemed more centered on clothes and makeup than on issues of equality and power — Bellafante and Labi seem to regard all third-wave feminism as marred by frivolity and superficiality. As Sarah Curtis-Fawley noted in her response to these articles, what is missing from Time's issue on feminism "is any attempt to analyze what real women think about feminist values and politics" (1998) or any indication that there might be a gap between the ways in which feminism is being represented and the ways in which actual feminists represent themselves. Instead, the Time articles are typical of the media's exploitation of second-wave resentment against third-wave feminists who seem to have rejected them. Though these resentments do have some grounds in reality, Time uses them to, as Jennifer L. Pozner writes, "erase real feminists from the picture" (2003, 34) and to represent feminism as a movement that has lost its purpose, energy, and will to live.

This absence of real feminist concerns is also typical of 10 Things and its portrayal of Kat as, supposedly, a "girl power" feminist. For example, the opening scene of the movie uses music to set up Kat's identity as an angry feminist, but avoids any indication of actual social issues that might be important to that feminism. This scene is set to the tune of "One Week (http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/barenaked+ladies/one+week_20013398.html)" by the all-male band Barenaked Ladies (http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/barenaked+ladies/one+week_20013398.html) — a song in which two lovers fight but, at the end, admit they were wrong and say, "I'm sorry." The song thus signals the plot of the film to come and, while the whole song does not play out in this sequence, it was a Top Ten hit in the summer of 1998, when the movie was being produced, and its basic theme would have been well- known to the audience of the film. As the camera pans across the Seattle skyline, it comes to rest by locating the source of the music in a very new and shiny convertible car with four teenage girls, two with ponytails and all wearing feminine tops, fairly heavy makeup, and jewelry, bopping along to the song and united in their enjoyment of Barenaked Ladies — a band whose name obviously draws attention to the ways in which women are subjected to male observation. As their car waits at a pedestrian crossing, suddenly "One Week" is drowned out by Joan Jett (http://www.joanjett.com/)'s "Bad Reputation www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 10/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/joan+jett+and+the+blackhearts/bad+reputation_20072312.html)." The camera pans left to discover the source — a rival, much more battered car, driven by Kat, alone, who looks over at the four girls with disdain and takes off the minute the street is clear.8 In contrast to the girls, Kat listens alone to the tough female Joan Jett, an introduction that implies an adversarial, lonely feminism for Kat that is isolating her from healthy relationships with other people, while the more conventionally feminine behaviors of the girls are portrayed as more fun and more likely to encourage healthy interpersonal relationships.

Music also signifies Kat's attitude as the movie ends, but that attitude is no longer the "bad" one signaled by Joan Jett. Kat has realized that she really cares for Patrick, in spite of his mercenary, but temporary, collusion with Joey to get her to date. As the movie nears its ending, Kat comes out of school to find the guitar she has longed for in her car, and Patrick turns up to apologize for taking Joey's money.

The Guitar The perceptive viewer realizes that Patrick has used Joey's last payoff to buy the guitar, which in an earlier scene Kat has handled at the guitar shop. This earlier scene is the only scene in which she actually plays, but rather than belting out a Riot Grrrl or Joan Jett song, she simply fingers a few chords, unaware that Patrick is watching her from behind. The non-diegetic music the audience hears is a plaintive, piano-based love song called "The Weakness in Me," sung by Joan Armatrading (http://www.joanarmatrading.com/), rather than Kat's own playing. The romantic music indicates the scene's importance not in terms of Kat's empowerment through music, but rather in terms of the development of Kat and Patrick's relationship. Significantly, Kat does not hold the guitar standing, in the traditional male rock star pose; instead, she plays it sitting down, very hesitantly, in sharp contrast to the macho posing of male guitar players such as Jimmie Page or even Joan Jett herself. Such playing hardly accords with Riot Grrrl feminist Melanie Klein's description of women playing guitar as "thrilling," as a vision of "a strong woman with a power tool waiting to be bent to her will" (1997, 215). Though Friedman argues that Kat's acceptance of the guitar signals her embrace of third-wave feminism (2006, 58), I see that acceptance as far more problematic. We never do see Kat forming her own girl band, or making any serious plans to do so. Furthermore, though Kat comes www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 11/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation from an upper-middle-class family and appears to have no money problems whatsoever, Kat does not buy the guitar herself — it comes as a gift that enables her entry into the traditional heterosexual romance.

As a symbol of her new relationship with Patrick, the guitar continues Kat's inscription within the confines of heteronormative economic control, as indicated by Stratford's post-prom decision to allow Kat to attend Sarah Lawrence College, a progressive private college that was once female-only. Sarah Lawrence is also one of the most expensive colleges in the country, and thus is economically out of reach for all but the rich and those who qualify for financial aid — and, given her father's income, Kat is clearly not a possible candidate for the last condition. At the beginning of the movie, Kat is excited to be accepted to Sarah Lawrence, but her father balks, wanting to keep her close by him and under his control. After the prom, when Kat's increased closeness to Bianca indicates her newer, gentler persona, Stratford tells her that he has sent a deposit check to Sarah Lawrence and Kat, overcome, hugs him. However, athough her father's change of mind indicates his greater trust of her, it also emphasizes that Kat must rely completely on his financial support. There is never any suggestion that Kat might take a job and earn her way through school, or alternately, declare financial independence from her father in order to qualify for financial aid. The movie's conservatism demands that Kat wait to have her desires for music and for college validated by males, and economic independence — an issue centrally important to both second and third-wave feminisms — is ignored.

Though Kat and Bianca finally talk and form sisterly bonds that enable Bianca to attack Joey violently at the prom in retaliation for his schemes, female closeness is validated only within conventional standards of female behavior. Family bonds are naturalized as the ones that should take priority, and sisterhood extends not outwards but, rather, inwards, towards blood sisters rather than towards a sisterhood of all women. The heterosexual romance is the only viable alternative to family life depicted in the film. Though Kat will ostensibly leave for Sarah Lawrence (http://www.slc.edu/index.php), the movie's final shot of her and Patrick kissing leaves them in the romantic moment, reinforced by the camera's sweep up to the roof of the school, where Letters to Cleo are playing the Cheap Trick song, "I Want You to Want Me." The logic of romantic comedy is used to subvert the possibilities of third-wave feminism, as well as to silence Kat altogether. When Patrick gives her the guitar, Kat, pleased, still puts up a little resistance to the happy ending, saying, "You can't just buy me a guitar every time you mess up." Patrick says, "I know. But there's always drums, the bass, and maybe even someday a tambourine." He kisses her, and she says, "And don't just think you can . . ." — but he kisses her again, stifling Kat's protests. The "happy ending" is thus defined as the moment when Kat — like Katherine in Shrew — is finally silenced by her firm placement as the "femininely" passive member of a heterosexual relationship. In contrast, in the play Petruchio says, "Come on, and kiss me, Kate" (5.2.179-80), thus giving Katherine the opportunity to perform her own action. Patrick, on the other hand, makes no invitation. He just goes ahead and kisses Kat, who becomes the passive recipient of Patrick's affection; and as the music swells up and takes over, we hear "I want you to want me, / I need you to need me, / I'd love you to love me, / I'm beggin' you to beg me . . ." — reinforcing the traditional romantic comedy message that any woman who says she doesn't need a man is fooling herself. As it depicts feminism as an artificial and damaging ideology that prevents women from engaging in truly fulfilling relationships, 10 Things also suggests that women need to acknowledge their own desires for men before they can become mature, adult individuals in a postfeminist world.

"GIRLS CAN'T BEAT BOYS" Like 10 Things, She's the Man deploys Shakespeare's cultural capital to validate its essentialist views of gender and sexuality and to promote a conservative view of class and education through a canonical text, in this case Twelfth Night — a play in which, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, "The transforming power of costume unsettles fixed categories of gender and social class . . . In Twelfth Night, conventional expectations repeatedly give way to a different way of perceiving the world" (1997, 1762). However, although She's the www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 12/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Man employs the cross-dressing plot of Twelfth Night, it carefully reinforces "conventional expectations" about gender and sexuality by constantly reminding us that Viola is in fact female, through flaws in her performance of masculinity and through scenes in which she is dressed as a properly feminine girl. Furthermore, the movie's use of upper-class markers of privilege, such as private boarding schools, debutante balls, cars for the students, and enormous houses, naturalizes those privileges even more than 10 Things does.

She's the Man portrays Viola as the exceptional female who proves her ability to play with boys' team, implicitly suggesting that Title IX's landmark assertion of girls' rights to play sports is irrelevant to contemporary girls. Viola is the only girl who manages to circumvent her school's cutting of the girls' soccer team, and her solution — to disguise herself as her brother Sebastian so that she can try out for his school's boys' team — isolates her as the exceptional female who can play with the boys, yet never lose her femininity or her attractiveness to males. Though Viola — like Kat, who also plays soccer — can be regarded as a kind of third-wave, girl-power feminist who combines athleticism and tomboyishness with makeup and romantic relationships, in fact the movie repeats 10 Things's split between second and third- wave feminism by deprecating the second-wave achievement of Title IX and reducing third-wave feminism to a single girl who displays only the most superficial signs of that feminism. Viola's dilemma is recast one not of survival, as in Twelfth Night, but rather as asserting her right to play soccer with the boys. More significantly, the blame for this dilemma rests with the girls of her school (Cornwall Academy), not enough of whom have signed up to play soccer to constitute a team. By assigning the blame for this problem to the girls themselves, who apparently do not appreciate the advantages granted them by Title IX, the focus on the split between second and third-wave feminism so central to 10 Things is used here to endorse the stereotype of third-wavers as frivolous girls and simultaneously suggest that the concerns of second-wave feminism are irrelevant to today's young women.

Like 10 Things, She's the Man restricts the primary adult female characters to one — Viola's mother — who is, however, no feminist, but rather a silly, upper-middle-class socialite. She is no Ms. Perky either, despite one brief moment of lust for Viola's ex-boyfriend, and in fact She's the Man avoids embodying second-wave feminist stereotypes in any specific character. However, the film does critique second-wave feminism through the specter of Title IX, the 1972 legislation that ensured equal support for male and female sports and academic activities in both public and private schools. Title IX was and is a major second-wave feminist triumph, and was one particular advance that allowed third-wave feminists to feel that they grew up with many opportunities that their mothers lacked. However, it has been much attacked by those who assert that it discriminates against male athletes and that it weakens all sports for both men and women. Title IX's status as the basis for non-discriminatory practices in educational athletics received a blow in 2005, when the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the Department of Education released a statement that purported to clarify Title IX's provisions. Assuring schools that they may use surveys to determine student interest in athletic participation, the statement argues that "results that show insufficient interest to support an additional varsity team for the underrepresented sex will create a compliance with part three of the three-part test [to ascertain a school's adherence to Title IX requirements] and the Title IX regulatory requirement to provide nondiscriminatory athletic participation opportunities" ("Additional Clarification" 2005). In other words, lack of interest, as defined by a survey, would justify cutting girls' and women's teams and allow the school to avoid being censured under Title IX, an interpretation that has justifiably earned criticism from advocates of women's rights (http://www.savetitleix.com/).

She's the Man begins as Viola learns that her high school girls' soccer team has been cut because not enough girls signed up. Horrified, the girls who want to play soccer confront the boys' coach, who is mildly sympathetic and tells them, "If there's anything I can do, just say the word." But when Viola suggests that she and her teammates try out for the boys' soccer team — a right that is, in fact, guaranteed them under

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 13/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the provisions of Title IX (Women's Sports Foundation) — the coach and the members of the boys' team laugh incredulously, and the coach slips into near-rhyme: It isn't me talking, It's scientific fact, Girls can't beat boys, It's as simple as that. When Viola reminds her boyfriend — the star of the boys' soccer team — that he has previously praised her as a better player than half the boys on his team, he chooses to lie rather than break solidarity with the other boys. The incident portrays males as smugly certain of their physical superiority as backed up by "scientific fact," yet also as threatened by athletic females.

Although if the girls had researched their legal rights at all, they would have had stronger grounds for their protest, there is a definite feminist element to this early scene, one that has considerable potential for a girl- power strategy. By grouping the girls tightly around the figure of the coach — who, as we see from a medium long shot, is actually watching the boys' team practice, while the girls are watching him — the scene suggests a female solidarity that empowers these girls to demand the right to play soccer.

The Girls Defend Their right to Play While Viola has most of the lines in the scene, she does not have all of them, and the girls seem to be united in their friendship and their athleticism, a unity reinforced when Viola breaks up with her boyfriend for his attempt to dominate her. The camera leads us to identify with the girls, and especially with Viola, who gets several close-ups, as opposed to the boys, who get only medium shots, and the coach, whose only close-up is in profile and clearly intended to show his arrogance, as he laughs off Viola's request to be allowed to try out for the boys' team.

So far, so feminist, more or less. But the scene's portrayal of a female solidarity opposed to male insensitivity and discrimination does not last long. Viola counts on the help of three friends to support her impersonation of her brother — two fellow girl soccer players, and one apparently gay male hairdresser, Paul. But the primary ways in which she "proves" her maleness draw uncritically upon the most stereotypical aspects of American masculinity, ranging from groping her crotch to using an excruciatingly awkward form of hypermasculine slang — "What up?," "You know it bro,'" and, addressed to a woman in a bar, "Foxy momma" — to asserting her sexual potency through the display of what appear to be former www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 14/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation girlfriends, dressed in tight revealing clothes and in sexy high heels, in front of her male teammates at a local restaurant.

Hypermasculine Viola Viola's "girlfriends" are in fact her soccer friends, and all of them are being coached in their performances by Paul. But in spite of these faint elements of solidarity, the scene not only defines masculine behavior as aggressive, rude, and sexually harassing, but it also naturalizes that behavior as an essential part of what being male is all about. As the climax to the parade of "girlfriends," who have been patronized and slapped on the butt, Sebastian's actual girlfriend Monique shows up and thinks that Viola is in fact Sebastian. Monique has already been established as an insensitive bitch who is relentlessly pursuing Sebastian, and by humiliating her in front of the entire restaurant (Viola proclaims that "When my eyes are closed I see you for what you truly are — which is uuugly!"), Viola earns the applause and approval of her teammates, who include her own love interest, Duke. After this "taming" of the unruly woman, the males now address her as "man," and Duke tells her, "You're officially my idol now, man." After their assistance at the restaurant, Viola's friends reappear in a helpful way only once more, at the carnival, where they help Viola escape Monique's attentions. Thus, although Viola's success as a male impersonator does rely significantly on her friends' support, the movie restricts the implications of such support by its increasing focus on Viola's growing love for Duke and the complications that ensue once Sebastian returns from London and turns up at Illyria.

The name of the restaurant — Cesario's — in fact calls attention to a significant difference between 10 Things and Twelfth Night. Cesario is the pseudonym Viola uses in the play, because she does not pretend to be her brother but rather invents a new persona for herself as a "eunuch" who can sing to the duke: ". . . for I can sing, / And speak to him in many sorts of music / That will allow me very worth his service" (1.2.53-55). In She's the Man, Viola is more constrained than Shakespeare's Viola. She has to use her brother's identity because this is the only way she will be accepted at Illyria as a possible soccer player, and her performance of "Sebastian" is marked by a hypersexual masculinity that is far removed from Shakespeare's Viola's construction of an androgynous persona that draws on both masculine and feminine gender stereotypes. This is all the more noticeable since the film's real Sebastian is actually a rather nuanced character, one who prefers rock music to sports and who writes sensitive song lyrics. Audiences are clearly meant to ponder the irony: The girl acts like a boy! The boy acts like a girl! However, Sebastian's rare appearances do not seriously disturb the film's essentialist view of gender, especially since his "sensitivity," which appears only on the paper on which his lyrics are written, does not prevent him from dropping his www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 15/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation trousers to prove his maleness at the climactic soccer game, an act that thrills the girls and makes his father say, "That's my boy!"

SHE'S THE WOMAN The movie avoids the potentially subversive implications of Viola's male impersonation by reminding us over and over that she is, in fact, female. Though Viola's act as "Sebastian" apparently fools everyone she meets, it is actually so inadequate that a charitable viewer can only assume that all the people around her are supposed to be blinded by their assumptions that no girl could act such a role. As Sebastian, Viola speaks in an inconsistently deeper voice that frequently shoots up the register towards a more "girly" high voice; displays inappropriately "feminine" sensitivity to feelings and injury; and seems oddly fashion-conscious, as when she notices Olivia's shoes and is surprised and pleased to hear that Olivia "got them at Anthropologie." While in real life these traits are hardly incompatible with maleness, in the world of the film they are clearly intended to remind viewers that Viola is only acting a role. These slippages in Viola's impersonation reinforce the film's conservative belief in essential gender roles; Viola may act tomboyishly at times, even when she is not in character, but she is so fundamentally a girl that she cannot maintain the "Sebastian" act consistently. More significantly, by interposing scenes of Viola's debutante activities with "Sebastian's" more masculine activities, the movie rarely goes more than one or two scenes without presenting Viola as a feminine, nubile, and desirable young woman. Her body-obscuring boy's clothes are regularly displaced by body-revealing dresses, and her short-hair wig comes off to remind viewers that, in fact, she has reassuringly feminine long hair — like Kat, in fact, who has long wavy blond hair that tends to be tightly tied back, but that is more loosely arranged in her more "feminine" scenes at Club Skunk and at the prom.

The Prom

Even in Viola's triumphant debut as a girl player on the boys' team, the film reminds us that she is still not quite one of the boys. After winning acceptance as a "man's man," Viola is able to earn a place on the first- string boys' varsity team, but only because she has been coached by Duke. The team's coach, played by the English former professional soccer player Vinnie Jones, routinely addresses his team demeaningly as "ladies," intimidating them with his special brand of "hard man" masculinity.9 Viola's performance as her brother is dramatically unmasked at the game between her school (Cornwall) and her brother's school (Illyria), but the coach, rather against character, tears up the rule book that forbids girls to play on boys' www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 16/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation teams and declares, "We don't discriminate based on gender!" However, though she plays a central role in the game, Viola makes no goals. Instead, she assists Duke to one goal and, through a slightly miscalculated foul shot, enables him to make the game-winning goal, as well. She may be good, but even within this team sport Viola supports the more effective male player, rather than becoming a star herself.

Between the game and the final shot, Viola makes her debut at the Stratford Country Club ball — no class- mixing prom for this movie. Dramatically late, Viola finally appears in the spotlight with Duke, dressed in a light green gown that reveals her figure extremely well, especially her cleavage. Once again, we are reminded that Viola is really female, a fact that Duke underscores right before the ball when he tells her, "Everything would be a whole lot easier if you just stayed a girl!" Viola says "I promise." The fluidity of gender so marked in Twelfth Night — in which Viola is never out of her boy's clothes — is firmly tamped down here in a strictly conventional and upper-middle class vision of female adulthood as sexually attractive, privileged, and heterosexual. This vision dissolves into the movie's final shot — Viola playing with the boys as a girl, her long hair flying — a filmic technique that suggests she may be able to move between her tomboy athleticism and her more conventionally feminine identity with ease. However, the final shot also suggests a vision of girls' athletics in which separate teams — and, implicitly, Title IX — will be unnecessary, as the best female players will rise to the top and be able to compete with even the toughest males. Such a vision, of course, endorses an individualistic, male-dominated hierarchy and relies on the antifeminist dismissal of sisterhood and its insistence that women must compete on men's terms and rely on themselves in order to succeed.

For both 10 Things and She's the Man, Shakespeare's plays are sources for romantic narratives that simplify the plays' far more complex and disturbing representations of gender, sexuality, and class into apparent celebrations of "girl power" and the opportunities today's girls enjoy for personal fulfillment. In the process, they also employ media stereotypes of second and third-wave feminism, playing one against the other to support essentialist views of gender and identity, and to suggest that late 1990s and early 2000s America is, indeed, a postfeminist society. In these fantasies of upper-middle-class American education, the principles and victories of second-wave feminism are portrayed as irrelevant to the current generation of girls; and third-wave feminism is reduced to being able to play with the boys while also remaining attractively girlish enough to guarantee romantic male attention. Given the influence films have in helping to shape teenage female identity, these representations of feminism deserve close attention, especially when they so clearly demonstrate how much the pinnacle of achievement in our society remains to be "the man." 10 Things and She's the Man, released seven years apart from one another, show graphically how Shakespeare's work continues to be invoked as the basis for conservative critiques of feminism that oversimplify feminist debates and market the movement as, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, harmful for teenage girls.

NOTES 1. She's the Man was written by the same screenwriting team as 10 Things, but has a different director and was produced from a different studio. 2. Two examples I have in mind are Jennifer L. Pozner's article "'The 'Big Lie': False Feminist Death Syndrome, Profit, and the Media" (2003) and Ednie Kaeh Garrison's article "Contests for the Meaning of Third Wave Feminism: Feminism and Popular Consciousness" (2004).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 17/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3. These critics include Richard Burt, in "Afterword: Te(en) Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High" (2002); Melissa J. Jones, in "'An Aweful Rule': Safe Schools, Hard Canons, and Shakespeare's Loose Heirs" (2004); Janet Badia, in "'One of Those People Like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath': The Pathologized Woman Reader in Literary and Popular Culture" (2005); Alexander Leggatt, "Teen Shakespeare: 10 Things I Hate About You and O" (2006); Monique L. Pittman, "Taming 10 Things I Hate About You: Shakespeare and the Teenage Film Audience" (2006); and Sarah Hentges, in her 2006 book Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film. 4. In act 5, scene 2, the Widow tells Katherine that "Your husband, being troubled with a shrew, / Measures my husband's sorrow by his woe. / And now you know my meaning" (29-31). 5. See act 1, scene 1. 6. In this respect, 10 Things resembles what the college students I teach seem to regard as the teen movie, John Hughes's The Breakfast Club (1985). That movie's scene of mutual confession and comfort is one of the few scenes in the film that is played with no music at all. 7. Even Joan Jett and the Blackhearts fits the template of a male band with a female singer; however, Joan Jett plays guitar and cultivates a tough-girl image more like that of the Riot Girrl bands. 8. Kat's action recalls the decidedly masculine drag-racing typical of other teen movies. As one who grew up in the eighties, my point of reference here is Grease (1978), where women cheer on the men, who always race the cars. A more recent update of drag-racing is the 2001 movie, The Fast and the Furious and its sequels, marketed with exactly this kind of macho auto combat. 9. In his soccer career, Jones displayed exceptional brutality and earned red and yellow cards for fouls with great frequency. Jones has translated his image as a tough fighter on the pitch into a number of film roles, most notably in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000).

REFERENCES "Additional Clarification of Intercollegiate Athletics Policy: Three-Part Test — Part Three." 2005. Office for Civil Rights. 17 March. Available online at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/title9guidanceadditional.htm (http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/title9guidanceadditional.htm)l [cited 25 August, 2008]. American Beauty. 1999. Dir. Sam Mendes. Perf. Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Mena Suvari. Dreamworks SKG. Badia, Janet. 2005. "'One of Those People Like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath': The Pathologized Woman Reader in Literary and Popular Culture." In Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present. Edited by Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Basic Instinct. 1992. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Perf. Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone. Canal+. Bellafante, Gina. 1998. "It's All About Me!" Time, June 29. Available online at: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,988616,00.htm (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,988616,00.htm)l [cited 17 January, 2007]. "Beverly Hills, 90210." 1990-2000. Creator Darren Star. Perf. Jenny Garth, Jason Priestly, Luke Perry. Breakfast Club. 1985. Dir. John Hughes. Perf. Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald. A&M Films. Burt, Richard. 2002. "Afterword: T(e)en Things I Hate About Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990's, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High." In Spectacular Shakespeares. Edited by Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 205-32. Chesler, Phyllis. 1997. Letters to a Young Feminist. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 18/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Curtis-Fawley, Sarah. 1998. "Feminism Fatale? Making Sense of a Movement's Mid-Life Crisis." The Declaration, December 10. Available online at: http://www.the-declaration.com/1998/12_10/featurkes/feminism.shtml (http://www.the-declaration.com/1998/12_10/featurkes/feminism.shtml) [cited 10 January, 2007]. Dangerous Liasons. 1988. Dir. Stephen Frears. Perf. Glenn Close, John Malkovich. Lorimar Film Entertainment. Dicker, Rory, and Alison Piepmeier. 2003. Introduction to Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. Boston: Northeastern University Press. 3-28. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi. 1999. "Articulating Adolescent Girls' Resistance to Patriarchal Discourse in Popular Media." Women's Studies in Communication 22.2: 210-29. Fast and the Furious. 2001. Dir. Rob Cohen. Perf. Paul Walker, Vin Diesel. Universal Pictures. Fatal Attraction. 1997. Dir. Adria Lyne. Perf. Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Ellen Gallagher. Paramount Pictures. Friedman, Michael D. 2004. "The Feminist as Shrew in 10 Things I Hate About You." Shakespeare Bulletin 22:2 (Summer): 45-66. Garrison, Ednie Kaeh. 2004. "Contests for the Meaning of Third Wave Feminism: Feminism and Popular Consciousness." In Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 24-36. Gerhard, Jane. 2001. Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982. New York: Columbia University Press. Gillis, Stacy, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford. 2004. Introduction to Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 1-6. Grease. 1978. Dir. Randal Kleiser. Perf. John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John. Paramount Pictures. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1997. Introduction to Twelfth Night. In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. Henry, Astrid. 2004. Not My Mother's Daughter: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hentges, Sarah. 2006. Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film. Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland. Heywood, Leslie, and Jennifer Drake. 1997. Introduction to Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 1-20. Is Feminism Dead? 1998. Issue of Time Magazine, 29 June. Available online at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601980629,00.html (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601980629,00.html) [cited 23 August, 2008]. Jones, Melissa J. 2004. "'An Aweful Rule': Safe Schools, Hard Canons, and Shakespeare's Loose Heirs." In Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television. Edited by James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner. Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland. 137-54. Klein, Melanie. 1997. "Duality and Redefinition: Young Feminism and the Alternative Music Community." In Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. Edited by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 207-25. Labi, Nadya. 1998. "Girl Power." Time, 29 June. Available online at: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,988616,00.html (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,988616,00.html) [cited 17 January, 2007]. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 19/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Leggatt, Alexander. 2006. "Teen Shakespeare: 10 Things I Hate About You and O." In Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Edited by Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Lehmann, Courtney. 2002. "No Laughing Matter: Pop Feminism and the Flockhart Effect in Michael Hoffman's William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream." Paper given at the Shakespeare Association of America Conference. 15 March. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. 1998. Dir. Guy Ritchie. Perf. Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher. HandMade Films. McRobbie, Angela. 2004. "Post-Feminism and Popular Culture." Feminist Media Studies 4.3: 255-64. Panek, Jennifer. 2004. Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pittman, L. Monique. 2004. "Taming 10 Things I Hate About You: Shakespeare and the Teenage Film Audience." Literature/Film Quarterly 32.2: 144-52. Pozner, Jennifer L. 2003. "The 'Big Lie': False Feminist Death Syndrome, Profit, and the Media." In Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. Edited by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier. Boston: Northeastern University Press. 31-56. Radway, Janice. 1999. "Romance and the Work of Fantasy: Struggles over Feminine Sexuality and Subjectivity at Century's End." In Feminism and Cultural Studies. Edited by Morag Shiach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 395-416. Radway, Janice. Professional website [cited 23 August, 2008]. Duke University English Department. Available online at: http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/jradway (http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/jradwayhttp://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/jradway). Save Title IX for Women in College. n.d. Available online at: http://www.savetitleix.com (http://www.savetitleix.com)/ [cited 25 August, 2008]. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. She's The Man. 2006. Dir. Andy Fickman. Perf. Amanda Bynes, Channing Tatum. Dreamworks. Snatch. 2000. Dir. Guy Ritchie. Perf. Ade, William Beck, Andy Beckwith. Columbia Pictures Corporation. 10 Things I Hate About You. 1999. Dir. Gil Junger. Perf. Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger. Touchstone. Title IX. 1972. U.S. Department of Labor. Available online at http://www.dol.gov/oasam/regs/statutes/titleix.htm (http://www.dol.gov/oasam/regs/statutes/titleix.htm) [cited 23 August, 2008]. Walker, Rebecca. Author's website [cited 23 August, 2008]. Available online at: http://www.rebeccawalker.com/ (http://www.rebeccawalker.com/). William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. 1999. Dir. Michael Hoffman. Perf. Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Stanley Tucci. Fox Searchlight Pictures. Women's Sports Foundation. 2002. "Mythbusting: What Every Female Athlete Should Know!" Womenssportsfoundation.org. 1 July. Available online at: http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/cgibin/iowa/issues/rights/article.html [cited 19 January, 2007].

ONLINE RESOURCES www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/show 20/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation American Beauty. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=american+beauty. "Bad Reputation" lyrics. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/joan+jett+and+the+blackhearts/bad+reputation_20072312.html. Basic Instinct. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=basic+instinct. Barenaked Ladies Homepage. http://www.bnlmusic.com/default2.asp. Bikini Kill Homepage. http://www.tigerbomb.net/pages/bkpages/bikintro.html. Dangerous Liasons. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094947/. Fatal Attraction. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093010/. "I Want You to Want Me" lyrics. http://www.80smusiclyrics.com/artists/cheaptrick.htm. Joan Armatrading Homepage. http://www.joanarmatrading.com/. Joan Jett Homepage. http://www.joanjett.com/. Letters to Cleo Homepage. http://www.letterstocleo.net/. "One Week" lyrics. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/barenaked+ladies/one+week_20013398.html. Raincoats Homepage. http://www.comnet.ca/~rina/raincoats.html. Sarah Lawrence College website. http://www.slc.edu/index.php. She's the Man. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454945/. 10 Things I Hate About You. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147800/.

ABSTRACT | KATFIGHTING | ABSENT MOTHERS, FRIGHTENED FATHERS | ". . . GIRLS WHO CAN'T PLAY THEIR INSTRUMENTS" | "GIRLS CAN'T BEAT BOYS" | SHE'S THE WOMAN | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

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Transnational Shakespeare: Salman Rushdie and

(/current) Intertextual Appropriation

PARMITA KAPADIA, NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | INTRODUCTION | A "YORICK" HAMLET: APPROPRIATION AND CHRONOLOGY | (/about) THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH: THE TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY AND INTERTEXTUALITY | NOTES | REFERENCES

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ABSTRACT

Through "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh Salman Rushdie maps the ever-present hybridity between, and, significantly, within literary texts and the cultures that produce and receive them. Thus, Rushdie's postmodern, metafictive palimsests ironically reveal how Shakespeare's literary endurance and global iconic status depend upon the revisions, adaptations, and appropriations of his work. Recognizing the cultural, historical, linguistic, and literary multivalency of Rushdie's "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh prompts a move away from the restrictive binary structures that oppose canonical texts to counter-discursive ones and suggests, instead, an intertextuality that actualizes the interstitial spaces and interconnectivity characterizing transnational appropriations of Shakespeare's plays. Rushdie's intertextual re-construction of Shakespeare — spanning as it does histories, geographies, time periods, literary genres, and cultures — destabilizes the principal binary that governs much of postcolonial Shakespearean discourse: the canonical/appropriation partition that divides the iconic Shakespeare of the West from the "local" reimaginings of the rest. Because of the fragmented quality of Rushdie's Shakespearean references, neither "Yorick" nor The Moor's Last Sigh offers the reader a straightforward retelling; instead, Rushdie's metafictive narrative style highlights the volatility of the Shakespearean text itself.

INTRODUCTION Current work regarding Shakespeare in the postcolonial context — most usually collected under the rubric of appropriation — reimagines the texts within an indigenous, "local" frame. Traditionally, such uses of Shakespeare's work have been viewed through an either/or paradigm: either they are seen to be subversive www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 1/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation trangressions of the iconic source text, or they are evocations of a colonialist or neo-colonialist mentality. This methodological mode promotes a binary construction that restricts our understanding of Shakespeare's iconicity as it continues to evolve through the appropriations of and references to his texts. Salman Rushdie's use of Shakespeare in "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh constructs an intertextual web of literary and cultural referents that precludes the drawing of easy binaries. In both the short story and the novel, Rushdie's deployment of Shakespeare, both narrowly through textual reference and, more broadly, by exploiting Shakespeare's global cultural capital, serves neither to reify the Bard's canonicity nor to establish his own counter-discursive credentials. In this paper, I argue that Rushdie's use of Shakespearean play texts creates intercultural, intertextual narratives that resist the binary logic that haunts most contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare. Challenging counter-discursivity complicates the traditional literary and theoretical affiliations between Rushdie's fiction and Shakespeare's plays by redressing the center/margin axis.

A part of Rushdie's East, West short story collection, "Yorick" uses a postmodern narrative to call attention to Prince Hamlet's childhood and his relationship with the court jester. The Moor's Last Sigh is a novel about the cultural, national, political, historical, and even geneological identity of its narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, known as the "Moor." In his efforts to make sense of his present, the Moor relates his family history going back nearly four generations. Set primarily in Bombay and Cochin, India, the book's intertextual, postmodern narrative suggests that cultural purity is a fictional construct. Juxtaposing "Yorick" with The Moor's Last Sigh emphasizes the main thrust of this essay, which is to foreground Rushdie's merger of intertextuality and transnationalism through his appropriation of Shakespeare.

Rushdie's push back against the traditional center/margin relationship that governs discourse and counter-discourse is rooted in Mikhail Bakhtin's framework regarding narrative theory. In Rushdie's texts we see the struggle between Bakhtin's "authoritative" and "internally persuasive" discourses. Bakhtin's "authoritative discourse" is a discourse "located in the distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. . . . Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse," while "internally persuasive discourse" is a discourse that is "half-ours and half someone else's," one that "does not remain in an isolated and static condition," but instead is "freely developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts" (Bakhtin 1981, 342 and 345-46; emphasis in original). Rushdie situates the authoritative "prior discourse" — Shakespearean texts — within an intertextual and an inter- and intra-cultural literary milieu and creates an "internally persuasive discourse." Such a juxtapositioning of narrative discourses forces an acknowledgment of how Shakespeare's language carries with it the ever- multiplying "tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life" — tastes and contexts that now include its postcolonial, cross- cultural, and intertextual afterlives (293). Gerard Genette explicitly echoes Bakhtin's argument: "Narrative consists less of a discourse than of some discourses, two or more, whether one thinks of Bakhtin's dialogism or polylogism" (1988, 11; emphasis in original).1 Rushdie further complicates both Bakhtin's dialogism and Genette's multiple discourses through his deliberate intertextuality. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 2/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation References to other texts, narrators, and characters problematize the narratological binaries of story/discourse and mimesis/diegesis.

Genette's "triad" — his distinction between "story," "narrative," and "narrating" — provides a useful frame for Rushdie's works. Through "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie deliberately draws our awareness to each of these components in order to disrupt the traditional constructs that espouse the immutability of the Shakespearean text. Focusing attention not only on the story and the narrative, but also on the act of narrating itself allows Rushdie to create a fluid narrative space in which stories/texts/narratives circulate, conjoin, and alter one another, suggesting that the hybrid story and the hybrid condition is not exclusively a consequence of postcolonialism, but as much a part of Shakespeare's work as it is Rushdie's. Juxtapositioned "against the background of normal literary language, the expected literary horizon" — in this case, the language of Shakespeare and the criticism surrounding it — Rushdie's works enter into "a conscious relationship with this normal language and its belief system" and are "set against them dialogically" (Bakhtin 1981, 314). "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh interact with the Shakespearean texts and their attending criticism, resulting in a "dialogic tension between two languages and two belief systems" (314). Through the intertextuality and inter- and intra-culturalism of "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie maps the ever-present hybridity between, and significantly within, literary texts and the cultures that produce and receive them. The consequent hybridity from this dialogical tension firmly situates both texts within Homi Bhabha's "Third Space," which "makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process [that] challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force" (Bhabha 2004, 37). Thus, Rushdie's postmodern, metafictive palimpsests ironically reveal how Shakespeare's literary endurance and global iconic status depend upon the revisions, adaptations, and appropriations of his work.2

Shakespeare appropriations constitute a major part of what has, since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, become the "postcolonial canon." Postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare's plays exemplify Kathleen Ashley and Veronique Plesch's observation in "The Cultural Processes of 'Appropriation'": "What the concept of appropriation stresses, above all, is the motivation for the appropriation: to gain power over. Because of its associations with power, the term [. . .] had a negative charge when it was first popularized within cultural studies" (Ashley and Plesch 2002, 3). The postcolonial Shakespeare seam has been a rich vein for writers and critics, as well as for actors and directors seeking to "gain power" over a colonial discourse that used literature, particularly Shakespeare, to solidify its social and political ideologies.3 Resituating the plays within an indigenous or localized frame, Derek Walcott's A Branch of the Blue Nile (1986), Salih Tayeb's Season of Migration to the North (2003), Suniti Namjoshi's "Snapshots of Caliban" (1989), and Salim Ghouse's jatra-infused production of Hamlet are all examples of the persistent appropriation of Shakespeare's plays (1992).4 Critical discourse considers each of these works as a deliberate and direct response back to the Shakespeare canon; Shakespeare's works are thus positioned as "source texts" while Walcott's play, Saleh's novel, Namjoshi's poem, and Ghouse's production are all tagged as contestatory, counter-discursive appropriations. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 3/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation In Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (1999), Thomas Cartelli offers a corrective against the potency of the counter-discourse model, noting that reimagining Shakespeare "may be expressly oppositional in orientation; [. . .] contestatory of Shakespearean drama's underwriting of class- based or imperialist agendas; or merely critically or creatively responsive to the force or authority exerted by texts like The Tempest in fixing the relationship of master and slave, colonizer and colonized, lord of culture or capital and immigrant laborer" (Cartelli 1999, 1). Cartelli goes on to catalogue the different types of appropriation: "confrontational" — that "which directly contests the ascribed meaning or prevailing function of a Shakespearean text in the interests of an opposing or alternative social or political agenda'; "transpositional" — that "which identifies and isolates a specific theme, plot, or argument in its appropriative objective and brings it into its own, arguably analogous, interpretive field to underwrite or enrich a presumably related thesis or argument"; and "dialogic" — a mode "which involves the careful integration into a work of allusions, identifications, and quotations that complicate, 'thicken,' and qualify that work's primary narrative line to the extent that each partner to the transaction may be said to enter into the other's frame of reference" (17-18). In this case, regardless of how a work references or uses Shakespeare — whether it be "confrontational," "transpositional," or "dialogic," to use Cartelli's language — the Shakespeare text remains fixed as the established source text. According to this paradigm, all appropriations, adaptations, retellings, and revisions are subordinated to what is presented as the immutability of the Shakespearean source. As Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds write in Shakespeare Without Class, "the theoretical mechanisms of adaptations are explored less often, and the term 'appropriation' tends to enforce a neutralizing sense of transformation or tone that implies some 'normal' function of the Shakespearean text in typical acts of cultural domination" (2000, 6).

In A Theory of Adaptation (2006), Linda Hutcheon furthers this critique by faulting the "morally loaded rhetoric of fidelity and infidelity used in comparing adaptations to 'source' texts," arguing that the critical methodology underpinning such a rhetoric proscribes the contemporary revision to a lesser, even derivative status (Hutcheon 2006, 31). Within the context of postcolonial studies, Bhabha charges that the use of such rhetoric is "a familiar maneuver of theoretical knowledge, where having opened up the chasm of cultural difference, a mediator or metaphor of otherness must be found to contain the effects of difference" (2004, 31). Trapped by this strategy of containment, "the Other text is never the active agent of articulation [and] loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse" (31). This essay argues that Rushdie's deliberately intertextual narratives, with their manifold literary and cultural references, challenge the presumed immutability of Shakespeare. "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh are "multilaminated" — works that are "directly and openly connected to recognizable other works, and that connection is part of their formal identity [and] hermeneutic identity" (Hutcheon 2006, 21). Through this intertextuality, the division between the source text and the appropriation is blurred and even negated.5 Rushdie's narratives thus open a space through which Bhabha's "Other text" can achieve agency and articulate its own discourse. Such a move frees Rushdie's texts from playing an exclusively www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 4/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation counter-discursive role, and, equally significant, it also challenges the assumed stability — and presumed superiority — of Shakespeare's works.

Recognizing the cultural, historical, linguistic, and literary multivalency of Rushdie's "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh prompts a move away from the restrictive binary structures that sets canonical texts against counter-discursive ones and suggests, instead, an intertextuality that actualizes the interstitial spaces and interconnectivity that mark the transnational appropriations of Shakespeare's plays. Rushdie's fiction evades definitive classification because of its postmodern preoccupation with self- referentiality, linguistic word games, and cultural interplay;6 foregrounding the intertextual composition, however, opens a space through which to investigate how the interleaved texts remap historical and narrative authority — what Ian Smith calls the "splitting of the sign and the referent, the separation of the aesthetic from the cultural" (2002, 11). Because of this "split," the cultural authority invested within and transmitted by the Shakespearean references is challenged, interrupting established meaning and disrupting Bhabha's strategy of containment and Hutcheon's status hierarchy. Additionally, Rushdie's intertextual re-construction of Shakespeare — spanning as it does histories, geographies, time periods, literary genres, and cultures — destabilizes the principal binary that governs much of postcolonial Shakespearean discourse: the canonical/appropriation partition that divides the iconic Shakespeare of the West from the "local" reimaginings of the rest. Because of the fragmented quality of Rushdie's Shakespearean references, neither "Yorick" nor The Moor's Last Sigh offers the reader a straightforward retelling; instead, Rushdie's metafictive narrative style highlights the volatility of the Shakespeare text itself. It is this last point that is especially significant for the purposes of this paper. Rushdie's postmodern narrative strategies foreground the multiple literary and historical sources present within the Shakespearean text to remind us of Shakespeare's own debt to earlier narratives and of the Bard's adaptive skills. For example, remembering that the Hero and Claudio plot in Much Ado about Nothing most likely traces back to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the second book of The Faerie Queene, and Fedele and Fortunio, or that Othello can be sourced back to Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi prompts us to see the hybridity extant within the Shakespearean text.

A "YORICK" HAMLET: APPROPRIATION AND CHRONOLOGY In "Yorick," Rushdie connects seventeenth-century Shakespeare to eighteenth- century Laurence Sterne to a postmodern author-narrator via the character of Yorick. Drawing a literary affiliation between the long dead court jester from Hamlet and the parson from Tristam Shandy, Rushdie challenges the hierarchy of literary and cultural knowledge. Using a host of narrative strategies, Rushdie subtly shifts the epistemological relationship between Hamlet and "Yorick" from its traditionally linear mode to one that suggests a more lateral and circulatory trajectory. "Yorick"'s self-referential narrator, fragmented structure, and historical "reversals" allow the story to sidestep the restrictive cuff of literary linearity that would otherwise pigeonhole it as a contemporary appropriation, using Hamlet as its source or originary text. Rushdie's narrative strategies and structural circularities explode the traditional linear model destabilizing the appropriation/source text

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 5/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation binary and constructing a narrative that promotes historical alterity and hybridity within an Occidental, not a postcolonial, context.

A figure in both Hamlet and Tristam Shandy, Rushdie's Yorick plays the protagonist of his own short story. Yorick also moves from Shakespearean play text to eighteenth — century novel to postmodern short story. As Julie Sanders writes in Adaptation and Appropriation, "the movement into a different generic mode can encourage a reading of the Shakespearean text from a new or revised point of view" (2005, 48). Unlike dramatic texts, which "offer broader perspectives on scenes and events than the single point of view of a film camera or a first person narrator in a novel," prose can "adopt a radical slant on a play simply by choosing to focus in on a single character and their reaction to events" (48). Rushdie's tale redirects our attention from Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and the Ghost to the relationship between the court jester and the boy prince — a common enough move in postcolonial appropriations — but unlike traditional postcolonial appropriations, the story does not give Yorick his own voice. Instead of relinquishing narrative authority to Shakespeare's long dead character, Rushdie employs a first-person, authorial persona to tell the tale. This author/narrator's digressions, repetitions, direct addresses, and relentless self-editing highlight the creation of the text and consequently force us to acknowledge the narrative's fallibility. "Yorick," like Tristam, challenges "the normal and canonical system of fiction," in which "the author is not supposed to be making up, but reporting" (Genette 1988, 15). Rushdie deliberately calls attention to the constructedness of the narrative by constantly reminding his readers that they are not simply reading a story, but experiencing the telling and/or creation of that story. Through phrases such as "I say again in case you have forgot my purpose," "on with my story," "as I had begun to say," and "did I not tell you, have I not just this moment set down [. . .]," Rushdie's story is as much about the composition of narrative, Genette's "narrating act," as it is about the content of that narrative.

Rushdie does not simply parallel or appropriate Hamlet; rather, he foregrounds how the play operates both as a material text and a renowned work of literature. "Yorick" is about "both the tale of the vellum itself and the tale inscribed thereupon" (Rushdie 1995b, 64; emphasis added). Suggesting that "Yorick's saga" contains a "velluminous history," Rushdie punningly calls attention to the "voluminous" scholarship devoted to the textual history of Hamlet, as well as to the critical discourse attendant to the play. Using the language of textual editing — abbreviate, explicate, annotate, hyphenate — Rushdie sets "Yorick" alongside traditional editions of the play. It is the narrator's "present intent" to "explicate, annotate, hyphenate, palatinate, & permanganate" this textual history (64). Rushdie's strategy recalls the copious number of Hamlet editions that collectively dispute the notion of a singular text. By suggesting that "Yorick" is another, alternative edition, Rushdie challenges the "completeness" of any edition of the play. Thus, "Yorick" operates less as a postcolonial appropriation of Hamlet than as a contemporary heir to textual editing practices. Positioning "Yorick "as a postmodern example of an edition of Hamlet also inserts the short story within the historical tradition of Shakespearean scholarship. Such a narrative strategy stretches "Yorick"'s roots back to Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, and Lewis Theobald: editors whose work continues to mediate our own, contemporary www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 6/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation reading experiences with Shakespeare's texts. Rushdie's implied question is: If, today, there can be an Arden Hamlet, a Signet Hamlet, and a Riverside Hamlet, why not a "Yorick" Hamlet?

"Yorick" uses a frame narrative structure that allows Rushdie to employ diverse writing strategies and styles: postmodernist fragmentation, dramatic scenography, iambic pentameter, and self-referential narrativity all push against one another. The fragmentariness of Rushdie's narrative style subtly recalls the now-lost fragments of various earlier texts (such as Thomas Kyd's so-called Ur-Hamlet) that may have influenced Shakespeare's Hamlet. Readers familiar with the textual history of Hamlet know that the First Quarto, the Second Quarto, and the First Folio all offer different versions of the play. As Frank Kermode admits in his introduction to the play for The Riverside Shakespeare, "The history of the text of Hamlet is very complex. Techniques of scholarly inquiry grow more subtle, but as yet they have achieved no certainty on some issues crucial to the task of editing Hamlet" (Kermode 1997, 1137). Reminding readers of the complicated textual history of Hamlet challenges the assumed fixed purity of Shakespeare's text and positions what is traditionally considered to be the "source text" as an appropriation of other, earlier work.

Another strategy that Rushdie uses to challenge the notion of textual stability is to juxtaposition contemporary dialogue against iambic pentameter. Modern linguistic construction is interspersed with Elizabethan verse to reflect the concurrently unfolding narratives. The jester, for instance, speaks in verse: "O, a! What whoreson Pelion's this, that, tumbling down from Ossa, so interrupts my spine?" when he is rudely awakened by the boy prince (Rushdie 1995b, 67). The narrative breaks off as the narrator wonders whether a court fool would (or could) use such language: "I interrupt myself, for there occurs to me a discordant Note: would any man, awakened from deepest slumber [. . .] truly retain such a command of metaphor and classical allusion as indicated by the text?" (67). The narrator's suspicions regarding a court jester's abilities to employ such metaphoric language parallel the doubts of those individuals who challenge Shakespeare's authorship of the plays because of his alleged lack of formal learning. The narrator's conclusion that "It may be that the vellum is not wholly to be relied upon in this regard; or it may be that Denmark's fools were most uncommon learned. Some things may never be known" similarly recalls the difficulties of establishing the "pure" text of Hamlet (67-68).

Although Rushdie explicitly challenges the accuracy (and authority) of the vellum, elsewhere he foregrounds the literary source that underpins Shakespeare's tragedy. Reversing the usual trajectory of most Shakespeare appropriations that locate themselves in the present, Rushdie pushes his narrative further back into Denmark's past and draws a direct line between "the bardic Hamlet" and "Amlethus of the Danes" to emphasize the literary sources behind Shakespeare's play (Rushdie 1995b, 65). The reference to "Amlethus" recalls the ancient Norse legend thyat is the basis of the Hamlet story. In addition to the legend of Amlethus, Rushdie draws on the authority of Saxo-Grammaticus's History of the Danes, which contains the foundation of Hamlet. The narrator's admission that this story will provide "a full exposition of why, in the Hamlet of William Shakespeare, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 7/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the morbid prince seems unaware of his own father's real name" stresses the text's ambiguous genesis (64). Paradoxically, the very specificity of the phrase "the Hamlet of William Shakespeare" implies the possible existence of other Hamlets. Through "Yorick," Rushdie suggests that the familiar Shakespeare play text is itself a fissured hybrid and not the absolute source it has been constructed to be.

THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH: THE TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY AND INTERTEXTUALITY Similarly, in The Moor's Last Sigh Rushdie again foregrounds literary, historical, and narrative hybridity and challenges the binary logic that subordinates the appropriation of Shakespeare to a counter-discursive status. In this sprawling, expansive novel, geographic, and cultural displacement complements the temporal dislocations to construct a narrative that breaks free of the limiting paradigms of containment and binary logic. The Moor's Last Sigh has received much more critical attention than "Yorick," and the affinities between the novel and Shakespeare's works have been noted by other critics. My focus here is not to promote the novel as a palimpsest, but rather to explore how the qualities of the palimpsest challenge notions of discourse and counter — discourse as they are used in Shakespeare studies and to dismantle the hierarchical divisions between them. As in "Yorick," Rushdie once again exhibits Bakhtin's dialogic tension and Genette's distinctions among story, narrative, and the narrating act to achieve a literary agency for his work. Deploying an astonishingly wide array of intertexts that by turns conjoin and conflict with one another, Rushdie articulates a fragmented hybridity7 that reflects literary, cultural, and national identities free from the totalizing essentialism of orderly binary structure.8 The Shakespearean characters, quotations, themes, and allusions (along with references to other writers and texts) create manifold textual layers, overlaps, and echoes that provide a shifting literary canvas that allows Rushdie to explore how narrativity constructs (and presses) upon identity. Drawing principally upon Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello, the novel's intertextuality provides Rushdie with a linguistic and textual flexibility through which he destabilizes entrenched constructions of individual, literary, cultural, and national identity.

The intertextual, interethnic identity that Rushdie constructs for his narrator actualizes the intercultural identity of the literary text and the nation-state. Jyotsna Singh writes, "The Moor's Last Sigh further demonstrates [Rushdie's] preoccupation with the postcolonial Indian nation-in-formation . . . [Rushdie's] vision of a shifting, hybrid landscape goes against the grain of totalizing narratives of both colonialism and nationalism" (1996, 169). Employing Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia advances the idea of the postcolonial Indian nation as a "shifting, hybrid landscape." Bakhtin defines heteroglossia as the "internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and passing fashions, languages that serve the various sociopolitical purposes of the day, even the hour" (Bakhtin 1981, 262-63). As in "Yorick," Rushdie again employs a first- person narrator in The Moor's Last Sigh; Moraes Zogoiby, known as the "Moor," reflects the multiple voices of the Indian nation's minority communities, Bakhtin's www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 8/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "internal stratifications." Like Saleem Sinai in Midnight's Children, the Moor constructs concurrent identities — at once individual and national — through narrative. The intertexual composition of the narrative actualizes the Moor's — and India's — interethnic, intercultural, and fragmented sense of self. The Moor's blended identity — characterized by his Jewish father, Catholic mother, and magical birth — immediately opens the possibility of a multivalent cultural experience.9 The racial and cultural hybridity located in the novel's primary figure precedes British imperialism and promotes a more elastic identity that crosses the traditional colonial/postcolonial boundary.

Constructing his narrative around and through Shakespeare's texts, Rushdie's novel uses the literary and cultural frames of Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice to clear a literary and historical space through which to express the individual stories of Abraham, Aurora, and the Moor, as well as the collective history of India's Jews.10 Abraham Zogoiby, the father of the Moor, is a descendent of the Jewish spice merchants of Cochin. Abraham's desire to marry Aurora de Gama — a Catholic who is of the "wrong-side-of-the-blanket descent from the great Vasco de Gama himself" — triggers his mother, Flory, to recount the history of Kerala's Jewish community (Rushdie 1995a, 70-73). Flory's memory rests on history and "the longer memory of the tribe. . . . [T]he White Jews of India, Sephardim from Palestine, arrived in numbers (ten thousand approximately) in Year 72 of the Christian Era" (70). But like all stories in the novel, the veracity of this one is challenged. Abraham contradicts his mother's memories, retorting that "Black Jews had arrived in India long before the White, fleeing Jerusalem from Nebuchadnezzar's armies 500 and eighty — seven years before the Christian era" (71). These countering claims expose the fissures within historical narratives and challenge narrative's authority.

Flory's refusal to accept the Catholic Aurora as her daughter-in-law evokes Romeo and Juliet as Rushdie uses Shakespeare's famous "star-cross'd lovers" to tell the story of Abraham and Aurora. Rushdie does not relocate Romeo and Juliet to Cochin just to give the play "Indian color." Rather, the narrative recalls Romeo and Juliet in order to complicate the traditionally received reading of Shakespeare's play. Rushdie references Romeo and Juliet precisely because it "stands as a cultural ideal that shapes our social understanding about what love should be" and because "there is probably no expression of love, public or private, that is not in some way indebted, albeit unknowingly, to the idea of love promulgated by this text" (Callaghan 2003, 2). While it is tempting to read Abraham and Aurora as Indian counterparts to Romeo and Juliet, Rushdie is not seeking to reaffirm the transcendent nature of love as it is constructed in Shakespeare's play. The reader's temptation to locate the affair between Abraham and Aurora in the realm of timeless love story is challenged by the novel's focus on Juliet's central question from act two, scene two: "What's in a name?" For Shakespeare's Juliet, Romeo's name "is no part of [him]" (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.43, 48).11 On the balcony, Juliet's answer to her question, "That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet," suggests that a name carries no importance — and more crucially for Rushdie's purpose — that a name signifies nothing besides itself (43-44). The Moor's Last Sigh shatters the notion that a name is but another word as Abraham delves deep into his ancestry, forcing the ethnically exclusive Flory to acknowledge www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 9/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the Arabic family name, El Zogoybi. Abraham uses the name as proof that he himself might be a descendant of Moorish Spain, not the White Jews of Flory's story. Although Abraham echoes Juliet's sentiment that names do not matter, the narrative offers another version of the Abraham and Aurora story to suggest that names and histories do make a difference. The Moor's ethnically mixed identity tracks back via his mother to Vasco de Gama and via his father to a union between "the dispossed Spanish Arab and the ejected Spanish Jew" (Rushdie 1995a, 82). Rushdie's transposition of "What's in a name?" suggests a linguistic slippage that allows the line to resonate in multiple directions, reflecting the cultural plurality that the novel espouses.

Abraham's refusal to acquiesce to Flory's wishes precipitates the novel's metaphoric reversal of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: Abraham rejects Judaism and embraces Aurora's Catholicism. The Moor, a child of this Jewish father and Catholic mother, directly references Merchant in his commentary regarding his father's decision. Abandoning Flory, Jewtown, and Judaism, Abraham walk[ed] away from his race, looking back only once. That for this favour, He presently become a Christian, the Merchant of Venice insisted in his moment of victory over Shylock, showing only a limited understanding of the quality of mercy; and the Duke agreed, He shall do this, or else I do recant the pardon that I late pronounced here. . . . What was forced upon Shylock would have been freely chosen by Abraham, who preferred my mother's love to God's. He was prepared to marry her according to the laws of Rome — and O, what a storm that statement conceals! (Rushdie 1995a, 89-90; emphasis in original). Rushdie's novel dialogues with The Merchant of Venice to reconfigure the play's literary and cultural status. Recalling Shylock's forced conversion to Christianity at the insistence of Antonio, Rushdie's intertextual commentary challenges the established and deeply entrenched attitudes that celebrate Christian, i.e., Western, commitments to tolerance and respect and, in the contemporary jargon of the academy, multiculturalism and diversity. In The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie foregrounds the Christian Antonio's circumscribed understanding of "mercy." The Duke, representing the Christian state, wholly supports Antonio's dictum. threatening to "recant the pardon" if Shylock does not renounce Judaism and convert.

But Rushdie's narrative does not simply invert the Christian/Jew binary, nor does it handily substitute Hindu and Muslim for Christian and Jew; to do so would reify the very paradigms that Rushdie seeks to challenge.12 As he did through his use of Romeo and Juliet, Rushdie uses Merchant to suggest that as stories travel across time, geography, and culture, they accumulate attributes to become a fluid, intertextual composite. Abraham, as Shylock the victim, later in the novel morphs into a victimizer, turning to mass murder, gangsterism, and terrorism. Rushdie's continued assault on the victim/victimizer binary results in a textual link between Shylock and Flory. Bindu Malieckal writes that a "jubilant Flory gloats very much like Shylock in the court scene of The Merchant of Venice, 'an oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven. . . . I stay here on my bond'" (2001, 163). Giving Shylock's words to Flory recalls the vengeful Jew of act four of Merchant rather than the www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 10/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation sympathetic, victimized Jew of the "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" speech (The Merchant of Venice, 3.1.64). Using The Merchant of Venice to dismantle the victim/victimizer binary complicates the binary logic that anchors much of the literary criticism surrounding the play.13The Moor's Last Sigh casts a shadow back over The Merchant of Venice; by directly identifying Abraham with Shylock the victim and then by linking Flory and Abraham's later activities with Shylock the victimizer, the novel foregrounds how Shakespeare's character embodies multiple — and perhaps hybrid — identities. Rushdie's appropriation allows for a reassessment of the play's oppositional binaries; besides Shylock and his dual roles, other characters and instances are also reconfigured when read through this appropriative lens.

Locating Portia's "quality of mercy" speech within Rushdie's appropriative frame reveals its duplicitous rhetoric. The inherent virtue of mercy is introduced at the very start of the scene by the Duke when he expresses pity for Antonio: I am sorry for thee. Thou art come to answer A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, Uncapable of pity, void and empty From any dram of mercy. (The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.3-6) The word "mercy" is repeated throughout the scene. Portia later describes mercy as being "twice blest" and says, "We do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy" (200-12; 202). She also identifies mercy as "an attribute to God himself [. . .] / When mercy seasons justice" (195, 197). Allowing Rushdie's appropriation to influence our reading of Portia's speech and, more broadly, the scene's representation of mercy complicates both the rightness of Portia's cause and the attributes of mercy itself. A deliberate attentiveness to the linguistic multivalency reveals how mercy does indeed possess a "quality" that can be manipulated and withheld. Between them, Portia and the Duke use the word thirteen times, mostly to urge Shylock to relinquish his bond and exhibit virtuous clemency towards Antonio. Having defeated Shylock's bond for a pound of Antonio's flesh, however, Portia also denies him his money, repeatedly declaring "He shall have nothing but the penalty," "[He] shall have nothing but the forfeiture," and "He shall have merely justice" (322, 343, 339). Earlier in this scene, Portia had counseled the Jewish moneylender to "season" his desire for justice (or revenge) with mercy, but now that their roles are reversed and she has triumphed, she denies him mercy's grace. Ironically, by refusing to "season" her own justice with mercy, Portia denies herself the very grace she had encouraged in Shylock. Rushdie's editorial gloss that Antonio, the "Merchant of Venice show[ed] only a limited understanding of the quality of mercy," applies presciently to Portia and the Duke, as well.

Foregrounding the Venetians' "limited understanding" of mercy opens a space through which to examine the rhetorical doublespeak inherent in the scene. According to Portia, mercy is "twice blest: / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes" (The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.186-87), but read through Rushdie's appropriative mode, mercy is "twice blest" because Christian Venice, through its control of the courts, can demand that Shylock show, or "give," mercy, but Venice can also deny or "take," mercy. Through its self-serving construction of mercy, Venice is blessed www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 11/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation by receiving mercy and blessed again by withholding it. In Rushdie's retelling, it is not mercy that is "twice blest"; rather, it is Venice. Framing The Merchant of Venice through Rushdie's retelling foregrounds the rhetoric's Christian tilt.

Rushdie's appropriation of Othello elaborates on the pattern he had established with his evocations of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice. Here, he further emphasizes the role that narrative and narrating play in the construction of identity. As with Hamlet in "Yorick," Rushdie's use of Othello in The Moor's Last Sigh stresses his concerns regarding how stories are told and who tells them. In challenging the supposed reliability and authenticity of the narrative text, Rushdie elides Othello's story with the story of his own Moor to highlight the relationship between the narrative's subject and the narration itself. The parallels between Shakespeare's Othello and Rushdie's Moor are too explicit to miss. First, there is the sameness between Othello's title and Moraes's nickname, Moor. Second, Othello and Rushdie's Moor both "lov'd not wisely but too well" in their bonds with Desdemona and Uma, respectively (Othello, 5.2.344). Third, both are marginalized figures in their respective societies — Othello by reason of his race, and the Moor because of his blended ethnicity and physical deformities. (The Moor's right hand is badly misshapen, "the fingers welded into an undifferentiated chunk, the thumb a stunted wart [Rushdie 1995a, 146].) And, fourth, the ethnic identity of each character is highly contentious. Othello is a Moor, and depending on whether we consult the Folio or the Quarto text, compares himself to either a "base Judean" or a "base Indian"; Rushdie's Moor is part Jewish, part Catholic, descends from the sultans that once ruled Moorish Spain, and is born Indian.

In The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie evokes both the character of Othello14 and the material text to draw our attention to the fissures that underlie all texts. Storytelling is an important trope in both Othello and The Moor's Last Sigh; exploring the narrative strategies of the novel opens alternate readings of the play.15 Both works contain numerous references to the power of narrative and the act of narration. Shakespeare's Othello and Rushdie's Moor engage in self-narration which, in Genette's words, results "with the narrative act initiating (inventing) both the story and its narrative, which are then completely indissociable" (1988, 15; emphasis in original). Othello, we know, wooed Desdemona through his stories. Brabantio, Othello says, "Still question'd me the story of my life" (Othello, 1.3.129). Enchanted by Othello's tale, Desdemona would "come again, and with a greedy ear / Devour up [Othello's] discourse" (1.3.149-50). The Duke refers to Othello's story as a "tale" (171). Moraes, too, has a tale to tell. Like Othello, Moraes also shares with us his lifestory: "Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born cross-breed: me, Moraes Zogoiby called 'Moor'" (Rushdie 1995a, 5). Unlike Othello, Moraes offers multiple, competing, often contradictory versions of his story; he gives the "approved and polished family yarn," but also promises to offer "alternative versions[s] by and by" (78).

Rushdie deliberately calls attention to the other versions of the Moor's story to pull these unapproved and unpolished accounts out of the margins of narrative and history; consequently, Rushdie's narrative strategy complicates the center/margin binary and contests the alleged authority of the narrative. Destabilizing this binary principle allows the "margin" to escape its traditional construction of representing, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 12/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation in Kalpana Seshardri-Crooks' phrase, the "constitutive outside" where "an intimate alterity [. . .] marks the limit of power" (2000, 13). The emphasis on multiple versions and competing accounts challenges the presumed cohesion of the narrative. The numerous, conflicting versions suspend the reader in a state of uncertainty that problematizes the solidity and authenticity of the text and complicates our conviction in the firmness of the narrative act itself. As in "Yorick," in The Moor's Last Sigh Rushdie employs a range of postmodern, metafictive strategies to disrupt the accepted authority of texts. Allusion, intertextuality, digression, parody, humor, unreliable narrators, and authorial interjections all work to interrogate the notion of a single, totalizing narrative. Reading Othello through the contextual frame of The Moor's Last Sigh similarly challenges the source text/appropriation binary and prompts us to question just how Othello's story will be told. Rushdie's reworking of Othello suggests that instead of a singular, cohesive narrative, Othello's story will circulate via fragments and allusions.

More so than most Shakespearean characters, Othello engages in Genette's narrating act in order to construct his identity. Early in the play, his words explain his wooing of Desdemona to Brabantio, who believes his daughter to have been won by sorcery. Othello tells "How [he] did thrive in [Desdemona's] love / And she in [his]" through his stories (Othello, 1.3.125-26). Othello defends himself, saying, "This [story] is the witchcraft I have us'd" (169). More significantly, the tale he tells of far off lands, cannibals, and the fantastical "Anthropophagi" introduces him to the audience as an exotic figure. In re-reading Othello's stories as instances of self-fashioning, Sabine Schulting suggests that through his "mastery of language," Othello "constructs himself as the Other, the object, of European colonial discourse" (1996, 7). Like Rushdie's Moor, Othello serves as both the narrator and the narrated subject.

Othello engages in self-narration elsewhere in Shakespeare's play, most significantly during the final moments of the last scene. After Othello is stripped of his command, he asks that his Venetian captors Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that lov'd not wisely, but too well; Of one not easily jealious, but being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like a base [Indian], threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu'd eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum. Set you down this; And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th' throat the circumscribed dog, And smote him — thus. (Othello, 5.2.342-56)16

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 13/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation In this final speech, Othello recounts the tragic events that have led him to this juncture and like Moraes, he is simultaneously participant, observer, subject, and narrator of the action that surrounds him. The speech uses both first and third- person perspective to delineate Othello's errors in judgment. Othello refers to himself as "I" and "me" before switching to the more distanced, third-person "one." Throughout this speech, his language suggests that he is narrating — for the final time — his life story. His instructions to the Venetians are quite explicit: he tells them to "Speak of me as I am." He asks that they not modify his story: "nothing extenuate." Finally, he advises them what to write: "Set you down this." He also recounts his actions in an effort to "fix" his identity upon his death. The language of this speech reveals the play's use of narration and storytelling as a rhetorical device that foregrounds Othello's difference. Fittingly, the play's last words belong to Lodovico, who must "straight abroad, and to the state / This heavy act with heavy heart relate" (Othello, 5.2.370-71). This dramatic conclusion, however, ruptures the possibility of narrative closure. Lodovico's aim to return to Venice so that he can "relate" this "heavy act" implies that the telling of this story is yet to come. Othello's eulogistic narration of himself is but one version. Other narrators — writers, actors, directors, and critics — will supply other accounts and revise and retell his story.

Examples of such reconsiderations are plentiful. In 1693, Thomas Rymer asks: "Shall a Poet thence fancy that [the Venetians] set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk" and argues against a "Blackamoor" heroic figure (1956, 134). A little over a century later (1812), Samuel Taylor Coleridge confidently concludes that Othello must have been a Moor — and not black — because otherwise, "it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro" (1960, 42). Jumping forward to the twentieth century, M. R. Ridley's now infamous introduction to the 1958 Arden edition of Othello maintains that the "trouble" with Othello results "from a confusion of colour and contour" (1958, li).17 Overt appropriations of Shakespeare's play similarly revise, retell, and relocate Othello's story. Salih Tayeb's Season of Migration to the North (1970) evokes Othello in the life story of the novel's protagonist, a Sudanese Arab Muslim, Mustafa Sa'eed. Like Othello, Sa'eed murders his white wife, but subsequently rejects English society's characterization of him as Shakespeare's tragic figure, asserting that far from being a "noble Moor," "Othello was a lie." In another, more recent example, the three-act Harlem Duet (1997) by Djanet Sears uses Othello to highlight America's racial struggles. Each text revises Othello's story through retelling it.

Appropriations, adaptations, and retellings serve dual and contradictory roles. They recall Shakespeare's texts, thus reifying Shakespeare's cultural capital while simultaneously challenging and resisting the iconicity represented by that capital. In "Yorick" and The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie's use of Shakespeare recasts the iconic Bard as an interstitial figure, one who speaks to the continued endurance of colonialism as well as the emergence of postcolonialism, globalization, and transnationalism. The nascent rise of these discourses problematizes prevailing literary classifications anchored along a nation-based axis. Shakespeare's plays have traveled across centuries, cultures, and geographies to reach Yorick and the Moor through the voice of a postcolonial, Indian-born, British-educated writer. The www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 14/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation contemporary contexts of Shakespearean drama actualized by Rushdie's fiction render inadequate exclusively "national" constructions of literary discourse. "English literature," Stephen Greenblatt argues, was "always an amalgam of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and other voices of the vanquished, along with the voices of the dominant English regions" (2001, 52). Rushdie's fictions blur the categories of the "vanquished" and the "dominant," the "indigenous," and the "foreign," the West and the rest, offering instead a more complex narration in which the multivalent agency accorded the plays through their re-imaginings suggests instead that Shakespeare's iconicity is a fluid signifier in an increasingly inter-, intra-, and multi-cultural global discourse.

NOTES 1. Dialogism refers to the concept that texts are in constant, even inevitable, contact with other texts and writers. Polylogism refers to multiple or competing systems of logic. 2. Appropriation implies a political element, whereas adaptation is less linked to the political. See Julie Sanders's Adaptation and Appropriation (2005). 3. For a more detailed examination of the uses of British literature during colonialism, see Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest (1989), Sara Suleri's The Rhetoric of English India (1993), and Chris Baldick's The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (1987). 4. In Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power, Martin Orkin writes, "By 'local' I mean here what characterises each reader who comes to the text, in terms of her or his place and time, what is within that place epistemologically current, the particular institutional position or struggles within which she or he is situated or which she or he is actively engaged or, again, the particular knowledges and ideologies she or he exemplifies or legitimates" (2005, 3). My focus here is not restricted to the individual reader of the text; rather, I am using the term "local" to draw attention to the binary classification that governs how Shakespearean discourse tends to categorize Western productions/interpretations as iconic, canonical, or universal, whereas non-Western ones are marginalized as "regional," "postcolonial," or local." 5. For a discussion regarding the connections between contemporary issues of adaptation and the concepts of imitatio and aemulatio, see Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation (2006), 20. 6. For a discussion regarding postmodernist narrative strategies in Rushdie's early work, see M. D. Fletcher, ed., Reading Rushdie (1994). 7. Ania Loomba discusses The Moor's Last Sigh and a 1996 production of Othello done as a dance-drama in the kathakali style "in order to suggest that discussions of colonial or postcolonial hybridities must pay attention to locations and an attention to non-European histories" (2005, 144). She argues that while Rushdie's "revision restlessly searches the globe for histories and motifs which foreground the question of difference, the other uses centuries of stagecraft to reach out and mould difference in its own image" (1998, 155). 8. For a more detailed study of Rushdie's poststructuralism, see Sabrina Hassumani's Salman Rushdie (2002).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 15/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9. The Moor is born after only four-and-a-half months. He says, "from the moment of my conception, like a visitor from another dimension, another time-line, I have aged twice as rapidly as the old earth and everything and everyone thereupon" (Rushdie 1995a, 144). 10. For a more detailed examination of Jews in India, see Dora Ahmad's "'This Fundo Stuff is Really Something New': Fundamentalism and Hybridity in The Moor's Last Sigh" (2005). 11. All references to Shakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (1997). 12. Mona Narain uses the destruction of the Babri masjid in December 1992 as her point of departure in her argument that in The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie challenges the violence that characterizes the Hindu/Muslim binary in an effort to advance "a different, re-imaginined history of India through the palimpsest of the early modern antecedents of its Jewish and Catholic protagonists" (2006, 5). She goes on to note that "Rushdie's turn to an allegorized early modern history as a means to cope with a failed, counterfeit, contemporary history is in fact significantly similar to the deep tensions over the problems of origin and meaning within Renaissance historiography itself" (10). 13. Examples of critical interpretation that foreground the play's "oppositions" include: Samuel Ajzenstat's "Contract in The Merchant of Venice" (1997), Thomas McKendy's "Gypsies, Jews, and The Merchant of Venice" (1988), and Mark Edwin Andrews's Law Versus Equity in The Merchant of Venice: A Legalization of Act IV, Scene I (1965). 14. Jonathan Greenberg also raises the similarities between Othello and Rushdie's Moor, particularly the textual controversy surrounding "Indian" versus "Judean" in 5.2.347, in "'The Base Indian' or 'The Base Judean'?: Othello and the Metaphor of the Palimpsest in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh" (1999). Unlike Greenberg, however, who reads The Moor's Last Sigh "as a novel of an artist's development" and reads Othello's last speech as one that "provides a hidden key to interpretation of the tale of Rushdie's own Moor" (94), my focus here is to examine how Rushdie's appropriation of Othello impacts how we read Shakespeare's play. In effect, my purpose is to blur the traditional discourse/counter-discourse trajectory by allowing Rushdie's Moor equal agency with Shakespeare's. 15. See Gerard Genette's Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982) for a discussion regarding transgeneric appropriations. 16. Rushdie never quotes Othello's final speech, so it is impossible to know whether he favored "Judean" or "Indian." For consistency, I am using "Indian" here as that is the text in The Riverside Shakespeare, and all other Shakespeare quotations have been taken from that edition. 17. For a detailed discussion of race and the bedroom scene, see Michael Neill's "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello" (1989).

REFERENCES Ahmad, Dora. 2005. "'This Fundo Stuff is Really Something New': Fundamentalism and Hybridity in The Moor's Last Sigh." Yale Journal of Criticism 18.1: 1-20.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 16/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Ajzenstat, Samuel. 1997. "Contract in The Merchant of Venice." Philosophy and Literature 21.2: 262-78. Andrews, Mark Edwin. 1965. Law Versus Equity in The Merchant of Venice: A Legalization of Act IV, Scene I. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Ashley, Kathleen, and Veronique Plesch. 2002. "The Cultural Processes of 'Appropriation.'" Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.1 (Winter): 1-15. Baldick, Chris. 1987. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932. New York: Oxford University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Callaghan, Dympna. 2003. Introduction to Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Dympna Callaghan. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. Cartelli, Thomas. 1999. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. New York: Routledge. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1960. Shakespearean Criticism. Edited by Thomas M. Raysor. 1930; London: J. M. Dent. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. 1999. Shakespeare and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Fletcher, M. D., ed. 1994. Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. New York: Rodopi. Genette, Gerard. 1982. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Genette, Gerard. 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Greenberg, Jonathan. 1999. "'The Base Indian' or 'The Base Judean'?: Othello and the Metaphor of the Palimpsest in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh." Modern Language Studies 29.2 (Autumn): 93-107. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2001. "Racial Memory and Literary History." PMLA 116.1: 48- 62. Hamlet. 1992. By William Shakespeare. Dir. Salim Ghouse. Perf. Salim Ghouse. Bombay. Hassumani, Sabrina. 2002. Salman Rushdie. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Hedrick, Donald, and Bryan Reynolds, eds. 2000. Shakespeare Without Class. New York: Palgrave. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 17/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Kermode, Frank. 1997. Introduction to Hamlet. In The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Loomba, Ania. 1998. "'Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows': Issues of Race, Hybridity, and Location in Post-colonial Shakespeares." In Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin. London: Routledge. 143- 63. Malieckal, Bindu. 2000. "Shakespeare's Shylock, Rushdie's Abraham Zogoiby, and the Jewish Pepper Merchants of Precolonial India." The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 21: 154-69. McKendy, Thomas. 1988. "Gypsies, Jews, and The Merchant of Venice." English Journal 77.7 (November): 24-26. Namjoshi, Suniti. 1989. Because of India: Selected Poems and Fables. London: Only Women Press. Narain, Mona. 2006. "Re-imagined Histories: Rewriting the Early Modern in Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh." Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6.2: 55-68. Neill, Michael. 1989. "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello." Shakespeare Quarterly 40.4 (Winter): 383-412. Orkin, Martin. 2005. Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power. New York: Routledge. Ridley, M. R. 1958. Introduction to Othello. Edited by M. R. Ridley. Arden Edition. London: Methuen. Rushdie, Salman. 1995a. The Moor's Last Sigh. New York: Vintage. Rushdie, Salman. 1995b. "Yorick." In East, West. New York: Vintage. 61-83. Rymer, Thomas. 1956. Critical Works. Edited by Curt A. Zymansky. New Haven: Yale University Press. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Sanders, Julie. 2005. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Schulting, Sabine. 1996. Bringing 'this monstrous birth to the world's light': Colonial Mimicry in Early Modern Writing." Erfurt Electronic Studies in English. Available online at: http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/eese.html (http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/eese.html) [cited 15 August 2008]. Sears, Djanet. 2000. Harlem Duet. In Adaptations of Shakespeare. Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. 1997; London: Routledge. 282-313. Seshardri-Crooks, Kalpana. 2000. "At the Margins of Postcolonial Studies: Part I." In The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies. Edited by Bawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks. Durham: Duke University Press. 3-23. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Bertrand Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Singh, Jyotsna. 1996. Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: "Discoveries" of India in the Language of Colonialism. New York: Routledge. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/show 18/19 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Smith, Ian. 2002. "Misusing Canonical Intertexts: Jamaica Kincaid, Wordsworth, and Colonialism's 'Absent Things.'" Callaloo 25.3: 801-20. Suleri, Sara. 1993. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tayeb, Salih. 2003. Season of Migration to the North. New York: Penguin. Viswanathan, Gauri. 1989. Masks of Conquest. New York: Columbia University Press. Walcott, Derek. 1986. Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; A Branch of the Blue Nile. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux.

ABSTRACT | INTRODUCTION | A "YORICK" HAMLET: APPROPRIATION AND CHRONOLOGY | THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH: THE TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY AND INTERTEXTUALITY | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

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Dream Loops and Short-Circuited Nightmares:

(/current) Post-Brechtian Tempests in Post-Communist Bulgaria (/previous) KIRILKA STAVREVA, CORNELL COLLEGE (/about)

ABSTRACT | SKETCHES FROM DISTANT SHAKESPEARES | PUPPETRY THEATRE, VARNA, 3 (/archive) JUNE | NATIONAL THEATRE "IVAN VAZOV," MAIN STAGE, SOFIA, 11 JUNE | ADANA STATE THEATRE, TURKEY, ON THE STAGE OF DRAMA THEATRE "STOYAN BUCHVAROV," VARNA, 4 JUNE | ANTI-NOSTALGIA | PASHOV'S POST-COMMUNIST PAPERS: PUCK, THE VITRUVIAN MAN, AND THE WALLED-IN BRIDE | MORFOV'S POST-MODERN ANATOMIES OF MEANING CONSTRUCTION | POST-POLITICAL TERROR IN GARDEV'S TEMPEST | FROM THE POST-COLONIAL TO THE POST-POLITICAL? | NOTES | REFERENCES

ABSTRACT

"Dream Loops and Short-Circuited Nightmares" explores the surge of interest in The Tempest among Bulgarian theater professionals and audiences after the fall of communism. The essay analyzes the interfaces between the Bulgarian post-communist cultural condition and three experimental performances of the play, discussed here as embodying the principles of Brechtian dialectical theater. In a notable divergence from postcolonial revisionist performances of the play, the Bulgarian directors choose to have Prospero remain on the island. Theirs is, however, a local Prospero, re-figured alternatively as the modern little man who desperately needs to make peace with the ghosts of his past, as the psychotic who has severed his ties to a reality outside of himself, as the Balkan and European colonizer/colonized incapable of connecting his past and his present in a narrative that would eschew annihilation. If postcolonial re-visions of The Tempest reconstruct its plot and dramatic conflict to focus on the cultural and political agency of the Other, the post-communist Bulgarian productions redefine the metropolis as the Other. Nobody gets elevated in these re-visions of The Tempest — not aesthetically, politically, or morally. Instead, they nurture poignant curiosity for fallen idols like Prospero, as well as for the Calibans, Ariels, and Mirandas these idols have traumatized — all of them little people exiled in their own minds.

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". . . It should, by now, be clear: / This could be paradise." Robin Kirkpatrick, "After Prospero"

SKETCHES FROM DISTANT SHAKESPEARES These are my memories of the three productions of The Tempest that I attended in Bulgaria in the summer of 2005. Two of them were performed at the yearly Varna Summer Theatre Festival; the third, which had won several awards at the same festival several years before, I saw in its ninth season at the National Theatre in Sofia.1

PUPPETRY THEATRE, VARNA, 3 JUNE The island is a place of psychedelic beauty. It is bathed in the deep blue and purple light that can only be seen right after the sun dives below the sea- washed horizon of this city. The soft billows of the parachute fabric covering the diminutive stage are alive with the "spirits" trapped below the surface. The island is a live creature of surreal beauty, gently breathing. Natural or artificial? Real or imagined? Prospero is too frantically busy with his own scientific and artistic experiments to pay any attention to the puzzles of this beauty, or to the demands of his attention-starved young lioness of a daughter. Here is a Renaissance man spread thin and lacking in focus, confidence, and control. His first appearance on stage is preceded by a snowfall of paper that comes loose from the tattered book in his hands; his silly glasses do not hide his desperation; his "state" — a wobbly plastic platform reflecting the shades of the island — literally totters. Again and again, he attempts to arrange the chaotic events of his life in a forward direction, but his call, "Let's get going," only manages to negate what has come before as an unsuccessful stage in an experiment that must start anew — until he gets reconciled, in the end, to the restless spirit of the island. Or is this ending yet another self-deluding, surreal dream?

NATIONAL THEATRE "IVAN VAZOV," MAIN STAGE, SOFIA, 11 JUNE The island is barren, but will soon grow "full of music." Dominating it under the oppressive, ruddy-colored sky is an almost life-sized sailing ship, "a rotten carcass of a boat" (The Tempest, 1.2.146).2 Half a revolution of the stage later, the cell that Prospero has built into his leaky boat metamorphoses into the stranded vessel of the Neapolitan party. So this is how spectacle gets made. The morphing ship is half-wrecked or perhaps not quite finished, for as the spectators take their seats, stage hands still roam the set, clutching their tools. On stage, the actors practice their lines. The performance promises to be a work in progress, or else, a study in theater-making. Before long, I realize that the space of the island stretches across the cherub-adorned Rococo stage frame into the still brightly-lit auditorium, now filled with the unmistakable beat of Balkan folk music. Here is no enchanted island; the mechanics of the sea gale and the makings of Caliban's, Miranda's, and Ferdinand's passions are exposed for all to see. Rather, the audience is invited into a theater workshop

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 2/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation where life stories are compulsively taken apart in a doomed attempt to short- circuit the cycle of history.

ADANA STATE THEATRE, TURKEY, ON THE STAGE OF DRAMA THEATRE "STOYAN BUCHVAROV," VARNA, 4 JUNE The island, bathed in stark white light, is confined to the proscenium dominated by a black-draped bench, reminiscent of an ancient altar. A see- through net divides it from the rest of the stage. The border is visually emphasized by a series of clocks running the length of the proscenium arch, set to the time of, respectively, Chicago, New York, Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Istanbul, Moscow, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sidney, and Honolulu. Mythic eternity meets the present here, ruptured by time-keeping technology in the imagery of this set. Blaring techno music stirs alive a Prospero, also clad in black and spread-eagled over a similarly costumed, and clearly distraught, Miranda. It soon becomes clear that this evil-eyed revenger is the island's most tightly confined prisoner. His island — a social space and also a mindset — is tightly squeezed between East and West, between interior and exterior, between the dream of revenge and the reality of terrorism born out of — what else — desperation. It is a three-dimensional chess-board, where Prospero simultaneously plays two ruthless games against the Neapolitans and Caliban, summoning to his aid one unreliably obedient Ariel after another. Narratives of revenge, violence, and trauma clash with one another, are continually modified, and cancel each other out. Yet remorse is a quality foreign to all those stranded on the island. Accordingly, the Shakespearean promise of freedom and "auspicious gales" (The Tempest, 5.1.315) on the way to Prospero's reclaimed dukedom is dashed to pieces in the outcome of this re-vision of the play, to be replaced by claustrophobic, deadly confinement.

ANTI-NOSTALGIA The summer of 2005 was the first season in Bulgarian theater history to see multiple productions of Shakespeare's Tempest. This is all the more noteworthy because before Alexander Morfov began staging his re-visions of the play — first in 1991 for Theatre Sofia, then in 1996 for the National Theatre — The Tempest had been performed only once, in the 1950s (Sokolova 2005, 60). There is a clear parallel between this surge of interest in re-visioning the play in the aftermath of communism and its postcolonial appropriations in Africa and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s, notably Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (first performed in 1969). Yet, as we shall see, the politics of post-communist and post-colonial Shakespearean appropriations are markedly different.

The three Bulgarian productions under discussion had disparate ambitions and targeted different audiences. The first, Petar Pashov's visually beguiling, yet resolutely anti-illusionistic, tale of post-communism, complete with clown masks and live cartoon drawing, first drew the families of Varna to its popular Puppetry Theatre in October 2004, before it was selected for the 2005 Varna Summer Theatre Festival. There it played to a full house of theater sophisticates, professionals, and cultural tourists. The second, Alexander Morfov's bleak postmodern reconstitution of the play liberally mixed farce, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 3/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation comic improvisation, and metatheatricality to earn an impressive nine-year run at the National Theatre, drawing young audiences as well as the usual middle- aged and older theatergoers. Like the other two productions, it was selected for the Varna Summer festival in 1997 as among the best for the season in which it opened. Later, it was warmly received by audiences in St. Petersburg and Skopje, winning major prizes in both Russia and Macedonia. The third Tempest, Javor Gardev's daring intercultural production, which opened in November 2004 at the Adana State Theatre in Turkey, wrenched the political overtones of the play to sound its full tragic potential. As part of the 2005 Varna Summer festival, it played to a wonderfully responsive audience of theater professionals and aficionados, mixed in with largely working-class Turkish-Bulgarians drawn to the theater by the prospect of hearing Shakespeare in the language spoken in their homes. It went on to tour France.

Clearly, the site and appearance of Prospero's island, the ghosts of its past, the yearnings of its love-starved people, and the question of their uncertain future consumed the thinking and imagination of Bulgarian theater-makers and their diverse audiences — in that country and in other states of the "New" and "Old" Europe. The Tempest interfaced with the socio-cultural condition of Bulgaria, variously described as a Balkan or a post-communist state, a transitional economy, a new democracy. But how? What were the theatrical means through which this seventeenth-century text, a pillar of the Anglo- American educational, literary, and cultural canon, was transformed into a compelling signifier in such geographically, temporally, and culturally remote performance sites? Furthermore, what were the new intertexts developed as Shakespeare's playtext was inscribed within the Bulgarian post-communist cultural condition? And finally, how can we describe the politics of these performance-generated intertexts?

A useful theoretical paradigm for addressing these questions would be Brecht's notion that formal experiment in the theater amounts to treating social hierarchies and relationships as capable of change, as if all social "actions were performed as experiments" (Brecht 1964, 195). Brecht's best known use of formal stage experiment to inculcate in audience members the intellectual habits of critical, revolutionary thinking is his extensively conceptualized epic theater, the parable theater that harnesses the material means and mentality of the "scientific age," whose signature mechanism is the Vefremdungseffekt (translated into English as "alienation" or "estrangement" effect and into French as "distanciation"). As Brecht himself pointed out, however, the epic theater's practices were historically circumscribed in their capability to induce critical thinking and enjoyment. In the last year of his life, he began developing the concept of dialectical theater. This concept is well suited for an analytical tool of Tempest productions in today's multi-networked "flat world," which doubles as an apartheid planet of high-tech "secure" borders. Staging old plays as dialectical theater, Brecht suggests, entails developing the "historical sense . . . into a real sensual delight," a delight "in comparisons, in distance, in dissimilarity." Still relying on the epic theater's penchant for narrative, dialectical theater "unreels" stories "in a contradictory manner," where "individual scenes retain their own meaning; they yield (and stimulate) a wealth www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 4/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of ideas; and their sum, the story, unfolds authentically without any cheap, all- pervading idealization (one word leading to another) or directing of subordinate, purely functional component parts to an ending in which everything is resolved" (Brecht 1964, 279). On the one hand, the aestheticized juxtaposition of fleeting antithetical images, gestures, and scenes of dialectical theater, "tossed like so many balls," is a source of powerful cognitive pleasure (283). Walter Benjamin, the first major theorist of Brecht's theater, describes what he calls Brechtian "dialectic at a standstill" as "the damning of the stream of real life, the moment when its flow comes to a standstill, makes itself felt as a reflux: this reflux is astonishment" (Benjamin 1983, 13). On the other hand, a Benjaminian reading of Brecht's theater underscores the intrinsic negativity of its "dialectic at a standstill." Dialectical theater dramatizes the tension between identity and its conceptualization through the non-identical, between stasis and dynamics, but this tension yields no totalizing resolution at some higher Hegelian level of ideation. Rather, it provokes the desire for sublation of contradictions even as it traumatically fails this desire.3 In line with this Brechtian-Benjaminian theoretical framework, the three productions of The Tempest under discussion flaunt a formal experimentation that re-draws Shakespeare's play in startingly unfamiliar ways. In an era when the concept of greatness has become deeply problematic, the Bulgarian directors, in a manner that Brecht describes with provocative admiration as vandalist, have ditched all hints of reverence for Shakespeare as the high embodiment of Western Civilization. In "Conversation about Classics," Brecht argues against the fear "of being accused of vandalism" and goes on to explain that the "vandalistic efforts" of his company provide the much needed raw material for a purposeful repertoire (Brecht 2003, 79). Such Brechtian choice has become an established trend in post-communist dramatizations of the European canon by a new generation of Bulgarian directors.

The Brechtian dialectical approach to staging Shakespeare came into being with the first Shakespeare production of the post-communist era, the Youth Theatre's absurdist Romeo and Juliet (1990) directed by Stefan Moskov. Coincidentally, Romeo and Juliet was the very first Shakespeare play to be performed, in 1868, by a newly established amateur theater in the Danubian city of Svishtov, as Bulgarian nationhood began to coalesce in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Moskov's production matched the bold cuts, fragmentation, rewriting, and rearrangement of the play text with rapidly switching rhythms of movement and line delivery. To this, he added visual dismemberment and reassembling of the dummy-props used by the actors as pantomimic and provisional extensions of their characters. The director's inventiveness took center stage as characters were played not only by actors using prostheses to dis-articulate and re-articulate their bodies, but also — in the case of Lady Capulet — by a statue whose lines were pulled out from various drawers (Shurbanov and Sokolova 2001, 44, 250-51). In an interview given several years prior to his staging of The Tempest, Gardev declared, "Directing happens most regularly in spite of the text. It lives in a constant state of interpretative war with the text" ("Dramaturgy of the 1990s" [1997], 6). Structure, characterization, metatheatrical distance from the play's narratives, the very identity of the play — all are up for grabs in this new www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 5/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation generation of directors' interpretive warfare with the classical text. Theater critic Violeta Decheva, columnist and reviewer for the prestigious weekly Kultura, notes their determination to blow up the dogma that Shakespeare should not be touched before one turns fifty or sixty (Decheva 2005).

As incarnations of dialectical theater, these productions, often announced in publicity posters to be "after William Shakespeare," do not simply switch scenes, cut speeches, rearrange entrances and exits, or use a locale markedly different from the setting in the play text (Sokolova 2005, 63). Nor do the directors content themselves with disillusioned da capo revisions of Shakespeare's endings, made famous by Jan Kott's influential 1964 book, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary and Roman Polanski's film Macbeth. Their dialectic has a distinctive structural manifestation. The play text and the swiftly flowing action are fragmented into startingly dissimilar and visually compelling scenes; comic skits parody the "sacred" text; surprising collages with excerpts from other Shakespeare plays question the very identity of the play; the familiar lyricism of Valery Petrov's canonical Bulgarian translation is subverted by alternating it with the bawdy language of the street. Furthermore, characterization in all three Tempest productions is carried out in an antithetical, dialectical fashion, the characters and their relationships a conglomerate of sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary traits. Two of these productions double up representation and performance, story and story-telling against each other, forcing the audience to consider the mechanisms of theatrical illusion and dramatic construction by either laying them bare (Morfov) or overindulging in them (Pashov).

What of the new intertexts that the dialectics of creative "vandalism" yields? Given the reputation of The Tempest as a play of forgiveness and redemption, it is tempting to speculate that its productions in Bulgaria's post-communist era, with the country having ostensibly regained democratic "normalcy" and poised itself for a "return to Europe" by joining the European Union, would be likely to develop what Susan Bennett would label as a "nostalgic" vision of the play.4 "Nostalgia," Bennett explains, is the representation "of a past which forms a continuous trajectory into the present and through into the future" — in other words, a false dialectic of the past and the present in which the critical tension of conceptualizing difference has been eliminated (Bennett 1996, 4). Profoundly conservative, "collective nostalgia can promote a feeling of community which works to downplay or (even if only temporarily) disregard divisive positionalities (class, race, gender, and so on); when nostalgia is produced and experienced collectively, then it can promote a false and likely dangerous sense of 'we'" (5). The immediate, personal connection that theater establishes between its humanly embodied stage narratives and live audiences, makes it an especially effective tool for inculcating collective nostalgia.

A nostalgic production of The Tempest for Bulgarian audiences around the turn of the millennium, then, would smooth over the gaps and tensions in the play's narrative to endorse Prospero's dream of returning to a Milan cleansed of betrayals and political machinations. It would indulge in the play's promise of freedom regained by Ariel and even (implicitly) by Caliban. It would resort www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 6/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation to seamless characterization, celebrating the restoration of Prospero's benevolent idealism and the age-wise love of Milan's future young rulers. Naturalizing the artifice of its signifiers, such a production would showcase its representational value as an elaborate allegory of the redemption of the abhorred communist past of secret informers, abrogation of individual freedoms, and stilted perspective for the young. Its politics would be unabashedly reconciliatory. The past would be forgiven, if not forgotten; the downtrodden, having realized that revolutionary violence would earn them nothing, would have been benevolently granted freedom in their own land; the ensnared spirits would be set free; and the young promised a future of love, wisdom, and justice. Such a staging of the play would certainly provide emotional gratification to audiences by fitting recent Bulgarian history into the master narrative of a continually revitalized Western History periodically cleansed of the sins of the past.

Let me be clear: Euro-nostalgia is not among the intertexts merging Shakespeare's play text and the cultural narratives of the post-communist experience in these dialectical theater productions. Although the question of national/regional identity construction through the intercession of the Other (embodied by the arrivistes from Naples and by Caliban) is central to all three Tempests, even the most lyrical one, Pashov's, eschews the departure from the island to Milan that Prospero promises at the end of the play. In effect, the Bulgarian directors have rejected the opportunity offered by Shakespeare's resolution to connect the evolutionary narrative of European Historical Progress and that of the Freeing of the Island. The island remains Prospero's in all three productions, or rather, Prospero remains on the island. For audiences who identify culturally as survivors of three imperial occupations (Byzantine, Ottoman, and Soviet), this could be an anxiety-provoking resolution. Yet what the Bulgarian directors offer is hardly a neocolonial solution, for theirs is a local Prospero, who has realized that Milan is either unattainable or undesirable, and has gone native. By no means an automatically optimistic outcome, this new direction of the narrative confronts audiences with important and uncomfortable questions about the makings of Bulgarian and European cultural identities, about cultural entitlement, isolationism, and responsibility.

What, then, is the politics of these stagings — interactive, scandalous, irreverent, and on occasion bitterly sarcastic of their source text? When they juxtapose and disarticulate the myths of classical romance and of victimized national memory, what new identity narratives do they offer to their audiences located geographically on the fringe of Europe and posed historically to join the European political structures? Clearly, the three directors veer away from a belief in historical progress. None of them sets himself the goal, driving many post-colonial revisions of The Tempest, of charting the cultural and political agency of the Other. Nor do the productions engage in some sort of political anarchy, in spite of the transgressive way in which they deregulate the orderly boundaries between past and present, Europe and its Balkan fringe. Instead, these post-communist Bulgarian productions of the play redefine the metropolis as the Other. Some of them critically explore and others explode www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 7/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the mythic geography of a European core of civilized order and its antithetical periphery, populated by irrational and violent Balkan types; all question coherent narratives connecting past and present, political desire and political action. The effect, I believe, is not only to deconstruct the dichotomy between metropolis/other, but also to present their audiences in the de-segregating Balkans and the globalizing West with the imperative need to reinvent the long-lost polis, that site of face-to-face interactions of humbled, yet perceptive, persevering, and imaginative equals.5 In a historical era in which politics has become a derogatory concept, such a goal is perhaps best described as cognitively ethical.

PASHOV'S POST-COMMUNIST PAPERS: PUCK, THE VITRUVIAN MAN, AND THE WALLED-IN BRIDE Pashov's Tempest is marked by its fragmented structure and characterization, as well as by a parodically flaunted indulgence in the art of theater illusionism typical of a Brechtian approach to radicalizing the classics. Its opening, already a structural transgression of the play's entity, is an unacknowledged quote from Puck's final speech. In A Midsummer Night's Dream this speech shifts the scene of the aristocratic wedding to a here-and-now of mysteriously glowing trees, "screech owls," and "graves all gaping wide" to release their "sprites," shortly before Puck comes out of character to call for the audience's applause (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.382-88). Delivered here by Prospero who, in a Brechtian instructive gesture, proceeds to summarize the plot of The Tempest, the opening establishes the Duke of Milan as quite the scatter-brained storyteller (was he about to spin the story of the woods or the island?) with a penchant for trickery and dark mystery.

The production's fragmented story-telling is underscored by a variety of visual quotations from realms ranging from Renaissance art to children's television shows. Prospero's near-fatal absent-mindedness as the conspirators Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo advance onto his cell to "burn . . . his books" (The Tempest, 3.2.90), kill him, and take over the island is not due, as the play text indicates, to the masque he is busy composing for Miranda and Ferdinand. Instead, he is preoccupied by engineering flying machines and makes an appearance with one of them strapped to his back, in an unmistakable visual quote of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Earlier, when telling the story of his exile from Milan, he keeps Miranda's attention by illustrating it with effortlessly sketched cartoons. Projected for the benefit of the off-stage audience as well, this multimedia art is an amusing reference to a children's television show hosted by Hristo Kolev, the actor playing Prospero. Similarly, the puppet-like rendition of Miranda and Ferdinand falling in love would ring familiar to spectators who have already seen Morfov's long-running Tempest at the National Theatre in Sofia. However, if the National Theatre's marionette- like characters were brought to life by having their limbs manipulated by the errant spirits of the island, in the production of the Varna Puppet Theatre the actors' bodies seem to lurch towards each other spontaneously, hands landing on breasts and buttocks of their own accord, as if driven by natural electro- magnetic forces (fig. 1). www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 8/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Figure 1: Ferdinand meets Miranda. The Tempest, dir. Peter Pashov. Varna Puppetry Theatre, 2005.

The diverse visual and media quotations woven into Pashov's adaptation are coupled with a sense that the play's narratives have fallen into place by random chance. We get the first indication of such contingency when Prospero drops his book of magic, sending its pages flying over the diminutive stage. This, in itself, is another visual quote from both Morfov's National Theatre production and from Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books. The scattered pages, imprinted with memories of influential adaptations of the play, are the constitutive elements of this performance. Actor Hristo Kolev (Prospero) comments on the improvisational nature of the rehearsal process which involved playing with a parachute and two rolls of paper: "All the paper in the show actually represents Prospero's book, which seems to blanket the island at the onset of the tempest" (Kolev 2005, 4).

Characterization is as fragmented and improvisational as the narrative structuring of the performance, with characters literally taking shape from the mixed-up pages of Prospero's book. The Neapolitans' ruffs, cloaks, and rather limp swords, Ferdinand's harmonica-style royal mantle and the stuffing of his empty codpiece, Miranda's wild, stubborn hair, and even Prospero's crown are made of paper. Except for Prospero, all the characters wear either reversible cardboard half-masks or partial body armor strategically accentuating body parts, such as Miranda's pointed breast plates, Ferdinand's codpiece, or the protruding stomachs and sagging testicles of the Neapolitans (fig. 2).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 9/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Figure 2: The Neapolitan party in Peter Pashov's production of The Tempest, Varna Puppetry Theatre, 2005. The overall impression of these pasted-on costumes is humorously Frankensteinian, as if the human bodies were some kind of grotesque found art. In this story created by the chance arrangement of book pages, the characters are also arbitrarily constructed and mutable, twisted into whimsical shapes through playful improvisation.

At the core of the play's social and narrative experiment is Kolev's Prospero, a character whose wide-ranging artistic talents do not add up to psychological or artistic coherence. No potent magus, he desperately strains his almost frenzied imagination to make do with the limited resources at his disposal, constantly racing against time, and in control of neither himself nor the rest of the island's inhabitants. A rushed insecurity marks his commentary on the development of the revenge plot. His assertion to Miranda that "a most auspicious star" (The Tempest, 1.2.180-87) guides his actions is followed first by a panicky observation that he has already "lost the moment," and then by the not entirely convincing statement, "I am in control." This Prospero is at a loss even when handling Miranda's adolescent rebellion in 1.2, when she pointedly accuses her father of depriving her of her history.

More protean than Prospero's character, and just as contradictory, are the island's spirits, Ariel and various unnamed ones. On the one hand, they are trapped underground, presumably by Prospero's magic. On the other, their motions beneath the surface of parachute silk literally shape the island, and they act much more independently than in most productions of the play. It is they, for example, who quench Miranda's rebellion, enfolding her in their invisible embrace and rocking her to sleep, to the visible relief of the befuddled Prospero.

The dialectical nature of the production is further underscored by the tension between fragmented story-telling and the flaunted artifice of the www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 10/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation representation, accomplished largely through the lighting and set designs. The island, a precariously balanced round platform with two rectangular aluminum reflectors for a sky, and a continuously shifting landscape of parachute silk, is resolutely unnaturalistic (fig. 3).

Figure 3: Prospero's island in The Tempest, dir. Pater Pashov, scenic design Marietta Golomehova, Varna Puppetry Theatre, 2005 The deep blues and reds of the lighting refract in the dents of the aluminum sky, creating an effect at once fantastical and music hall-like. The audience witnesses an artistic experiment in creating beauty, and the intimate space of the puppet theater renders it both exciting and disconcerting, especially when the island starts tottering under the weight of the newly landed Neapolitans, or when Ariel, trapped under the parachute surface, pushes desperately against it.

The experience of a grand, but barely controllable, experiment under way in this small place of beauty is of course painfully familiar to the play's spectators, young and old. Parents and grandparents would have remembered only too well the failed social experiment of communism, which among other things redrew the navigable outlines of the scenic Varna Bay. Both young and adult audiences would have witnessed the recent frantic construction of imposing, bold-colored hotels and homes carried out in ecologically vulnerable locations. Most of the adults would be too familiar with the mad rush to seize the mirage of business opportunity as the country transitioned from the government-run communist economy to a free-market economy; some perhaps lost a good part of their meager investments as the infamous Varna financial pyramids collapsed in the late 1990s. Those driving in from the nearby resorts would have gotten tangled in the maze of traffic-locked roads that within the last few years displaced the ancient woods flanking the coast. Almost all would know something about failed expectations for retribution against the old corrupt communist bosses, turned businessmen with millionaire investment portfolios. What the phantasmagoric set and lighting design suggest is that as

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 11/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation breathtaking and exciting as the promises of these social ventures may have been, none of them was natural or inevitable.

The intertexts emerging from the dialectical tensions of articulating The Tempest within a post-communist historical context are memorable and provocative. Prospero here comes across as a man of the island, rather than as an exile yearning to restore justice and order to the metropolis. There is an unmistakable similarity between the endlessly shifting outlook of the island and the workings of the Duke's restless mind. It is difficult to imagine anyone else but him surviving this constant shape-shifting day in, day out; hence, the appropriate excision of Gonzalo's famous "Had I a plantation" speech (The Tempest, 2.1, 147-56, 159-68). But the clearest statement that Prospero belongs to this place is made in the play's final scene, when the so-far invisible Ariel emerges from underneath the island's silky surface to embrace him gently. This is no parting embrace, but rather, a reunification tableau (fig. 4).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 12/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Figure 4: Prospero and Ariel's reunification, The Tempest, dir. Peter Pashov, Varna Puppetry Teatre, 2005 But what is this couple? Surely not Penelope welcoming home the wandering Odysseus, for these two, invisible to each other yet cognizant of each other's struggles to know and to live, have inhabited the same space for twelve hard years.

A foundational myth about civilization-building that is preserved in folk songs and tales throughout the Balkans may help identify the reunited partners and explain their separation. In the myth, as narrated in the Bulgarian folk song "Struna Nevyasta" ("Struna the Bride"), three brothers are building a city, only to find their day's work mysteriously destroyed every night. They decide that the only way for the city to endure is to entomb alive in its wall the first of their wives to arrive the following morning. The two older brothers warn their wives to stay home, but the youngest brother, though deeply in love with his wife, who has just given birth to their first child, plays fair. Struna rises before dawn to complete the household chores before bringing "the morning bread" to her husband at the construction site. When she arrives there, her fate is sealed. As she is entombed into the citadel's wall, she asks for one last favor, that her right breast is left exposed so she can continue feeding her baby ("Struna Nevyasta" 1996, 528-31). Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble reports 180 Bulgarian variants of this ballad. The myth, in variations involving the building of a bridge, a monastery, a tower, is familiar throughout the Balkans, as well as in Hungary (Parpulova-Gribble 1996, 170).

In a study of a Serbian variation of this nostalgic myth of foundational feminine sacrifice, philosopher Branka Arsiċ interprets the walled-in bride as a "new symbolic field" . . . built on the grave of the "symbolic," insofar as the whole city is the crypt of the buried female body, of a buried kingdom and [alien] race. This myth is therefore the myth of the foundation of another type of "race," not only the race that would be the effect of homosocial bonds . . . but the psychotically "pure" race of brothers who are literally brothers, who are building the city as the city of eternal life that would make it possible for the race to exist eternally as a pure race, as the race that never changes. (Arsiċ 2002, 264) In Pashov's production, when Emilia Petkova's Ariel breaks through the membrane of Prospero's magical island, having served for twelve years as the living cornerstone for Prospero's civilization, the audience witnesses the implosion of the "pure race" Balkan myth. Earlier, Prospero's characterization had satirized the Western myth of the multi-talented Renaissance Man of towering ambition wielding magical control over his life-story and of his world. The production, then, juxtaposes and finds wanting both the myth of the civilizing and conquering Western Humanism and the Balkan myth of a polity built on pure eternal brotherhood. Furthermore, since the "hero" in both of these identity-constitutive mythic narratives is Prospero, the outcome of the production compels audiences to deconstruct the very dichotomy of the metropolitan West and its Balkan fringe. The difficult cognitive task of www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 13/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation imagining the post-communist self outside of alluring, precarious, and ultimately destructive mythologies remains facing the spectators.

MORFOV'S POST-MODERN ANATOMIES OF MEANING CONSTRUCTION While Pashov's creative "vandalism" invites audiences to engage in juggling arbitrary narrative elements and playful myth deconstruction, Morfov presents them with a more methodically transgressive dialectics, albeit one that similarly builds on the fragmentary narration, alienating and disjointed characterization, and enhanced metatheatricality of Brechtian dialectical theater. The Tempest, to this director, is like a beautiful corpse that he approaches with the curiosity, precision, and performative panache of a demonstrator in a Renaissance anatomy theater. Judging from the lengthy run of the play, this director's obsession with the (dead) play text has proved contagious to spectators. Yet by interspersing his demonstration with humorous commentary, Morfov's Brechtian estrangement from the body/world of the play distances the audience, too, from emotional engagement with almost all of the characters.

Morfov's formal experimentation with narrative begins by questioning the very notion of what constitutes a performance and when it starts. For the play opens with what appears to be a rehearsal, and not a terribly coordinated rehearsal at that. The action starts in a fully lit house with Vrangova's Miranda, coffee mug in hand, practicing the scene of her encounter with Ferdinand with an imaginary acting partner. Adding body movement and delicate music to bring out the yearning in her voice, she presses a seashell against her ear and pretends to pluck the strings of an invisible harp. Enter an absorbed Lukanov (Prospero) in no-nonsense, loose overalls, who carelessly interrupts the creation of Miranda's falling-in-love scene to utter his speech about Antonio's betrayal and his own miraculous survival. Although Vrangova is on stage, Lukanov addresses this tale to an imaginary Miranda. He finishes the account of the arrival on the island against the musical background of a Balkan folk tune and sweeps right into the celebration of the highest accomplishment of Prospero's magic arts: "Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves" (The Tempest, 5.1.33). At this point, the audience witnesses an exploratory rehearsal transformed into an alternate reality created out of words. The transformation is marked by the darkening of the auditorium and the change to a full palate of stage lighting, but not before the production has established itself as "rough" and provisional magic.

This "rough" opening already contains the motif of the short-circuiting of communication among the characters, which will rupture the play's narrative fabric, again and again. Here and on multiple other occasions, characters direct their words to unresponsive or, worse, disdainful interlocutors. Thus when Ferdinand, who during his close imprisonment by Prospero in Caliban's cage has kept busy by writing, attempts to read his poetry to the Neapolitans strolling below him, he is derisively shouted down. And although these rowdy newcomers to the island pause to attend to Caliban's plan to overthrow and kill Prospero, the heart-rending coda of his speech, "Am I human, or a

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 14/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation monster?" — delivered pointedly in the direction of Prospero's cell — yields no response (fig. 5).

Figure 5: Caliban pondering his humanity, The Tempest, dir. Alexander Morfov, National Theatre Ivan Vazov, 2005 Fittingly, Morfov's Tempest ends as it began, with story-telling frustrated by unresponsiveness. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," ruminates a wistful Prospero to Miranda and Caliban, only to be interrupted by Caliban's parodically inappropriate, "Master, when should I eat?" Caliban's words, of course, are his own urgent call for human connection, but the two fail to communicate. As Miranda feebly resigns herself to what she perceives as yet another bout of her father's philosophizing — "I'm listening" — Prospero cuts himself short, "No, it's still early." At this point, Miranda and Caliban go back to tending to the voices in the seashells pressed against their ears, and the stage rotates to reveal the Neapolitans descending from the other side of the ship that doubles as Prospero's cell. The play ends with its characters holding www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 15/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation on to shreds of narratives that are deeply meaningful to them, but completely useless as a means of relating to others.

In addition to deconstrucitng the unity and structure of the play, Morfov questions the notion of character cohesiveness and integrity. A step in this direction is the casting of Reni Vrangova as both Ariel and Miranda. Which of the two does the island's magical power rest with? Prospero's identity? His future? While the disorienting effect of the doubling undermines emotional affiliation with either character, it opens up important questions for the audience about power and identity, the family and the state.

In the case of the Neapolitan party, including Ferdinand, the Brechtian emotional distance from the characters is acquired by means of farcical representation. The costumes in which they appear — kilted lawyers' wigs, high-heeled boots worn on bare feet, long cream-colored overcoats through which their underwear peeks — are a ridiculous sight rendered laughable by Gonzalo's exclamation, "Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when we put them on first in Afric" (The Tempest, 2.1.68-69). Ferdinand's costume is an even crazier assembly of disparate symbols of high culture: a lawyer's wig, a poet's shirt, and a ballerina's tutu. Stephano, as Sokolova notes, cuts a farcical figure of yet another arbitrary sort, "a 1930s black-face music-hall clown" (Sokolova 2005, 62). Just as farcical is the scene of first contact with the island's spirits, who appear in exotic head-dress and grass skirts, dancing to a wild beat and threatening the aristocrats with their spears. When Gonzalo is volunteered by his terrified companions to pacify the stereotypically savage crowd, he frantically goes through his inventory of languages: "English? Deutsch? Swahili?" Before long, the Neapolitans don grass skirts and feathery head-dress on top of their Euro-garments. This accumulation of farcical signifiers, mixing low and high cultural registers, along with cultural symbols from different continents should sate the audience's appetite for spectacle and entertainment, fulfilling the etymological promise of the term farcire: to fill, to stuff full, to fatten. It also flattens the characters, precluding possibilities for non-reflective empathy with their plight and remorse.

But the principal figure for incohesive characterization is Caliban. Neither a tragic character nor a heroic rebel, Krustyu Lafazanov's Caliban lacks shape. Theater critic Chavdar Dobrev sees him as "a little man of the twentieth century, whose body and soul have incorporated the horrors of being " (Dobrev 2000, 15). Here is a man whose tortured existence has literally forced him to forget how to stand on his own two feet. As Trinculo and Stephano lower the cage, in which Prospero has left his servant to agonize with his fear of heights, and take off Caliban's chains, he has to relearn how to walk. Tellingly, the ecstatic call of Shakespeare's character — "Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! Freedom, hey-day, freedom!" (The Tempest, 2.2.190-91) — gets rendered here as the pathetic curse of the helpless, "A plague on the tyrant!" Perhaps because Lafazanov's Caliban is such a deflated rebel, Sokolova views him as the allegedly semi-civilized Bulgarian bossed around by the equally pathetic aristocrats who have descended on the island from the "white" European metropolis. His interactions with Trinculo and Stephano www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 16/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation especially, she claims, evoke dealings with "the endless string of dignitaries from the World Bank and other international institutions who briefly visit to tell the natives how to run their lives and then go away." Yet as shapeless as Caliban's survival strategies are, they are also comically subversive, as both critics agree (Sokolova 2005, 62). The conspicuous boredom with which he meets Prospero's chastisement, as well as his cunningly passive resistance, are anti-authoritarian strategies familiar to Bulgarian audiences from a long line of characters in popular folklore and literary fiction.6

Foolish in his actions but by no means a dimwit, this Caliban turns out to love the written word. In fact, the only book on the island of the magus who supposedly prizes his "volumes" above his dukedom belongs to Caliban (The Tempest, 1.2.168). This is where he records all kinds of sounds that strike his fancy — including his own curses — and where he puts together his life story, his moving reading of which would earn him Trinculo's and Stephano's attention. Shakespearean scholar Evgenia Pancheva sees Caliban's obsession with writing as "his own recipe for survival in a brave new world" (Pancheva 1994, 257). The question remains for the audience, however, as to who would attend to the pithy tragic tales of this pathetically shapeless character.

Along with unraveling the Shakespearean dialogue into the misdirected lines of replicable, parodically flattened, or comically incohesive characters, Morfov's methodical theater dialectics involves anatomizing theater illusionism. The island magic in his production is an acoustic phenomenon, but the creation of sound is no supernatural, nor even a mysterious, matter. As Prospero conjures up the tempest in the opening scene, at the culmination of the description of his "so potent art" he urges Miranda to "Listen! Listen!" and dissolves Shakespeare's language into Latin incantations. The magical aura of the ensuing storm, however, is immediately dispersed when it is exposed as a sound show by the "spirits," who crumple paper, beat drums, and churn wind machines on the proscenium and in the orchestra pit. Soon afterwards, the sprinklers in the flies activate, sending down water in sheets in a gleeful demonstration of the company's technical equipment.

The production ends on the same metatheatrical note. As Sokolova points out in her critique of Moskov's "reconstitution" of the play, the director eschews Prospero's anticipation of his return to Milan and his final monologue, replacing them with a section from the revels speech in the wedding masque scene: These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: ...... We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest, 4.1.147-58) At this point, the auditorium lights are turned on, the actors return to their original positions in the opening scene, and "the backdrop of painted clouds www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 17/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation gently folds aside to lay bare the recesses of the theater with their magic- making ropes and pulleys" (Sokolova 2005, 63). The disassembly of the set recalls the ending of Giorgio Strehler's influential production of The Tempest (staged first at the Piccolo Theatre in Milan in 1978), which, however, also involved the reconstruction of the set as the audience started applauding (Bevington 2007, 217). Unlike Strehler, once Morfov pulls his spectators out of the Shakespearean fantasy to point out the theatrical engineering of such "dreams," he has no interest in restoring the "dream" of theatrical grandeur.

In this production of enhanced theatricality, certain scenes qualify as outright celebration of what Alexander Shurbanov, in his study of Shakespearean production on the Bulgarian stage in the 1990s, has aptly called "theater's liberation from literature" (Shurbanov 1997, 11). During Miranda and Ferdinand's first encounter, for example, the characters are completely deprived of their dialogue (fig. 6).

Figure 6: Miranda meets Ferdinand, The Tempest, dir. Alexander Morfov, National Theatre Ivan Vazov, 2005 Instead, their lines are parodically uttered by the spirits, as they open and close the mouths of the young lovers and propel Miranda's and Ferdinand's bodies — marionette-like — into sexually explicit positions. Later, Stephano and Trinculo bring the dramatic action to a complete halt to indulge in the comic skit of a peeing competition. "I'll throw it to third row," hollers Stephano, and Trinculo one-ups him, "I'll throw it to the gallery circle!" The arresting of the momentum of the dramatic narrative by performative comedy readily triggers audience laughter, while subverting the spectators' emotional identification with the play's romantic and redemptive narratives.

In spite of the surges of creativity and humor in Morfov's production, his take on Prospero's very Balkan island and its people is far from optimistic. The ending of his Tempest does away with the catharsis of forgiveness, renders www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 18/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation pointless all consideration of the political future, and circles back to the beginning. Tired and dejected, Prospero, remains on the island with Miranda and Caliban. As the stage revolves, it reveals the Neapolitan aristocrats drowsily descending from the other side of his boat. Nothing has been resolved; rather, vital energy has been spent in dreams of a resolution. Prospero has not even begun to notice the parallels between his "rough magic" and Sycorax's, nor has he acknowledged the wretched Caliban, "this thing of darkness," as his creation. Caliban has never promised to "seek for grace" (The Tempest, 5.1.295). Miranda has been deprived of the Game of Chess and the chance to declare her support for Ferdinand's "wrangling" for kingdoms — the one opportunity the play text offers to distinguish her as a political agent. The past has failed to connect to the future, and the characters have failed to take responsibility for duplicating in their own actions the betrayals and violence they have suffered.

What Morfov confronts his audience with, in the case of Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban, are, in Arsiċ's terms, spectralized subjects. Uniformly, they have failed to recognize the Other calling out to them and to constitute their subjectivity in response to the interpellation of that Other. Instead, they have produced little others, figments of what they experience as exterior reality, but actually products of their own dream-like existence. Arsiċ explains the outcome of this psychotic subjectivation thus: "The subject spectralizes itself (as well as others) and becomes its own apparitional other (its own shadow), thus subjecting itself to itself, recognizing itself by itself" (Arsiċ 2002, 258). The Neapolitans, who do not even attempt to articulate a call to the Other, can be diagnosed with the same neurosis.

Unlike Pashov's playful deconstructive juxtaposition of the myths of Western civilization and its Balkan fringe, which invites a creative intervention on the part of the audience, in Morfov's bleak postmodernist aesthetic the various strands of the mythic narratives are unraveled, mercilessly parodied, and finally reconstituted as self-consuming vicious circles. His island, a place of frustrated desires (communicative, political, sexual) inhabited by spectralized neurotic subjects, is stuck in a narrative loop between past and present, completely severed from the future. What, a spectator might ask, would it take for Prospero to learn how to listen to the Other, for Miranda to break out of the Ariel-like mode of mimicry and subjection, and for Caliban to command the attention and respect he deserves?

POST-POLITICAL TERROR IN GARDEV'S TEMPEST Foregoing the restorative playfulness or humor as well as the metatheatrical estrangement of Pashov's and Morfov's productions, Gardev's Tempest wields its dialectics by splicing the play's action across three distinct stage loci. It ratchets up the tension between Prospero's penchant for sadism and his vulnerability, a tension informing the Duke's relationships with Ariel, Caliban, and the island. Spectators fond of the multi-faceted emotional world of the Renaissance romance would have to wrestle with the manifest contradiction between their generic expectations and the stark darkness of this production. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 19/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation The most radical of the three adaptations of Shakespeare analyzed here, in Gardev's Tempest the generic hybridity of the romance has been hammered into a full-blown revenge tragedy in which, as one reviewer noted, "the corpses on the stage must be more than those at the end of Hamlet" (Yaneva 2005).

Nikola Toromanov's set has rendered Prospero's island as a clearly compartmentalized space with stark geometric outlines. Where does one find such an island? As signifiers of an altered mental state multiply — Prospero's glazed eyes, the hypnotic spinning of the fifteen ceiling fans in the main cabin of the Neapolitans' ship, the slight delay in responding to dialogue clues, the inwardly addressed lines in Prospero's first exchange with Miranda — it becomes clear that most of the action of Gardev's Tempest unfolds within Prospero's dream. The set's linear divisions — the sunken cell area in the proscenium, the main stage space of the brightly lit main cabin of the aristocrats' ship, the continually reconfigured narrow space behind the sliding backdrop — allow the audience to distinguish among dialectically contrasted narratives. In the foreground is Prospero, who has turned a blind eye to the exterior world, tossed in the unforgiving rhythms of his dreams; the middle ground relates the content of these revenge dreams, sometimes susceptible to the dreamer's control, more often not; the backstage unveils startling tableaus of the dreamer's deepest fantasies and fears. The effect is a visualization of Prospero's tortured psyche without losing sight of his body, always located in the performance space closest to the audience.

The narratives taking shape in the different loci may be geometrically parallel, but they are often at odds with each other. The unfolding of the storm scene in the middle ground of the dream, for example, captures not only Prospero's vengeful desires, but also something of his political/ethical ambition to cleanse the world of sinfulness and depravity. The storm is unleashed upon the ship at the very moment when Sebastian and Antonio lead a drunken orgy for the benefit of a passive, but not terribly reticent, Ferdinand. The aristocrats are so carried away that they remain oblivious to the frantic commands of the ship's officers and the sickening sound of the tearing of the metal hull. One would expect the dreamer to be fully satisfied by his retribution. Instead, we see Prospero's body writhe in pain in his barren cell. Dreams, it seems, can be hard to control.

Gardev's restructuring of Shakespearean story-telling plays havoc not only with expectations raised by the visual symmetry of the play's loci, but also with genre conventions. In an interview, Gardev characterizes his resolution of the vicious conflicts taking place in Prospero's cell and in his subconscious as a "virus" that "has attacked the happy-ending convention of the fairy tale" (Gardev 2005b, 1). His Prospero gives up his supernatural and political powers not because he has been moved to remorse by Ariel, nor because he has accomplished his political goals and secured his daughter's queenship of Milan. He gives them up because he has realized that his mind, obsessed with revenge, is on the verge of self-destruction. But this does not stop destruction from taking place. In the penultimate scene, a frozen tableau of a wedding www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 20/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation feast is displayed in the discovery space, in a conventional wedding- portrait fashion. But the action continues beyond the sentimentally framed happily- ever-after ending. As an explosive-wired Trinculo parodically blesses the bride and groom, Stephano arrives, removes the unresponsive Ferdinand, and installs himself next to Miranda (fig. 7).

Figure 7: The virus attack of the ending of The Tempest, dir. Javor Gardev, Adana State Theatre, 2005 He then lays out her body on the table — a visual quotation of the earlier harpy scene — and climbs on top of her. This time Prospero will not be able to prevent the rape: Caliban has entered the proscenium clutching the detonators for the explosives stuffed in his suicide-bomber vest. The lights go out with a deafening blast. If the audience harbored any illusions that what they just witnessed was nothing worse than Prospero's terrifying nightmare, the final scene dispels them. Prospero does indeed awake with a jolt on the proscenium bench, only to comment that "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on," climb into a body bag, and pull closed the zipper. In the discovery space, more body bags are carried on a conveyor belt on top of what was the table for Miranda's wedding feast.

Dialectical tensions between expectations and artistic decisions permeate the characterization in this production. Its revisionist mode gets established as soon as the spectator meets the hypnotizing eyes of Savaş Özdemir's Prospero in the opening scene. No learned, noble magus, he appears more as a merciless conqueror, brooding over memories of violence wrought and the anticipation of further violence. His control over others is not a matter of knowledge gleaned from arcane books, nor is it accomplished by magic staff and cloak. Power is inalienable to this Prospero and is channeled mainly through his heavy stare. His is the Eastern magic of the evil eye, an effect accomplished through the use of white contacts that render Özdemir's stunning eyes a deathly pale green. It is created early in the production when the partially dimmed auditorium and Özdemir's position on the proscenium place him in the same visual space as the spectators. "It is as if he sees through the www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 21/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation characters, calls them into existence," explains director Gardev (Gardev 2005a).

The Shakespearean Duke's propensity for inflicting mental and physical anguish is portrayed as distinctly sadistic, bringing out both the pleasures with which Prospero lures his opponents and the pains he concocts for them. The banquet scene is one such demonstration of his sadistic sensuality. Unfolding in the "discovery" space behind the backdrop, the locale for Prospero's most deeply seated fears and desires, it features three scantily clad women who, striking seductive poses on top of a table spanning almost the entire width of the stage, offer themselves and the apples in their mouths to the Neapolitans (fig. 8).

Figure 8: The banquet scene in Javor Gardev's production of The Tempest, Adana State Theatre, 2005 As the shipwrecked party begins to indulge greedily, the "harpies" utter their curses so calmly and quietly that they elicit no signs of remorse or fear from Alonso and company. It is only after Alonso displays the unmistakable symptoms of food poisoning that all hell breaks out. The harpies, Antonio, and Sebastian start hurling apples and oranges at each other, while in the proscenium cell space Prospero, whose subconscious has created the scene, spastically beats his bench to the blare of techno-music.

The sadism of Prospero's subconscious corrupts even the scene of Miranda and Ferdinand falling in love. Like the banquet scene, it is staged in the space of the tyrant's deep subconscious, the loss of Miranda to another man ranking among his gravest fears. Here Ferdinand is almost crushed like an insect under the weight of a huge refrigerator, which he has been sentenced to drag across the back of the stage — a task at once more strenuous and absurd than the moving of logs in Shakespeare's play text (fig. 9). www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 22/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Figure 9: Ferdinand patiently bearing a refrigerator, The Tempest, dir. Javor Gardev, Adana State Theatre, 2005 It is from underneath this burden that he professes his love for Miranda. She herself remains tied up throughout the scene within the middle-plane of the dream space. Thoroughly subjected to Prospero's control, the two dejected lovers are relegated to disparate loci and cannot even touch. Their helplessness is eagerly watched by Prospero, the creator of this torture chamber, who is joined by Ariel in the proscenium cell space.

But the power of the island's tyrant is dialectically conjoined to powerlessness. For Özdemir's Prospero is even more tightly confined than Shakespeare's exiled duke. Unlike the rest of the characters, his movements are entirely constricted to his cell, the recessed proscenium furnished with a single black- draped bench, emphatically separated from the main stage — the site of pleasure cruises and chance encounters.

Ironically, it is Ariel, the tool for enacting Prospero's sadistic dreams, who functions as the clearest indicator of how tenuous the tyrant's power is. Ariel's appearance and body language in his first scene, probably the one comical instance in this dark production, strikes a parodic contrast to the deferential greeting in the play text: All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality. (The Tempest, 1.2.189-93) The words are uttered not by a "dainty spirit," but by a fleshy, aging sea captain in a pristine white uniform who struts confidently on stage, plunks himself down next to Prospero, and proceeds to take off his gleaming white www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 23/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation shoes and wring the water from his soaked socks. His sheer bulk suggests imperviousness to commands and manipulation, supernatural or not (fig. 10).

Figure 10: Enter Ariel, The Tempest, dir. Javor Gardev, Adana State Theatre, 2005 When we realize that Ariel is also the captain of the wrecked Neapolitan boat, the distinction between Prospero's revenge dreams and a terrorist plot becomes tenuous (fig. 11).

Figure 11: Ariel as the captain of the Neapolitans' ship, The Tempest, dir. Javor Gardev, Adana State Theatre, 2005 At the same time, one wonders whether the painful effect of the orgiastic storm scene was not deliberately inflicted upon the ascetic Prospero by this epicurean Ariel. If so, how has he managed to infiltrate the tyrant's unconscious? www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 24/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Clearly dissatisfied by his lack of control over Captain Ariel, Prospero summons a second incarnation of the "spirit," a stern young man with inscrutable Eastern eyes whose black costume fits better the asceticism of his master as well as the sinister world of his dreams. He, too, proves evasive and difficult to control and never appears overly impressed by Prospero. So the master resorts to a third Ariel, a melancholy schoolgirl in a black satin dress, who acts smitten by him. Her submissiveness and emotional dependence make her the ideal servant, but on the other hand, she clearly lacks the force and energy of the previous two Ariels (fig. 12).

Figure 12: Ariel's third incarnation in Javor Gardev's production of The Tempest, Adana State Theatre, 2005 Besides, Prospero's constant need to refashion the image of the faithful spirit underscores the waning of his powers.

But the tyrant's greatest vulnerability is the calculated resoluteness of his one autonomous subject, Caliban. Like Ariel, Caliban freely crosses between dream space and island space. Unlike Ariel, whose material shape Prospero somehow manages to control, he is impervious to the Duke's powers. A killing machine in army fatigues, one eye covered with a black patch, Caliban's first action is to climb on top of the sleeping Miranda. The rape is prevented because Prospero wakes up in the nick of time, but his and Caliban's icy determination in the ensuing exchange of curses suggests that this was not the first confrontation between these evenly matched foes, nor is it likely to be the last. The two know all about infiltrating enemy territory and breaching the boundaries of the Other. Just as Prospero takes control over the Neapolitans' ship by implanting Ariel as its captain, Caliban will invade Prospero's unconscious mind. Both are set to destroy. The revenge each takes issues from their dejected isolation, though it is also tinted with painful curiosity about the world of pleasure and indulgence from which both have been exiled. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 25/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Gardev's radical re-vision of The Tempest weaves provocative intertextual connections between the play's exploration of the concept of the Other and a contemporary cultural context permeated with fear of Otherness. The production's contemporary references are many and conspicuous. The army fatigues, suicide vests, army boots, and techno music unambiguously locate this apocalyptic rendition of The Tempest in the volatile present. As the row of twelve clocks marking the boundary between Prospero's cell and the space of his dreams reminds us, the time allotted for the understanding and forgiveness that would be necessary to break the cycle of revenge is ticking out, albeit at a languid Eastern pace.

Prospero's island is not fleshed out in terms as unambiguously local as in Pashov's and Morfov's visions. It is, nonetheless, a place that audiences in both Turkey and Bulgaria — and indeed, in many countries familiar with home- grown terrorism — can clearly recognize. "The performance deals with our tempests and our hysteria, and the impossibility to be sufficiently compassionate to the other," explains Gardev (Gardev 2005b, 1). Its world, colored in Toromanov's scenic and costume design almost exclusively in black and white (Caliban's green and brown fatigues are the one exception), embodies the jouissance of the Balkans — abandon, leisure, casual encounters — as well as the dialectical obverse of this jouissance — brooding, victimization, vengefulness. It is a world painfully familiar with suicide missions and, in Gardev's words, with "the difficulty of distinguishing between a martyr and a terrorist" (Gardev 2005a).

To its audiences in Bulgaria, the eruptions of unmitigated violence in the play's plot would bring to mind the bombings of passenger trains and hotels by underground resistance groups of Bulgarian-Turks in the 1980s. These acts of violence were also acts of revenge, triggered by the infamous campaign for ethnic unification waged by Bulgaria's then Communist government. During this campaign the Bulgarian Turks were forced to change their ethnic names to Bulgarian — a state order that did not spare the tombstones of the dead and that was backed by the full power of the police and the army. To the production's first audiences in Adana, in Southwest Turkey, the detonations on stage would have recalled the bombings of tourist sites by Kurdish militants fighting for their human rights. All of these spectators would know something about the desperate desire to scorch one's place into the consciousness of those in power. In Gardev's vision of The Tempest, the same desire drives Prospero to blow a hole in the hull of the Neapolitans' ship to drown the casual merry-making of the aristocrats who have completely forgotten this lonely exile, or Caliban to blow up his master's cell to destroy a world that has deprived him of love. If it is difficult to absolve from moral responsibility any of the entangled protagonists of these revenge tragedies, it is as imperative to conceive of political action that would break the cycle of hatred and violence.

Unlike Prospero's surrender to a somnolent, spectralized subjectivity in Morfov's rendition of The Tempest, in Gardev's production the exiled Duke is confronted by a clearly constituted Other. When Caliban names Prospero "tyrant" and "usurper" and ensures that his deadly threat to Prospero's world www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 26/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation would be heard, he brings Prospero's subjectivity into existence. In the end, Prospero yields to Caliban's subjectivity construction — and destruction — because he has recognized himself in the Other. In a Brechtian dialectic fashion, he perceives himself as both a colonial ruler (over the belligerent Caliban and the Ariels relentlessly morphing out of his control) and a colonial subject (exiled to the edge of civilization by Antonio). When Caliban, his finger on the detonator, presents Prospero with the very plot of revenge and destruction that the exiled Duke dreamed of unleashing upon the passengers on the royal ship, he has no way to stop the cycle of violence but to annul his own existence. Hence Gardev's substitution of the body bag into which Prospero crams his own body for the hope of Shakespeare's Duke "to see the nuptial / Of these our dear beloved solemnized; / And thence retire me to my Milan" (The Tempest, 5.1.308-10).

Self-representations "as both colonial rulers and as colonial subjects," cultural theorist Dušan Bjelić maintains, are commonly held by Balkan people. He goes on to illustrate his claim: "Serbian nationalism, for example, both celebrates its medieval empire and remembers Ottoman slavery, a dual sensitivity which then gets translated into calling Bosnian Muslims 'Turks' — that is, colonizers — even while claiming Kosovo as an important part of the Serbian Empire" (Bjelić 2002, 6). The "translation" of Shakespeare's Prospero in Gardev's production then, renders the Duke of Milan — the learned politician from the cradle of the European Renaissance — as a Balkan subject. For this writing subject, constituted as Balkan and localized as American, such "translation" rests on the assumption of equivalence between "Balkan" cultural disorder and Western cultural disorder. Both amount to confining the self within vindictive dreams of the glorious restoration of absolute power, often in the aftermath of an exile from such meeting places as the main cabins of ships of international importance. Such dreams are deadly.

FROM THE POST-COLONIAL TO THE POST-POLITICAL? "We can best salvage the Shakespearean text when we savage it, when we plunder it for its gaps and blind spots," writes Susan Bennett in endorsing such post-colonial revisions of The Tempest as Lewis Baumander's Toronto production of the play (1987 and 1989), Derek Jarman's film (1979), and Philip Osment's production of This Island's Mine for London's Gay Sweatshop (1988) (Bennett 1996, 169). From the intellectual leaders of the independence movements in the Caribbean and Africa in the 1960-1970s, to British artists active in the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1980s, Shakespeare's last play has been aggressively refashioned to confront the oppression of the subaltern in various colonial and post-colonial settings. Its recent adaptations for the Bulgarian stage continue the revisionist tradition, but with a difference. On the one hand, the Bulgarian Tempests confront the colonizing of Balkan cultural identities, their mooring in age-old myths of oppression and destruction, and the frustrated efforts to set them free of doomed narratives of history and power. But their focus is not Caliban, as in post-colonial revisions of the play, nor Ariel, as in the recent environmentally-conscious British productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Opera www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 27/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation House.7 Embedded within the Bulgarian post-communist cultural context, The Tempest remains Prospero's play, though it is by no means a nostalgic celebration of the enlightened and compassionate ruler. The Bulgarian Prosperos have been re-figured in various anti-nostalgic terms: as the modern little man who desperately needs to make peace with the ghosts of his past; as the neurotic who has severed his ties to a reality that is not a replica of himself; as the Balkan and European colonizer/colonized incapable of connecting his past and his present in a narrative that eschews annihilation.

The narratives of these Prosperos and their counterparts — the Mirandas, Ariels, and Calibans of recent Bulgarian performances — engage their audiences through the Brechtian-Benjaminian principle of negative dialectics. Discussing negative dialectics, Theodore Adorno writes: "The name of dialectics says no more . . . than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction . . . indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived" (Adorno 1973, 5). The dialectical tensions in the productions discussed here, tensions between inherited concepts of identity and the contradictions exceeding them, render strange and even untenable the traditional makings of Western cultural identity. In these post-communist productions, the old myths of the grandeur and moral uprightness of Western civilization are dismantled and their heroes knocked down from the pedestal of veneration. Unlike Brecht, most Bulgarian theater professionals would hasten to declare that theirs is no political theater, for it offers neither political nor moral alternatives to the fallen idols and their value systems. It is worth questioning, however, whether the cognitive and ethical questions raised in these experimental, intellectually engaging productions do not constitute the kind of dialectical contradiction that provides a much needed corrective to the concept of the political.

NOTES 1. Field research for this essay was made possible by a Global Partners faculty travel grant of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, for which I am grateful. To Kornelia Slavova and Kristalina Statkova, for their invaluable assistance in conducting my research on site in Bulgaria, many thanks. I am also indebted to Gina Bloom, Huston Diehl, Stacy Erickson, Miriam Gilbert, Alvin Snider, and Douglas Trevor, members of the Early Modern Reading Group at the University of Iowa's English Department, for their astute responses to an earlier version of the essay. 2. All references to Shakespeare's plays will be to The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (see Shakespeare 1997a and 1997b). 3. For an insightful study of Benjamin's reading of the dialectics of Brecht's theater and its underpinnings by Theodore Adorno's concept of negative dialectics, see Carney 2005, 45-50. 4. Bulgaria joined the European Union in January 2007.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 28/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 5. The need to reinvent the polis and foster democratic habits of inter-subjective relationships as a condition for historically responsible political action is described in Lawrence Weschler's essay, "Aristotle in Belgrade," on the arduous cultural identity shifts in Serbia after the demise of the Milosevic regime. See Weschler 2004, 75-76. 6. The best known among those would be Hitar Petar (Cunning Peter) and Andreshko. The sly peasant Hitar Petar features in countless folk tales, in which he outwits the rich, pretentious, and powerful. Andreshko, the humble horse-cart driver and titular character in one of Elin Pelin's best known short stories, outwits a greedy tax collector, leaving him mired in a bog overnight. 7. Although the RSC's Tempest, directed by Rubert Goold and produced for the 2006-2007 Complete Works Festival, featured Patrick Stewart as a formidable Prospero, theater critics focused their attention on the pallid, otherworldly Ariel, played by Julian Bleach. During its Spring 2007 London season, Goold's play performed concurrently with the first revival at the Royal Opera House of Thomas Adès's opera, The Tempest, directed by Thomas Cairns, a performance also dominated, both visually and acoustically, by Cyndia Sieden's haunting Ariel.

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. 1966; London: Routledge. Arsiċ, Branka. 2002. "Queer Serbs." In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Edited by Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 253-77. Benjamin, Walter. 1983. "What Is Epic Theatre? [First Version]." In Understanding Brecht. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Verso. 1-13. Bennett, Susan. 1996. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. London and New York: Routledge. Bevington, David. 2007. This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bjelić, Dušan. 2002. "Introduction: Blowing Up the 'Bridge.'" In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Edited by Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1-22. Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. "A Short Organum for the Theatre." In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang. 179-205. Brecht, Bertolt. 2003. "Conversation about Classics." In Brecht on Art and Politics. Edited by Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles. London: Methuen. 76-83. Carney, Sean. 2005. Brecht and Cultural Theory: Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge. Césaire, Aimé. 1974. Une Tempête. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 29/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Decheva, Violeta. 2005. Personal interview. Sofia, Bulgaria. 14 June. Dobrev, Chavdar. 2000. "'Buryata' na Shekspir v Narodniya Teatar [Shakespeare's The Tempest at the National Theatre]." Bulgarski pisatel [Bulgarian Writer Weekly] 3 May, 17. "Dramaturgiyata na devetdesette [Dramaturgy of the 1990s]." 1997. Kultura [Culture weekly] 23. 13 June, 6. Gardev, Javor. 2005a. Personal interview. Sofia, Bulgaria. 26 June. Gardev, Javor. 2005b. "Svetut e kato zmiya, zahapala opashkata si [The World Is Like a Snake Devouring Its Tail]." Interview with Elitza Mateeva. Teatralen festival Varnensko Lyato 2005 Byuletin [Bulletin of the Varna Summer Theatre Festival] 2. 5 June. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Prospero's Books. Perf. John Gielgud, Michael Clark, Isabelle Pasco. Allarts. Kolev, Hristo. 2005. "Buryata [The Tempest]." Teatralen festival Varnensko Lyato 2005 Byuletin [Bulletin of the Varna Summer Theatre Festival] 2. 5 June. Kott, Jan. 1964. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. Translated by Boleslaw Taborski. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Pancheva, Evgenia. 1994. "Nothings, Merchants, Tempests: Trimming Shakespeare for the 1992 Bulgarian Stage." In Shakespeare in the New Europe. Edited by Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. 247-60. Parpulova-Gribble, Lyubomira. 1996. "The Ballad of the 'Walled-Up Wife': Its Structure and Semantics." In The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook. Edited by Alan Dundes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 169-84. Polanski, Roman, dir. 1971. Macbeth. Performers John Finch, Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw, Terence Bayler. Playboy Productions. Shakespeare, William. 1997a. A Midsummer Night's Dream. In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York and London: Norton. Shakespeare, William. 1997b. The Tempest. In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York and London: Norton. Shurbanov, Alexander. 1997. "Kakvo e imeto: Shekspir v post-totalitarna Bulgaria [What's in a Name: Shakespeare in Post-Totalitarian Bulgaria]." Kultura [Culture weekly] 27. 11 July. 10-11. Shurbanov, Alexander, and Boika Sokolova. 2001. Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Sokolova, Boika. 2005. "Relocating and Dislocating Shakespeare in Robert Sturua's Twelfth Night and Alexander Morfov's The Tempest." In World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Edited by Sonia Massai. London and New York: Routledge. 57-64.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show 30/31 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "Struna Nevyasta." 1996. In Monumenta Bulgarica: A Bilingual Anthology of Bulgarian Texts from the 9th to the 19th Centuries. Compiled by Thomas Butler. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications. 528-31. Weschler, Lawrence. 2004. Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Yaneva, Anelia. 2005. "Podvodni rifove v 'Buryata' [Underwater Reefs in The Tempest]." Kapital [Capital Daily] 18 June. Available online at: http://www.capital.bg/show.php?storyid=5595 (http://www.capital.bg/show.php?storyid=5595).

PERMISSIONS Rehearsal photographs from The Tempest (dir. Petar Pashov) courtesy of the Varna Puppetry Theatre. Performance photographs from The Tempest (dir. Alexander Morfov) courtesy of the National Theatre "Ivan Vazov." Photographs from the French tour of the Adana State Theatre's production of The Tempest (dir. Javor Gardev) courtesy of the production's composer, Kalin Nikolov.

ABSTRACT | SKETCHES FROM DISTANT SHAKESPEARES | PUPPETRY THEATRE, VARNA, 3 JUNE | NATIONAL THEATRE "IVAN VAZOV," MAIN STAGE, SOFIA, 11 JUNE | ADANA STATE THEATRE, TURKEY, ON THE STAGE OF DRAMA THEATRE "STOYAN BUCHVAROV," VARNA, 4 JUNE | ANTI-NOSTALGIA | PASHOV'S POST-COMMUNIST PAPERS: PUCK, THE VITRUVIAN MAN, AND THE WALLED-IN BRIDE | MORFOV'S POST-MODERN ANATOMIES OF MEANING CONSTRUCTION | POST-POLITICAL TERROR IN GARDEV'S TEMPEST | FROM THE POST-COLONIAL TO THE POST-POLITICAL? | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

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Appropriate This

(/current) CHARLES WHITNEY, UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, LAS VEGAS

ABSTRACT | APPROPRIATION IN RECEPTION | HAMLET AND PRODUCTION FOR (/previous) APPROPRIATION | COMMODITY AND THE COMMON GOOD | NOTES | REFERENCES

(/about) ABSTRACT

(/archive) This essay maps three fundamental features of the Renaissance theater as a theater of appropriation. The first feature considers how early modern audience response can be fruitfully characterized as oriented toward appropriation, and particularly appropriation as action, as the re-situation of dramatic material to do or make something. The second involves a corollary, that a major aspect of production must have involved accommodating practices of appropriation, even though producers sometimes resisted this. Shakespeare and other playwrights seem to have worked to provide material for appropriation, so that audience appropriation came not just after production, but actually was factored into the creative process. Hamlet provides the best example of how a producer may have grasped the creative possibilities of audience appropriation. The third feature considers the theater's concern with the common good, as well as with particular goods. It places the theater's appropriative exchanges in the context of early modern economic exchange, and specifically in relation to evolving notions of the balance between private and public interests. Two of Shakespeare's uses of a key word in this regard, "commodity," suggest an ethical framework for understanding the theater of appropriation.

Graham Holderness shows how practices of appropriation have gained major theoretical backing in postmodernism. Michel Foucault's announcement that "the death of the author is the birth of appropriation," he points out, broke with traditional scholarship that focused on discovering meanings inherent in texts (Holderness 2006, 2). The claim asserted that interpretation of supposedly intrinsic meanings could not be distinguished entirely from appropriation — that is, from the co-opting or seizure of textual material for extraneous purposes. It also implied that authorship itself depends on practices of appropriation, such as the quotation and www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 1/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation collage that had come to characterize art and popular culture (Foster 1984). Appropriation has become an intrinsic aspect of postmodern culture. But when it comes to Shakespeare and other English Renaissance dramatists, there was another time in reception history when certain practices of appropriation were equal with, if not superior to, those grounded in respect for the intrinsic authority of performance or text. That was, well, the Renaissance.

Here I wish to map out three fundamental features of the Renaissance theater as a theater of appropriation, features that build on my recent book, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, and other studies. The theater was about more than appropriation, but my emphasis here serves to redress an imbalance that has underestimated this crucial aspect. The first feature concerns appropriating audiences. Early modern dramatic audience response can be characterized as oriented toward appropriation, and particularly toward appropriation as action, as the re-situation of dramatic material to do or make something. Here, Paul Ricoeur's definition of appropriation as "event" is relevant: "Interpretation is completed as appropriation when reading yields something like an event, an event of discourse, which is an event in the present moment. As appropriation, interpretation becomes an event" (Ricoeur 1979, 92). Appropriation is an event, such as an allusion, that applies interpretation to a particular situation. But for Renaissance dramatic response, as for postmodern culture, one must qualify and adjust Ricoeur's conception. Appropriation may go beyond mere discursive action to physical action, and it need not reflect faithful interpretation of supposedly intrinsic meanings, since the appropriator may not be interested in such meanings or even acknowledge their existence.

The second feature of the Renaissance theater of appropriation involves a corollary, that a major aspect of production must have involved accommodating practices of appropriation, even though producers sometimes resisted this. Shakespeare and other playwrights seem to have worked to provide material for appropriation, so that audience appropriation not only occurred after production, but actually was factored into the creative process. Hamlet provides the best example of how a playwright may have grasped the creative possibilities of audience appropriation. The third feature considers the theater's concern with the common good, as well as with particular goods. It places the theater's appropriative exchanges in the context of early modern economic exchange — specifically, in relation to evolving notions of the balance between private and public interests. Two of Shakespeare's uses of a key word in this regard, "commodity," suggest an ethical framework for understanding the theater of appropriation.

APPROPRIATION IN RECEPTION Before at least 1660, playgoers and play readers, as the record of response suggests, were most interested in discovering ways to apply, use, and adapt elements of plays. In the course of pursuing some goal, they often cite dramatic material extracted from its contexts in performance or text and www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 2/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation apply it for a special purpose in analogy, example, or precept. Many such comments show fascinating insights into the plays that are dear to us. But the comments are far from being analytical interpretations, or interpretations at all, in the normal sense of elaborating a meaning assumed to have been there already. The commenters generally do not want to show off their insights into plays. Their words express a willingness to leave behind the play as play and to appropriate its resources. That is, they reflect an assumed prerogative to adapt and apply specific dramatic material creatively, according to a range of interests and purposes. As opportunistic agents, such audience members take initiative in ways no playwright or performer could predict. The focus of interest is on the practical effects and uses of drama in life, not on structure or meaning, and in that sense is on appropriation rather than interpretation.

No extended analyses, discursive interpretations, or reviews of plays for their own sake survive from the English Renaissance. Appropriation was apparently the norm in dramatic response. Other forms of comment developed later in English history, in concert with new kinds of printed commodities (Donoghue 1993, 54-74). One eighteenth-century producer of such commodities, Samuel Johnson, advised journal-keepers "to write down everything you can . . . and write immediately" (quoted in Brady 1984, 50). But even when defending plays in print in the late sixteenth century, Thomas Nashe excused himself from any extended remarks about their contents: "And to prooue euerie one of these allegations, could I propound the circumstaunces of this play and that play, if I meant to handle this Theame other wise than obiter [on the way]" (Nashe 1592, sig. H2). The epistle to Troilus and Cressida also demurs, "And had I time I would comment upon it [the play], though I know it needs not" (quoted in Shakespeare 1997, p. 1826). Virtually no one we know of in the period ever had time, or thought such comment necessary.1

On the other hand, the most interesting responses are those that appropriate and apply — citing theatrical material obiter — in the course of fulfilling some other purpose. Contemporary habits of reading no doubt provided impetus to such responses. Readers of Shakespeare's poems often approached the text, Sasha Roberts finds, "as a groundplot of their own invention," extracting, appropriating, and applying passages "to personal or topical circumstances" and, with their commonplaces, de-emphasizing the notion of the author as creator (Roberts 2003, 7, 11, 100; on early personal uses, see also Duncan-Jones 1993, 490, 492). Rhetoric, which was taught everywhere, focuses likewise on the effects of discourse, but it concerns ways of moving audiences as one wants to move them. Appropriators among those audiences may resist the drift. And there was no "standard of taste," as they put it in the eighteenth century at a more advanced stage of cultural commodification, to prescribe or channel response. Many audience members in the early modern period felt empowered, as it were, to carry on the process of production, creating use-values themselves by adapting and re-performing theatrical material.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 3/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Here are some examples, with my interpretive inflections, in chronological order from 1598 to 1654. (For discussions of all except those of Nicholas Richardson and John Holles, see Whitney 2006.) Gentleman servant I. M. appropriates servant Costard's joke in Love's Labour's Lost about good and bad tips ("guerdon" vs. "remuneration") to defend the dignity of traditional service against the rise of wage-work (I. M. 1598, 11r-v). Shakespeare's affectionate satire of lovers in the same play frustrates the earnest amorous designs of Robert Tofte's playgoing persona, providing him with yet another opportunity to wallow triumphantly in self-abasing Petrarchan agony (Tofte 1598, G5r). Several years later, though, another frustrated playgoing lover uses Hamlet's love-madness to therapeutic effect (An. Sc. 1604, e. g. A2r, E4v). John Davies of Hereford's sonnet on Tamburlaine in his king-drawn chariot describes a process of resourceful response, the mastering of a challenging temptation through moral discovery and personal resolve that are his own insights, not the play's (Davies of Hereford 1967, 2:28). Simon Forman, of course, derives lessons from his visits to the Globe that are applicable to daily life and also finds a reflection of a passion of his own in Macbeth's revelation of guilt and punishment (Forman 1930, 2:337-41). But two years later, in 1612, Richard Norwood found his visits to the Fortune as morally corrupting as they were compelling, and in that way they played a significant role in his spiritual journey (Norwood 1945, 42, passim).

Later in the Jacobean period, Joan Drake habitually mocks her in-house spiritual adviser, comparing him to Jonson's Ananias, whom she had seen at the Blackfriars, as she searches for a new subject position in her family apart from obedient and pious wife (Hart 1647, 26). Inns of Court traditions of festive satire powerfully link stage and world, and for law student Henry Fitzgeoffery the Blackfriars's social mingle-mangle, as well as its plays, provoke anxious bravado that shapes his gallant's creed (Fitzgeoffery 1617). Oxford preacher Nicholas Richardson twice allegorizes Juliet's concern that the dawn will discover and endanger Romeo as God's care for his elect (Shakespeare 1997, p. 3345). Like I. M., workingman John Taylor uses a theatrical allusion to appeal to traditional values of reciprocity against newfangledness, hilariously comparing the hackney coach craze to the triumphant glee of Tamburlaine in his chariot (Taylor 1967, 2: 239). Courtier John Holles reports dourly to his political ally about the demise of their diplomatic strategy, as depicted in a performance of Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess (Holles 1983, 2:288-90).

Moving on to the Interregnum, John Milton's Eikonoklastes uses Shakespeare's Richard III to help debunk monarchy (Milton 1953-82, 3: 361). At the court-in-exile, playgoer Anne Murray Halkett virtually re-performs lines of John Fletcher's Celia in The Humorous Lieutenant as she triumphantly asserts her moral authority and good taste following royal recognition for her undercover work during the Civil War (Halkett 1974, 54). For the benefit of her secret suitor, Dorothy Osborne provocatively compares herself to Richard III in her epistolary effort to negotiate familial duty and romantic affection (Osborne 1928, 56). For disenfranchised Royalists Henry Tubbe and Edmund Gayton, Jonson's Catiline and The Alchemist become reference www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 4/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation points in grim times that, respectively, bolster political conviction or provide festive solace (Tubbe 1915, 101; Gayton 1654, 3, 56, 79).

The number of extant allusions to Falstaff make him a special case. They suggest the existence of a popular orature (in the sense of imitative conversational allusions; see Roach 1996, 69), if not an actual tradition of impersonation. Young Toby Matthew's 1598 allusion to Falstaff's catechism on honor seems to express Matthew's discomfort with the identity imposed on him by parents, society, and his own infirmity (Matthew 1979). In a letter to her husband the Earl of Southampton, Elizabeth Vernon Wriothesley celebrates their recent, scandalous marriage and its fruitful outcome with an allusion to scandalous Falstaff and his supposed son by Mistress Quickly (Wriothesley 1872, 148). In a brilliant appropriation, Jane Owen's An Antidote for Purgatory (1634) strikingly reframes the credo embedded in Sir John's mock-catechism on honor as she exhorts her Catholic readers to reform and prepare for the next life. Beneath the irony of Sir John's hilarious re-inflection of sacred speech and ritual she finds a straightforward affirmation of resolved faith (Owen 160-61). Debt-ridden Barbados colonizer Richard Ligon's 1647 reverie of Falstaff and Doll contributes to his goal of promoting colonization, yet also gestures towards his own bondage and moral compromise (Ligon 1653, 12-13).

Every one of these cases richly repays historical and biographical study, revealing what the theater actually meant to some of the audience members for whom its plays were written, as well as to early modern society more generally. Such study celebrates the power of the plays to disseminate meaning, as well as the power of their audiences to appropriate resourcefully.

These appropriative activities are generally, although not necessarily, part of what can be called secondary audience response. Many of the responses cited above clearly had their roots in the primary experience of the theater, but developed and evolved over time. They were all recorded and preserved partly, if not entirely, because of the meaningful ways they were developed and applied outside the theater. This range of secondary experience is the main bridge between primary experience (occurring in the theater or study) and the myriad, more diffuse ways the theater is involved in culture and society — for instance, in the historical development of a public sphere recognizing diverse interests and viewpoints. Accordingly, the cases above do not usually indicate whether the plays in question were actually seen at all, rather than read or even simply heard about. The extant record of early modern audience response is, in fact, mostly the record of secondary response.

If in-theater experience is the place of "delight in the dramatic process, in the variety of episodes and the convoluted way they relate to each other, and delight in the completion of the process," as Jeremy Lopez puts it (2003, 133), secondary response is the place of delight in both interpretation and appropriation. The prominence of the latter in the record of response is a reason why so much evidence for early modern response has been neglected www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 5/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation until recently. The essential materials for the study of early modern dramatic response, which originally catalogued many of the examples of response above, have been in place for a long time. The Shakspeare-Allusion Book (1932) first appeared in 1909, with compendia on Jonson and Marlowe to follow within about fifteen years. Yet this archive and later supplements have been largely ignored by generations of interpretation-oriented critics and scholars. Jejune, scattered, and ephemeral, evidence for early response, of course, seems underwhelming and inadequate in itself, especially in relation to the towering stature of the Bard. Moreover, the evidence is usually unsuitable for grounding inferences regarding the kind of analytic, literary interpretation that has been recognized as response worthy of consideration. So accounts of early reception resorted to inferring primary audience reception by examining how the plays themselves construct and address audiences in the theater during performance. These accounts celebrated the ways Shakespeare brilliantly managed, manipulated, and orchestrated primary audience response.

But the appropriating character of our forlorn, early evidence of response, skewed as it was toward application to the praxis of life, should attract new interest now. We have a heightened appreciation of how meanings and practices are created by audiences, of processes whereby meaning is generated through or "by" Shakespeare, for instance (Hawkes 1992). And by the same token, it should be easier for us to move beyond a narrow, production-centered view of the ethics of reading and realize how audience studies that rely primarily on evidence from the production rather than the consumption side may deny the Otherness or alterity of actual audience members in their full agency as human beings.

No one would question that the multifarious artistic "delight" of primary theatrical experience, of which we have so little direct evidence, was of primary importance to producers and consumers. Nor am I suggesting that, in that age of commentaries, interpretation was not important. But it is questionable that Shakespeare and company were interested in eliciting the kind of analytic interpretation that literary or theater scholars came to have. Those producers could not help but be aware of their audiences' appropriative response practices, and their productions must have accounted for them, to which question I now turn.

HAMLET AND PRODUCTION FOR APPROPRIATION Not that producers were eager to advertise the power of plays to disseminate rather than control meaning. Anti-theatricalism and the suspicion of sedition required the early modern theater to remain modest about its openness to unpredictable applications. But players acknowledge audiences' use of commonplace books, which catalogue material for appropriation, and their practice of quoting plays in conversations and recitations. One returns to the theater partly because the first experience resonated in the interval, often through appropriation. Players must then have thought not only about gratifying audiences during the play, but afterward, as well (Weimann 1996, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 6/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1-20). The area of appropriation to which producers give by far the most attention is of course moral improvement, though some of that attention results from the need to defend the stage against anti-theatrical attacks. The ability of plays to improve audiences must generally involve post- performance introspection and application, despite the survival of an account or two of spontaneous confession in the gallery. Thomas Heywood explains how this is supposed to work in An Apology for Actors (Heywood 1612, F4v-G1v). Audience members respond to the stage's models of virtue and vice according to their individual needs, bolstering their strengths and remedying their weaknesses. In other words, they selectively appropriate dramatic resources — character, action, speech — and apply them to extraneous matters. In his preface to the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, James Shirley focuses on manners rather than morals, touting the finishing- school benefits of plays for the gentry, benefits that would also be realized through selective appropriation (Shirley 1970, 1:iv).

Another way in which producers recognized the importance of appropriation was through their own practice of it. Writers and performers imitate and emulate one another, and modern copyright law sets up certain roadblocks that did not exist in the early modern period. Toleration for appropriation by producers parallels that by audiences, partly for the same reason: lack of a highly developed sense of Foucault's "author-function," of a work as stemming from and belonging to an individual creator and legal subject. The author-function provides a rigorous way of identifying a producer's (illegal) appropriation of another's property, as well as of distinguishing between a responder's interpretation and her appropriation. Early modern audiences freely appropriated lines from plays, just as playwrights did. Soon-to-be Reverend Samuel Drake writes to a friend, "For the Apothecarys bill tis a sniueling inconsiderable summe; what sd Falstaffe in yt case to Lieft: Peto, Lay out Hall I'le bee responsable to all"; in The Example, James Shirley's Jacintha remarks, "Falstaff, I will believe thee, / There is no faith in villainous man" (both quoted in Whitney 2006, 88, 90). In context, both quotations reveal and extend the self.

Thomas Middleton's collection of plague stories, The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, is a remarkable statement affirming the unexceptionality of both writers' appropriations of one another and of audience appropriation. Plague survivors characterize their precarious situation by echoing the scene in 1 Henry IV in which Captain Falstaff leads his lean and ragged band of conscripts toward battle, where most die (4.2). Their echoes include "latter ende of a Fraye," "two sheets & a halfe," "an Antient full of holes and Tatters," and ''tottred Souldiers after a Fray'' (Middleton and Dekker, 1604, B1r-v, B4r). In Shakespeare's grotesquely festive scene, death is a laughing matter, just as it is for the tale-telling host of Middleton's tavern, identified as Sir John Oldcastle's great grandson (B4v). (Like many other alluders to Falstaff, Middleton uses the original name of Shakespeare's character). It is the great-grandson who restores these survivors with his mirth and his grotesquely festive tales. The survivors themselves can also be said to have appropriated the festive solace that Falstaff in his tavern, and elsewhere, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 7/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation provided to thousands on the stage. During the plague, the memory of theatrical mirth could come in handy. Both audiences and players furthered an early modern culture of appropriation by quotation and other means.

This essay's un-posted motto, "appropriate this," then, complements the famous saying, totus mundus agit histrionem, "all the world plays the actor," for both suggest that early modern audiences are actors, free agents who take the initiative in adapting stage-plays to their lives and vice versa. Holderness calls our attention to the contradictions entailed by identifying interpretation and appropriation too closely: If postmodern logic dictates that "there is nothing other than appropriation" (Holderness 2006, p. 3 in PDF), then there can be nothing to appropriate. But along with Christy Desmet and John Joughin, he argues that a play can be both something distinctive and unique, and yet capable of becoming a protean resource through appropriation (Desmet, 1999; Joughin 2000, 16). It is not that people in the early modern period held an uncompromisingly postmodern view about the ubiquity of appropriation, but that, in the history of reception, appropriation seems to have been a relatively larger factor in transactions between authors or performers and audiences than it became later when analytic interpretation became the critical norm.

To what degree might the originality and power of early modern drama have been the result of a dialectic that challenged dramatists to deal with many- faceted practices of appropriation, practices that may at times have challenged aspirations to artistic form and audience management, but that opened alternative vistas? And with what different inflections could the tacit invitation to "appropriate this" have been uttered? Sometimes with a sense of inspiration at the opportunities of this audience-centered theater, or a sense of serviceable accommodation that eagerly offered quotable quotes or moral emblems available for diverse interpretation and application? But resistance to a culture of responsive appropriation would be natural, as well, in a culture in which one's work could be handled willy-nilly. Some might have viewed meeting this audience demand as a duty that had to be discharged as they aimed for higher, more Aristotelian, literary or aesthetic goals, maximizing absorption and soliciting disinterest through the comprehensive management of collective response.2 Yet that effort points to later ages, when better behaved audiences sat in the dark and expected to have a more explicitly aesthetic experience. Early modern producers were faced with a demand for useful material that was bound to be appropriated by audiences as they pursued their own purposes, interests, and views of the world.

Ben Jonson's desire to control interpretation and his occasional disgust with his audiences bespeak resistance to a perceived waywardness of appropriation. This "self-crowned laureate" (Helgerson 1983) furthered the development of the author-function. The later Jonson, who pled with himself in vain to stop writing plays, might inflect our motto this way: "Appropriate this and be hanged." Yet Jonson's plays, like those of some other dramatists, seem to have exploited the practice of personal application www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 8/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation that audiences relished, fostering interest by drawing characters with suggestive resemblances to one or even several contemporaries, while still preserving deniability about authorial intention. And Jonson's greatest comedies challenge audience members to question themselves and their society, to search for positive values beyond the morally deficient worlds of the plays. His patron and admirer Lucius Cary appreciated this process, although he did not do it justice in the memorial volume for Jonson, Jonsonus Virbius (1638). Cary's splendid encomium could make ethical challenge sound almost automatic, when it could only have involved audience members' own initiatives, efforts, and insights as appropriators. Jonson's playgoers, With thoughts and wils purg'd and amended rise, From the Ethicke Lectures of his Comedies . . . Where each man finds some Light he never sought, And leaves behind some vanitie he brought; Whose Politicks no less the minds direct, Then these the manners, nor with less effect. (Cary 1990, 101) The most intriguing inflection of "appropriate this" would stem from the challenge posed by audiences' particularizing agendas, a challenge that producers could return by offering provocative material that could — by being applied diversely — make appropriation a more deeply involving experience than many complacent, instrumentalizing audience members could have imagined: "Appropriate this — if you can," or "Appropriate this — if you dare." The dynamic animated by that inflection would raise the stakes of the theater and deepen theatrical production and experience. It would make appropriation truly a two-way process. Some such injunction might fit Hamlet's encounter with the First Player (2.2). Hamlet struggles with several phases of appropriating response to the First Player's speech, and his struggles finally contribute to the larger compass of his tragedy. The dramatist, whether by design or accident, thereby seems to represent both the theater's accommodation of the practice of appropriation and the difficult, but productive, challenge that practice can mean for individual audience members. Since Hamlet's response can be seen as contributing to his tragedy, it cannot be judged as entirely effective or successful. Hamlet may have bitten off more than he can chew, or he may have failed to realize the appropriative potential offered by the Player's speech. But especially in the context of actual contemporary response, it seems unlikely that his work with dramatic performance is simply disabling or symptomatic of a perverse consciousness lost in words (as argued by Danner 2003). But however one interprets Hamlet, his relation to actual playgoers and his potential for illuminating the possibility of a Shakespearean theater of appropriation must be considered.

Hamlet gets more than he expected from the Player's "passionate speech" (Shakespeare 1997, 2.2.414).3 His appropriation is unique to him, and it bears on great matters of duty, right, and the murder of a King. It also resembles those of some audience members surveyed above. John Davies of Hereford re-discovers his personal identity and goals after witnessing, like www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 9/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Hamlet, a dramatic rendition of rampantly violent heroism (Tamburlaine in his chariot whipping his harnessed kings). In both cases, a process of personal reflection and discovery involves emotion aroused not simply by dramatic action, but also by emotion released in the playgoer through the action's personal resonance — that is, its appropriation in a personal application. In each case, that resonance involves a challenge to a basic assumption the playgoer holds about himself, demanding further levels of charged, appropriating response that entail a new perspective and resolve. In Hamlet's case, the challenge also entails a series of specific actions, which actually turn out to involve the pointed appropriation of another play, the Mousetrap, as applied not only to Claudius, but also to Ophelia and Gertrude. The implication of Hamlet's total response is that Shakespeare expected ordinary audience members to frame their own kinds of applications and uses from theatrical material that was compelling to them, which, as in Hamlet's situation, might have unpredictable consequences in their lives. The perspective of reception here also allows us to understand the "To be or not to be" soliloquy afresh, as a contrast between response as appropriation or "action" and response arrested at the stage of interpretation or mere "thought" (2.2.87, 90). The whole complex process extending from the Player's speech to the springing of the Mousetrap represents Shakespeare's appreciation of the collaboration of players and audiences in a dynamic theater of appropriation. It suggests that he responded to audiences' challenges to provide material for their own creative appropriations — appropriations that he could neither predict nor contain — with material that challenged audiences in ways they could not predict and on levels they could not have expected. "Appropriate this, if you dare, and you may never be the same again."

Hamlet, of course, has already heard the First Player's passionate rendition of Aeneas's speech to Dido recounting the actions of bloody Pyrrhus at Troy ("I heard thee speak a speech once . . . " [2.2.416]), and his enthusiasm has prompted him to commit part of it to memory (plausibly with the help of his "tables" [1.5.107-108] or commonplace book). He praises the speech according to disinterested criteria of excellence: "well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty and cunning . . . and by very much more handsome than fine" (2.2.420-26). But the avenging warrior motif could have interested Hamlet from the beginning because he admired his own warlike father, even though Hamlet recognized that he himself was not from the same mold. And now, of course, after the Ghost's revelation of murder and his injunction to kill Claudius, the scope for special application has grown, and the meaning of the speech has changed for Hamlet, prompting him now to request particularly its recitation. In one dimension, the personal application is potentially double: Sympathetic Dido, hearing about Pyrrhus killing King Priam, represents horrified Hamlet hearing about Claudius killing King Hamlet; but in another sense, wavering Hamlet is vicariously applying Pyrrhus to himself furiously killing King Claudius. Pyrrhus's sword, which "seemed i' th' air to stick" (2.2.459), could also be Hamlet's own self- aggravating wavering. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 10/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation One imagines Hamlet immediately moved by the second performance, finding that it arouses more emotions than he is able to assimilate at once. He bids the Player stop and makes plans with the company to savor the remainder apart from Polonius's distracting comments (2.2.499-502). Hamlet asks the players to perform at court The Murder of Gonzago, fortified with a "dozen or sixteen lines" (518) that would prompt its audience to apply the action of the play to current circumstances in the Danish court. We are free to suppose that he got the idea to appropriate The Murder of Gonzago for this purpose from realizing how closely Aeneas's speech also recalls those topical circumstances. And just before asking for Gonzago, he shows explicit awareness of the possibilities of topical application, remarking to Polonius that stage players "are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live" (2.2.504-506). Gonzago will be appropriated as an "ill report" against Claudius, but Hamlet has yet to grasp fully its usefulness as an appropriation.

Hamlet's subsequent reflection on the Player's performance in his second soliloquy (2.2.527-82) clarifies its significance for him and takes his appropriation further. Reflection first releases Hamlet's frustration and outrage at himself and at Claudius. Applied to his present dilemma over killing Claudius, the Player's genuine tears become a goad to indict his own tardiness in failing to carry out the Ghost's injunction to murder Claudius: "What would he [the Player] do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have? / He would drown the stage with tears" (2.2.537-39). This is how the moral textbook says plays should work: Staged models of "virtue her own feature," as Hamlet puts it in his instructions to the players (3.2.20- 21), prompt audiences' self-criticism. But we see here that the self-criticism arises in the context of a particular person's particular crisis, for which dramatic material is appropriated and processed with effort and insight. And it is here, in his extended, performance-induced paroxysm of guilt and self- loathing, that Hamlet realizes that plays can effectively guilt-trip others, as well. Now Hamlet sees that Gonzago can also be appropriated more specifically as the Mousetrap, actually to entrap Claudius in his guilt ("I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play . . . have proclaimed their malefactions" [2.2.566, 569]). Hamlet's work with the Player's speech allows him to confront more deeply the depths of his self-hatred and to move beyond them. For he not only devises the Mousetrap, but also acknowledges that he has had good reason for not acting precipitously: "The spirit I have seen may be a devil . . . I'll have grounds more relative than this" (2.2.575-76, 580-81). His soliloquy represents audience response as a complex transformation that appropriates dramatic material, moving beyond play and performance to focus on present and personal matters, whose outcome is a course of action.

But is this playgoer up to carrying through his own theatrical appropriations? He has hardly set himself right with the Player's speech, as if it were fully adequate medicine or therapy. That speech addressed only some of Hamlet's issues. The next scene's soliloquy, "To be or not to be," acknowledges further doubts about his plan and himself: www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 11/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Thus conscience does make coward of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. (3.1.85-90) Rather than acting with the benefit of thought's due discretion, the playgoer may become a mere interpreter, an observer of life, settling for the "pale cast of thought" that contemplates without consequence, positing a universe in which thinking humans are trapped and paralyzed. And after the Mousetrap has been sprung, Hamlet passes up an opportunity to carry out his resolve, whether from paralysis or from appreciation of the complexities of the matter and of his own desires. But Shakespeare has nevertheless represented powerfully an overlooked dimension of what Hamlet has called "the purpose of playing" (3.2.18-19), one that accords a more active and collaborative role for the audience as the players' appropriating Other than we have yet realized. It represents the audience member in his alterity, as an Other who remains a free agent and an end in himself. With the right audience, playing — we now see — presents "virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" (3.2.20-22), as Hamlet says, partly through appropriation. Hamlet is an engaged and discerning audience member who is able to appropriate theatrical experience as part of a personal and political struggle of several stages, one that eventually loses its specificity as it flows into larger patterns of life. The play appropriates him, too, in the sense that its total effect and significance increase as it brings him to a new place.

In the Mousetrap scene itself, Hamlet carries out his intention to appropriate another performance. He becomes a tendentious commentator, ensuring that the others apply the play to the situation at court in ways that expose them, especially Claudius. In this sense, he answers the unspoken injunction to "appropriate this," modeling in a different way what might take place in the mind of a playgoer during or after a performance, what a playgoer might actually speak during a performance, or what a playgoer might say about a play afterwards in order to turn it to a special purpose. In this case, of course, the purpose is treasonous and therefore dangerous to speak. As The Murder of Gonzago begins, Hamlet sets up this guilt-arousing application by implying to Claudius that Hamlet's own hopes for the succession to the throne have been fobbed off with empty promises (3.2.85-86). Then, to Ophelia, he compares the play's brief prologue to a woman's brief love (3.2.136-37). Right after the Player Queen has reiterated her intention never to remarry after her husband dies, Hamlet coyly asks Gertrude, "Madam, how like you this play?" (3.2.209), provoking her immortal reply. A few lines later, he tells Claudius that the play is indeed based on a true story, "the image of a murder done in Vienna" (3.2.218), implying its applicability to other real murders. And then of course when the murderer Lucianus "pours the poison in [the Player King's] ears" (p. 1714, s.d. after line 238), Hamlet interrupts the play with an outburst meant as an accusation against Claudius, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 12/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation whereupon the King leaves, "marvelous distempered" (3.2.276), and the trap is sprung. All of these cases represent tendentious readings that appropriate dramatic material for present application, mainly to test Claudius, but also to indict Ophelia and Gertrude. Claudius's automatic response contrasts strongly with Hamlet's extended and strenuous play-work of appropriation. It seems that players in the theater who disrupt a performance can also lend to it an extra dimension of meaning.

In these ways, Hamlet appropriates both Aeneas's speech and The Murder of Gonzago in an evolving process of response. Dramatic production is represented here as a resource to be given up to the purposes of playgoers, who can shape and apply it at will. When they do so with discretion, powerful theatrical stimulants may be processed to become medicine rather than poison, to use words commonly applied to the effects of plays at the time (Pollard 2005). The degree to which that process is successful here is debatable, of course. But what player, one might say at first, would not want a playgoer like Hamlet, unruly though he can get? He wants something particular out of a scene, yet when he gets more than he asks for, he rises to the challenge, allowing the experience to work on his inner conflicts, as he works through to a productive way of processing his theatrical experiences. But an application to a head of state as accusatory as this could get players in trouble, as it almost did with Shakespeare and his company shortly after, when Essex's men commissioned a production of Richard II the night before their attempted coup. Still, appropriating loose cannons such as Hamlet, bent on assassination, raises the stakes for the theater as a political, psychological, social, cultural, and at times, religious force. Hamlet is surely the world's most intensively interpreted literary work. It is a great irony of literary-critical history that near its center the author has placed a vivid account of how an audience member can creatively appropriate a play's resources for huge personal and political goals. That dynamic transaction between writer and audience calls forth powerful artistry from both sides. Perhaps Shakespeare also valued appropriation partly because it seemed to be a means to make the theater a multifarious force in the world, including a force for change.

COMMODITY AND THE COMMON GOOD Hamlet, then, represents the public impact of the theater as centering on its empowerment of the appropriating, personal agendas and aspirations of individual audience members. And in this respect, Hamlet's mode of reception illustrates the argument I have made elsewhere concerning the place of the theater in the early modern marketplace — that the theater offers its plays primarily as "commodities" to audiences, in the early modern sense of that word: as "a quality or condition of things, in relation to the desires or needs of man . . . conveniency, suitability, fitting utility" [OED, "commodity" 1]; and further, that the modern meaning of "commodity" as an item set to sale, while it is certainly part of the picture at this time, accords more with later periods' highly developed notions of aesthetic

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 13/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation experience, authorial control over meaning, and analytic literary interpretation.

The invitation to "appropriate this" offers the stage as a "commodity" in the older sense, one that accommodates a range of desires, needs, and purposes of its audience, and supplies equipment for living. Hamlet's responses, as some of the extant actual responses do, also illustrate how that invitation can challenge audiences to explore beyond set ideas and understandings of self and purpose. Such appropriation can, in this way, contribute to the artistic excellence of the play, though it may compete with, as well as complement, other kinds of formal artistry and authorial control of response.

Clearly, the theater of appropriation or of accommodation does not tend toward reconciliation of disparate interests by unifying or harmonizing responses and attitudes according to a prescribed view of nation, faith, or culture. It is ideologically pluralist, yet that openness could bear hope for tolerance and reconciliation. For it broaches the possibility of a world in which the disparate multitude of "commodities" that audiences discover might somehow coexist, support one another, or be adjusted, redefined, replaced, and so reconciled. This theater forgoes mastery of signification for the sake of the Other, the audience, thereby bringing those Others to the question of what could join them. Valuing the alterity of the audience leads, logically at least, to valuing the pursuit of another radical alterity, a common good that contextualizes audiences' pursuits of particular goods. I. M. and John Taylor, two of the audience members mentioned above who appeal to shared values — albeit embattled traditional ones — and to the public good while promoting their own interests. I. M. appeals to traditional values when he speaks out against the decline of traditional service as the model of pure wage work advances. The generous tip or "guerdon" that Costard gets from Biron in Love's Labour's Lost represents the manifold rewards of traditional service, and Armado's stingy "remuneration" that of impersonal wage work. John Taylor defends urban civility against ostentatious and dangerous hackney coaches by comparing their occupants to charioteer Tamburlaine with his leash of kings. Republican agent John Milton seeks to counteract the pious sympathy Charles I had generated through his personal testament Eikon Basilike by comparing him to Shakespeare's Richard III, who feigned religious devotion to fool the public into accepting him as king. Rev. Nicholas Richardson was trying to help when he preached that Juliet's care for Romeo was a figure for God's providence. The goals of Prince Hamlet in his dramatic appropriations entail ridding Denmark of what is rotten. This ethical dimension of the theater of appropriation could also be called spiritual in that it risks depending on the Other — audience response — for its own identity, but posits that response as radically unknowable. Some history of the early modern sense of "commodity" and consideration of its uses by Shakespeare can concretize these ideas.

"Commodity," in its older sense, figures in a key moral issue in Tudor economic policy, what Keith Wrightson calls the conflicting demands of personal "commodity" and community welfare or "commonwealth" www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 14/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (Wrightson 1986, 23). The increasing respectability of an eye for self- interested "commodity" rather than for observance of reciprocal obligations to the commonwealth is registered in the following historical progression. The protests of Robert Crowley and other "commonwealthsmen" ministers in the mid-sixteenth century include an attack on the pursuit of "commodity" by "'such as passe more on the world then god, more on ther pryvat profett then on the common welthe'" (quoted in Wrightson 1986, 150). By 1571, Thomas Smith was searching for a rapprochement between self-interest and reciprocity amid the depredations of the advancing market economy, standing up for what he paradoxically called "the commoditie . . . of the common wealth" (quoted in Wrightson 1986, 157). Finally, by the 1620s, merchants Thomas Mun and Edward Misselden were heralding capitalist ideology, asserting that the general pursuit of private "commodity" is sufficient in itself to secure the good of the commonwealth (Wrightson 1986, 204).

As has been emphasized for some time, the exchanges between theatrical producers and consumers were part of the evolving early modern economy. The theater of appropriation might appear in some respects to parallel the emerging doctrine of Mun and Misselden, that in the capitalist market the pursuit of profit benefits the whole, with appropriating audience members concerned more about their individual interests than their sense either of the play as a whole or any vision of commonality that the play might offer. But it could also accord with Smith's paradoxical ideal of combining self-interest and reciprocity in a "commoditie . . . of the common wealth" — that is, whatever is good for the commonwealth as a whole. Along these lines, Paul Yachnin insightfully distinguishes the values of the Shakespearean theater from purely commercial ones, aligning them with an artisan consciousness (rather than that of a capitalist entertainment industry) and with spiritual notions of community (Yachnin 2005). Good theater figures the good society. To this I would add that it is also through its focus on facilitating the audience's power to engage with self and world that the theater of appropriation remains fundamentally involved with ethical questions of commodity and commonwealth. It is produced by artisans who express their citizenship, as well as their craftsmanship, through performance.

Philip the Bastard's famous invective in King John draws on the paradoxes of the early modern discourse of "commodity." And if one substitutes "play" for "world" below in the second and third lines, the Bastard could speak for the impatience felt by Ben Jonson, and perhaps sometimes by Shakespeare, about appropriating audiences inclined to dismember and pervert the well- made play:

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 15/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity; Commodity, the bias of the world [play], The world [play] who of itself is peisèd well, Made to run even upon even ground, Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias, This sway of motion, this commodity, Makes it take head from all indifferency, From all direction, purpose, course, intent . . . (King John, 2.1.575- 82) But the context undercuts Philip's moral: The English and French kings' agreement not to level the city of Angiers, of which Philip complains, seems less a case of private interest subverting fair play — "indifferency" — and the course of nature than does Philip's own concluding admission: "And why rail I on this commodity? / But for because he hath not wooed me yet" (2.1.582-83). Philip's own behavior belies his cynical self-assessment here, for his advance combines personal ambition (his own "commodity") with admirable concern for and service to the nation. As the play's commentator, he emphasizes others' and his own mixed motives, expressing aspirations to justice and honor that in the world of the play are both noble and simplistic.

Philip's career actually shows how even that smooth-faced gentleman, Commodity, can be a hero (Hobson 1991, 95-114). In my tickled application, his career also shows that many players might resolve their reservations about the specter of "this vile-drawing bias" of appropriation in the playhouse with the understanding that it challenges them to greater achievements. They have the opportunity to make of themselves and their audiences mutually accommodating "commodities" who share an interest in a theatrical commonwealth that extends well beyond the moment of performance and contributes to the common good and an emerging public sphere. But Philip himself cannot envision this good. That is up to the audience.

In The Merchant of Venice, likewise, the term "commodity" implies a the embrace of a general as well as particular good, and the questions this play raises about community are also relevant to the theatrical community of players and audience, as well as to the society beyond. The Duke cannot dismiss Shylock's suit for a pound of Antonio's flesh because, Antonio says, The Duke cannot deny the course of law, For the commodity that strangers have With us in Venice, it if be denied, Will much impeach the justice of the state, Since that the trade and profit of the city Consisteth of all nations. (Merchant of Venice, 3.3.26-31) The phrase "commodity . . . with us" refers in the first place to the benefits that citizens extend to non-citizens, perhaps specifically trading privileges. Not allowing Shylock to carve up Antonio constitutes a denial of his trading privileges because his contract with Antonio to do so would be voided. Such www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 16/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation privileges express "the justice of the state" because that justice is based on allowing "all nations" to conduct business and thereby contribute to the city as a whole. Citizens extend certain commodities, or useful privileges, to Shylock, but those commodities are also assets to the citizens and to all the residents of Venice. The anti-Semitic defendant is wry here about an expedient policy that requires catering to the special interests of a perverse group of aliens. But the principle to which Antonio refers involves the rudimentary semblance of a just, multicultural society based on the reciprocal "commodity" that diverse groups with valid interests represent for one another (though only some of the groups are actually citizens).

The term "commodity," then, would suggest recognition of a duty to dispense equal justice by accommodating diverse interests for the common good. This is a principle that could also extend to the theater of appropriation as a dispenser of commodities and an enabler of audiences' discoveries of benefits. Of course, in this particular case it would be catastrophic to allow such "justice" to be applied, since doing so would result in murder. And Antonio is saved by an obscure provision specifically distinguishing between citizens and aliens: "If it be proved against an alien / That . . . / He seek the life of any citizen" (Merchant of Venice, 4.1.344-46), the alien loses his estate, and his life lies at the mercy of the Duke. It is ironic that a discriminatory law saves the day rather than a general, sorely lacking prohibition against murder that is equally respectful of everyone's commodity. There were limits to the theater's pluralism, and pluralism in or out of the theater has no power in itself to secure equal treatment for all interests. But where is the theater, where is the community, where is the world in which the goods we pursue are just, forgiving, and hospitable?4 These questions posed by The Merchant of Venice resonate also in a theater that addresses diverse identities and conflicting needs and desires and yet tries to give all some of what they want. Such a theater does not provide the answers, but it does provide a means to them.

Many historicist studies have enabled us to appreciate how the Renaissance theater thrived artistically by magnetizing a powerful centripetal flow of social, cultural, and religious energy centered on performance "commodities" (in the fully modern sense) that appropriate and rehearse cultures and enable a new kind of distinctively theatrical experience. But the theater of appropriation, as I have defined it, runs all the other way. It sacrifices mastery of signification to provide material for appropriation by audiences. These audiences, as it were, re-appropriate by discovering, in the context of the common good, "commodities" (in the older sense) that are beneficial to their evolving practices of life and community. Besides that centripetal flow of cultural energies toward the stage itself, then, the Renaissance theater also recognized the value of striving to meet the challenge of a powerful undertow, a proliferating economy of use and application, a sublime, unfathomable, appropriating reversal powered by the supreme cultural centrifuge, the audience.

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NOTES 1. The two who come closest are Nathaniel Tomkyns and Abraham Wright. See Tomkyns's letter of 16 August 1634 on The Late Lancashire Witches, in Herbert Berry, "The Globe Bewitched and El Hombre Fiel," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984): 211-30; and Abraham Wright, Excerpta Quaedem per A. W. Adolescentem, BM Add MS 22608 (ca. 1640), transcribed by Kirsch, 256-61. 2. For a debate on the degree to which players tolerated or encouraged "distracted" or individualized response, see Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, 79-81 and 89-105, passim. 3. All citations to Shakespeare's plays will be to The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) and will be incorporated into the body of the text. 4. Ewan Fernie cites these "three great works of love" in his account of Hamlet's deconstructive spirituality (Fernie 2005, 179). See also "Merchants of Venice, Circles of Citizenship" (Lupton 2005, 73-102).

REFERENCES Anon. 1997. "A neuer writer, to en euer reader. Newes." In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. 1826-27. Berry, Herbert. 1984. "The Globe Bewitched and El Hombre Fiel." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1: 211-30. Brady, Frank. 1984. James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769-1795. New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill. Cary, Lucius, Viscount Falkland. 1990. "An Eglogue on the Death of Ben Johnson." In Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage, 1599-1798. Edited by D. H. Craig. London and New York: Routledge. 183-87. Danner, Bruce. 2003. "Speaking Daggers." Shakespeare Quarterly 54.1: 29-62. Davies of Hereford, John. 1967. Essaies Upon Certaine Sentences, Wittes Pilgrimage. In The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford. Edited by Alexander B. Grosart. 2 vols. 1878; reprint, New York: AMS. Dawson, Anthony B., and Paul Yachnin. 2001. The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Donoghue, Frank. 1993. "Colonizing Readers: Review Criticism and the Formation of a Reading Public." In Mercantilist Economics. Edited by Lars Magnusson. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 54-74. Desmet, Christy. 1999. Introduction to Shakespeare and Appropriation. Edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. London: Routledge. 1-12.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 18/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 1993. "Much Ado with Red and White: The Earliest Readers of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593)." Review of English Studies 44 (November): 479-501. Fernie, Ewan. 2005. "The Last Act: Presentism, Spirituality, and the Politics of Hamlet." In Spiritual Shakespeares. Edited by Ewan Fernie. London and New York: Routledge. 186-211. Fitzgeoffery, Henry. 1617. Satyres: and Satyricall Epigrams: with Certaine Observations at Black-Fryers. London. Forman, Simon. 1930. "The Bocke of Plaies and Notes therof per formane for Common Pollicie." In William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Edited by E. K. Chambers. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. 2:337-41. Foster, Hal, ed. 1984. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay. Gayton, Edmund. 1654. Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixote. London. Halkett, Anne. 1974. The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett. Edited by John Loftis. Oxford: Clarendon. Hart, John. 1647. Trodden Down Strength, By the God of Strength, or Mrs. Drake Revived. London. Hawkes, Terence. 1992. Meaning by Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Helgerson, Richard. 1983. Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heywood, Thomas. 1612. An Apology for Actors. London. Hobson, Christopher Z. 1991. "Bastard Speech: The Rhetoric of 'Commodity' in King John." Shakespeare Yearbook 2: 95-114. Holderness, Graham. 2006. "'Dressing Old Words New'": Shakespeare, Science, and Appropriation." Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1.2 (Fall/Winter): 22 pp. in PDF. Holles, John. 1983. Letters of John Holles, 1587-1637. Edited by P. A. Seddon. 3 vols. Nottingham: Thoroton Society. 2:288-90. I. M. 1598. A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Seruingmen: or, the Seruingmans Comfort: With other things not impertinent to the Premises, as well pleasant as profitable to the courteous Reader. London. Joughin, John. 2000. Introduction to Philosophical Shakespeares. Edited by John Joughin. London: Routledge. 1-17. Kirsch, Arthur C. 1969. "A Caroline Commentary on the Drama." Modern Philology 66.3: 256-61. Ligon, Richard. 1657. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados . . . London. Lopez, Jeremy. 2003. Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 19/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Lupton, Julia Reinhard. 2005. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Matthew, Toby. 1598. Tobie Matthew to Dudley Carleton, 20 September. In The Complete State Papers Domestic: Series One, 1547-1625. Woodbridge, Conn. and Reading: Gale Group, 1979. Reel 113, No. 61 (12/268/61). Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker. 1604. The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie: or, The Walkes in Powles. London. Milton, John. 1953-1982. Eikonoklastes. In Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Edited by Don M. Wolfe et al. 7 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nashe, Thomas. 1592. Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Diuell. London. Norwood, Richard. 1945. The Journal of Richard Norwood: Surveyor of Bermuda. Edited by W. F. Craven and W. B. Hayward. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints. Osborne, Dorothy. 1928. The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple. Edited by G. C. Moore Smith. Oxford: Clarendon. Owen, Jane. 2000. An Antidote for Purgatory. Edited by Dorothy L. Latz. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Pollard, Tanya. 2005. Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson, Nicholas. 1997. Sermons quoted in Bodleian MS. eng. misc. d. 28, p. 359, col. 705. In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. 3345. Ricoeur, Paul. 1979. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: TCU. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Roberts, Sasha. 2003. Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sc., Anon. 1604. Daiphantus, or The Passions of Loue, Comicall to Reade, But Tragicall to Act: As full of Wit, as Experience. London. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. Shakspere Allusion-book; A collection of allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700. Originally compiled by C. M. Ingleby, L. Toulmin Smith, and F. J. Furnivall, with the assistance of the New Shakspere Society: re-edited, revised, and re-arranged, with an Introduction by John Munro (1909), and now re-issued with a Preface by Sir Edmund Chambers. 1932. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press. Shirley, James. 1970. "To the Reader." In The Works of Francis Beauimont and John Fletcher. Edited by Alexander Dyce. 11 vols. 1843; reprint, Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781730/show 20/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Taylor, John. 1967. The World Runs on Wheels. In The Works of John Taylor the Water-Poet Comprised in the Folio Edition of 1630. 3 vols. 1869; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin. Tofte, Robert. 1598. Alba: The Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover. London. Tubbe, Henry. 1915. "Character: A Rebell." In Oxford Historical and Literary Studies: Henry Tubbe. Edited by G. C. Moore Smith. Oxford: Clarendon. Weimann, Robert. 1996. "Thresholds to Memory and Commodity in Shakespeare's Endings." Representations 53 (Winter): 1-20. Whitney, Charles. 2006. Early Responses to Renaissance Drama. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wrightson, Keith. 1982. English Society, 1580-1680. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Wriothesley, Elizabeth, Countess of Southampton. 1872. "To my dearly loved husband the Earle of Southampton." In The Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquis of Salisbury, at Hatfield House: The Cecil MSS. Appendix, Third Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. Edited by J. S. Brewer. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Yachnin, Paul. 2005. "'The Perfection of Ten': Populuxe Art and Artisanal Value in Troilus and Cressida." Shakespeare Quarterly 56.3: 306-27.

ABSTRACT | APPROPRIATION IN RECEPTION | HAMLET AND PRODUCTION FOR APPROPRIATION | COMMODITY AND THE COMMON GOOD | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Queer Appropriations: Shakespeare's Sonnets

(/current) and Dickinson's Love Poems

PÁRAIC FINNERTY, UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH (/previous)

ABSTRACT | JEWEL AND PEARLS | CONFERRING OF TITLES | TO MAKE ME FAIREST OF (/about) THE EARTH | TWO QUEENS | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES

(/archive) ABSTRACT

While it is expected that nineteenth-century love poetry would engage with Shakespeare's Sonnets, considering their status and pervasive appeal at the time in Anglo-American culture, this paper puts forward the case for Emily Dickinson's specific borrowings from these poems. More specifically, within the context of their afterlife, it argues that the Sonnets provided the American poet with an authoritative and, at the same time, controversial resource for her construction of love. It examines Dickinson's use of a vocabulary of aristocratic and economic tropes, love triangles, imagery of light and darkness, physical beauty and erotic multiplicity, which she would have identified as Shakespearean. His unconventional sonnets, it will be suggested, offered Dickinson a means of validating the traditionally feminine position of powerlessness within the discourse of love, of representing female desire for a male figure, and of constructing poems that connote same-sex love. Like the Sonnets, Dickinson's love poems are queer: They unsettle repressive categories of gender and sexuality and make possible the signification of same-sex passion. This paper continues current discussion of the queer afterlives of both writers as an antidote to the intrusive and spurious biographical readings of their brief, repetitious, and figurative lyrics.

While scholars have long acknowledged the powerful influence of Shakespeare's writings on Emily Dickinson, they have only recently discussed her appropriation of a specifically Shakespearean vocabulary for the depiction of gender, sexuality, and eroticism (Bennett 1990b; Farr 1992; Hart 1990; Finnerty 1998; Comment 2001). This article considers Dickinson's appropriation of the language of Shakespeare's Sonnets, a language that encourages "alternative and competing constructions of gender" and is www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 1/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation especially useful to readers, such as Dickinson, who seek to unsettle the normative limits of sexual desire (Bennett 1993, 95). Although Dickinson's edition of the Sonnets, now at the Houghton Library, Harvard suggests much use, this topic has been relatively unexplored by scholars (Finnerty 2006, 118- 19; Richwell 1989, 22-31). Judith Farr notes the similarities between the Sonnets and Dickinson's love poems that address both a male figure associated with "courtesy, loyalty, physical appreciation" and an awe-inspiring female who is "false, feline, and distant" (Farr 1990, 132, 182). For Farr, the Sonnets are one of Dickinson's models of the expressive lyric, a genre that offers "a personal encounter, a private moment publicized" (Jackson 2004, 10). Yet it seems more likely that Dickinson would have extended to Shakespeare her own disclaimer about the dangers of reading lyric poetry as personal expression: "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person" (L268).1 From Dickinson's many references to his plays, it seems that Shakespeare's importance to her lay in his powers of multiple identification rather than personal revelation. Like Robert Browning, a writer whose use of dramatic monologue and personae she admired and emulated, Dickinson probably felt that Shakespeare had not "unlocked his heart" in the Sonnets, and that "If [he had done] so, the less Shakespeare he!" (Browning 1996, 1317).

If for Browning and Dickinson the idea that the Sonnets were autobiographical lessened Shakespeare's genius, for other readers it caused the scandal that England's national poet was guilty of sodomy and adultery (De Grazia 1993, 37-49; Stallybrass 1993, 91-103). In Dickinson's edition of Shakespeare, the editor Charles Knight offers an essay on the Sonnets that chronicles the intrusive way these lyrics were being read as privacy made public, and also the concerted assertion by scholars that the Sonnets were highly stylized and conventionalized Renaissance lyrics in which the author's literal presence and personal expressivity were elaborate conceits (Knight 1853, 8:459-60, 479; see also Vendler 1988, 1-12; Rosemarin 1985, 20-37). Knight's essay suggests Dickinson's awareness of a historical alternative to the lyric's position in the post-Romantic period as the genre of "personified identification," and this offered a rationale for what Virginia Jackson regards as Dickinson's interrogation of the "cultural identification of personhood with writing" (Jackson 2004, 197). Other nineteenth-century critics questioned the validity of the sonnet sequence and argued that these so-called revelatory poems, for the most part, obscure the identity, gender, and sexuality of both speaker and addressee (Knight 1853, 8:476; Jameson 1829, 238-41; Hudson 1872, 24-26; Massey 1866, 173-84, 205-24, 228-31; Edmondson and Wells 2004, 30; Dubrow 1996, 291-305). The Sonnets were poems not of exemplary individual disclosure but "multiple eroticism," and, as a result, were probably all the more important for Dickinson's poems in which the gender of the speaker or addressee is treated as an interchangeable alternative (Henneberg 1995, 1-19; see F1396; F1566; F494).2

Of course, for Dickinson the significance of the Sonnets was the fact that they marked a break in a tradition of English love poetry in which a male lover speaks and a female beloved is silent. The Sonnets also offered an www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 2/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation authoritative endorsement of the traditionally feminine position of powerlessness, passivity, and longing. Consequently, Dickinson's female contemporaries recognized the special relationship that existed between women and the "feminine" Shakespeare of the Sonnets; for example, Mary Cowden Clarke noted that the "tenderness, patience, devotion, and constancy worthy of the gentlest womanhood are conspicuous in combination with a strength of passion and fervor of attachment belonging to manliest manhood" (Clarke 1887, 356). Accordingly, the Sonnets were models for Dickinson's unsettling of the naturalness of the male or female position within the lover's discourse (Barthes 1978, 13-15). Shakespeare's poet-speaker likens himself to a mother (S21),3 a tender nurse (S22), a widow (S97), and Philomela (S102); but he also presents himself as the slave (S57, 58) of a powerful male figure, who is his "Lord" (S26), "sovereign" (S57), and "master" (S106). At other times, the Sonnets feminize the young man, using a language traditionally associated with women (Stapleton 2004, 271-96). The speaker is a "deceived husband" (S93), the male beloved a "master-mistress" (S20) who is compared to Helen of Troy (S53), Eve (S93), and a Queen (S96).

While for conservative readers such features made the Sonnets troubling, for Dickinson they were a means of rethinking conventional categories that organize human desire and present gender disjunction. The male homoeroticism of these poems provided her with a language that authorized and ennobled same-sex passion (Edmondson and Wells 2004, 138-39, 148-53; Sinfield 1994, 20); and her susceptibility to such a language is likely, considering her passionate relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, regardless of whether their homoerotic friendship was self- consciously lesbian or not (Faderman 1978, 197-225; Bennett 1990a, 150-80; Smith 1992, 23-30). In the poems to be discussed, Dickinson appropriates the Sonnets, their mercantile and aristocratic imagery, their gender ambiguity, and their concern with time, waste, aging, and beauty to destabilize and complicate categories of gender and sexuality and to question compulsory heterosexuality and the conventional relationship between identity and desire.

JEWEL AND PEARLS Many critics in Dickinson's day read the Sonnets as a record of an intimate relationship between a rich and handsome nobleman (believed to be the Earl of Southampton or the Earl of Pembroke) and a lowly and reliant poet; their homoeroticism was often explained as a petition to gain and keep the financial support and influence of a wealthy patron (Marotti 1990, 143-73; Kernan 1995). Yet in many of the Sonnets, the gender of the addressee and of the speaker are indeterminate, and what connects the poems is a concern with "metaphorical wealth, profit, worth, value, expense, 'store,' and 'content'" (Greene 1985, 231-32). Using the posture of the impoverished and dependent lover, a posture first employed by Sappho and of great influence on nineteenth-century women writers (see Prins 1999, 227; Bennett 2003, 175), Shakespeare created speakers who are rich while their beloved is present, but in a state of poverty (emotional and actual destitution) when the beloved is absent. The Sonnets begin by addressing a beautiful figure, "rich in youth," www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 3/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation who squanders his beauteous treasure (S15) and makes "famine where abundance lies" (S1). In other sonnets, the vulnerability of the poet-speaker is expressed through jewel-image clusters: So am I as the rich, whose blessed key, Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure, The which he will not every hour survey, For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure; Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare, Since, seldom coming, in that long year set, Like stones of worth they thinly placed are, Or captain jewels in the carcanet. So is the time that keeps you as my chest, Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide, To make some special instant special-blessed By new unfolding his imprisoned pride. Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope, Being had, to triumph; being lacked, to hope. (S52) Here, the beloved is the male speaker's "treasure," "stones of worth," and "jewels," who when possessed, gives secret or imprisoned pride and when lost, a feeling of utter emptiness. In other sonnets, the beloved's tears are rich pearls that "ransom all ill deeds" (S34), and the beloved is "time's best jewel" (S65) and Nature's own store and wealth (S67), in comparison to whom all other "jewels" are mere trifles. Even the beloved's faults are graces: "As on the finger of a throned queen / The basest jewel will be well esteemed" (S96). The speaker's "only care" is that his jewel will be stolen in this "filching age," and he hoards the precious stone like a miser who enjoys his treasure sparingly (S48, 75).

Dickinson invokes this vocabulary of eroticized affluence in many poems. For example, in "Your Riches – taught me – Poverty" (F418), a female speaker was a millionaire until she encountered a beloved who teaches her "a different Wealth – / To miss it – beggars so –." This recalls the sonnets in which the beloved is a "sweet thief which sourly robs" (S35) and a "gentle thief" who "steals "all [the poet's] poverty" (S40). Although this poem was sent to the poet's sister-in-law, as in many of Dickinson's love poems and in Shakespeare's Sonnets, the gender of the addressee is ambiguous; gender seems less important than what the figure represents — a wealth beyond mines, gems, diadems, jewels, and monarchy. The beloved is the Pearl "That slipped my simple fingers through – / While just a Girl at school." Like Shakespeare's beloved, Dickinson's Jewel/Pearl alters all value systems and economies of worth and impoverishes the speaker eternally by its loss. Similarly, "I held a Jewel in my fingers" (F261), written a year later in 1861, presents the same situation; although here the genders of the speaker and of the addressee are unclear, the theme remains commemoration ("Amethyst remembrance") of the moment of loss. Whereas in the previous poem, simple fingers drop the jewel, here overly trusting, "honest" fingers allow it to be pilfered by a dishonest thief. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 4/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation The most provocative version of this scenario occurs in "That Malay – took the Pearl," which presents the loss of a Pearl/Jewel from the perspective of a male aristocratic speaker; this poem also brings together many of the motifs present in the Sonnets: the erotic triangle, the Earl figure (Southampton or Pembroke), and the imagery of light and darkness: That Malay – took the Pearl – Not – I – the Earl – I – feared the Sea – too much Unsanctified – to touch – Praying that I might be Worthy – the Destiny – The Swarthy fellow swam – And bore my Jewel -– Home – Home to the Hut! What lot Had I – the Jewel – got – Borne on a Dusky Breast – I had not deemed a Vest Of Amber – fit – The Negro never knew I – wooed it – too – To gain, or be undone – Alike to Him – One – (F451) As in Dickinson's other Jewel poems, the anxiety of loss is examined in its aftermath (Porter 1981, 9-24). Her Earl is comparable to Shakespeare's sonnet speaker in two key ways: Both are unable to prevent the loss of that which is most precious to them, and both feel unworthy and inadequate. The sonnet speaker declares, "O how thy worth with manners may I sing, / When thou art all the better part of me" (S39). In the Sonnets, this feeling of unworthiness is emphasized because there are poetic and sexual rivals; the sonnet speaker calls himself "a worthless boat" and the rival poet a "tall building, and of goodly pride" (S80). The Pearl is the "prey of every vulgar thief" (S48), who would steal it away, but not appreciate its value. Dickinson not only appropriates from Shakespeare this central imagery of theft and competition, but her Malay also evokes the sonnet speaker's main rival, "a woman colored ill" (S144) — "black save in thy deeds" (S131), "black as hell, as dark as night" (S147) — who tempts the "man right fair" away (S144). This suggests that Dickinson is not using a "heterosexual discourse for the expression of lesbian love" (Smith 1992, 116), but rather a homoerotic one. Paula Bennett argues that nineteenth-century women writers used classical material with homosexual import to "negotiate a same-sex relationship" and treated the beautiful youth found in such material as if he were a woman (Bennett 2003, 165). Here Dickinson's Pearl on the Malay's sooty bosom is equivalent to Shakespeare's Pearl, which is like the "sea's rich gems" (S21) and which, "like a jewel hung in ghastly night / Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new" (S27). Just as the Malay can take the Pearl, the sexual allure

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 5/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of Shakespeare's Dark Lady can effortlessly woo the beloved from the speaker's side: For still temptation follows where thou art. Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won; Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed; And when a woman woos, what woman's son Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed? (S41) Despite the change of sex, Dickinson's Malay and her Pearl become equivalent to Shakespeare's Dark Lady and Pearl/Jewel.

In addition, same-sex passion in Shakespeare's Sonnets is presented as the merging of the identities of the poet-speaker and the young man in and through the body of the woman. For example, the poet speaker is not jealous of the relationship between the young man and the Dark Lady because "here's the joy, my friend and I are one: / Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone" (S42). This level of identification within the Sonnets is mirrored in the final lines of Dickinson's poem: "To gain, or be undone – / Alike to Him – One –." Evoking the Sonnets, the final lines connect the Earl with the sexual and sexualized Malay, affirming, and also complicating, the cultural correlation between hypersexuality and darker or "Southern peoples" (Bennett 2003, 165). As in the Sonnets, a desire for the same object unites the rivals beyond notions of difference, whether of class, gender, sexuality, or race.

This poem has been read as one in which Dickinson uses a male persona, the Earl, to express the anguish of watching a less worthy rival steal one's idol (Patterson 1979, 1-29; Pollak 1984, 156). What is visible here, as in other Dickinson poems, is the invisibility of lesbian love and the need for a refraction of same-sex desire through identification that crosses boundaries of sex (Sedgwick 1994, 175; Patterson 1979, 16, 88-89). The Malay represents the male rival who can with natural ease take, rather than merely covet and idealize, the Pearl: heterosexuality and male physical superiority are victorious over a feminized aristocratic masculinity, associated in the nineteenth century with deviant sexuality (Sedgwick 1985, 216-17). Here, Dickinson makes her poet-lover of higher rank than Shakespeare's is, perhaps to reflect emerging stereotypes of male homosexuality, and uses these to figure female same-sex passion. Yet Dickinson's inactive and weak Earl might also be read as representing a female figure, suggesting that Dickinson is not using a male persona or identifying with — or performing — masculinity, but rather playing with gender itself (Finnerty 1998). What is most interesting about Dickinson's use of gendered titles or names is that it does not represent a gendered or sexual identity, but is "the site of a certain crossing, a transfer of gender," staging possible "exchange[s] of gender identifications that the substantiating of gender and sexuality conceal" (Butler 1993, 144-45). The fear, failure, and introspection of the Earl might suggest passivity, reticence, and a socially-constructed reserve associated with Victorian ideals of femininity; thus, the Earl might connote gender and sex rather than sexuality. The suggestion that Dickinson's Earl is a woman is supported by another www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 6/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation poem, "No Matter – now – Sweet – but when I am Earl" (F734); here the speaker imagines a future time when she, a powerless girl, will transform into a magnificent Earl with belts, buckles, crests, and ermine robes. Reading these two poems together, Dickinson's Earl complicates the discourse of love and the traditional erotic triangle by making impossible the identification of the sex/gender and sexuality of their protagonists.

If Dickinson's Earl connotes a desiring woman whose object of desire is proscribed, it is easy to read the poem as a coded articulation of same-sex passion; however, in order to read the female Earl as heterosexual we would need to view the Pearl as male, a conceptual move corroborated by the Sonnets. But if the Pearl is male and the Earl female, the poem is about the speaker watching two men together: The Malay takes the Pearl from the "unsanctified" sea, which the Earl fears, and brings it to his hut. The sea imagery and the activity of swimming/driving in the poem have homoerotic connotations and are used in other nineteenth-century poetry (Bennett 2003, 170-73). For example, the twenty-ninth bather in Whitman's "Song of Myself" becomes aroused as she spies on nude male bathers; similarly, Dickinson's female voyeur watches an equivalent homoerotic scene between the Malay and (male) Pearl. In this poem, Dickinson appropriates the central scene and imagery of Shakespeare's Sonnets, maintaining their fluid and protean eroticism, their validation of gender-blurring figures such as a female Earl and male Pearl, and the permission they grant her to represent (male and female) same-sex passion. Using Shakespeare, Dickinson expands the possibilities of identification, creating triangles of desire that are not, despite the use of gender pronouns and titles, anchored to sex.

CONFERRING OF TITLES Another theme from the Sonnets that Dickinson uses is that of a dependent and inferior lover who must flatter, praise, and love a powerful, aristocratic beloved (Scott 2004, 316; Bennett 2003, 177). Such a submissive and masochistic identification runs throughout her writing, in which speakers frequently address with love, fidelity, and meekness various distant, aloof, and often careless "Master" figures (Griffith 1964, 166-69; St. Armand, 1984, 39- 41, 137-51). Yet as in the poems already discussed, Dickinson may have added "masculine pronouns, or 'bearded' pronouns," "an occasional 'sir,' 'signor,' or 'master'" to her declarations of love, thus disguising "affirmations of love for a woman" (Patterson 1951, 8). This would mean that some of Dickinson's heterosexual love poems use the homoerotic sonnets to queer normative sexuality. Dickinson evokes the sonnet speaker and the idea that a lover's unquestioning compliance to and devotion for an aristocratic beloved confers titled status. In Sonnet 91, the speaker declares that Thy love is better than high birth to me Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost, Of more delight than hawks or horses be; And having thee, of all men's pride I boast – Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take All this away and me most wretched make. (S91) www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 7/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation In another sonnet, the poet-speaker is "crowned with" the beloved and "drink[s] up the monarch's plague, this flattery" (S114); love allows the speaker to be "engrafted to [the beloved's] store," to transcend physical and social stigma, to share in the beloved's "abundance," and "by a part of all thy glory live" (S37). In yet another Shakespeare sonnet, the speaker notes: Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising, From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (S29) Similarly, Dickinson's speakers become unadorned queens (F280, 353, 347, 575) or aristocratic figures (F194) on whom love confers nobility (Crumbley 1997, 125-38). Yet Dickinson's poems alter the central fear of Shakespeare's poet-speaker, that this status is dependent on his beloved's favors: "Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take / All this away and me most wretched make" (S91); "To leave poor me, thou hast the strength of laws, / Since why to love, I can allege no cause" (S49). In Shakespeare, the beloved's absence and distance cause the speaker to experience destitution and a range of negative emotions, including frustration, neglect, resentment, fear, and anger (S33-35, 40-42, 57-58, 67, 69); in Dickinson, by contrast, although such emotions are expressed, the loss of love does not imply a loss of rank.

In "The Sun – just touched the Morning" (F246), written in 1862, for instance, a male sun touches a female "Morning" with the hope of a life of spring: The Sun – just touched the Morning – The Morning – Happy thing – Supposed that He had come to dwell – And Life would all be Spring! She felt herself supremer – A Raised – Ethereal Thing! Henceforth – for Her – What Holiday! Meanwhile – Her wheeling King – Trailed – slow – along the Orchards – His haughty – spangled Hems – Leaving a new necessity! The want of Diadems! The Morning – fluttered – staggered – Felt feebly – for Her Crown – Her unanointed forehead – Henceforth – Her only One! The male "Sun" in Dickinson's text is comparable to the morning's "Sovereign's eye," which touches meadows and streams, in Shakespeare's "Full many a glorious morning have I seen" (S33):

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 8/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace: Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all triumphant splendour on my brow; But out, alack! he was but one hour mine; The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now. Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth. The male figure in each of these poems (the sun in Dickinson's and morning in Shakespeare's) touch and alter a grateful and unworthy beloved. Both depict an erotic encounter: In Shakespeare's poem, the "sovereign eye" kisses the landscape and fills the speaker with bliss; a similar ecstasy is experienced by the speaker in Dickinson's poem when the sun rises to make her "supremer / A Raised – Ethereal Thing." Yet this joy is short lived because the "haughty" male lovers in each poem regard the beloved as equivalent to the "basest clouds" that must ultimately be left behind, "And from the forlorn world his visage hide, / Stealing unseen to west." Like Dickinson's speaker, the sonnet speaker can only recall when "one early morn did shine / With all triumphant splendour on my brow; / But out, alack, he was but one hour mine." In Dickinson, the nobility conferred is also momentary: morning's "holiday" of "Diadem" ends when "Her wheeling King – / Trailed – slow – along the Orchards" and disappears. In Shakespeare, the "triumphant splendour" of aristocratic status is taken away, for Shakespeare's morning is a "sun of the world" that, like the sun, stains the poet-speaker, reducing his value and worth. Here there is a sense of disappointment and betrayal at the injury and disgrace associated with the encounter ("Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth") not present in Dickinson's poem. In both poems, there is conflict between the "desire to praise and the fear that the idol has feet of clay" (Jackson 2002, 32); however, Dickinson's speaker suggests that the sun's abandonment leaves "a new necessity! / The want of Diadems!" Her crownless and unanointed head becomes an alternative "crown," opening up the sexual possibility and independence that are forestalled by the sun's presence (Henneberg 1996, 4-6). There is a sense in which the loss of the power-giving sun allows for alternative erotic configurations, what Dickinson describes in another poem as "Night's possibility" (F161).

In a poem from the same year, Dickinson presents another speaker, who like the sonnet speaker, is ever faithful to an absent lover; however, this is not acknowledged or appreciated by her lover (F267). Again, a crown becomes the symbol of the lover's absence rather then his presence: Having been covertly raised in status by love, the speaker wears a crown of "Thorns" by day and only puts on after sunset her "Diadem." The poem begins by www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 9/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation suggesting that what this speaker has endured is equivalent to a violent sex change: Rearrange a "Wife's" Affection! When they dislocate my Brain! Amputate my freckled Bosom! Make me bearded like a man! Blush, my spirit, in thy Fastness – Blush, my unacknowledged clay – Seven years of troth have taught thee More than Wifehood ever may! Love that never leaped its socket – Trust entrenched in narrow pain – Constancy thro' fire – awarded – Anguish – bare of anodyne! Burden – borne so far triumphant – None suspect me of the crown, For I wear the "Thorns" till Sunset – Then – my Diadem put on. Big my Secret but it's bandaged – It will never get away Till the Day its Weary Keeper Leads it through the Grave to thee. This reversal of sex is a visible sign of the speaker's faithfulness, representing all the pain she has suffered, her "Constancy thro' fire"; in addition, she describes her secret love as big and "bandaged," only to be revealed beyond the grave. Dickinson repudiates and, at the same time, impersonates the role of the conventional woman (Runzo 1996, 350); heterosexual love — albeit, in this case, a proscribed love — turns the woman into something unnatural, freakish, and unrecognizable: She is queer in terms of sex and gender. Love, trust, and fidelity cause her pain, and her endured burden is symbolized as a horrific mutilation. This counters the idea presented in the Sonnets that men are more constant in love and women more changeable. One of the most famous presentations of this notion occurs in the notorious Sonnet 20, a poem which also presents a change of sex, although through a natural process, when Nature doting on "a woman's face" adds to it a male body:

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 10/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion, A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion, An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth, A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created, Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure, Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure. (S20) Shakespeare's man has "a woman's gentle heart, but [is] not acquainted / With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion"; Dickinson subverts this idea by creating a female speaker who represents her constancy as the violent transformation of a woman's body into a man's. She is made unwomanly in her attempt to keep the secret of their love. Dickinson playfully suggests that there might be another secret behind her bandages: Perhaps this bearded amputee has also been, like Shakespeare's master-mistress, "prick'd" out "for women's pleasure," offering an interesting revenge upon her neglectful male addressee. This appropriation of Shakespeare is all the more provocative, since the word "Wife" is in quotation marks, suggesting that the addressee might be read as female and that Dickinson's speaker is imagining becoming a "male" figure to naturalize and conventionalize female same-sexual passion (Smith 1992, 113-14). If so, Dickinson is evoking the language of Sonnet 20 because its speaker, in a manner similar to hers, needs to conceptualize the attraction and love for a member of his own sex and does so by making his beloved an androgynous figure of female beauty and male virtues.

TO MAKE ME FAIREST OF THE EARTH Perhaps one of the most interesting of these "Master" poems is "Fitter to see Him, I may be" (F834), which is generally interpreted as describing how God's grace transforms the ugliness and decay of human sin into beauty and the speaker's fear that her lover (Christ) will not recognize her after this transformation (Mudge 1979, 153-56; Eberwein 1985, 182). The poem stands out in Dickinson's canon because its form deviates from her usual hymnal meter, presenting what might be viewed as two sonnets, with iambic tetrameter instead of pentameter, back to back. The vocabulary recalls that of the Sonnets: their obsession with beauty and youth and the popular name given to the male beloved of these poems, "the Fair Youth" (MacInnes 2000, 1-26): Fitter to see Him, I may be For the long Hindrance – Grace – to Me – With Summers, and with Winters, grow, Some passing Year – A trait bestow www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 11/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation To make Me fairest of the Earth – The Waiting – then – will seem so worth I shall impute with half a pain The blame that I was chosen – then – Time to anticipate His Gaze – It's first – Delight – and then – Surprise – The turning o'er and o'er my face For Evidence it be the Grace – He left behind One Day – So less He seek Conviction, That – be This – I only must not grow so new That He'll mistake – and ask for me Of me – when first unto the Door I go – to Elsewhere go no more– I only must not change so fair He'll sigh – "The Other – She – is Where?" The Love, tho', will array me right I shall be perfect – in His sight – If He perceive the other Truth – Upon an Excellenter Youth – How sweet I shall not lack in Vain – But gain – thro' loss – Through Grief – obtain – The Beauty that reward Him best – The Beauty of Demand – at Rest – The poem reverses the oppositions established by Shakespeare's text — young/old, man/woman, aristocratic/common, beautiful/ugly, and grace/disgrace — as Shakespeare's speaker begs the beautiful young man to make a copy of himself, either through procreation and marriage, or to allow the poet to immortalize him in verse. He warns the young man that "forty winters [will] besiege thy brow" (S2), his lease on beauty will end (S13), and perfection leads to decay; the young man will become, as the speaker is now, a man of "forty winters" (S2), with chapped and tanned skin, lame, decrepit, and physically defective (S37): When hours have drained his blood, and fill'd his brow With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night, And all those beauties whereof now he's king Are vanishing or vanished out of sight, Stealing away the treasure of his spring; For such a time do I now fortify Against confounding age's cruel knife That he shall never cut from memory My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life. (S63) In contrast, Dickinson's speaker imagines metamorphosing into the most beautiful of women, transcending the natural cycle of decay and time (what Shakespeare calls the "never-resting time [that] leads summer on / To hideous www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 12/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation winter, and confounds him there") (S5); she will become "the fairest of the Earth," contradicting the basic premise of the Sonnets that "every fair from fair sometimes declines" (S18). At her Master's return, she will be "Fitter to see Him" and rewarded for the painful waiting; however, as in "Rearrange a 'Wife's' Affection!" a radical change in appearance, caused by her fidelity, makes the speaker unrecognizable to her beloved, despite her being arrayed by love and perfect in his sight.

Whereas association with and distance from the beloved lead to disgrace in the Sonnets, Dickinson's speaker gains grace (Heale 2003, 165-67), and the fear of physical change (decay and waste) in the Sonnets becomes here anxiety about beauty. The fairness makes Dickinson's speaker unidentifiable and unchosen. Upon his return, the Master treats her face as an object to be scrutinized, itemized, and described, in the way that the Dark Lady's features are in Shakespeare's Sonnets (e.g., S130). While the Fair Youth "masters" and perfects older ideas of beauty (S106), the Dark Lady is desired despite her lack of conventional beauty: "For well thou knowest, to my dear doting heart / Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel" (S131). Like Shakespeare's speaker, Dickinson's male figure ultimately prefers the "Excellenter Youth," Dickinson's version of Shakespeare's "lovely boy." Although the term "Youth" might suggest a person of either sex, the Shakespearean resonance suggests we read the figure as male. If so, following Shakespeare, Dickinson's text unsettles the blazon tradition in which the body of the beautiful female is admired and sought, for as in Shakespeare it is the youth who is "Excellenter," has "sweet beauty's best / Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow," and is chosen (S106). Dickinson's youth, like Shakespeare's, may be a favorite of Nature, who though she "goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, / She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill / May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill" (S126). Perhaps Dickinson's evokes the Sonnets to remind her Master that although this youth has stifled time's destruction of beauty, he is bound to Nature's "audit," which "though delay'd, answer'd must be, / And her quietus is to render thee" (S126). However, it is her Master's choice of the Youth, over and above the newly beautified speaker, that is Shakespearean and homoerotic. Read in light of the other poems discussed, this choice might suggest that the Master is in fact female; if so, perhaps the speaker's beloved chooses the youth to conform to traditional heterosexual roles.

The concluding lines take the "Master's" hypothetical rejection to its logical conclusion in grief; however, this allows the speaker to transcend the cult of beauty and her lover's implicit demand for change and (physical and/or spiritual) perfection. The beauty that will reward this figure best (which might be read as sarcastic, considering the Master's choice of the "Excellenter Youth") is the end of his control over her, "The Beauty of Demand at Rest." This ending, which might signify silence, passivity, and death, could also hint at alternative and un-represented (sexual) possibilities beyond the failed and rejected heterosexuality described in the poem.

TWO QUEENS www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 13/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Two Dickinson poems attempt to represent such possibilities in the form of female same-sex relationships: "Like Eyes that looked on Wastes" (F693) and "Ourselves were wed one summer dear" (F596). These poems appropriate from the Sonnets their economic and aristocratic terms, and their discourse of sameness and identity (and marriage). At first, the Sonnets associate a same-sex relationship with (literary) creativity and regeneration. The poet- speaker asserts his ability to immortalize the youth: "His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still green" (S63). However, such Sonnets are undercut by others in which only marriage and procreation can prevent shame and waste: But Beauty's waste hath in the world an end, And kept unused, the user so destroys it; No love towards others in that bosom sits That on himself such murd'rous shame commits. (S9) In another sonnet, the Youth is advised, "That thou among the wastes of time must go, / Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake, / And die as fast as they see others grow" (S12). As the sonnet sequence progresses, the speaker presents his relationship with the youth as something that causes him scandal and shame (S72, 89, 95). Another poem might be read as expressing the vulnerability of same-sex love to issues of public reputation: Let me confess that we two must be twain, Although our undivided loves are one: So shall those blots that do with me remain Without thy help by me be borne alone. In our two loves there is but one respect, Though in our lives a separable spite . . . I may not evermore acknowledge thee, Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame, Nor thou with public kindness honour me, Unless thou take that honour from thy name . . . (S36) Shakespeare's depiction of a same-sex relationship becomes equivalent to what Dickinson describes as a "compact" of misery, perishability, and hopelessness in "Like Eyes that look on Wastes," where the same-sex relationship is represented as one woman seeing in the other blankness, a "Wilderness" and "Infinites of Nought": Like Eyes that looked on Wastes – Incredulous of Ought But Blank – and steady Wilderness – Diversified by Night – Just Infinites of Nought – As far as it could see – So looked the face I looked upon – So looked itself – on Me –

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 14/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation I offered it no Help – Because the Cause was Mine – The Misery a Compact As hopeless – as divine – Neither – would be absolved – Neither would be a Queen Without the Other – Therefore – We perish – tho' We reign – (F693) This poem charts a trajectory backwards and forwards between the joy and pleasure of passionate friendship and the painful isolation, shame, suffering, and unhappiness associated with same-sex attraction (Patterson 1951, 227). Of course, the Shakespearean youth's relationship with the Dark Lady also corrupts him (S144) because she is "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame" (S129). Dickinson's "wastes" may reflect the doom and death that awaits non- procreative existence or be the result of an association with a woman similar to Shakespeare's mistress (Farr 1992, 132). The mirroring of dependency in the poem, whereby the speaker and beloved are the same, also summons up many of the Sonnets in which the lovers share one identity: "Even for this let us divided live, / And our dear love lose name of single one" (S39). When the poet-speaker praises and loves the youth, it is represented as a form of narcissism and self-love (S62), since the youth is the "better part" of the old, decrepit speaker (S74). For the sonnet speaker, "My friend and I are one" (S42), and "We two must be twain / Although our undivided loves are one" (S36); any attempted separation ("Let us divided live / And our dear love lose name of single one") is painful self-division and mutual destruction (S39). Whereas rank alters the discourse of sameness in Shakespeare, in Dickinson both women are of the highest status; but this state of equivalence and unrealizable rank becomes something that defies expression. The lack of dissimilarity between lover and beloved, subject and object, creates a nothingness that cannot be described: It is beyond everyday communication (Homans 1985, 118-23). Neither woman can absolve or actualize monarchy "Without the Other"; their love is in a state of indeterminacy and equivocalness because it cannot be one of togetherness and unity. The poem ends with the paradox that same-sex passion must be renounced (must perish), but cannot be (must reign).

As if following on from this poem, "Ourselves were wed one summer – dear" begins with a state of mutuality and identity: a same-sex marriage, equivalent to its provocative representation in Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediment" (S116): Ourselves were wed one summer – dear – Your Vision – was in June – And when Your little Lifetime failed, I wearied – too – of mine –

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 15/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation And overtaken in the Dark – Where You had put me down – By Some one carrying a Light – I – too – received the Sign. 'Tis true – Our Futures different lay – Your Cottage – faced the sun – While Oceans – and the North must be – On every side of mine – 'Tis true, Your Garden led the Bloom, For mine in Frosts – was sown – And yet, one Summer, we were Queens – But You – were crowned in June – (F596) The syntactical oddity of the opening line suggests a lack of available language to describe this deviant nuptial (Erkkila 1996, 169). As a result, the poem presents the destruction of the initial unity and equality through a discourse of light and darkness, winter and summer, life and death, day and night, procreativity and decay, similar to that used in the Sonnets (S6, 12, 15). One of the women yields to the forces of conventional regenerative marriage; she enjoys creativity ("Bloom") and domesticity (a sun-facing cottage), which places the speaker, in turn, in a realm of darkness, coldness (a north-facing cottage), and decay (frosts). This recalls the Sonnets, wherein the youth is advised to marry to avoid a desolate and wasteful state: Who lets so fair a house fall to decay, Which husbandry in honour might uphold Against the stormy gust of winter's day And barren rage of death's eternal cold. (S13) In Dickinson's poem, by choosing the traditional female role one queen is crowned; the other continually replays the earlier moment of unity, their wedding when they were mutually crowned: "One Summer, we were Queens – / But You – were crowned in June –." However, an erotic triangle is also apparent as "Some one carrying a light" offers the rebellious queen an alternative sign, recalling the imagery of "a man right fair" (S144). Yet this figure is genderless and unidentified, and the vision he/she brings is an alternative future of coldness and frost that signifies the opposite of normative heterosexuality. While in other poems there is a gesturing towards same-sex passion as something not yet expressible and permissible but existing, here the speaker's choice to defy convention allows her to fashion herself as a negative or inverted version of the Queen who actually marries. Yet her reminiscences on an earlier ideal state, their same-sex marriage, might be read as more than mere nostalgia. "One Summer, we were Queens": This is a warning that the married Queen has rejected the very essence of her identity, her sexuality, what Foucault calls "the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness" (Foucault 1979, 69).

CONCLUSION www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 16/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Queer theory offers us new ways of viewing identity, gender, and desire in the works of Shakespeare and Dickinson. Judith Butler's idea that the oppressive binaries of sex might be confounded and denaturalized by alternative configurations of bodies and desires is evidenced in Shakespeare's Sonnets, which complicate a twenty-first century reader's taken-for-granted notions of sex and gender (Butler 1990, 149). For readers such as Dickinson, Shakespeare's radical and deviant representation of human love, deriving from Early Modern conceptions of human Eros, unsettle poetic and social conventions as they were understood in the nineteenth-century, allowing her access to a dissonant and oppositional "order of things." Dickinson found in the Sonnets breaks and fissures in the story that her culture told itself about male and female roles within transactions of passion and desire (Sinfield 1994, 9-10). For Dickinson, the Sonnets made visible and expressible that which dared not be seen or spoken about, as is shown by her use of a Shakespearean vocabulary to represent the possibility of same-sex passion. She opportunistically uses these poems to fashion her own vision in which categories such as male and female multiply into feminized male bodies, masculinized female bodies, or sexless indeterminate bodies; and the assumed sexed bodies of the speaker and the addressee have not the kind of fixed or determined meanings we might expect. With the Sonnets as her guide, Dickinson avoids such simplistic binaries and makes sex — and, by implication, sexuality — a variable (or variant) within the scope of human desire.

NOTES 1. References to Dickinson's letters are to The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward (1986). All subsequent references are to this edition, will be included in the body of the text, and will be indicated by the abbreviation L, followed by the letter number. 2. References to Dickinson's poems are to The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin (1998). All further references are to this edition, will be included in the body of the text, and will be indicated by the abbreviation F, followed by the poem number. 3. References to Shakespeare's Sonnets are to the The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems of William Shakspere, edited by Charles Knight (1853). All subsequent references are to this edition, will be included in the body of the text, and will be indicated by the abbreviation S, followed by the sonnet number.

REFERENCES Barthes, Roland. 1978. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Bennett, Paula. 1990a. Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 17/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Bennett, Paula. 1990b. "'The Orient is in the West': Emily Dickinson's Reading of Antony and Cleopatra." In Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare. Edited by Marianne Novy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 108-122. Bennett, Paula. 1993. "Gender as Performance: Shakespearian Ambiguity and the Lesbian Reader." In Sexual Practice, Textual Theory. Edited by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope. Oxford: Blackwell. 94-109. Bennett, Paula. 2003. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Browning, Robert. 1986. "House." In Volume 2 of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Edited by M. H. Abrams et al. 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge. Chedgzoy, Kate. 1995. Shakespeare's Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clarke, Mary Cowden. 1887. "Shakespeare as the Girl's Friend." Shakespeariana 4: 355-69. Cody, John. 1974. After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Comment, Kristin M. 2001. "Dickinson's Bawdy: Shakespeare and Sexual Symbolism in Emily Dickinson's Writing to Susan Dickinson." Legacy 18.2: 167-81. Crumbley, Paul. 1997. Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. De Grazia, Margreta. 1993. "The Scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets." Shakespeare Survey 46: 37-49. Dickinson, Emily. 1986. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward. 1958; Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. Dickinson, Emily. 1998. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by R. W. Franklin. Variorum Edition. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. Dubrow, Heather. 1996. "'Incertainties Now Crown Themselves Assur'd': The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare's Sonnets." Shakespeare Quarterly 47.3: 291-305. Eberwein, Jane Donahue. 1985. Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Edmondson, Paul, and Stanley Wells. 2004. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 18/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Erkkila, Betsy. 1996. "Homoeroticism and Audience: Emily Dickinson's Female Master." In Dickinson and Audience. Edited by Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Faderman, Lillian. 1978. "Emily Dickinson's Homoerotic Poetry." Higginson Journal 18: 19-27. Farr, Judith. 1990. "Emily Dickinson's 'Engulfing' Play: Antony and Cleopatra." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 9.2 (Fall 1990): 231-50. Farr, Judith. 1992. The Passion of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Finnerty, Páraic. 1998. "'No Matter Now Sweet – But When I am Earl': Dickinson's Shakespearean Cross-Dressing." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.2: 65-94. Finnerty, Páraic. 2006. Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel. 1979. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Greene, Thomas M. 1985. "Pitiful Thrivers: Failed Husbandry in the Sonnets." In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen. 230-44. Griffith, Clark. 1964. The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson's Tragic Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hart, Ellen Louise. 1990. "The Encoding of Homoerotic Desire: Emily Dickinson's Letters and Poems to Susan Dickinson, 1850-1886." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 9.2 (Fall): 251-72. Heale, Elizabeth. 2003. Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Henneberg, Sandra. 1995. "Neither Lesbian nor Straight: Multiple Eroticism in Emily Dickinson's Love Poetry." The Emily Dickinson Journal 4.2: 1-19. Homans, Margaret. 1985. "'Oh, Vision of Language!': Dickinson's Poems of Love and Death." In Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Edited by Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 114-33. Hudson, Henry Norman. 1872. Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters. 2 vols. Boston: Ginn and Company. Jackson, MacDonald P. 2002. "The Distribution of Pronouns in Shakespeare's Sonnets." AUMLA: Journal of the Australian University Language and Literature Association 97: 22-38. Jackson, Virginia Walker. 2004. Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jameson, Anna. 1829. Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 19/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Kernan, Alvin. 1995. Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theatre in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613. New Haven: Yale University Press. Knight, Charles. 1853. The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems of William Shakspere; with a Biography and Studies of his Works: The Pictorial and National Edition. 8 vols. New York: Little, Brown, and Company. MacInnes, Ian. 2000. "Cheerful Girls and Willing Boys: Old and Young Bodies in Shakespeare's Sonnets." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.2: 1.1-26. Available online at: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-2/macisonn.htm (http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-2/macisonn.htm) [cited 7 December 2008]. Marotti, Arthur F. 1990. "Shakespeare's Sonnets as Literary Property." In Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 143-73. Massey, Gerald. 1866. Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Mudge, Jean M. 1975. Emily Dickinson and the Image of Home. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Patterson, Rebecca. 1951. The Riddle of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Patterson, Rebecca. 1979. Emily Dickinson's Imagery. Edited by M. H. Freeman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Pollak, Vivian R. 1984. Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Porter, David. 1981. Dickinson: The Modern Idiom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Prins, Yopie. 1999. Victorian Sappho. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Richwell, Adrian. 1989. "Poetic Immortality: Dickinson's Flood-Subject Reconsidered." Dickinson Studies 69: 1-31. Rosmarin, Adena. 1985. "Hermeneutics versus Erotics: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Interpretive History." PMLA 100: 20-37. Runzo, Sandra. 1996. "Dickinson, Performance, and the Homoerotic Lyric." American Literature 68: 347-63. St. Armand, Barton Levi. 1984. Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Alison V. 2004. "Hoarding the Treasure and Squandering the Truth: Giving and Possessing in Shakespeare's Sonnets to the Young Man." Studies in Philology 101.2: 315-31. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1994. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781869/show 20/21 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Sinfield, Alan. 1994. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press. Sinfield, Alan. 1996. "How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist." In Alternative Shakespeares: Vol. 2. Edited by Terence Hawkes. New York: Routledge. 122-39. Smith, Martha Nell. 1992. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stallybrass, Peter. 1993. "Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare's Sonnets." Modern Language Quarterly 54: 91-103. Stapleton, M. L. 2004. "Making the Woman of Him: Shakespeare's Man Right Fair as Sonnet Lady." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46.3: 271-96. Vendler, Helen. 1988. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 1966. The Portrait of Master W. H. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Edited by V. Holland. London: Collins.

ABSTRACT | JEWEL AND PEARLS | CONFERRING OF TITLES | TO MAKE ME FAIREST OF THE EARTH | TWO QUEENS | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

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Erotic Politics Reconsidered: Desdemona's Challenge to

(/current) Othello

ELIZABETH GRUBER, LOCK HAVEN UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | STRANGE BEDFELLOWS | ADAPTATION AS FEMINIST PROTEST | SISTERHOOD IS (/about) SORROWFUL: THE PROBLEM OF COLLECTIVE POLITICS | PERFORMING DESIRE | PERIPETEIA AS FEMINIST PROTEST | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

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ABSTRACT

Adaptations frequently revamp their source-texts by reversing the disposition of margins and center. This principle is epitomized in Paula Vogel's Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief, which retells Othello, but focuses on the formerly marginalized female characters from Shakespeare's play. My essay examines Desdemona as feminist protest, showing how Vogel's adaptation responds to the elegiac politics of Shakespeare's play. Of particular significance is Vogel's transformation of the necrophilic impulse in Othello: in Shakespeare's play, of course, Othello vows to love Desdemona after killing her. Fittingly — given that adaptations employ repetition itself as a vehicle for transformation — Desdemona both reprises and critiques the death æsthetic of Othello.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS In the opening passages of his memoir, The Future Lasts Forever (published posthumously in 1993), Louis Althusser writes of awakening and slowly realizing that he has strangled his wife Hélène while the two were in bed. Written during Althusser's three-year stay in a mental hospital (his sentence for killing Hélène), the memoir issues a corrective to accounts of the crime that had circulated in French newspapers.1 Althusser suggests that Hélène wanted to die and therefore that her death should be classified not as homicide, but as a case of suicide-via-third party (Althusser 1993, 281). In a curious way, The Future Lasts Forever invokes Shakespeare's Othello (1604); the play, of course, also www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 1/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Desdemona, Directed by Nina Rastogifeatures an act of uxoricide — and a husband who attempts to control narratives of his wife's death. Specifically, Othello instructs his listeners: "Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate," and he instructs future biographers to describe him as "one who lov'd not wisely but too well" (Othello, 5.2.234).2 Obviously, generic properties and literary conventions distinguish the play from the memoir, and these texts are also imprinted by (and help to shape) the vastly different cultural contexts in which and for which they were produced. But analogies, after all, are useful precisely because of their capacity to forge unlikely connections. And an intriguing link between Othello and The Future Lasts Forever is their shared treatment of wife-killing: In both cases, murder is shrouded in the mists of excess love. Or, to alter the metaphor slightly, the play and the memoir bathe violence in the waters of sentimentality. More specifically, the (marriage) bed becomes the site of murder, and this physical detail powerfully encapsulates the merger of violence and eroticism that characterizes Shakespeare's play and Althusser's memoir.

ADAPTATION AS FEMINIST PROTEST It is this very phenomenon of eroticized violence that seems the target, or impetus, of Paula Vogel's delightfully irreverent Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief (first performed as a staged reading at Cornell University in 1987), which is a retelling of Shakespeare's Othello.3 Desdemona reverses Othello's disposition of margins and center, so that the action of Shakespeare's play is replicated (with some key innovations), but also absorbed and understood from the perspectives of Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca. The play delineates these characters most clearly in terms of marital status: Desdemona is an adulterous wife; Emilia a chaste wife; and Bianca a prostitute who wishes to become a wife. Othello, Iago, and Cassio (the respective mates for Vogel's trio of Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca) never actually appear in the adaptation, although they collectively function as an absent presence that defines female behavior. Vogel's adaptation both preserves and critiques the vexed knowledge-quest that consumes Othello: The calumniated woman plot requires that Othello seek knowledge of his wife, an epistemological arrangement that positions Othello as subject/seeker and Desdemona as object. Desdemona complicates subject-object distinctions, however, because its heroine ultimately awakens to the grim realities of her precarious position as the object of Othello's obsessive thoughts.

The adaptation further disrupts the calumniated-woman plot in its insistence upon the heroine's exuberantly adulterous acts. Vogel's Desdemona does not simply understand her husband's fears: She also acknowledges that they are warranted. In the play's fifth scene, for example, Desdemona complains about Othello's erratic behavior, citing his recent "rotten moods," headaches," "handkerchiefs," and "accusations" (with these details, of course, strategically and humorously reprising Othello) and faults her husband for believing the rumors linking her to Michael Cassio, stating: "Leave it to a cuckold to be jealous of a eunuch" (Vogel 2000, 233-35). Though Desdemona redresses the marginalization of female characters in Shakespeare's play, Vogel's text also offers a piercing critique of women's collusion in patriarchal structures. To do so, Desdemona puts adaptation in the service of feminist protest, a strategy that exposes the elegiac politics of tragedy.

What follows is an account of the relationship between Othello and Desdemona. Analysis of the two plays is deliberately interlaced, as this permits the best means of examining how www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 2/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Desdemona comments on and transforms Othello. While both texts continue to invite new staged versions, and these performances raise fascinating dramaturgical questions, my argument focuses on the plays as written texts. Still, drama is the scopophilic genre par excellence, and it therefore requires interpretations that are attuned to the visual. Othello dramatizes epistemological crisis (investigative procedures were being overhauled in the seventeenth century); tensions over visual evidence (or "ocular proof") were especially acute, and Othello, of course, expressly engages with economies of gazing, a point illustrated in the hero's pledge to be satisfied with nothing less or other than "ocular proof" of Desdemona's infidelity.4 In this sense, Othello is the primary spectator and audience for the mini-drama presided over by Iago. On the other hand, as Valerie Wayne reminds us, Othello also inadvertently positions himself as a reader of Desdemona, projecting his (misogynist) fears/suspicions onto her (Wayne 1991). In short, Othello clarifies how the activities of reading and seeing converge. Desdemona elaborates on this point, particularly in its dramatization of the ways in which its characters are trapped within and by their own flawed interpretations of themselves and each other. Capitalizing on early modern anxieties about cultural difference, Othello ultimately presents "a near schizophrenic hero," who defines himself as, simultaneously, "Christian and infidel" (Loomba 1989, 289). By contrast, Desdemona ultimately erodes distinctions between its female characters. Ironically, perhaps, while the erasure of differences between women may have been intended as Desdemona's strongest feminist protest against patriarchy, it might actually compromise the play's radical politics. I return to the vexed issue of female solidarity later in the essay. For the moment, it should be noted that Desdemona foregrounds relationships among women, and the ensuing dynamics provide a barometer by which to measure feminist movement. At the same time, Desdemona's consideration of sexuality — particularly those expressions and behaviors that challenge cultural norms — refreshes awareness of the ways in which, as Carole S. Vance suggests, "The tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure is a powerful one in women's lives" (Vance 1984, 1).

Criticism of tragedy has proven to be a potent measure of the inroads made by feminist approaches to literature, which have often served to render visible the values, ideals, or ideologies buttressing existing theoretical models. For example, in a pivotal essay on Othello that was first published in 1980, Carol Thomas Neely writes: "The men's murderous fancies are untouched by the women's affection, wit, and shrewishness. The play ends as it began, in a world of men — political, loveless, undomesticated" (Neely 1980, 214). This view, of course, stands in opposition to more traditional readings of tragedy, which tend to emphasize the suffering and affirm the nobility of the tragic hero.5 Neely's point is that the sympathies and sensibilities discernible in traditional readings are themselves generated by culture-bound assumptions.

SISTERHOOD IS SORROWFUL: THE PROBLEM OF COLLECTIVE POLITICS Though Neely's article helped to steer interpretation of Othello in a new direction, she herself eventually criticized her essay's exclusive focus on gender at the expense of other considerations, such as race and class. If Neely's feminist re-reading of Othello is compromised somewhat by its singular attention to gender and its neglect of other kinds of difference, this very limitation helps to put into perspective important debates and tensions associated with feminist theory and criticism for the last few decades. Audre Lorde eloquently synopsizes these debates in "An Open Letter to Mary Daly," when she www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 3/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation writes: "To imply that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how these tools are used by women without awareness against each other" (Lorde 1983, 95). Calling for an acknowledgment of variety and diversity among women, Lorde articulates the dangers of invoking a false universality: Doing so certifies as normative the experiences of select women, while marginalizing those who do not fit this putative norm. The problem is one of ventriloquism, with certain feminists having appropriated the act of speaking on behalf of all other women. This point is skilfully argued by Anne McClintock in her very fine study of the gendering of imperialism. She writes: "Since the late 1970s, an impassioned and compelling feminist critique has emerged — largely from women of color — that challenges certain Eurocentric feminists who claim to give voice to an essential womanhood (in universal conflict with an essential masculinity)" (McClintock 1995, 7).

Desdemona has been faulted for the very problem outlined by Lorde and McClintock. For instance, in their introduction to the play, Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier comment that Desdemona's "notable omission of race as a further mode of adapting Othello may represent an unfortunate simplification on the part of Vogel" (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 234). Of course, performances of Desdemona need not feature all-white casts.6 Still, Vogel's text would appear to evade treating race as a specific source of tension between Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca. On the other hand, as Fischlin and Fortier also acknowledge, Vogel "provocatively recasts Emilia as stage-Irish and Bianca as stage-cockney, [with] the servants being more clearly depicted in terms of class and nation than they are in Shakespeare, where Emilia is not classed in terms of speech at all" (234). Thus, Vogel distinguishes characters on the basis of geographical region and nationality, and class differences prove to be the most potent mediators of social identity, including sexual roles. Desdemona adroitly raises questions about the very possibility of solidarity among women, and the play warns that dangers accompany women's inability to view themselves as a social collective. If this stance fails adequately to address matters of race or ethnicity, it does shed light on a past and current objective of feminism, namely achieving an equitable balance between celebrating differences between women and working on behalf of all of them.7

From its first scene, Desdemona chronicles ways in which its female characters work at cross-purposes. A stage direction notes that the play opens to show a nearly empty stage. Though devoid of actors, the stage is meant to feature one lonely item — a woman's handkerchief. Here, Vogel invokes Othello by training her audience's attention on a richly symbolic artifact from Shakespeare's play.8 Emilia inaugurates the action: She happens along and, spying the handkerchief, she scoops it up and hides it in the bodice of her dress. As is true of her Shakespearean predecessor, Vogel's Emilia commits a duplicitous act — she takes Desdemona's handkerchief and then professes ignorance of its whereabouts — and this helps to solidify Othello's suspicions about his wife.

In the play's very next scene, Desdemona exacts a promise of complete loyalty and truthfulness from Emilia, which is the preamble to several questions about Othello's behavior. Emilia assures Desdemona that she has heard nothing of Othello's jealousy regarding Cassio. After she offers this declaration, however, stage directions read: "(But as DESDEMONA is to EMILIA'S back, EMILIA drops a secret smile into the wash bucket. EMILIA raises her head again, though, with a sincere, servile face, and turns to www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 4/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation DESDEMONA)" (Vogel 2000, 240). Here, servility is shown to be a social mask Emilia wears in order to camouflage what she does know. Once again, Desdemona skilfully recreates Othello: Shakespeare's hero errs in trusting that Iago is "honest," just as Desdemona accepts at face value her servant's show of trustworthiness. Both plays, therefore, call attention to the epistemological dimensions of hierarchical relationships, with the "master" presuming (or fantasizing about) pure or complete knowledge of the servant.

Shakespeare's play never specifically addresses Emilia's motive for betraying Desdemona. By contrast, Vogel's adaptation emphasizes what Marianne Novy refers to as "the exploitative possibilities in relationships between women of different classes" (Novy 1999, 67). Emilia can never forget her position as servant; she is, in virtually every scene, performing a chore or task for Desdemona, with these acts underscoring the peculiar intimacy of mistress-servant relationships. For example, the fourth scene consists entirely of a stage direction that reads "EMILIA, scrubbing. DESDEMONA lies on her back on the table, feet propped up, absentmindedly fondling the pick, and staring into space" (Vogel 2000, 239). This single instance graphically illustrates how the labor of Emilia produces the luxuries enjoyed by Desdemona. The resulting arrangement between the two characters can perhaps best be described as symbiotic. It should be noted, however, that Desdemona's infidelity undercuts her power over Emilia. In the adaptation, just as in the source-text, the possession of secrets connotes power.

It is worth asking why Vogel rewrites Desdemona so that her character appears to bear out the misogynistic arguments — usually promulgated by Iago — that are discernible in Othello. That is, the corroboration of sexist attitudes seems at odds with the spirit and purpose of a feminist retelling. But Vogel's strategy becomes clear when one considers how the critical tradition (especially prior to the advent of feminist work) had equated feminine virtue and female chastity. Or, as Shirley Nelson Garner points out, "The major critics of Othello idealized Desdemona, seeing her as near to divine, if not actually" (Garner 1996, 295). My own experience teaching Desdemona to undergraduates indicates that the heroine's outspoken delight in her own sensuality is unsettling to (some) readers. In any case, endowing Desdemona with an abundant sexual appetite virtually ensures that readers must confront their own assumptions about the "proper" behavior for female characters. An unfaithful heroine/victim requires a new calibration of empathy. Novy acknowledges this point when she asks: "Do we feel different about a husband killing a wife who really is unfaithful? Should we? In what ways do we feel the same?" (Novy 1999, 72-73). Here Novy articulates an issue that is central to understanding how Vogel's text functions in conversation with (and opposition to) Shakespeare's. But the collective pronoun employed in Novy's questions downplays, or obscures, diversity of response. For example, within Othello, the answer to Novy's first question is a resounding "yes." After all, Shakespeare's hero regrets committing murder only after learning that he has been duped about his wife's guilt. As Garner suggests, the palimpsest of criticism accompanying Othello tends to uphold the notion that Desdemona's chastity is required, if the conventions of tragedy are to be fulfilled. Put a bit differently, the glories of tragic recognition have, traditionally, been ceded to Othello precisely because he errs in killing a chaste wife. By implication, a guilty Desdemona would deserve the punishment meted out to her in the play. Desdemona, however, challenges readers to question not only this interpretive paradigm, but the ideologies of gender and sexuality that nourish it.

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PERFORMING DESIRE Whatever social tensions divide Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca, a fleeting unity emerges when they collectively participate in the production of the myth of chastity. One of Emilia's more unpleasant duties involves scrubbing the blood off the bed-sheets that were soiled by Desdemona and Othello on their first night together as husband and wife. Emilia and Desdemona reveal that they used the blood of a hen, donated by Bianca, in order to provide the necessary proof of Desdemona's virginity on her wedding night. Emilia attributes the excessive staining of the sheets to Bianca's inability to provide a sufficiently elderly hen. Emilia explains: "Young chick blood's no good for bridal sheets, it's the devil to come out" (Vogel 2000, 237). This conversation disgusts Desdemona, who says that the public airing of sheets stained with virgins' blood is a "barbaric custom" (237). She adds: "Nobody displays bridal sheets on Cyprus" (237). Emilia responds, "There aren't any virgins to be had on Cyprus," and the two joke that at least half of those who congregated to gawk at the sheets were there "to pay their last respects to the chicken!" (237). Ironically, the flash of female solidarity that briefly unites Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca actually works to their collective detriment, since it requires them to perpetuate an ideal — female chastity — that redounds to their disadvantage.

In fact, Emilia presents a rationale for female obeisance to patriarchal structures: For us in the bottom ranks, when man and wife hate each other, what is left in a lifetime of marriage but to save and scrimp, plot, and plan? . . . I'd like to rise a bit in the world, and women can only do that through their mates — no matter what class buggers they all are. I says to [Iago] each night, "I long for the day you make me a lieutenant's widow!" (Vogel 2000, 240) By her own account, Emilia hungers for the luxuries that would accompany Iago's promotion to a better position. Of course, she also admits to telling her husband that she yearns for the freedoms that she imagines accompany widowhood. This moment arcs back to Othello in a playful way, exploiting the comedic potential discernible in Shakespeare's text. After all, the basic set-up of Othello — older man married to young and beautiful wife — could easily elicit a farcical conclusion. While Emilia's mini-lesson on marriage is both humorous and pleasingly irreverent, even her apprehension of the economic realities of marriage does not induce in her a revolutionary, radical, or even mildly feminist attitude. Capitulation to sexist institutions, rather than protest against them, ultimately defines Emilia's actions. Desdemona's sexual licentiousness (and Bianca's work as a prostitute) may, initially, render these two characters the more likely social rebels. But in truth Vogel emphasizes their startlingly traditional or conformist attitudes. And Desdemona's overall logic, its relentless progression towards the violent denouement prefigured in Othello, hints that oppression can best be accomplished via the conformity or acquiescence of the oppressed. If pragmatism, in the form of understanding the economic basis of marriage, prevents Emilia's rebellion against the forces of (patriarchal) tradition, Desdemona proves to be distracted by her own epicurean tendencies. Reacting in frustration to the boredom of married life, Desdemona seeks novelty and excitement, and believes she finds them, at Bianca's (it seems that even working girls need one night off a week, and Desdemona is only too happy to fill in for her friend).

In presenting her heroine as a seeker of novelty and adventure, Vogel revisits a key moment from Othello, wherein the hero describes his courtship of Desdemona. Othello www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 6/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation notes that his tales of adventure — replete with "Cannibals" and "Anthropophagi," as well as the account of his heroic escape from enslavement — constituted the only "magic" he used to win over Desdemona. Othello reports that Desdemona listened with "a greedy ear," so as to "devour up [his] discourse," and he caps his speech by explaining that Desdemona "wish'd / That heaven had made her such a man" (Othello, 1.3.143-63). By Othello's own account, Desdemona's response to his exotic adventures was a desire to be him. That is, Desdemona's real wish was to assume Othello's identity. It seems, then, that marriage to Othello effects the sublimation, rather than the fulfillment, of Desdemona's desire. Vogel follows up on this point: Her Desdemona laments that she had married a "strange dark man" in order to leave the "narrow little Venice with its whispering piazzas behind [. . .] But under that exotic facade was a porcelain white Venetian" (Vogel 2000, 242). This passage distills the cleverness of Vogel's adaptation, which consistently returns to the Shakespearean original precisely in order to transform it. Specifically, the "whispering piazzas" aptly conjure the world of calumny and innuendo so powerfully delineated in Othello. And, of course, the charge that sameness, rather than difference, renders Othello distasteful to Desdemona, provides an intriguing commentary on the earlier play's statements about desire and difference.

In the adaptation, Desdemona's dissatisfaction with her marriage leads her to temp-work as a prostitute. Desdemona considers Bianca to be a "free woman — a new woman — who can make her own living in the world, who scorns marriage for the lie that it is" (Vogel 2000, 242). Obviously, there is a profound difference between playing at prostitution (which is what Desdemona does) and actually being a prostitute. On the other hand, it is difficult to maintain the separation between charade and reality when Desdemona actually fills in for Bianca. If we take Vogel's Desdemona at her word, she seeks work as a prostitute because she enjoys doing so. Here is how Desdemona describes her own adventures as a prostitute: I lie in the blackness of the room at [Bianca's] establishment . . . on sheets that are stained and torn by countless nights. And the men come into that pitch-black room — men of different sizes and smells and shapes, with smooth skin, rough skin, with scarred skin. And they spill their seed into me, — seed from a thousand lands, passed down through generations of ancestors, with genealogies that cover the surface of the globe. And I simply lie still there in the darkness, taking them all into me. I close my eyes and in the dark of my mind — oh, how I travel! (242-43)

In Desdemona's fanciful terms, semen magically enables transport — it is only when customers' "seed" spills into her that Desdemona's flights of fancy are recorded. "Seeing the world" may be a lofty goal, and one that reflects Desdemona's desire to be free of all chains that bind her, but if such travel can only be imagined — and imagined as the by- product of servicing men's sexual needs — it cannot be accepted as a measure of female autonomy. "Service" is probably the operative word here, as it properly conveys Desdemona's assent to participate in a system that is designed neither around her needs, nor to give her pleasure or power, but to satisfy male customers. Ironically, Desdemona's naïve and somewhat romantic view of prostitution proves to be reciprocal, as Bianca mistakenly believes that marriage guarantees security to women. Though Desdemona's evaluation of prostitution is almost comically misguided, it strikes a serious note by underscoring the heroine's inability to imagine modes of escape that would rewire — rather than uphold — the circuitry of power in the play. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 7/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation For much of the play, pursuit of pleasure seems to be Desdemona's main goal, a point illuminated in the scene that features Bianca instructing her pupil in additional tricks of the trade (or perhaps skills to please tricks). More specifically, Bianca explains that some of her customers like to play a bit rough and engage in spanking, and she offers to demonstrate on Desdemona, who eagerly agrees to cooperate. This interlude of flagellation is designed as a dress rehearsal for the "real thing" — surely, prostitution calls into question the concept of the "real thing" — but both Desdemona and Bianca seem to enjoy it. As with other provocative inventions of Vogel's adaptation, one might ask: Why is this performance of masochism, whereby Desdemona learns to demonstrate pleasure when her partner inflicts pain, incorporated into the text? One possibility is that this episode is intended to convey the theatricality of all expressions of desire. Theatricality accompanies desire because, as Lynda Hart suggests, desire "takes place in the fantasy one constructs with others" (Hart 1998, 9). She adds that desire is "theatrical" "in much the same way that the play always takes place in the space between the spectators and performers" (9-10). In effect, the dynamism, or alchemy, of theater creates a temporary though productive and powerful location, one from which, to borrow a phrase from Vogel, we can "confront the disturbing questions of our time" (Vogel 1996, 231).

True to her word, Vogel uses Desdemona to explore several "disturbing questions" that range over complex and shifting terrain. The training Bianca provides to Desdemona may prove unsettling to some readers precisely because it affirms desire as both an appetite and a performance grounded in specific cultural and social frameworks. In recasting Shakespeare's heroine as a guilt-free adulterer (and the pseudo-apprentice to a prostitute), Vogel has pleasure triumph over propriety — if only temporarily. Desdemona's brief foray into sadomasochism allows Vogel to highlight distinctions between sadomasochism as consensual practice and masochism as pretext for actual violence. This Desdemona expresses eagerness to feign being hurt, and she proves to be a quick study, rapidly learning to synchronize her screams with the slaps she is administered. Desdemona's eagerness to engage in sexual play should not, of course, be confused with a desire to experience actual pain, much less total annihilation and death. This may seem an obvious point, but it nonetheless merits emphasis, if only to dislodge the Freudian view — arguably, the normative view — of gender and sexuality. Freud moors his assessment of "normal" heterosexual relations to his understanding of "sadomasochism," which he defines in terms of exertion of force and accompanying surrender to it. Specifically, Freud states: "The sexuality of most men shows an admixture of aggression, of a propensity to subdue, the biological significance of which lies in the necessity for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object" (Freud 1970, 21). Of women's sexuality, Freud writes, "Masochism comprises all passive attitudes to the sexual life and the sexual object" (92). The passages from Freud's work selected for inclusion here mute female desire, suggesting that women may surrender or acquiesce to sexual attention, but they do not actively seek it. While I have no wish to reinstall Freud as supreme authority on gender and sexuality, it is important to recognize the enduring legacy, and attendant implications, of his views.

Stretched to its chilling limits, the masochism that Freud assigns to female sexuality culminates in a death wish. To understand the durability of this myth, we might recall Althusser's rationale for murdering his wife. Describing his killing of Hélène as a fulfillment of her death-wish, Althusser would appear to find an accomplice in Freud. Othello, too, deflects blame away from its murderer, as Shakespeare's heroine uses her www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 8/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation dying words to claim responsibility for her death, thereby exculpating her husband. When asked who is responsible for killing her, Desdemona responds: "Nobody. I myself. Farewell" (Othello, 5.2.125). And immediately before being killed, Desdemona seems resigned to her fate. Or so, at least, is the conclusion of Alan Sinfield, who writes of Shakespeare's character: "Desdemona does not manage much opposition to her death" (Sinfield 1992, 53). Perhaps unwittingly, in this interpretation of Desdemona's murder Sinfield reprises a conversation that Althusser ostensibly had with "an old doctor friend" about killing Hélène. As Althusser recounts the conversation, the friend in question remarked on Hélène's lack of resistance to her own murder, asking: "Does that mean she was aware of her impending death and wanted to die at your hands, and thus passively let herself be killed? It cannot be ruled out" (Althusser 1993, 281). Admittedly they make for strange bedfellows (and certainly the synopses provided here are not intended to be exhaustive renditions of their respective work), but Shakespeare, Freud, and Althusser mutually engender a thematic of female passivity.

PERIPETEIA AS FEMINIST PROTEST Vogel's characters give the lie to this theme of female passivity, but ultimately they prove to be studies in frustration — at least to readers wishing for a transformation of the nightmarish conclusion in Othello. Mirroring its source-text, Desdemona's final scenes feature an eruption of jealousy. Upon learning that the handkerchief given to her by Cassio actually belongs to Desdemona, Bianca concludes that Cassio must have been sexually intimate with Desdemona. Once she suspects this, Bianca turns violent, advancing on Desdemona and threatening her with a hoof-pick. On her way out of the room, Bianca reveals that the night Desdemona had filled in for her had coincided with Iago's regular visit. To their horror, Desdemona and Emilia establish that Iago had indeed been a client on the night in question (he is identified by the short duration of his visit). It is worth noting that Desdemona's enactment of jealous rage furthers the play's de- sentimentalizing project. Rather than presenting her female characters as idyllic contrasts to their male counterparts in Othello, Vogel opts to emphasize the structural relations in which Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca participate — to their collective undoing.

In the wake of Bianca's departure, Emilia and Desdemona attempt to assess the severity of their situation. Initially, Emilia tries to reassure Desdemona, telling her, "I'm sure your husband loves you!" (Vogel 2000, 253). Skeptical, Desdemona asks for proof. Emilia is prepared to provide just this, and she launches into a description of Othello's "loving" behavior: "I've seen him, sometimes when you walk in the garden, slip behind the arbor just to watch you, unaware . . . and at night . . . in the corridor . . . outside your room — sometimes he just stands there. Miss, when you're asleep . . . he just stands there" (252). Desdemona interrupts this narrative only to offer a frightened exclamation. Emilia continues in her recounting of Othello's behavior: "And once . . . I saw . . . I came upon him unbeknowin', and he didn't see me — I'm sure — he was in your chamber room and he gathered up the sheets from your bed, like a body, and . . . he held it to his face, like, like a bouquet, all breathin' it in" (252). After this description, stage directions note that the two women "both realize OTHELLO'S been smelling the sheets for traces of a lover" (253). Reflecting upon Othello's behavior, Desdemona says, "That isn't love. It isn't love" (253). Vogel's heroine, therefore, powerfully contradicts the self-serving claim of Shakespeare's Othello, who, we remember, stands almost over the corpse of his wife and says that he killed her because he "lov'd not wisely but too well" (Othello, 5.2.345). www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 9/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

CONCLUSION The conclusion of Desdemona blurs into that of Othello, so that the curtain falls on Vogel's play only to open onto the murderous denouement of Shakespeare's. In Desdemona, the seeming acquiescence of Shakespeare's heroine becomes would-be resistance. Recognizing that her secrets have been exposed, Desdemona tries to come up with a plan to save her own life. Knowing that Othello will return later (and evidently suspecting that he will have murder on his mind), Desdemona instructs Emilia: "Now listen carefully . . . I'll go to my own chamber tonight. You're to wait up for my husband's return — tell him I'm ill and I've taken to my bed. He's not to disturb me, I'm not well. I'll turn in before he comes, and I'll . . . pretend to sleep if he should come to me" (Vogel 2000, 253). After a pause, Desdemona adds, "Surely [Othello will] not . . . harm a sleeping woman" (253). This declaration/plea nullifies the assumption that Desdemona participates in her own murder by failing to oppose it. Vogel's text suggests that strategy only masquerades as surrender, leaving no doubt about Desdemona's will to live. But because Desdemona melts into Othello, readers know that the heroine is doomed.

The final question Desdemona leaves us with is this: Why, even in the hands of a feminist redactor, are the female characters resurrected from Othello ultimately relegated to the same violent ends as their namesakes? That is, why does Desdemona recapitulate, rather than reject or transform, the deadly erotics enacted in Shakespeare's play? Surely one answer is that retaining the specter of death best permits Vogel to dramatize the effects of female collusion in sexist structures or systems. But perhaps more important, the tense final moments of the adaptation powerfully illuminate the intimacy of Desdemona's murder. In a grim obverse of Othello's relationship with Iago, which is ultimately sealed in the blood of their respective wives, the adaptation shows how Desdemona and Emilia are, finally, linked on the basis of a shared victimhood. Moreover, both wives are to be punished for the sexual excesses of Desdemona, a point that underscores Vogel's critique of class-based inequities. In effect, Desdemona's conclusion dramatizes tragic recognition in slow motion: In full cognizance of imminent violence, Desdemona and Emilia can do nothing but await death. Rather than paying homage to the moribund heroic world of Othello, then, Vogel's adaptation records its violent excesses. This is an important point, since it highlights Vogel's critique of tragedy, whose customary function, as Mary Beth Rose suggests, is to chronicle "the need for a future by destroying the past and then mourning its disappearance" (Rose 1988, 206). Graphically illuminating her heroine's recognition of and terror at her plight, Vogel severs murder from romance. And the sympathies the adaptation generates for Desdemona and Emilia indicate that the play's harshest critique is reserved for a deeply entrenched and persistent ideology, a feminine ethic that rests upon the metonymical relationship of (female) chastity and (feminine) virtue.

Vogel's critique notwithstanding, the chastity-theme promulgated in Othello seems lodged in an echo chamber, fated for ceaseless repetition (the future, as Althusser might say, does indeed seem to last forever). Consider, for example, the powerful narratives generated through juridical processes and therefore stamped with the imprimatur of justice. As Kimberlé Crenshaw argues, "In both rape and sexual-harassment cases the inquiry tends to focus [. . .] on the woman's conduct and character" (Crenshaw 1992, 408). She adds that "our own legal system once drew a connection — as a matter of law — between lack of chastity and lack of veracity" (412).9 Desdemona's complex engagement with Othello www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 10/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation suggests that the words "she wanted it" are deployed — in narrative and "real-life" contexts — against women, as though the very existence of (female) desire is damning. Ultimately relinquishing her Desdemona to the plot of Othello, Vogel forcefully indicts the prescription of desire. As Vance has suggested, women have often been compelled to choose between pleasure or danger, with (female) desire thus "restricted to zones protected and privileged in the culture: marriage and the nuclear family" (Vance 1984, 3). These zones of permissibility may have been renegotiated since the nineteenth century, as Vance suggests, but Desdemona elegizes those victims who (like the eponymous heroine) have been sacrificed on the altar of propriety.

NOTES 1. Althusser struggled with mental illness throughout much of his life, for which he was "treated" with electroconvulsive shock therapy. His memoir is often a poignant chronicle of his suffering. It is this very emphasis on his own suffering that invites comparison to Othello's similar attempts at narrative "self-fashioning," to borrow a term from Stephen Greenblatt (Greenblatt 1980). 2. All references to Shakespeare's Othello are to The Riverside Shakespeare (1997). 3. For a synopsis of performances, see Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier's Introduction to Desdemona, in Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (2000). 4. See Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the Renaissance (1991), for an analysis of the ways in which ocular proof was subject to mistrust. On the other hand, Patricia Parker's survey of myriad texts charts the ascendance of what she terms an "ocular impulse." Consult "Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gender': Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light" (1994). 5. Richard Levin presents a fierce critique of feminist criticism's diminution of the role of the tragic hero in "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy" (1988). In her introduction to a collection of essays interrogating how gender and genre intersect, Madelon Sprengnether provides a useful synopsis of both feminist critics' treatment of tragedy and Levin's objections (1996). 6. An analysis of the racial or ethnic composition of the casts for all productions of Desdemona is outside the scope of this essay. I would point out, however, that Desdemona, like Othello, compels interrogation of race-based casting. For an illuminating discussion of ways in which assumptions about race influence casting decisions, see Celia Daileader, "Casting Black Actors: Beyond Othellophilia" (2000). 7. In her essay "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" (1999), Susan Moller Okin suggests that feminism must actively work to cross geographical and cultural boundaries precisely because patriarchy traverses all such borders. She also argues that sometimes the defense of "group rights" (as a means of advancing or shoring up multiculturalism) comes at the expense of women's rights. Although Okin's privileging of gender is sure to anger some feminists, she — like Vogel — does suggest the necessity of a collective feminist politics. 8. Kenneth Burke's essay, "Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method" (1951), skilfully traces significations of the handkerchief — and the critical ire it has provoked.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 11/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9. Crenshaw's comprehensive study of the history of litigation in the United States turns up abundant evidence regarding the ways in which women of color are doubly discriminated against, particularly when it comes to the perceived credibility of their testimony (Crenshaw 1992, 412-13). Similarly, journalistic accounts of violent crime affirm that "society views the victimization of some women as being less important than that of others" (414).

REFERENCES Althusser, Louis. 1993. The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir. Translated by Richard Veasey. New York: The New Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1951. " Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method." Hudson Review 4: 165-203. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1992. "Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill." In Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Edited by Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon. 402-40. Daileader, Celia. 2000. "Casting Black Actors: Beyond Othellophilia." In Shakespeare and Race. Edited by Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 177-202. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier. 2000. Introduction to Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief. In Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. London: Routledge. 1-22. Freud, Sigmund. 1970. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. 1930; reprint, New York: Johnson. Garner, Shirley Nelson. 1996. "Shakespeare in My Time and Place." In Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender. Edited by Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 287-306. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hart, Lynda. 1998. Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. New York: Columbia University Press. Levin, Richard. 1988. "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy." PMLA 103: 125-38. Loomba, Ania. 1989. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Manchester, U.K.: St. Martin's Press. Lorde, Audre. 1983. "An Open Letter to Mary Daly." In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. New York: Kitchen Table. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. 1991. Inwardness and Theater in the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 12/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Neely, Carol Thomas. 1980. "Women and Men in Othello: 'What should such a fool / Do with so good a woman?'" In The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 211-39. Novy, Marianne. 1999. "Saving Desdemona and/or Ourselves: Plays by Ann-Marie MacDonald and Paula Vogel." In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Revisions in Literature and Performance. Edited by Marianne Novy. New York: St. Martin's Press. 67-85. Okin, Susan Moller. 1999. "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" In Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? With Respondents. Edited by Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 9-24. Parker, Patricia. 1994. "Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gender': Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light." In Women, 'Race,' and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. London: Routledge. 84-100. Rose, Mary Beth. 1988. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice. In The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1246-96. Sinfield, Alan. 1992. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sprengnether, Madelon. 1996. "Introduction: The Gendered Subject of Tragedy." In Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender. Edited by Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1-27. Vance, Carole S. 1984. "Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality." In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Edited by Carole S. Vance. London: Routledge. 1-27. Vogel, Paula. 1996. The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Vogel, Paula. 2000. Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief. In Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. London: Routledge. 233-54. Wayne, Valerie. 1991. The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

ONLINE RESOURCES Hill, Katherine. 2000. "If all that Shakespeare spoke were marr'd . . ." Arts and Entertainment. Yale Herald Online. 8 December. http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxx/2000.12.08/ae/p18desdemona.html (http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxx/2000.12.08/ae/p18desdemona.html). Reel, James. 2003. "Hanky-Panky: There's Moor than meets the eye in Paula Vogel's 'Othello' spin-off . . ." Tuscon Weekly. 9 June.

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ABSTRACT | STRANGE BEDFELLOWS | ADAPTATION AS FEMINIST PROTEST | SISTERHOOD IS SORROWFUL: THE PROBLEM OF COLLECTIVE POLITICS | PERFORMING DESIRE | PERIPETEIA AS FEMINIST PROTEST | CONCLUSION | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781790/show 14/14 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

The Greening of Will Shakespeare

(/current) JONATHAN BALDO, UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER

ABSTRACT | BLEATING HEARTS | GRAFT AND CORRUPTION | A MAN WALKS INTO A (/previous) BAR | NOTES | REFERENCES

(/about) ABSTRACT

(/archive) In The Winter's Tale (1611), those presumed dead repeatedly return to new life. At the end of the play, the "statue" of Hermione moves through an old stage trick. Similarly, a moldy tale, a genre, and an old enmity are all revived. As Hermione descends from her pedestal, in her movements hoping to move us, so does Shakespeare implicitly extend the same treatment to Pandosto and its author, Robert Greene. The statue trick almost seems to be a metaphor for the larger contrivance that is the play itself: the necromantic way Shakespeare has with an old text like Greene's as he coaxes it to move and breathe through the lively art of theater. The play as a whole bears a resemblance to the cony-catching tricks described in rogue pamphlets by Greene and others, with Greene cast alternately as Shakespeare's partner in a con game to catch the more literate part of the play's audience and as a forced lender to the borrower Shakespeare, who once again beautifies himself with the feathers of the rival who had famously accused him of intellectual property theft.

"When he speaks of fools he is one; when of kings he is one, doubly so in misfortune. / He is a woman, a pimp, and prince Hal — / Such a man is a prime borrower and standardizer — No inventor." William Carlos Williams, "The Descent of Winter" (1928), 11/13

When William Shakespeare arrived in London, most likely sometime in the late 1580s, he walked into a theatrical world dominated by six men, all university educated and instrumental in the remarkable transformation of English drama that took place in the decade from 1580 to 1590. These were the so-called "university wits": Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nashe, all graduates of Cambridge; and Thomas Lodge, John Lyly, and George Peele from Oxford. Their eccentric center was Greene, a man www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 1/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation who was to become as famous for his dissolute life as for his diverse writings, which included euphuistic novels, imitations of Greek romances, plays, numerous semi-autobiographical pamphlets, and cony-catching pamphlets that vividly depicted life in London's underworld. What remains of his fame today derives in large measure from the lines in his rancorous deathbed pamphlet, A Groats-Worth of Witte, that were directed at the "upstart Crow" Shakespeare (Greene 1966a).

Shakespeare, it is well known, drew his plot and most of his characters for The Winter's Tale (1611) from Greene's popular romance Pandosto (1588).1 Even when Shakespeare seems to deviate from his source, the influence of the dead author's hand may be felt. Autolycus, perhaps the character who seems most independent of the play's primary source, bears the unmistakable fingerprint of Greene.2 To be sure, Autolycus is developed far beyond the unprepossessing Capnio, servant to the King of Sicilia's son Dorastus in Greene's romance. But that does not make him Shakespeare's free, unfettered invention, for he seems to have stepped right out of the pages of Greene's cony-catching pamphlets and other rogue literature. William Carroll observes that the "language of Autolycus . . . reveals a strong indebtedness to the conny-catching pamphlets of Robert Greene" (Carroll 1996, 168).3 According to Lori Newcomb, "Autolycus's ruses are drawn directly from Greene's Second and Third Part of Conny-Catching" and would have been recognized as such by Shakespeare's audiences (Newcomb 2002, 123). In her reading, Autolycus catches the reflection not only of Greene's underworld figures, but also of Greene himself. She speculates that the false beard that Autolycus removes (The Winter's Tale, 4.4.714) might have recalled Greene's flamboyant red beard, and she compares the rogue's downward social mobility to Greene's: "Greene, too once 'wore three-pile' and then scraped by in borrowed 'lesser linen,' could ooze 'court-contempt' but then 'compasses a motion of the Prodigal Son' and ran through 'knavish professions'" (4.3.14, 24, 93-94, 96, quoted in Newcomb 2002, 123).

Reminiscent of both Greene and his cony catchers, Autolycus is also frequently regarded as a front for Shakespeare himself, as critics as diverse as Robert Adams, Stephen Greenblatt, and Harold Bloom have all maintained (Adams 1989, 102-103; Bloom 1998, 652; Greenblatt 2004, 371).4 These contrary identifications of Autolycus as a surrogate for both Greene and Shakespeare are not merely unrelated, divergent alternatives of the kind that inevitably proliferate over centuries of criticism. Rather, these opposed readings obey a logic whose principles are set forth by the play itself. From its opening scene, The Winter's Tale is virtually a paean to the practices of borrowing and lending that supported so many theatrical and literary careers in early modern London, including Shakespeare's own. Literary borrowing was as crucial to the flourishing of Elizabethan theaters as moneylending was to England's burgeoning mercantilism.

One dimension of the aging playwright's borrowing from his erstwhile detractor involves the cunning plotting of the The Winter's Tale, which like the charismatic figure of the rogue himself, owes much to Greene's cony- www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 2/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation catching pamphlets. The ending of the play has attracted a language of religious experience to characterize the living statue of Hermione. Editors and commentators seldom fail to note the Pauline aspects of Paulina. Marjorie Garber writes, "In this moment Paulina is a true descendant of her namesake, the Apostle Paul, who spoke to the Ephesians and the Romans of awakening out of sleep to redemption, and to the Corinthians of the natural body and the spiritual body, the earthly and the heavenly. . . . The scene is a visibly Christian one, transforming the diurnal and cyclical into the redemptive" (Garber 2004, 850).5 Balancing the piety of the play's ending, I would suggest, is an impish, if not impious, analogy more consistent with the spirit of Autolycus. The entire play is a ruse to catch the unaware, an elaborate exercise in cony-catching, which, like the swindles Greene exposes in his pamphlets, trades on the confidence of those who pride themselves on possessing an insider's knowledge.

BLEATING HEARTS No Shakespearean comedy or romance better illustrates the economy of borrowing and lending than The Winter's Tale, a veritable feast of filching. Shakespeare's is an open theft, practiced by day like Autolycus' craft. That is, it openly advertises its extensive debt to Greene's romance. Kenneth Muir has noted, "There are more verbal echoes from Pandosto than from any other novel used by Shakespeare as a source" (Muir 1957, 257). Arden editor J. H. P. Pafford observes that "The picture is inescapable of a Shakespeare who, having closely studied the story and made his plot, had Pandosto at his elbow as he wrote, . . . using it sometimes almost verbatim" (Pafford 1963, xxxi). Because Shakespeare borrowed his plot from a long dead rival who had accused him of intellectual property theft, it is curious that criticism of the play has tended to ignore the ways in which The Winter's Tale play mirrors the circumstances of its own production, not only in the prominent part it gives the itinerant peddler and thief Autolycus, but also in exchanges at the beginning of the play that borrow heavily from the language of moneylending. Patricia Parker has recently shown how the play's language "combines gestation or pregnancy with a series of contractual, commercial, and legal terms" as it "moves between older aristocratic models of social place and reminders of the new economy of contract and credit" (Parker 2004, 25, 29). The language of that new economy would have particularly suited an occasion when Shakespeare borrowed so extensively from his dead rival. In opening dialogue resembling a courtly dance, Shakespeare sets the terms of his own late-life reflections on how, in the winter of his career, he plays both borrower and lender to Greene.

As the play begins, King Polixenes and his retinue are winding up their nine- month stay in Sicilia. The Bohemian lord Archidamus projects a complementary visit of the Sicilian court to Bohemia, which would ostensibly repay the debt owed Sicily by Bohemia. In making the visit, Archidamus advises the Sicilian lord Camillo, "You shall see . . . great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia" (The Winter's Tale, 1.1.3-4). In his reply, Camillo inverts the order of the kingdoms set forth by www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 3/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Archidamus: "I think, this coming summer, the King of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which he justly owes him," Camillo assures the Bohemian lord (1.1.5-7). This chiastic series — "Sicilia . . . Bohemia . . . Bohemia . . . Sicilia" — not only anticipates Sicily's reciprocal visit to Bohemia, but also reflects the mutual, reversible economy of hospitality itself. The current host Leontes may "owe" the overdue debt of a visit to his guest Polixenes, even while Polixenes feels a burdensome obligation, one that lies virtually beyond repayment, to his host, accrued during his nine- month stay at the Sicilian court: Time as long again Would be fill'd up, my brother, with our thanks; And yet we should, for perpetuity, Go hence in debt. (1.2.3-6) Borrower and lender, apparently, are roles as indistinguishable as "twinn'd lambs" (1.2.67).

Not only is Polixenes a borrower without reasonable hope of ever emerging from his host's debt, but he is also a lender whose principal commodity is none other than his own person. Hermione's successful entreaties for him to remain in Sicily maintain the language of borrowing and lending introduced by Archidamus and Camillo, language that now begins to yield interest: Yet of your royal presence I'll adventure The borrow of a week. When at Bohemia You take my lord, I'll give him my commission To let him there a month behind the gest Prefix'd for's parting. (The Winter's Tale, 1.2.38-42) Hermione jestingly proposes to repay a one-week loan of Polixenes with a one-month extension of her husband's term in Bohemia, an exchange rate that is less than flattering to Leontes. Further, she playfully grants Polixenes an alternative to his steadily accumulating debt as their guest at the Sicilian court, debtor's prison: Force me to keep you as a prisoner, Not like a guest: so you shall pay your fees When you depart, and save your thanks? How say you? My prisoner? or my guest?" (1.2.52-55) Imprisonment, Hermione implies, represents the only possible means of escape from the ongoing sense of reciprocal obligation felt by host and guest.6

The language of borrowing and lending extends to the Bohemian half of the play as well. The Clown's meeting with Autolycus seems almost a reprise of the opening, trading as it does in the language of lending. "Lend me thy hand, I'll help thee: come, lend me thy hand," the Clown urges, unaware that Autolycus is about to "borrow" more than his hand and the money he offers (The Winter's Tale, 4.3.68-69). Autolycus' peddling of the ballad of the usurer's wife, "brought to bed of twenty money-bags" (4.4.264), reinforces www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 4/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the theme, as does Leontes' sense of an immense debt to the memory of Hermione, which Cleomenes insists that he has paid down with his penance: "indeed, paid down / More penitence than done trespass" (5.1.3-4). Florizel seems to think he can cancel his debts to his father, though the disguised Polixenes advises him that "a father / Is at the nuptial of his son a guest / That best becomes the table" (4.4.395-97). Finally, the Shepherd's fond recollection of his dead wife, who on the feast day "was both pantler, butler, cook, / Both dame and servant; welcom'd all; serv'd all," and chastisement of Perdita, who behaves like a "feasted one" rather than "the hostess of the meeting," recalls the language of Archidamus and Camillo at the beginning of the play on the ambiguous and reversible identities of host and guest (4.4.56-57, 63-64).

In a reading of The Comedy of Errors, Patricia Parker notes how the narration of the shipwreck in the play's opening scene, an event that sunders Egeon from his wife and his twins from one another, is dominated by the figure of chiasmus. She further shows that the device by means of which Egeon tries to save his family is the visual equivalent of the rhetorical figure. Egeon divides the twins and places them on opposite sides of the ship's mast, so that he and his wife could "Fix . . . our eyes on whom our care was fixed" (Comedy of Errors, 1.1.84). This visual chiasmus, according to Parker, is an emblem of "the sense of crossing or exchange which dominates the play right from this opening scene . . . an emphasis appropriate in any case to a scene where this father faces death precisely because he has crossed an absolute dividing line" between the antagonistic towns of Syracuse and Ephesus (Parker 1987, 79). Like The Comedy of Errors, The Winter's Tale is a story of twins — "twinn'd lambs," as Polixenes rather innocently characterizes his boyhood friendship with Leontes (The Winter's Tale, 1.2.67).7 — built on a series of chiastic exchanges: of Sicilia for Bohemia, and of Leontes, King of Sicilia for Pandosto, King of Bohemia in Shakespeare's adaptation of Greene's romance; of Sicilia for Bohemia as the play's setting shifts; of the characteristics of the more northern Bohemia, the setting of the summery part of the play and the southern Sicilia, setting of the wintry acts;8 and of the tragedy of the first three acts for the romance of the final two. These exchanges or reversals, in turn, help produce the play's iterative structures that have been extensively analyzed by James Siemon and Richard Proudfoot (Siemon 1974, 10-16; Proudfoot 1976, 67-78). As youths, because of their "twinning," what Leontes and Polixenes "changed / Was innocence for innocence" (1.2.68-69). The phrase conjures a form of exchange that was no exchange because difference — including gender difference — had not yet slithered into their paradise of sameness. Innocence, as Polixenes conceives it, is a freedom from chiasmus and the crossness it may produce. The epithet "twinn'd lambs" pairs innocence with sameness, suggesting that innocence lasts only until the wolf of difference (partnered, inevitably, with Time) discovers the sheepcote. Polixenes describes their prelapsarian youth to Hermione — "Your precious self had not yet cross'd the eyes / Of my young play-fellow" (1.2.79-80) — the word "cross'd" signaling the introduction of gender difference and an elaborate economy of exchange based upon that difference. In the postlapsarian world www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 5/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of the play, the first of two sea crossings from Sicilia to Bohemia will result in a different sort of "change" or exchange: not of innocence for innocence, but of experience (in Blake's sense) for experience; one Greene-like, volcanic outburst for another; injuries to an innocent wife for new ones to an innocent daughter.

Chiasmus, a figure predicated on difference, carries a potentially leveling force, with rich implications for the exchange of identities and places. Even the chiastic series with which The Winter's Tale begins — "Sicilia . . . Bohemia . . . Bohemia . . . Sicilia" — may be seen as an attempt to overcome (adult) difference and to recapture (childhood) sameness, to reverse time and to recapture the putative fullness of their youth. Chiasmus is also a figure of social advancement and the verbal twin to the exchanges of clothing and costume in the play. (Given the nature of the trope, it is not surprising that it should trade places with itself, as it were, and alternately serve the ends of social leveling and advancement.) As if trying to overcome the great gap in their social rank, Florizel and Perdita join the economy of chiastic exchange in the sheepshearing feast as Prince Florizel adopts the appearance of a country swain, and Perdita becomes "poor lowly maid, / Most goddess-like prank'd up" (The Winter's Tale, 4.4.9-10). Greene's romance was the site of a similar exchange. In her splendid account of Greene's changing readership, Lori Newcomb shows how much anxiety was caused in early modern England by a readership that included a growing number of artisans, apprentices, and servants, and the degree to which Greene's texts participated in the "cross-marketing" of texts across social classes (Newcomb 2002, 103). It is as if the play, with its multiple exchanges of costume and social rank, is telling the tale of its wintry and aged source-text as well as recounting the tale within that text.

Later in the feast scene, in order to escape Florizel's wrathful father a parallel "exchange" of outward appearances takes place, which is engineered by Camillo as he addresses Autolycus: "Yet for the outside of thy poverty we must make an exchange; therefore discase thee instantly, — thou must think there's a necessity in't — and change garments with this gentleman" (The Winter's Tale, 4.4.633-36). Although the exchange is advantageous to Autolycus, Camillo sweetens the deal with "some boot" — presumably some money to help persuade him to part with his clothes. Left alone to muse upon the exchange that has allowed him to change outward appearances with a country gentleman (for so Prince Florizel was disguised before his exchange with Autolycus), Autolycus resorts to the rhetorical figure of exchange, the antimetabole or chiasmus: "I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here, with this exchange!" (4.4.673-76).9 That it is Autolycus who uses the figure of antimetabole and participates in its visual equivalent, the costume exchange, should not be surprising. Named for the son of Hermes and maternal grandfather of Odysseus, the wolfish Autolycus is linked with the god Hermes and his mercurial changes: He was "littered under Mercury," he informs us (4.3.25).10 A virtual figure of difference, he also exemplifies the powers of exchange that meet in the figure of chiasmus. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 6/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Autolycus seems to have been produced by an imaginative process similar to the garment exchange we witness in act 4, scene 4. In writing The Winter's Tale, Will Shakespeare changes garments with Robert Greene, as it were, and the results are a character that critics tend to identify alternately with Shakespeare, Greene, and Greene's cony-catchers, and a play in which, on the one hand, Shakespeare takes a Greene-like turn into the world of urban conies and cony-catchers, and on the other, Greene's text is tailored to the ends of Shakespearean romance, with its stress on reconciliation, renewal, and forgiveness.

In spite of a name that boasts a proud independence, Autolycus is virtually a figure of interdependence and exchange, and not merely as a peddler of commodities. During the sheepshearing, Autolycus hopes to make "the shearers prove sheep" (The Winter's Tale, 4.3.117) — a phrase that suggests more than Autolycus intends, as those ultimate dupes, the Shepherd and Clown, acquire wealth and status while retaining the innocence implied by the imagery of sheep. In a manner similar to Greene's cony-catchers, who frequently get cozened or undone in his pamphlets, Autolycus will fall victim to another crossing or exchange. For in The Winter's Tale, it is the wolf — Autolycus, a "lone wolf" as his Greek name would have us believe — who ultimately gets fleeced.11 When Autolycus, hoping for advantage by turning the fleeing Florizel and Perdita over to the King, unwittingly serves as vehicle for the revelation of Perdita's identity and the reunions and reconciliations of the final act, he also causes the advancement of his former victims, the Shepherd and Clown, who receive the rich pickings that Autolycus expected to pluck. The cony-catcher proves to be a sheep in wolf's clothing. Since Shakespeare makes his cony-catcher so irresistible to audiences, his play, like Greene's pamphlets, has a way of making audiences feel sheepish, by coaxing — or conning — us into identifying with a cozener who ultimately gets cozened.

In act 5, greeting Leontes after the crossing from Bohemia to Sicilia and pursued by his bear-like father Polixenes, Florizel represents Perdita as coming from Libya: "We have cross'd, / To execute the charge my father gave me / For visiting your highness" (The Winter's Tale, 5.1.160-62). In representing their "crossing," Florizel boldly crosses an imaginative boundary between Europe and Africa. In so doing, he produces a Perdita who, already suspected of being one of "nature's bastards" by her biological father Leontes (4.4.83), becomes for us increasingly "pied" or variegated, like the gillyvors she despises. An African Perdita is the essence of inter- breeding or cross-fertilization, improbably and momentarily produced in the garden of our imaginations by grafting Europe onto its other. The play, too, is a product of grafting, as I will argue in the next section, and, like Autolycus and Florizel, it changes garments, as it were, as it seesaws between (low) comedy and (high) romance, sometimes registering both in a single line, as in the Clown's remark about his sister Perdita: "There is no other way but to tell the King she's a changeling, and none of your flesh and blood" (4.4.687-89). Autolycus and Florizel's exchange of garments is a metatheatrical emblem of the pied genre of The Winter's Tale. Most broadly, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 7/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation The Winter's Tale represents the chiastic exchange of borrowing and lending. Like Autolycus, Shakespeare is a creature of disguise and a master of the con. One of Shakespeare's most Hermes-like feats in The Winter's Tale involves his disguising his borrowing from Greene as something else: in particular, as a form of restoration and rebirth akin to those that take place at the end of the play. Shakespeare is, in other words, an Autolycus in the guise of a Paulina.12

Not exactly a "mouldy tale" (as Ben Jonson called Pericles), Greene's romance appears to take on that coloring and odor from the many references in Shakespeare's play to "tales" as "old" (Jonson 1975, 355). A popular and often reprinted text well into the Jacobean era, Pandosto had no cause to be rescued, no desperate need of being "greened" or revived through a triumph over time, even though critics persist in referring to it as an "old-fashioned piece."13 And yet, if one were to credit the view promoted within The Winter's Tale itself, tales in general are as wintry and decrepit as the figure of Time and stand in dire need of resuscitation. Stanley Cavell notes, "Three times an assertion is said to sound like an old tale — that the king's daughter is found, that Antigonus was torn to pieces by a bear, and that Hermione is living — and each time the purpose is to say that one will have trouble believing these things without seeing them, that the experience of them 'lames report,' 'undoes description,' and lies beyond the capacity of 'ballad- makers . . . to express it' (5.2.61-62, 26-27)" (Cavell 1987, 199). Early modern theater bore the capacity to rejuvenate the prose tales on which its plots were frequently based by bringing the past — in the form of an old tale, but also the past tense in which the tale was written — into the present tense of live performance. In addition, theater can add the semblance of proof, validating dubious reports by adding seeing — and thereby believing — to the recounting of improbable events.14 Greene's romance thereby incurs a mighty debt to the sticky-fingered playwright who filched it. The Winter's Tale does credit to Greene's text, but it also takes credit. Recounting the reconciliation of fathers and children to the very seller of absurd tales, the ballad-monger Autolycus, three Gentlemen speak of "such a deal of wonder . . . broken out within this hour, that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it" (The Winter's Tale, 5.2.23-25). The Third Gentleman adds details of a "sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of"; an "encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it" (5.2.43-44, 58-59). The last line in particular reveals a fascinating subplot of retribution when read in light of the play's relation to the tale that spawned it. Report lamely follows sight. The tale limps after the "deal of wonder" that it is ill-fitted and ill-equipped to serve. The weakness of a projected report (by the Third Gentleman) reflects a putative weakness in Greene's prose romance in the face of Shakespeare's visual-theatrical deal of wonder. Shakespeare "undoes description," including his descriptive-narrative source, with the feast of visual "encounters" that is The Winter's Tale: a play that begins to look like a greened version of his rival's tragic, wintry romance. A wondrous aspect of The Winter's Tale is the way it "lames" its source, and so appears to give life to that which gave it life.15 www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 8/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation In the course of fleecing Greene's romance, stripping it bare, Shakespeare, by harping on the secondary and belated aspect of tales, makes the play seem to come before its source, the prose romance seemingly a poor, disfigured telling of that which Shakespeare shows.16 By writing The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare places Greene eternally in his debt. In other words, Shakespeare robes his most spectacular act of borrowing as a lending. It is a trick worthy of Autolycus himself. And it is augured by the play's first lines, which chiastically represent Polixenes, the guest, as a lender as well as a borrower, and the host Leontes as a lender who is paradoxically in debt to his guest.

GRAFT AND CORRUPTION Lending his clothes a living presence through apostrophe, Lear exclaims in his mad lucidity, "Off, off, you lendings: Come, unbutton here," on the way to experiencing what it means to be "the thing itself," "unaccommodated man" (King Lear, 3.4.104-107).17 Lear's clothes are "lendings" because they are borrowed from the beasts and also because they represent so many layers of obligation to a network of social meanings. The social network of mutual obligation having ostensibly collapsed through the cruelty, filial ingratitude, and inhospitality of his daughters, Lear seeks (impossibly, of course) to be free altogether of obligation, including debts to the natural world.

William Carroll has shown how much this putative figure of the "thing itself," Poor Tom, apparently beyond obligation and without "lendings" of any kind — "Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume," Lear observes (King Lear 3.4.101-103) — owes to contemporary stereotypes of the Bedlam madman and of the Abraham man, or fraudulent mad beggar. The very figure of "unaccommodated man" is, paradoxically, indebted to the widespread representation of the Poor Tom figure "in plays, archival documents, and particularly in the rogue pamphlets" (Carroll 1996, 102).18 Nevertheless, the austere vision of tragedy struggles to get around the inevitable circuitry of borrowing and lending that lies at the core of social identity and all forms of cultural production. Shakespearean tragedy continually reminds us of its basis in borrowed identities, fashioned largely by the lendings of "borrow'd robes," the cast-off clothes of the court that the King's Men and other theatrical companies of the time required in order to plausibly represent their social betters. The phrase is Macbeth's, of course, in response to Rosse's addressing him as Thane of Cawdor (Macbeth, 1.3.109).19 Characters in Shakespeare's tragedies and histories, like actors, are acutely self-conscious that their identities are fashioned by what Lear terms "lendings," and, like those of the actors that play them, these identities are merely borrowed for the nonce.

Tragedy represents the frustrations of characters who strive to move beyond the lendings of inky cloaks and borrowed robes. Characters in Shakespearean comedy, by contrast, accommodate themselves to the economies of borrowing and lending that were essential to Renaissance self- www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 9/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation fashioning. "Accommodate" derives from Latin accommodatus, "suitable," past participle of accommodare, "to fit." Shakespeare's comedians accommodate or fit themselves not only to particular roles, but also to the need to play a role, the awareness of which produces more often than not a sense of freedom and happy advantages. They stop well short of the desire to circumvent the network of borrowing and lending on which the theaters, like social relationships in general, were founded. Shakespearean comedy moves toward the enrichment of personhood through the robings and robbings of personae: Portia's borrowing of a male identity, for example, is perfectly suitable to the discoveries and expansions of personae and makes a better "fit" with her enlarged personae than her previous, corseted role as passive and obedient daughter to a dead father. "Sure this robe of mine / Does change my disposition," the queenly Perdita remarks at the sheepshearing feast (The Winter's Tale, 4.4.134-35). The borrowings of comedy extended to language as well: Stephen Greenblatt observes, "Shakespeare's plays from the 1590s are sprinkled with sly parodies of the words of his erstwhile rivals" (Greenblatt 2004, 215). Comedy calls attention to the widespread economy of literary borrowing and lending that helped produce the booming economy of the Elizabethan theaters. Shakespearean tragedy, by contrast, explores the terrible desire to be debt-free by repeatedly enacting the stripping away of "lendings" or mere contingencies. Curiously, Lear admires Poor Tom in terms that echo his mendacious ideas about kingship as existing in a sphere beyond mutual obligation. Kingship and need, he believes, are mutually exclusive. He can acknowledge need only after ceasing to be king — after abdicating the throne he planned to place himself under Cordelia's "kind nursery" (King Lear, 1.1.139). Cordelia's ominous "nothing" both mirrors and mocks Lear's implicit idea of kingship as a debt-free condition.

A botanical equivalent of the Elizabethan practice of textual borrowing and lending is "grafting," a term used both by Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale and in various texts by and about Robert Greene. The metaphor is itself a way of grafting the social practices of borrowing onto the natural world. It evokes the geographical mobility of the play, which transplants us, so to speak, from Sicilia to Bohemia; the social mobility of both playwrights; and Shakespeare's grafting of his imagination onto that of his old rival in composing The Winter's Tale. When Leontes tallies the possible reasons for Camillo's blindness toward Polixenes' alleged perfidy, he says, "Or else thou must be counted / A servant grafted in my serious trust, / And therein negligent" (The Winter's Tale, 1.2.245-47). Leontes' metaphor anticipates Perdita's later association of grafting with corrupting the purity of a particular stock. Early in the festival scene, striving to match flowers with their recipients' ages, Perdita takes pride in having no "streak'd gillyvors, / Which some call nature's bastards" in her garden (4.4.82-83). When Polixenes asks, "Wherefore, gentle maiden, / Do you neglect them?" she responds that she has heard, "There is an art which, in their piedness, shares / With great creating nature" (4.4.87-88). For Perdita, who seems unaware of the extent to which the play that contains her is a product of literary graft, grafting represents a corruption that extends well beyond the particular www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 10/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation instance in question. It corrupts nature itself by transgressively joining it with something that lies outside of nature. Botanical grafting, in short, grafts art onto nature. Polixenes, by contrast, views art as an outgrowth of nature. Though his argument implicitly affirms the marriage he is about to oppose, Polixenes famously replies that the art of grafting, "an art / Which does mend nature . . . itself is nature" (4.4.95-97). The issue, of course, is breeding, and whether good breeding may be achieved by grafting the stocks, say, of the seemingly lowborn shepherdess Perdita and of Prince Florizel.

Grafting was also the metaphor used by Nashe in a preface to Greene's late romance Menaphon (1589), complaining of the ambitions of uneducated dramatists from "the engrafted overflow of some kill-cow conceit": a probable reference, Greenblatt suggests, to Thomas Kyd, another playwright who, like Shakespeare, lacked the advantages of a university education (Greenblatt 2004, 203). It is an image particularly well suited to describe socially mobile playwrights such as Shakespeare and Greene. It is also the image Greene used to describe himself in his deathbed pamphlet "Repentance" when deploring his dissolute life in Cambridge. Growing acquainted "with notable Braggarts, boon companions, and ordinary spend- thrifts, that practized sundry superficiall studies, I became as a Sien grafted into the same stocke, whereby I did absolutely participate of their nature and qualities" (Greene 1966a, 20). The metaphor bears a double aptness to Greene's collegiate years, which yielded two Master's degrees, since it was precisely his university education that allowed him to raise himself from humble beginnings in Norwich. Greene, the son of parents of modest means, managed to attend university on scholarship. In this respect, he was like at least two other of the university wits: Marlowe, a cobbler's son, and Nashe, son of a curate. Like Falstaff, however, Greene characteristically inverts the narrative, pretending that his "grafting" was of a corrupting kind. By nature he was virtuous, becoming debased only when joined unto collegiate braggarts and boon companions.20

Autolycus "blends into Shakespeare" (Bloom) and into Greene. He may be the hardiest product of this grafting of two imaginations, and the surest sign that Shakespeare saw his play as a kind of partnership with this rival from his past: not a full partnership, to be sure, but just the kind Autolycus himself would have relished, one in which profits need not be shared. Shakespeare uses Greene to pick the pockets of a credulous crowd, to adopt Greenblatt's metaphor for the statue scene (Greenblatt 2004, 371). Autolycus is at once Shakespeare, pilfering from his old rival in order to turn a profit; and Greene as Shakespeare's rival, the worldly figure undone by Shakespeare's unprepossessing and unlettered rustics the Shepherd and his son the Clown, as the urbane Greene's sad tale is both undone and "newborn" (The Winter's Tale, 3.3.113) by the rustic Shakespeare, a scenario also borrowed from Greene's cony-catching pamphlets;21 and Greene as Shakespeare's agent, the two playwrights collaborating together to work the crowd, as it were, like cony-catcher and accomplice. He is the surest sign that the green world of act 4 of The Winter's Tale is also a Greene world: That www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 11/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation is, at its most pastoral moment, in the sheep-shearing feast, Shakespeare's play bears unmistakable traces of the London underworld that Greene knew so well, having left a respectable wife and child to take up with the sister, Em, of a notorious underworld figure by the name of Cutting Ball.

Shakespeare's romances focus our attention on the enactment of forgiveness, a subject that drifts center stage even or especially when it is withheld: for instance, in the recognition scene where Hermione never explicitly forgives Leontes, or when Prospero withholds explicit and public pardon from Caliban. In a phase of Shakespeare's career when he was thinking so extensively about forgiveness, it is hard to imagine that Greene, no less than his romance, was not on Shakespeare's mind when he crafted his scenes of reconciliation. When one considers details of the two men's lives and careers, comparisons spring up like pied gillyvors. Greene was an Antonio to Shakespeare's Prospero, or a Leontes to Shakespeare's Polixenes. In some respects "twinned" like the two kings (The Winter's Tale, 1.2.67), they were also embodiments of "great difference."

Each playwright, borrower and lender, had a son who died in his youth. Shakespeare's only son Hamnet died at the age of eleven in 1596; Greene's bitter enemy Gabriel Harvey reported the death in 1593 of a son, Fortunatus Greene, borne to Greene by Em Ball. Like young Prince Mamillius in the play, neither Fortunatus Greene nor Hamnet Shakespeare would live to make "old hearts fresh" by fulfilling the desire "to see him a man" (The Winter's Tale, 1.1.41-43). Greene abandoned a wife and child after spending his wife's dowry and went to London to seek a theatrical career; if Shakespeare did not exactly abandon Anne and their three children in quite the same way, he certainly stretched the idea of being "away on business" to its limits. In their varying degrees of disregard for family ties, as well as in their literary cunning, each may be aptly described as an Autolycus or "lone wolf."22 In his late pamphlets, Greene repeatedly and extravagantly renounced his earlier works and deeds; Shakespeare staged a less self- indulgent, but nonetheless memorable renunciation in his final play The Tempest, in which Prospero vows to "abjure" his "rough magic," break his staff, and "drown [his] book" (The Tempest, 5.1.50-57). Above all, the two shared certain theatrical trademarks and practices, as critics have frequently noted, including a penchant for strong, intelligent, loyal, sympathetic, courageous, and frequently stoic heroines (Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It may have owed a debt to Greene's Margaret of Fressingfield in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay [1594] and to Dorothea in James IV [1598]); a delight in blending history and comedy; a skill in weaving subplots with main plots; and the practice of combining tragedy and comedy, as Greene does at the end of Pandosto. Like Leontes and Polixenes, Shakespeare and Greene are "twinned" enough for Greene's faults to seem exaggerated versions of the other's, and Shakespeare a redeemed version of his rival: an Elizabethan prodigal who, exercising financial care and prudence throughout his long absence, eventually returned home.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 12/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation In creating such a composite character as Autolycus, I have been arguing, Shakespeare grafts himself onto Greene, as he has been doing implicitly while writing his winter's tale of revenge and recognition. He also draws a Greene-like character, a cony-catcher from London's underworld who is caught in his own trap while his gulls or marks, the shepherd and his clownish son, prosper at his expense. It is a scenario that might have suggested to its very author, the prosperous man from Stratford — now a gentleman made though not a "gentleman born" (as the shepherd's son improbably claims on the basis of their new garments [The Winter's Tale, 5.2.129-35]) and without the benefit of a university education — the final undoing of his clever rival.

In A Groats-Worth of Witte, Greene tells the tale of the dying usurer Gorinius and his two sons: the scholar Roberto, about whom Greene later reveals, "Heereafter suppose me the saide Roberto," and the son he hopes will follow in his miserly and usurious footsteps, Lucanio (Greene 1966a, 39). Upon the latter, the dying father bestows his blessing: "Because I hope thou wilt as thy father be a gatherer, let me blesse thee before I dye. Multiply in welth my sonne by any meanes thou maist" (11). As E. A. J. Honigmann has suggested about this tale and about the fable of the grasshopper and the ant that follows, Shakespeare's quality as a "gatherer" may have irked his rival as much as his meteoric rise in London's theatrical world (Honigmann 1982, 1- 6). On at least two occasions, Shakespeare's father John had faced accusations that he lent money at usurious rates, and Shakespeare himself appears to have done likewise later in his career.23 Whether or not the playwright ever did so during Greene's abbreviated lifetime, Greene would likely have recognized in the upstart crow he maligned at the end of the same pamphlet the personality traits that the father projects onto "Roberto's" brother and rival Lucanio: namely, those of the gatherer aiming to improve and enlarge his estate rather than squander a patrimony.

In The Winter's Tale, those presumed dead repeatedly return to life. At the end of the play the living statue of Hermione moves under the influence of Paulina's careful dramaturgy. As Hermione descends from her pedestal, in her movements hoping to move us, so does Shakespeare implicitly extend the same treatment to Pandosto (1585) and its author, Robert Greene. The statue trick may serve as a metaphor for the larger contrivance that is the play itself: the necromantic way Shakespeare has with an old text like Greene's as he coaxes it to move and breathe through the lively art of theater, making a wintry narrative green again in the fullness of his stagecraft.24 Largely through the figure of Autolycus, The Winter's Tale slyly reveals the extent to which that most brilliant of theatrical careers was built on literary grafting and even outright theft. At the same time, the play justifies its roguish behavior by demonstrating that its author never steals from the dead without reviving, never lifts without elevating.

A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 13/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation It is more than a little curious that Shakespeare worked exceptionally closely with the text of a man who famously accused him of intellectual property theft in his deathbed pamphlet, A Groats-Worth of Witte. The well-known passage excoriates the interloper as an "upstart Crow . . . that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and . . . is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country" (Greene 1966a, 45-46).25 Greene's line may refer to Shakespeare-as-actor, robing himself in the university-trained playwrights' elegant rhetoric and well-turned lines, or to the upstart playwright who, without benefit of a university degree, pretends to follow the profession then dominated by the so-called University Wits. Either way, there is a strong suggestion of Shakespeare as confidence man, though this celebrated and widely quoted passage is not usually read in the context of Greene's cony-catching pamphlets.

The continued popularity in Jacobean England of Greene's romance from the 1580s makes it even more surprising that Shakespeare hewed so closely to Greene's original. The printing press assured a long and vigorous afterlife for the text. Pandosto had run through no fewer than six editions between its first printing and the premiere of The Winter's Tale in 1611, the most recent dating from 1609. In addition, imitations in prose and verse adaptations had sprung up well before Shakespeare penned his stage adaptation, as Lori Newcomb records in her detailed study of the afterlife of Greene's romance (Newcomb 2002, 82).26 Shakespeare presumably worked so closely from the printed text of Pandosto for reasons other than a desire to honor his bitter predecessor. Shakespeare, I would suggest, is setting up his audience, and in so doing revives the dead spirit as well as the letter of Robert Greene. Early modern theaters were notorious haunts for cony-catchers, as Greene was fond of reminding his readers (see, for example, "The Second Part of Conny-Catching," in Greene 1966b, 30, 32, 34). As in other large assemblies of Londoners and visitors to the capital, these members of London's underworld performed little "scenes" of pick-pocketing and purse-cutting away from the stage, among the jostling crowds of distracted spectators. The con I want to describe, however, takes place on the stage, its perpetrator none other than the celebrated playwright himself.

In his 1591 pamphlet "A Notable Discovery of Cozenage," Greene exposes an elaborate swindle that urban cony-catchers practiced on unsuspecting visitors to the capital. To begin with, a man walks into a bar: presumably a man not unlike Shakespeare when he arrived from rural Warwickshire. Conies or marks, Greene notes, were frequently men from the country who had journeyed to London for the sitting of the assizes: "The poor man that cometh to the Term to try his right, and layeth his land to mortgage to get some Crowns in his purse to see his Lawyer, is drawn in by these devilish Cony-catchers that at one cut at Cards loseth all his money, by which means he, his wife, and children [are] brought to utter ruin and misery" (Kinney 1990, 164). The trick involves a "Setter," or "partie that taketh vp the Connie," and the "Verser," or "he that plaieth the game," and the success of the trick depends on the setter and verser's getting the cony to believe that www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 14/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation he is being let in on trade secrets. After the setter lets the victim in on a card-marking trick, a "barnacle" appears: another swindler who appears to wander in from the outside and either asks or is asked to play at cards. The verser then offers to play "a game at which there can be no deceit, . . . mum- chance at cards," a simple game that involves both the barnacle and the cony calling a card. That player wins whose card shows up first. The elegance of the trick derives from the verser's pretending to enlist the cony's aid to deceive the barnacle. The setter would deal the cards in such a way that the cony would catch sight of a card near the top of the deck and ask the cony to call a card for him against the barnacle. After several rounds at which the cony succeeds at the apparent expense of the barnacle (the cony has by this time decided to stake his own money), and after the stakes have had time to double and redouble, the trick would unaccountably go awry for the cony: the card he called would fail to turn up before the one called by the barnacle, and he would lose all that he had wagered.27 It is more than the cony's innocence and susceptibility to urban predators that have been exposed, for the swindle's success also entails the exposure of the cony's greed and willingness to swindle others. Thus, the cony-catchers strip the victim of not only his cash, but also his dignity. Any claim the cony might make to moral superiority, any ability to play the part of the outraged and victimized innocent, has been unwittingly wagered and lost along with the cony's purse.

An audience member who was familiar with Pandosto, leaving the theater after a performance of The Winter's Tale in 1611, might very well have felt him- or herself playing the part of a cony in an artistic form of the swindle Greene had exposed in his popular cony-catching pamphlets. Such a spectator, lured to predict, silently or otherwise, various plot twists as well as the eventual outcome of the play, implicitly "wagered" and "won" repeatedly — until the end. It is likely that at least a few of those in Shakespeare's audience who knew Greene's highly popular and widely circulated story even proudly displayed their foreknowledge, revealing to nearby spectators the turn the play was about to take and ignoring the warning of Autolycus on catching sight of the Shepherd and his son, the Clown: "Here is more matter for a hot brain: every lane's end, every shop, church, session, hanging, yields a careful man work" (The Winter's Tale, 4.4.684-86).

For these, Shakespeare's ending would have yielded considerable surprise. Until this point, there have been slight modifications of Greene, like the reversal of Bohemia and Sicilia, and embellishments that any spectator would have expected in a stage adaptation: the long sheep-shearing feast, for example, developed from a glancing reference in Greene; or the addition of characters such as Paulina, Autolycus, and Antigonus with little or no equivalent in Pandosto. To those who knew their Greene, the appearance of a bear chasing Antigonus must have seemed a temporary rout of their expectations, doubling the onstage action. But none of Shakespeare's alterations before the denouement would have prepared audience members for Shakespeare's radical departure from his source at the end of the play, as sudden as the volcanic eruption of Leontes' jealousy and Polixenes' www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 15/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation departure from Sicilia. In The Winter's Tale, Hermione is revealed to be alive and to have been sequestered over a broad expanse of time, allowing for a reunion and reconciliation of sorts among Hermione, Leontes, and Perdita. In Greene's romance, by contrast, Bellaria (Hermione) dies following her trial. Furthermore, Pandosto (Leontes) is drawn into what he does not recognize as an incestuous desire for his daughter Fawnia (Perdita). Shakespeare's play takes only a hesitant step in this direction when Leontes momentarily entertains the idea of marrying Perdita at the end of act 5, scene 1. When Florizel assures him that "at your request, / My father will grant precious things as trifles," Leontes responds, "Would he do so, I'd beg your precious mistress, / Which he counts but as a trifle," a remark that earns a rebuke from Paulina: "Your eye hath too much youth in it" (The Winter's Tale, 5.1.220-24). In a play about rejuvenation, about the power to make "old hearts fresh" (1.1.39), as Camillo says about the young Prince Mamillius, Shakespeare has Leontes take a hesitant step on a perverse, unnatural, and mendacious path to this end.

For those who knew Greene's romance, this exchange would likely have produced the expectation of a prolonged fit of (incestuous) desire, mirroring the fit of jealousy at the romance's beginning, and confirmed that, after the long intermezzo of the sheep-shearing feast, the play is back on track and traveling towards its tragic outcome. Greene's romance ends with Pandosto's fall "into a melancholy fit" and suicide, triggered by his having lusted "after his own daughter," his betrayal of Egistus (Polixenes), and his having caused Bellaria's death (Pafford 1963, 225). The point at which Shakespeare departs most dramatically from Greene is marked by a chorus of references to the inability of an "old tale" to command or compel belief: "That she is living, / Were it but told to you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale" (5.3.115-17). Furthermore, the play's final scene is built upon what Richard Proudfoot has characterized as a "thirst of seeing," as "the motif of seeing is revived in a series of sights" and "Paulina stresses to Leontes the importance of visual proof" (Proudfoot 1976, 74, 77).28 The theater can partly assuage that thirst and provide such proof; Shakespeare's print source cannot. Thus, at the very moment when Shakespeare's play swerves away from the content of Greene's prose romance, it also vigorously asserts the superiority of its own theatrical medium.

Because the play-text follows Greene's romance so closely until the end, the spectator is effectively set up. Like any skilled confidence man, Shakespeare leads his spectator to believe that, armed with a superior knowledge of Greene's text, he or she is an insider, privy to the playwright's tricks and knowing the outcome in advance, only to have that confidence exposed as a con by the sudden divergence of play from print source. For the cony/spectator of The Winter's Tale who knew Greene's romance, the anticipated "card" would unaccountably fail to turn up at the end. Paradoxically, by suddenly departing from Greene at the end of the play, Shakespeare hewed ever closer to him: specifically, by enacting a ruse like those that Greene was famous for exposing. By effectively tricking those literate spectators who prided themselves on their knowledge of Greene's www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 16/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation prose romance, he causes his play to resemble nothing so much as an episode from a pamphlet by Robert Greene and, further, Greene's rhetorical method itself.

As Arthur Kinney shows in his commentary on Greene's first cony-catching pamphlet, "A Notable Discovery," Greene does not simply record cony- catching practices, but also reenacts them in the shifting rhetoric and vagaries of his own text: "In many examples Greene sets us up to see that those who seek to outcozen the cozeners are only themselves cozeners at heart and therefore deserve what they get even as the cozeners do . . . We are constantly forced into situations where we are shown that our own sympathies are either ambiguous or downright immoral." Greene tricks us into sympathizing with those who deserve no sympathy. Like that of the conies in his stories, "our own earnestness provides grounds for our own deceptions; and in exposing the ugliness of the farmer who is willing to prey on others he exposes our baser traits." Thus, Greene's "book is designed not to reveal cony-catchers but to play games with the language as cony-catchers do; the author is transformed by the pamphlet into a cony-catcher himself; and we are in turn teased into becoming conies by buying this book, tricked into thinking it was the exposé it proposed to be" (Kinney 1990, 158-59).29 Like the cony who is led to think of himself as an insider, Greene's reader is set up to fall into the same confidence trap (of feeling overconfident), since "A Notable Discovery" begins by making the reader feel, like the cony, an insider who is in on the most elaborate swindles of London's underworld. Like his dead rival, Shakespeare enacts the very ruses and tricks he exposes in the figure of Autolycus — with the crucial difference that Shakespeare's "victims" are not country bumpkins, but largely an elite drawn from London's literate classes. This difference may in part explain Shakespeare's exchanging Bohemia for Sicilia, country for court, in his adaptation of Greene.30

The resemblance of Shakespeare's play to a cony-catching trick lends an added dimension and level of intrigue to his title. Those who remembered Greene's popular pamphlets might have heard in Shakespeare's title, in addition to the usual meaning of a trivial old tale useful mainly for whiling away a long winter's evening (see Pafford 1963, liii-liv, for a discussion of the meanings of the title), the echo of a promise made by Greene's cony-catcher as he pretends to take the cony into his confidence: "Ile learne you a trick worth the noting, that you shall win many a pot with in the winter nights" (Greene 1966b, 25). Like Greene's cony-catcher and like Greene himself, Shakespeare pretends to take his audience into his confidence with Mamillius' line to his mother, "A sad tale's best for winter" (The Winter's Tale, 2.1.25). Seeming to give us a cue for interpreting the play's title, the line is a deliberate miscue, masking the sudden turn toward restoration and reunion behind the expectation of a sorrowful ending, an expectation that would have been even stronger for those who recalled Pandosto. The title itself serves the ends of the playwright-trickster, who no doubt gleaned many a pot with his play in the winter nights of 1611. Beneath one level of confidence — the attentive spectator's pride in connecting the title with www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 17/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Mamilius' apparent cue that this play will prove to be a tragedy — the title winks a second time, imparting a sense of the gentle confidence game that is afoot through its echo of Greene's cony-catching pamphlet.

The Winter's Tale is an elaborate cony-catching trick in which Greene and Shakespeare play setter and verser, with the literate portion of Shakespeare's audience unwittingly cast as conies. Autolycus, the character who wanders into Shakespeare's Greene-world from outside the romance-text, much like the barnacle who pretends to wander in from outside the tavern, also, like a barnacle, seems to lose, tripped up as he is by his own actions and by the competent bungling of the Shepherd and Clown. Like that of any effective barnacle, however, Autolycus' presence is a distraction, designed to build the confidence of the cony-spectator. Watching the barnacle's undoing, he fancies himself to be his superior in wit, and invulnerable to a more cunning and advanced craft. But the rogue spirit of the play is not subdued with the defeat of Autolycus in act 5, scene 2. Rather, it goes underground. As in Greene's pamphlets, after the barnacle's apparent undoing there remains one more level to the con, one more undoing in the offing. The spectator who looks for it onstage misunderstands his or her own part in the play, as the cony invariably does.

At another level of deception, The Winter's Tale is a confidence game between partners. "At some moment in the late 1580s, Shakespeare walked into a room — most likely, in an inn in Shoreditch, Southwark, or the Bankside — and quite possibly found many of the leading writers drinking and eating together": So begins Stephen Greenblatt's vividly imagined account of Shakespeare's introduction to the group of London's leading playwrights (Greenblatt 2004, 200). Shakespeare, of course, was a young man from the Warwickshire countryside, precisely the sort that Robert Greene imagined walking into the London taverns that served as warrens of cony-catchers in his rogue pamphlets. His position vis-â-vis this group is in part indicated by Greene's complaint in his deathbed pamphlet about the "upstart Crow." The Winter's Tale is, among other things, Shakespeare's demonstration of the utter — call it confidence — that he has achieved over his career as a playwright. This confidence is underscored both by the playwright's close adherence to Greene's text, knowing full well his ability to outstrip his dead rival in language, characterization, and even plotting, and by his implicit demonstration, like that of a student to his former tutor, that he has thoroughly mastered the art that Greene repeatedly exposed in his popular and notorious pamphlets.

All of Shakespeare's romances feature examples of improbable reunions. Perhaps the most unlikely is that between Shakespeare and the bitter man who excoriated the actor-poseur. The thriving survivor calls back from the dead his old rival across a gap in time, nineteen years, roughly comparable to the sixteen-year stretch that separates the first three acts of the play from the last two. In this play of forgiveness and reconciliation, Shakespeare and Greene "shake hands, as over a vast; and embrace, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds" (The Winter's Tale, 1.1.29-31), but not to enact a www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 18/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation sentimental reunion between the successful playwright and his irascible and intensely jealous bohemian rival.31 Immobile as a statue, Greene, we may imagine, doubles as both cony-catching partner and gull or "fool, / That seest a game play'd home, the rich stake drawn, / And tak'st it all for jest" (1.2.247-49), as Leontes says of Camillo. He is at best a reluctant collaborator with the upstart crow who has once again beautified himself with his rival's feathers.

NOTES 1. References to The Winter's Tale come from J. H. P. Pafford's second Arden edition of the play (Shakespeare 1963). The date for Greene's romance is traditionally given as 1588, but Lori Humphrey Newcomb argues for an earlier date for the first edition of Pandosto in her recent and thorough study of the lives and afterlives of Greene's text, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (Newcomb 2002, 56). Though it may be mere coincidence, the gap between the commonly accepted date of 1588 and the likely premiere of Shakespeare's play, 1611 — namely, twenty-three years — may account for the curious recurrence of the number twenty-three in The Winter's Tale. It is the difference in ages between father and son, Leontes and Mamillius: "Looking on the lines / Of my boy's face, methought I did recoil / Twenty-three years" (The Winter's Tale, 1.2.153-55). Cleomenes and Dion have been away twenty-three days on their sojourn to Apollo's oracle (2.3.197-98). And the number marks the beginning of mature adulthood according to the Shepherd, who wishes "there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting —" (3.3.59-63). In The Winter's Tale, it seems to be the number of regeneration, truth, and maturation. Might it be Shakespeare's calculated way of implying that The Winter's Tale, which like Mamillius is twenty-three years younger than its source, is a renewed and reanimated Pandosto that is both artistically more mature (for it is, in another sense, exactly twenty-three years older than its infant source) and truer to nature than Greene's romance? For an account of other critics who have noticed this particular numerical pattern in the play, see Turner and Haas (2005, 82- 83n). The only other explanation for the pattern that has been advanced, as far as I know, is that of Emrys Jones: "The number twenty-three . . . was possibly felt to have symbolic value: Being one short of twenty-four it is expressive of a state of being almost complete and is comparable to . . . 'the eleventh hour'" (cited in Turner and Haas, 83n).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 19/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2. There are several other characters in the play with little or no correspondence to characters in Greene's source, notably Paulina, Antigonus, Emilia, the Clown, Mopsa and Dorcas, and Time. As to the latter, Greene has no need of an equivalent figure in his prose romance, whose conventions allow Fawnia to grow up in the space of a page without any such awkward intervention. Still, he seems to have given Shakespeare the cue for his rare allegorical turn in the subtitle of his romance, "The Triumph of Time." Even more apposite, since Shakespeare's Time seems more decrepit than triumphant, the figure may owe something to the proverbial opening of Greene's first cony-catching pamphlet, "A Notable Discovery": "Time refineth men's affects, and their humors grow different by the distinction of age" (Robert Greene, "A Notable Discovery of Cozenage," in Kinney 1990, 163). Likening himself to Diogenes, Ovid, and Socrates, Greene postures at the beginning of this pamphlet as a repentant and self- reformed wanton, as he does throughout his works, arguably providing the model for Shakespeare's penitent Leontes, who, unlike his suicidal counterpart Pandosto in Greene's romance, is tempered by time and experience. 3. Arthur Kinney points out how Autolycus, in his meeting with the Clown, borrows a page from the early rogue pamphlet by Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors (1566): "Autolycus follows Harman's description of the Counterfeit Crank [epileptic] as if it were a rule-book" (Kinney 1990, 26). 4. See especially Bloom, "As parodistic song writer, Autolycus blends into Shakespeare, immensely enjoying his fantasies of usurers' wives (Shakespeare himself being a usurer)" (Bloom 1998, 652); and Greenblatt, "Where is Shakespeare in this strange story, a story lifted from his old rival Robert Greene? In part, he seems playfully to peer out at us behind the mask of a character he added to Greene's story, the rogue Autolycus" (Greenblatt 2004, 371). 5. Garber goes on to note the classical and Ovidian dimensions of the scene, particularly its references to the Pygmalion and the Proserpina stories. In his Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play, Stephen Orgel explains Paulina's name in terms of the Pauline faith in "things not seen, the primacy of the spirit over the letter" (Orgel 1996, 59-60, n2). Richard Proudfoot refers to the "ripple of that association between art and divine providence which culminates in the statue scene" (Proudfoot 1976, 71). Patricia Parker points out that Paulina's "name recalls the Pauline definition of faith as the evidence of things unseen" (Parker 2004, 44). Giving a geographical turn to the frequent linkage of Paulina with St. Paul, Richard Wilson writes, "It may be no coincidence that The Winter's Tale is perhaps the first of Shakespeare's plays to be written or revised specifically for the Burbages' enclosed Blackfriars Playhouse, in the monastic quarter on the opposite bank of the Thames to the Globe amphitheatre, in the shadow of St. Paul's." With a mistress like Paulina to control the entrances and exits, the Blackfriars Playhouse was "fulfilling the historic function of this 'little Rome' or foreign corner of the Square Mile, which was as the gateway to London's recusant underground" (Wilson 2004, 258). www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 20/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 6. In an elaborate homonymic pun linking "gest," "jest," "guest," "gestation," and "guess," Hermione unwittingly partners guess-work and gest-work, or storytelling, with the economics of hospitality, or what might be called guest- work. The gest or duration of Polixenes' visit happens to coincide with the gestation period of an infant and of the wild story or gest that Leontes has conceived. The polyphony sounded by the many-layered, homonymic pun "gest" echoes throughout the remainder of the play. It would be no exaggeration to say that The Winter's Tale as a whole represents a miraculous dilation of this single word. "Gest" evokes "jest" (OED, "gest," sb1.3), the courtly playfulness of Hermione, Leontes' fear of being made a mockery, as well as Leontes' serving, like Lear, as his own unwitting court jester; "to gest" in the sense of "to tell a tale, to recite a romance" (OED, "gest," v1), evoking the play's larger identity, its tendency to reflect on tales, and the mad tale of adultery conjured by Leontes' imagination, a "gest" that, like Hermione's child, has a "gestation" period of exactly nine months; "gest" as "the time allotted for a halt or stay" (OED, "gest," sb4b), as projected extensions of the gests of the two men are measured against one another by Hermione; "to gest" in the sense of "to perform" and the related sense of "gest" as deed or exploit (OED, "gest," v2 and sb1), both of which raise the shadow of the exploit of which Polixenes is suspected; "gest" as "bearing, carriage, mien" and "a movement of a limb: an action, gesture" (OED, "gest," sb3.1-2); and Leontes' misguided attempts to read his wife's "gests"; "guess," specifically the mad guesswork of Leontes, which, I shall try to show later, is duplicated by the erroneous guesswork of the spectator who is ultimately misled by his or her knowledge of Shakespeare's source; and "gestation," both of the infant girl and of what Patricia Parker deems "the play's gestational plot of loss and return" (Parker 2004, 31). It is echoed by Hermione's word "guest" fourteen lines later (The Winter's Tale, 1.2.55), referring to Polixenes' status as a visitor and debtor who owes his presence to Hermione and her husband, and subsequently by Leontes' reference to Camillo, in his refusal to acknowledge Polixenes' treachery, as "a fool, / That seest a game play'd home, the rich stake drawn, / And tak'st it all for jest" (1.2.247-49), as well as by Polixenes' "guess" (1.2.403). The larger gest ("a story or romance in verse: also simply [in later use] a story, tale" [OED, "gest," sb1.2]) that is The Winter's Tale requires of us, as Hermione does of Polixenes, a gest or stay of a certain length of time. As the title of the play suggests, Shakespeare's gest, the time allotted for The Winter's Tale, resembles that of a tale or narrative (gest) more than a play. Shakespeare's Time, announcing as he does a sixteen-year, temporal gap, mimics techniques of narrative compression that are apparent in Greene's gest or romance. The gest of the play is a compressed form of the unusually long, sixteen-year gestation period before it comes to term. Sounding in both heroic and satiric registers, the word summons and summarizes the compound nature of the play and calls attention to the play's origins and gestational development from Greene's romance.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 21/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 7. Like the boys whose closeness it describes, Polixenes' phrase is itself twinned. In the Folio text, as editors Susan Snyder and Deborah Curren- Aquino point out in their recent New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play, the word is spelled "twyn'd," "a variant of 'twined' = entwined, interwoven" (Snyder and Curren-Aquino 2002, 89n). In the two-word phrase "twinn'd lambs" the faunal metaphor of twinning entwines with the botanical metaphor of twining with which the play opens: "They were trained together in their childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now" (The Winter's Tale, 1.1.23-25), Camillo observes in an expression that elaborately twines sameness and difference. As has often been noted, the metaphor of branching suggests both proliferation, the fullness of the two kings' adult friendship, as well as separation and divergence, rootedness or stasis and movement or change, a dyad also implicit in the faunal-botanical "twinn'd"/"twyn'd." The twinned/twined pair anticipates what Susan Snyder has described as Leontes' pathological aversion to change, even during the period of "frozen, iterative mourning," similar to the phenomenon of "blocked mourning" analyzed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. "If the mourning process is not allowed to go its course," writes Snyder, "a process of incorporation may take place, which instead of working through loss and change seeks to deny them by secretly 'encrypting' the lost loved one, perfect and fixed, within the psyche. This (delusory) recuperative magic of incorporation is distinct from, and opposite to, introjection, the normal process by which the ego expands and transforms itself by taking in internal and external changes" (Snyder 2002, 204-205). 8. Patricia Parker has noted the chiasmus behind the odd difference in season and setting between the wintry but southern Sicily, ruled by a king whose name "suggests 'Leo,' the zodiacal sign of summer" and the Arcadian or pastoral, but more northern Bohemia (Parker 2005, 189). 9. See Snyder and Curren-Aquino 2002, 253n for a discussion of the crux of the exchange of clothes. Richard Proudfoot is particularly astute on the question of exactly what clothing Autolycus receives in his exchange with Prince Florizel: a shepherd's disguise or the more courtly clothing that would allow him to pass himself off as a courtier (Proudfoot 1976, 75-76). 10. The attributes of Hermes — patron of wealth, of trade, of travelers, of thieves, of eloquence, and of increase in the animal world — curiously connect the diverse elements of act 4, scene 4. But in a sense, Shakespeare works against the Hermes-like spirit of the scene — the name Hermes means "the hastener," and he was noted for his swiftness — in setting a slow and deliberate pace. Following on the heels of the swift spatio- temporal movement across sixteen years and the watery gap between Sicilia and Bohemia, the dilated feast scene slows time to a crawl.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 22/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11. Among the meanings of "fleece" current in Shakespeare's day, according to the O.E.D., were "2. To pluck or shear (the wool) from a sheep. Hence fig. to obtain by unjust or unfair means. Also, to take toll of, take pickings from. 3. To strip (a person, city, country, etc.) of money, property, etc., as a sheep is stripped of its fleece; to make (anyone) pay to the uttermost; to exact money from, or make exacting charges upon; to plunder, rob heartlessly; to victimize." Parker notes that "'sheep-shearing' and 'fleecing' were . . . part of the lexicon of usury, equated with both theft and the proverbial wolf among sheep" (Parker 2004, 31). 12. The Shakespeare of The Winter's Tale has been likened to both characters. Greenblatt observes that the Shakespeare of The Winter's Tale is no less a Paulina than an Autolycus: "Shakespeare is somewhere else onstage, peering out from behind a different mask — that of the old woman who arranges the whole scene of the statue's coming-to-life" (Greenblatt 2004, 371). Mowat argues that Autolycus can shift according to the intertexts he evokes: As a trickster figure, he "can be seen as a stand-in for the artist himself, endowed with Mercury's gifts of eloquence and illusion-making, a kind of earlier-day Felix Krull"; as a rogue, he "speaks more of social and economic struggle, of counterfeiting, of acting, if you will, as Autolycus first licks the sweat off the true laborer's brow and then exits to change his costume for his next actorly role" (Mowat 1994, 70). 13. The phrase is Greenblatt's, who writes that "near the end of his career, when he wanted to stage an old-fashioned piece, a 'winter's tale,' [Shakespeare] dramatized Greene's by-now-forgotten story of irrational jealousy, Pandosto" (Greenblatt 2004, 207). Newcomb shows how in the early Stuart era romance, including Greene's text, had begun to be denigrated, "discounted by Rowlands as reading for the countrified and by Jonson as reading for women" (Newcomb 2002, 119), but Greene's romance was hardly forgotten by the time Shakespeare staged his revival. 14. Cavell writes that Shakespeare's play asserts "the competition of poetic theater with nontheatrical romance as modes of narrative, and especially claiming the superiority of theater (over a work like his own 'source' Pandosto) in securing full faith and credit in fiction" (Cavell 1987, 199).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 23/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 15. In a manner related to this point, Shakespeare puns on the word "grave" in the sense of what is written or inscribed, what is sculpted, and what is dead in act 5 of the play. In an apostrophe to Hermione following the Servant's praise of the peerless Perdita, Paulina laments, As every present time doth boast itself Above a better gone, so must thy grave Give way to what's seen now! Sir, you yourself Have said, and writ so; but your writing now Is colder than that theme. (The Winter's Tale, 5.1.96-100) "Thy grave" condenses Hermione in her grave, having yielded to the sight of Perdita, and what the Servant has written of her, which has also given way to "what's seen now," and looks ahead to the revelation of the sculpted or graven statue of Hermione in act 5, scene 3. Hermione's statue seems, among other things, an emblem of the lively art of the theater which rescues what is written — for example, Greene's prose romance — from "the grave," from death as well as from a condition of being merely written or graven. 16. Patricia Parker has shown how the rhetorical figure of hysteron proteron, which entails the "reversal of proper or natural order," informs The Winter's Tale (Parker 1987, 67-69). I would add to her wonderful remarks that the relation of play to source, Shakespeare to Greene, is also governed by this trope. 17. All citations from King Lear refer to the Arden Third Series edition (Shakespeare 1997). 18. Carroll does not make this point about indebtedness himself, but I freely lend it to him, even as I borrow from his wonderful analysis of the Abraham man. 19. Citations from Macbeth refer to the Arden Second Series edition (Shakespeare 1984). 20. Greenblatt has recently advanced the controversial argument that Shakespeare modeled Falstaff in part on Robert Greene (Greenblatt 2004, 216-25). 21. See, for example, "The Second Part of Conny-Catching" (Greene 1966b, 18, 26, 28). 22. The son of Hermes and Chione, Autolycus inherited from his father his gifts for thievery, cunning, and salesmanship. He was the maternal grandfather of Odysseus. 23. On Shakespeare's moneylending activities, see Honigmann 1982, 12. For a recent summary of Shakespeare and his father's activities as moneylenders, see Greenblatt 2004, 271. 24. Stephen Greenblatt notes the necromantic aspect of this scene: "There is something deliberately witchlike about the dead queen's friend Paulina, for there is something potentially illicit about this resurrection, something akin to the black art of necromancy" (Greenblatt 2004, 371). Arden editor J. H. P. Pafford describes Shakespeare's stagecraft in The Winter's Tale in terms that might suggest necromancy: "He gives life to characters and does everything he can to give credibility to the plot" (Pafford 1963, xxxi). www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 24/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 25. The sources of much of the biographical material we possess about Greene — his three "repentance" pamphlets, written on his deathbed, one of which ("The Repentance of Robert Greene") contains a short autobiography entitled "The life and death of Robert Greene Maister of Artes" — are of questionable authenticity. Indeed, their authorship began to be questioned immediately on their publication after Greene's death. Even in the twentieth century, there are strong partisans on both sides, claiming authorship both for Greene and for his friend and publisher Henry Chettle. For a discussion of the authenticity of the deathbed pamphlets, see Crupi 1986, 32-35. Crupi's discussion of Greene's life (1-35) pays judicious attention to disputed facts. 26. See Newcomb 2002, Appendices, 262-65 for detailed lists of prose and verse versions of Pandosto. 27. The definitions are Greene's own and may be found in "A table of the words of art, vsed in the effecting these base villanies," in Greene 1966b, 39. 28. Shakespeare's "reliance on visual spectacle," Proudfoot contends, increases "from Macbeth to The Tempest to The Two Noble Kinsmen" (Proudfoot 1976, 77). 29. Karen Helfand Bix notes how the rogue pamphleteers in general "slyly celebrate the cony-catchers' cunning, resourcefulness, and aggressive individuality, demonstrated within the fray of urban life" (Bix 2004, 172). Lori Newcomb, by contrast, contends that it is Greene's enemy Gabriel Harvey who "resignifies his notorious writing career as calculated coney- catching" (Newcomb 2002, 29). 30. On a related note, some editors gloss Florizel's line after the couple's exposure, "The odds for high and low's alike" (The Winter's Tale, 5.1.206) as a reference to false or loaded dice, though this explanation has been disputed. See Turner and Haas 2005, 503n for a summary of arguments for and against this interpretation. 31. According to the O.E.D., in France, at least since the fifteenth century, the terms "bohémien" and "bohême" were regularly applied to gypsies, who were thought to have originated in Bohemia. It seems plausible that, when Shakespeare read the name "Bohemia" in Pandosto, it might have evoked for him elements of the gypsy-like life of Robert Greene. Indeed, a French translation of Pandosto from 1615 claims that the work was originally Bohemian, having been translated first "en Anglois, de la langue Bohême, et de nouveau mis en François" (cited in Newcomb 2002, 83).

REFERENCES Adams, Robert M. 1989. Shakespeare: The Four Romances. New York: W. W. Norton. Bix, Karen Helfand. 2004. "'Masters of Their Occupation': Labor and Fellowship in the Cony-Catching Pamphlets." In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 171-92. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 25/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. Carroll, William. 1996. Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1987. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crupi, Charles W. 1986. Robert Greene. Twayne's English Authors Series. Boston: G. K. Hall. Garber, Marjorie. 2004. Shakespeare After All. New York: Pantheon Books. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will and the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton. Greene, Robert. 1990. "A Notable Discovery of Cozenage." In Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature. Edited by Arthur Kinney. 1973; reprint, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Greene, Robert. 1966a. "Groats-Worth of Witte" and "The Repentance of Robert Greene." Edited by G. B. Harrison. Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartos. New York: Barnes and Noble. Greene, Robert. 1966b. "A Notable Discovery of Coosnage" and "The Second Part of Conny-Catching." Edited by G. B. Harrison. Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartos. New York: Barnes and Noble. Greene, Robert. 1588. Pandosto. London. Harman, Thomas. 1566. A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors. London. Honigmann, E. A. J. 1982. Shakespeare's Impact on His Contemporaries. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books. Jonson, Ben. 1975. "On The New Inn." In Poems. Edited by Ian Donaldson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 355. Kinney, Arthur, ed. 1990. Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature. 1973; reprint, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Mowat, Barbara. 1994. "Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter's Tale 4.3." Shakespeare Studies 22: 58-76. Muir, Kenneth. 1957. Volume 1 of Shakespeare's Sources. 2 vols. London: Methuen. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. 2002. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press. Orgel, Stephen, ed. 1996. The Winter's Tale, by William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pafford, J. H. P., ed. 1963. The Winter's Tale, by William Shakespeare. Arden Shakespeare. Second series. London: Methuen. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781872/show 26/28 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Parker, Patricia. 1987. Literary Fat Ladies. London: Methuen. Parker, Patricia. 2004. "Temporal Gestation, Legal Contracts, and the Promissory Economies of The Winter's Tale." In Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England. Edited by Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson, and A. R. Buck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Parker, Patricia. 2005. "Sound Government, Polymorphic Bears: The Winter's Tale and Ovid's Metamorphoses of Eye and Ear." In The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Edited by Helen Regueiro and Frances Ferguson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Proudfoot, Richard. 1976. "Verbal Reminiscence and the Two-Part Structure of The Winter's Tale." Shakespeare Survey 29: 67-78. Shakespeare, William. 1962. The Comedy of Errors. Edited by R. A. Foakes. Arden Shakespeare. Second series. London: Methuen. Shakespeare, William. 1963. The Winter's Tale. Edited by J. H. P. Pafford. Arden Shakespeare. Second series. London: Methuen. Shakespeare, William. 1964. The Tempest. Edited by Frank Kermode. Arden Shakespeare. Second series. London: Methuen. Shakespeare, William. 1984. Macbeth. Edited by Kenneth Muir. Arden Shakespeare. Second series. London: Routledge. Shakespeare, William. 1997. King Lear. Edited by R. A. Foakes. Arden Shakespeare. Third series. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Siemon, James. 1974. "'But It Appears She Lives': Iteration in The Winter's Tale." PMLA 89.1 (January): 10-16. Snyder, Susan, and Deborah Curren-Aquino. 2002. Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. Turner, Robert Kean, and Virginia Westling Haas, eds. 2005. A New Variorum Edition of The Winter's Tale. New York: Modern Language Association. Wilson, Richard. 2004. Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

ABSTRACT | BLEATING HEARTS | GRAFT AND CORRUPTION | A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Dreaming of Orientalism in Kenneth Branagh's As

(/current) You Like It

ELIZABETH KLETT, UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-CLEAR LAKE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) Kenneth Branagh's choice of Meiji-era Japan for Shakespeare's pastoral comedy inspires some visually pleasing imagery and tableaux in his film version of As You Like It, but the mingling of Asian cultures and marginalizing of Asian actors makes the film racially problematic and, ultimately, Eurocentric.

As You Like It (2006). Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Shakespeare Association of America Annual Convention, San Diego. April 7, 2007. Performed by Bryce Dallas Howard (Rosalind), Romola Garai (Celia), David Oyelowo (Orlando), Brian Blessed (Duke Senior/Duke Frederick), Adrian Lester (Oliver), Kevin Kline (Jaques), Alfred Molina (Touchstone), Janet McTeer (Audrey), Alex Wyndham (Silvius), Jade Jefferies (Phoebe), Richard Briers (Adam), and Jimmy Yuill (Corin).

Viewers of Kenneth Branagh's most recent Shakespearean film, As You Like It, may well ask, along with the film's textual adviser Russell Jackson, "Why Japan?" (Jackson 2007). The unusual choice of Meiji-era Japan as the setting for Shakespeare's pastoral comedy creates a plethora of troubling images and meanings in Branagh's film. On the one hand, the setting allows him to craft lovely, picturesque tableaux, as in the opening scene, where Duke Senior, Rosalind, Celia, and various courtiers watch a kabuki performance, and the closing scene, where the brides wear ornately embroidered silken kimonos to the wedding ceremony, which takes place amid brightly colored streamers and floating blossoms. On the other hand, the film largely marginalizes Asian bodies, constructing a vision of both court and forest where, despite the setting, nearly all the major players are white. The non-white characters who do appear are often exoticized or silenced. Although Branagh appears to be working to create a positive, multi-cultural, multi-racial version of the play (particularly since Orlando and Oliver are played by black www.borrowers.uga.edu/781856/show 1/5 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation actors), a kind of inadvertent racism, compounded by particular choices in casting and characterization, emerges in the film's dynamics.

There is no denying that the film's Japanese setting creates some aesthetically pleasing imagery. The opening credits make liberal use of Japanese watercolors as backdrops, and Orlando's tree-hung poems about Rosalind are written in graceful calligraphy. The Duke's forest abode is a zen-like haven that includes a feng shui meditation garden. Amiens (Patrick Doyle) sings "Under the Greenwood Tree" in this idyllic space, while Jaques sits cross-legged in the center of a circle and demands reverently, "More, more, I prithee, more" (As You LIke It, 2.5.9).1 The Duke is often seen meditating, his lords practice tai chi, and Jaques advocates a vegetarian diet. Their brotherhood includes two Asian musicians, who accompany Amiens on flute and strings. Even the wild-haired and often volatile Touchstone is affected by his surroundings: in an ironic moment, he too is discovered performing tai chi.

Branagh blends aspects of various Asian cultures in his film (feng shui and tai chi are Chinese), indicating an orientalist fetishization of the setting rather than an interest in cultural specificity. This is apparently intentional; the text that appears at the beginning of the film characterizes it as "a dream of Japan," indicating its imaginary otherworldliness. There is also a strong sense of theatricality throughout: The same titles proclaim "all the world's a stage," projected onto a silken curtain that draws back to reveal a kabuki performer. A different set of titles informs the audience that nineteenth century British colonial opportunists in Japan formed insular, "private mini-empires," thus creating a context in which Shakespeare's characters might operate. This prologue — at once abstract and historical, unreal and real — does not, however, mitigate the discomfort produced by the scenes involving actual Asian characters. In the scenes with the improbably named Charles (Nobuyuki Takano), a sumo wrestler who fights with Orlando, his voice is literally co-opted by a white character. Dennis (Gerard Horan), a servant of Oliver's who has only a few lines in Shakespeare's text, speaks all of Charles's lines in the film. The reason for Charles's silence is unclear, since he obviously understands English, as indicated by his curt nods in response to Oliver's warnings about Orlando. The pronouncement of Le Beau (Richard Clifford) that signals Charles's defeat — "He cannot speak, my lord" — aptly describes Charles's situation both before and after the wrestling match (1.2.214). He becomes instead merely a mountain of flesh, and the audience (both on- and off-screen) is invited to gaze at his exoticized body as he stares impassively at Oliver and warms up in front of the wrestling spectators.

Perhaps even more troubling than the silent, inscrutable Asian stereotype embodied by Charles is the diminutive, simple-minded, grinning Asian stereotype presented by William (Paul Chan). His first encounter with Audrey (a former servant at the court who escapes after Duke Frederick's coup) does not appear in the play and is thus non-verbal. He surprises her while she is sleeping in the forest, and offers her shelter, smiling hugely and bowing repeatedly while she looks at him in apprehension. His claim on Audrey, a busty blonde who stands a full head taller than he, is made to seem both ridiculous and easily overcome by Touchstone. It is significant that William, like Charles, is shown to be ill-equipped to deal with the linguistic stylings of his rival. Touchstone laughs uproariously at his claim to "have www.borrowers.uga.edu/781856/show 2/5 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation a pretty wit," (5.1.29), and then uses violence to subdue William, twisting his fingers and forcing him to his knees, while Audrey looks on admiringly, clearly impressed by Touchstone's strength, bravado, and elaborate threats. The feminized William, unable to fight back either physically or verbally, runs away.

The only main characters who are visually troped as Japanese are Silvius and Phoebe. Both have long, straight black hair and wear more "native" dress than the other inhabitants of the forest, most of whom wear rustic Western nineteenth century clothing. (Both Silvius and Phoebe nonetheless speak with impeccable English accents.) In this context, Rosalind's condemnation of Phoebe's appearance, focusing on her "inky brows," "black silk hair," and "bugle eyeballs," feels racist, particularly since the actress playing Phoebe appears to be at least part-Asian (3.5.51-52). All the other women are light-haired and fair-skinned, setting Phoebe apart as the undesirable non-white Other.

The casting of Brian Blessed as both Duke Senior and Duke Frederick reinforces the dichotomy between East and West in ways that associate qualities such as savagery with the Orient and civilization with the Occident. Duke Senior appropriates certain elements of Asian culture, such as the kabuki performance at the court and the meditative practices in the forest. Yet he is consistently coded as Western in his dress, particularly after leaving the court. Duke Frederick, on the other hand, is always dressed as a samurai warrior, surrounded by faceless, frightening servants in armor, and is unremittingly violent in his behavior, particularly to Rosalind and Oliver. The textual prologue to the film notes that the English émigrés to Japan "tried to embrace this extraordinary culture, its beauties and its dangers." The artistic side of Japanese culture is enjoyed by Duke Senior without fundamentally altering his essential Englishness, and the violent aspects of the culture are absorbed and embodied by Duke Frederick. The film thus perpetuates the ideology of Orientalism as described by Edward Said, in which the exoticized Orient becomes the "other" to the Western "self": "European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self" (Said 1978). The dichotomies of Self/Other, West/East, civilized/savage are physically embodied by the two Dukes in Branagh's film. The crises of identity experienced by both men are articulated through opposing aspects of Japanese culture (the "beautiful" and "dangerous"); yet ultimately the film tells us little about that culture or its people, nor does it break out of a stereotypically stratified vision of what "Japan" actually is.

As with his 1993 film version of Much Ado About Nothing, which cast Denzel Washington as Don Pedro, Branagh uses black actors seemingly as a gesture toward color-blind casting. The actors playing the three sons of Sir Roland de Boys are the only black characters in the film; yet their blackness is supposed to be unremarkable, much as Washington's was in the earlier film. While Branagh's continued fetishization of non-white bodies is tempered, to a certain extent, by the very strong and nuanced performances by David Oyelowo and Adrian Lester as Orlando and Oliver, respectively, their bodies, like those of the minor Asian players, are exoticized, particularly Orlando's in the wrestling scene. He appears in minimal sumo garb, and the camera presents numerous shots of his muscles and the sweat glistening on his skin. (There is even a hint that the white, English Le Beau admires www.borrowers.uga.edu/781856/show 3/5 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation his physical prowess, through Clifford's suggestive reading of the line, "Hereafter, in a better world than this, / I shall desire more love and knowledge of you" [1.2.285-86]).

The inter-racial marriages of Rosalind and Orlando and Celia and Oliver, along with the joyous celebration involving most of the forest's inhabitants at the end of the film, indicate that perhaps Branagh intended a more inclusive, liberal message than the reading I have offered here. Indeed, this interpretation is voiced by a commenter on the Internet Movie Database website, who writes: "Set in a lush, beautiful forest in an imaginary old Japan, populated by people of all races, this version is an innovative and modern one rather than a conventional and classical one — and it works" (Sarastro7 2006). There are some aspects of the film that support this reading. For example, there are some indications that the dichotomy between self and other begins to break down by the end of the film, in which we see that Duke Senior's new court is more open, less hierarchical, and multi-racial. The stark contrast between Senior and Frederick is also lessened by the latter's spiritual conversion, and we see him meditating in the forest, in a pose formerly occupied by Senior. Yet by casting the same actor as both Dukes, the film creates the impression that the savage Oriental Duke is a kind of "surrogate . . . underground self" (in Said's words [Said 1978]) who must ultimately become like his brother — Western and civilized — in order to be redeemed.

In the "From Page to Screen" feature on the DVD version of As You Like It, Branagh says that he invented the Japanese setting and added the prologue showing the usurpation of Duke Senior by Frederick as "a strong way to start the film in cinematic terms." He implies that he wanted to take advantage of the medium of film by exploring a milieu that would not have been possible in a theatrical production of the play. Certainly, the "dream of Japan" offers Branagh plenty of opportunities for lovely settings and costumes and for creating (in his words) a "fantastic life-learning holiday" for the characters. Using an Asian setting, however, should also have reminded him that raced bodies "speak" in performance, even if he tries to silence them, make them funny, or make them part of the background (as a crowd of festively dressed Japanese people are during the wedding scene, in which grinning children appreciatively gaze at the lovely white Rosalind and Celia). The film has many strong performances — particularly from Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind and Kevin Kline as Jaques — and it does a good job of delving into the darker side of Shakespeare's text, especially in its focus on the violence inherent in many of the play's relationships. With these merits, Branagh's As You Like It would have more than held up in a less racially problematic setting.

NOTES 1. All references to As You Like It as to the Folger Shakespeare Library edition, edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (2004).

REFERENCES www.borrowers.uga.edu/781856/show 4/5 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Jackson, Russell. 2007. "'What Movie, Friends, is This?' — Some Thoughts on Genre Anxieties and the Filming of Shakespeare's Comedies." Paper presented to the seminar on "Shakespeare's Comedy on Screen," Shakespeare Association of America Annual Convention. April 7. Much Ado About Nothing. 1993. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, Michael Keaton. Columbia. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Sarastro7. 2007. "Beautiful, but with shortcomings." Comment on As You Like It (2006). December 8, 2006. Internet Movie Database. Available online at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450972/usercomments (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450972/usercomments). April 18 [cited 24 December 2008]. Shakespeare, William. 2004. As You Like It. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library. New York: Washington Square.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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Setting As You Like It: Shakespearean Appropriation for

(/current) the Cable Television Market

RACHEL WIFALL, SAINT PETER'S COLLEGE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) Continuing his trend of Shakespearean adaptation, Kenneth Branagh and his Shakespeare Film Company recently released a new interpretation of As You Like It through HBO and BBC films. Although the film was released to theaters in Italy on 1 September, 2006, it went straight to television in the United States; HBO first aired the film on 21 August, 2007. With stage and screen veterans Brian Blessed, Kevin Kline, and Alfred Molina, RSC star David Oyelewo, RADA graduate Adrian Lester, and talented newcomers Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of director Ron Howard) and Romola Garai, Branagh's film is generally well acted; indeed, Howard was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television, and Kline won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries. Set in nineteenth-century Japan, the film is also visually gorgeous; that setting, however, is also what makes this production awkward and ultimately unsatisfying.

As You Like It (2006). Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Shakespeare Association of America Annual Convention, San Diego. April 7, 2007. Performed by Bryce Dallas Howard (Rosalind), Romola Garai (Celia), David Oyelowo (Orlando), Brian Blessed (Duke Senior/Duke Frederick), Adrian Lester (Oliver), Kevin Kline (Jaques), Alfred Molina (Touchstone), Janet McTeer (Audrey), Alex Wyndham (Silvius), Jade Jefferies (Phoebe), Richard Briers (Adam), and Jimmy Yuill (Corin).

Mocking the craze for transporting Shakespeare's plays to exotic times and places, the witty online magazine The Onion previewed a hypothetical production of The Merchant of Venice: "In an innovative, tradition-defying rethinking of one of the greatest comedies in the English language, Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles announced Monday his bold intention to set his theater's production of William Shakespeare's The

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781867/show 1/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Merchant of Venice in sixteenth-century Venice." The writer relates his tongue-in-cheek, imagined interview with Director Hiles: I know when most people hear The Merchant of Venice, they think 1960s Las Vegas, a high-powered Manhattan stock brokerage, or an 18th-century Georgia slave plantation, but I think it's high time to shake things up a bit," Hiles said. "The great thing about Shakespeare is that the themes in his plays are so universal that they can be adapted to just about any time and place." According to Hiles, everything in the production will be adapted to the unconventional setting. Swords will replace guns, ducats will be used instead of the American dollar or Japanese yen, and costumes, such as Shylock's customary pinstripe suit, general's uniform, or nudity, will be replaced by garb of the kind worn by Jewish moneylenders of the Italian Renaissance. ("Unconventional Director" 2007) Of course, Michael Radford did set his 2004 film version of The Merchant of Venice in sixteenth-century Venice, drawing his audience's attention to the historical reality of early modern anti-Semitism as he recreated Venice's Jewish ghetto. The so-called new historicism in Shakespeare studies over the past two decades has influenced directors to look more closely at the political and daily realities of the era in which the works were produced. As this Onion article suggests, however, Shakespeare's plays have, on many occasions, been adapted both on film and on stage to historical eras and locales originally unintended by their first performers; these adapted productions have been most successful when their newly-envisioned settings have served to emphasize and illuminate important themes within the plays and/or to bring a new awareness to events closer to our collective cultural memory. Richard Loncraine, for one, set his 1995 film adaptation of Richard III, starring Ian McKellen, in Europe during World War II. In this case, although H. R. Coursen complains that we are not able to make our own inferences — "everything is done for us" (Coursen 2001, 210) — it is clear in Loncraine's film that the psychologically ill, morally crippled, and yet darkly charismatic Richard is to be compared to a dictator such as Adolf Hitler.

Around the same time that Loncraine and McKellen were updating Richard for the screen, Steven Berkoff was playing an ultra-modern Coriolanus on the London stage, decked out in black leather with his head shaven. When Berkoff originally directed this play in New York in 1988 with Christopher Walken playing the lead, Frank Rich noted how Berkoff's interpretation reflected political disenchantment in the United States after that year's presidential election, calling the play "Shakespeare's corrosive view of Roman democracy in the 5th century B.C." and claiming that "Coriolanus is a tragedy in which the political process proves every bit as chaotic and poisonous as war" (Rich 1988). In this production, Berkoff's modernist sense of the diffusion of identity updated Shakespeare's cynicism about human nature to our own time. As Rich describes it, in this production " [t]he Roman plebeians are black-shirted rabble, virtually indistinguishable from their enemy. . . . The people's tribunes . . . are conniving, street-corner gangsters in pin stripes, while the generals . . . are steely bureaucrats." Rich concludes that "the exact place and time of this Coriolanus remain vague," but "it's the intellectual point that's firm" (Rich 1988).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781867/show 2/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Patrick Stewart looks a lot like the bald, leather-clad Berkoff in previews of Rupert Goold's Macbeth, which debuted in the summer of 2007 at the Chichester Festival in the UK, received critical and commercial success in London's West End, and appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 2008. Described on the BAM website as a "harrowing study of the seductive nature of power," this production is "[s]et in an industrial chamber that is equally military hospital ward, kitchen, torture chamber, and abattoir." According to this preview, "Goold's eerily modern Macbeth rings with the echoes of Stalinist terror. Macbeth is a decorated and loyal war hero, but loyalty only goes so far when greatness and history beckon and murder is only a matter of military coups and secret assassinations" (Brooklyn Academy of Music 2008). Michael Coveney links the production to world events within living memory: "When Stewart delivers the 'Tomorrow' dirge to his wife's corpse stretched out on a trolley, it really is like watching the end of an era in, say, Romania or the former Yugoslavia. As a political thriller, this Macbeth combines all the elements of the corrupt tyranny envisaged by George Orwell and expressed again in the great recent movie The Lives of Others" (Coveney 2007).

On a very different note, Michael Hoffman set his 1999 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in not Athens, but late nineteenth-century Tuscany, with the opening defense that "Necklines are high. Parents are rigid. Marriage is seldom a matter of love" (Hoffman 1999). Certainly, the Victorian social code supported a patriarchal policing of young people's sexuality much like that which Egeus attempts in the play. But A Midsummer Night's Dream does not have a fully-developed sense of setting to begin with, outside its poetic allusions to tales from Greek mythology; it could work in many contexts. In this case, Tuscany is appropriate merely for its sensual beauty.

I would argue that, like A Midsummer Night's Dream and other comedies such as The Winter's Tale, As You Like It is a play that, despite its repeated references to the "forest of Arden," is not particularly specific about its setting, except that part of it takes place in the city, the corrupt center of "civilization," and the other part unfolds in the country, where characters escape limitations, find themselves, and find love (consider, for example, the decision of the Oxford Shakespeare to place the play in the French forest of "Ardennes"). So one might think that Branagh could, with little difficulty, transport this text from the indeterminate court of Duke Frederick and the forest of Arden or Ardennes in a non-specific time period (besides some references to early modern doublets and hose) to a mini-empire and a forest in nineteenth-century Japan. Even though Branagh's adaptation is visually stunning, with its cherry blossoms, kimonos, and Zen rock garden, it lacks a rationale for its specific setting, and this is where the production falls most short.

While Branagh's As You Like It is ostensibly set in a realistic, historical Japan, Asian actors play only the shepherd Silvius, the shepherdess Phoebe, the "country youth" William, Charles the wrestler, and unnamed country folk. The pretext provided in the opening of the film explains this demographic: In the latter part of the 19th Century, Japan opened up for trade with the West. Merchant adventurers arrived from all over the world, many of them English. Some traded in silk and rice and lived in enclaves around the "treaty ports." They brought their families and their followers and created private mini-empires where they tried to embrace this extraordinary culture, its beauties and its dangers. (Branagh 2006) www.borrowers.uga.edu/781867/show 3/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation While this premise might at first seem intriguing, offering new insights into an old plot, it proves ultimately to be both forced and flimsy.

Branagh begins his production by depicting an event to which the text of As You Like It only alludes, namely the overthrow of Duke Senior by his brother Duke Frederick. In act I, scene 2 of the play, Rosalind laments that prior to the play's action, her father Duke Senior had been banished from the court. Branagh's film opens, however, with a violent ambush in which the evil Duke, decked out in Samurai warrior gear, leads a band of stealthy ninjas to interrupt Duke Senior and his guests, who are in the midst of enjoying a Kabuki theater performance. This innovation seems contrived, but Branagh explains some of his reasoning in an interview with HBO: I began with the prospect of bringing the palace coup — the overthrow of Duke Senior by his so-called evil brother, Duke Frederick — right at the front of the story — something that's impossible to do in the theater in the same way. So that in the cinema we would start that way and continue all the way through so that the story could have underneath it what the play also contains, which is a sense of danger. (Home Box Office 2007) Branagh continues to explain his overall choice of setting: I wanted to put it in a potentially violent place, but also in a place that addressed the other themes within the play, which are the notion of romantic love — boy meets girl. I wanted that to happen in a place that would be romantic in the way that Shakespeare comedies seem to require. And the play also talks about the tension, if you like, between town and country, between busy lives in the city and the desire to be simple in the outside world. I found that all of those desires — to explore more explicitly in cinema themes that were in the play — were answered for me by the idea of taking it away from the conventional English glades, and go to Japan where in the second half of the 19th Century— from about 1850 to 1900, roughly speaking — there was a moment where Japan was trying to become an industrial nation from an agricultural one. (Home Box Office 2007) There is a sense of danger from the beginning of the play, as Duke Senior banishes Rosalind, and Celia decides to follow her. The women feel the need to disguise themselves for, as Rosalind notes, "Alas, what danger will it be to us, / Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! / Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold" (As You Like It, 1.3.104-106).1 There is also a second brotherly rivalry going on between Oliver and Orlando; the jealous Oliver wants his younger brother dead, telling Charles the wrestler, "I had as lief thou didst break his neck as his finger" (1.1.135-36). It is also true that, once the characters are out in the country, the play revolves around considerations of romantic love. The wooing scenes would seem to require an idyllic pastoral setting, but why Japan? Japan is indeed a visually beautiful country, and it could be an appropriate locale for love in the countryside. But, ironically, while Branagh was trying to get away from the "traditional English glades," he filmed this production not in the far East, but in London and West Sussex, England — the land from which most of its actors hail.

As for thematic concerns, it would be difficult to argue that this play has any connection to industrialization (a post-Shakespearean phenomenon), or to commerce, as does The www.borrowers.uga.edu/781867/show 4/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Merchant of Venice; accordingly, Branagh makes no references to industry or trade within the film. As You Like It is also not a play about colonization, cultural clashes, or cultural exploitation (a case many have made for The Tempest). If the director's intent were to examine the play's apparent themes of loyalty, the folly of romantic love, power conflicts between blood relations, forgiveness, and redemption through the lens of Japanese culture and values (in the vein of Akira Kurosawa), then it would have been appropriate to cast Japanese actors in the leading roles, for a start. This endeavor simply seems like a good excuse for Branagh to get his troop of Western actors into an exotic locale.

It is a nice touch that Duke Frederick (played by Brian Blessed, who doubles as a very sympathetic Duke Senior) finds a kind of Buddhist enlightenment in the end of the play, sitting in meditation in the forest with courtier/truth-seeker Jaques, as the others dance about, celebrating the quadruple wedding that resolves the action of this comedy. For most of the production, however, Branagh's chosen setting seems merely an excuse for novelty, including Duke Frederick's Samurai warrior suit and his band of ninjas; Orlando's wrestling with, and unrealistically defeating, a sumo wrestler who is twice his size; and Orlando's love notes to Rosalind, written in huge Japanese characters on long white scrolls that hang on the trees of the forest, billowing in the nighttime breezes. This is all very visually appealing and catchy, but it seems as though Branagh has chosen this setting merely because it is something that has not been done before.

Why does the world need another Shakespearean film if it offers no freshly illuminating vision of the kind, say, that Cartelli and Rowe describe in New Wave Shakespeare on Screen? And why feature it on the Home Box Office network and not in cinemas? This is Branagh's first film to go straight to television. Although his Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996) met with critical acclaim, Branagh's 2000 musical version of Love's Labour's Lost flopped at the box office. Consequently, his option with Intermedia Films, which financed Love's Labour's and was slated to finance and distribute two more Shakespearean adaptations (Macbeth and As You Like It), expired. In time, however, according to The Daily Telegraph, "An unlikely saviour arrived in the form of the adventurous American cable television network HBO, for whom Branagh had won an Emmy as Heydrich in the award-winning Conspiracy. The network wanted him to star as Franklin D. Roosevelt in its television film Warm Springs, and to his delight agreed to finance As You Like It" ("Branagh Returns" 2005). This film, produced in conjunction with BBC Films, received a Golden Globe nomination and a Screen Actors Guild nomination in the "Made-for-TV" category, and has generally been reviewed in favorable terms.

The Home Box Office network has in recent years fostered an image of itself as a purveyor of respectable entertainment, offering offbeat, urbane, and intelligent television series ranging from Deadwood and Curb Your Enthusiasm to Sex in the City and Rome — another joint BBC-HBO venture. HBO has sponsored documentaries on contemporary issues, including Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, about Hurricane Katrina. It has also worked with the BBC on other productions that feature notable British actors, including the comedy series Extras, co- written, co-directed by, and starring Ricky Gervais (of The Office fame); this show also featured appearances by such British A-list actors and impresarios as Ian McKellen, Kate Winslett, Patrick Stewart, and David Bowie. The HBO-BBC mystery thriller Five Days starred David Oyelewo and Janet McTeer, both featured in Branagh's As You Like It (as www.borrowers.uga.edu/781867/show 5/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Orlando and Audrey). In 2006, HBO also produced and aired the historical drama miniseries Elizabeth, starring Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons. A Shakespeare production, made in association with BBC Films and the famed Brit Kenneth Branagh, would seem to add to HBO's cultural clout; after all, the works — and simply the idea — of "Shakespeare" are used worldwide as a measure of what can properly be called "culture."

From Stratford-upon-Avon to Hollywood, "bardolatry" has been used as a cultural and a capitalist tool. As John Drakakis writes, "The deification of the man Shakespeare proceeds hand-in-hand with the valorization of 'culture,' thus masking the ideological practice of production and re-production of Shakespearean texts as agencies of authority and subjection" (Drakakis 1988, 25). The fact that Branagh calls his production company The Shakespeare Film Company in itself insinuates a claim of cultural authority, almost as if Branagh is the only director making Shakespearean films — or as if, were Shakespeare alive today, he would be working with Branagh.

To give Branagh credit, he did much to popularize Shakespeare during the 1990s — but this popularity came at a price. Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe note that, while "Branagh surely played a crucial role in bringing Shakespeare into the circuit of Cineplex and art-house alike," his films are essentially conservative, "rooted in realist and heritage conventions" (Cartelli and Rowe 2007, 16), and they accuse him of "opportunistic concessions to blockbuster film conventions and celebrity casting" (19). Branagh's catering to mainstream sensibilities and corporate interests (the latter informing the former) is a double-edged sword: While one may want to foster the appreciation of Shakespeare's works, one must also question the form in which these works and the culture of "Shakespeare" are being disseminated. Douglas Lanier describes the strain of films from the "age of Branagh" in the 1990s as "Shakescorp Noir," describing that period as one "in which classics that were long understood by Hollywood as 'box office poison' were systematically assimilated to the dominant visual modes, genres, and market niches of the Hollywood marketplace . . . [and] assimilated to the interests of global corporations" (discussed by Cartelli and Rowe 15).

Taking Lanier's assertions into consideration, Cartelli and Rowe consider the pros and cons of such adaptation: Probably few would quarrel in the abstract with the idea that it is a good thing to maximize the circulation of Shakespeare's plays in any form, particularly at a moment in history when classical musical concerts play to aging and rapidly diminishing audiences, and when classic artworks have to rely on the marketing and promotion of blockbuster exhibitions at major museums to sustain their cultural capital. But just as the marketing of catalogues, posters, and postcards, illustrated t- shirts and coffee mugs, often migrates beyond the gift-shop to the entrances of exhibition galleries themselves — not only altering the way we see and respond to art but transforming the art-object itself into merchandise — so too may the filmic reconstitution of a Shakespeare play alter and commodify our terms of engagement with it. (Cartelli and Rowe 2007, 15) Once an artist works in collusion with the dominant economic forces that shape a culture, he or she becomes complicit with the forces that seek to inform and uphold the status quo. While Branagh's directorial efforts have certainly helped to put Shakespeare's

www.borrowers.uga.edu/781867/show 6/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation works into wider cultural circulation, they have done little to re-envision or put these plays into question. This is certainly the case with his As You Like It.

Because of HBO's efforts, cable television subscribers can feel good (since they pay a hefty monthly sum for cable service and then pay a bit more on top of that for HBO), to know there are legitimately "cultural" programs to be viewed in their homes, even if these shows do not ultimately offer much depth. Many HBO programs have garnered critical accolades, and it would seem that Branagh's As You Like It — with a great script (they don't get much better), talented celebrity actors, and rich visual images — should be a hit. With his contrived premise, however, Branagh has — in the words of Douglas Lanier — negated "art's capacity for critique and opposition, offering [his] audience only the illusion of enlightenment and diversity while in fact compelling conformity to a social and aesthetic status quo'" (cited by Cartelli and Rowe 2007, 15). This film may be enjoyable and it may feel like "culture," but only until one gets below its shiny surface.

NOTES 1. All references to As You Like It are to the Penguin single-play edition, edited by Ralph M. Sargent (1987).

REFERENCES Brooklyn Academy of Music. 2008. Macbeth. Available online at: http://www.bam.org/events/08MACB/08MACB.aspx [link expired]. Branagh, Kenneth, dir. 2006. As You Like It. Performers Bryce Dallas Howard, David Oyelowo, Brian Blessed, Romola Garai, Kevin Kline, Alfred Molina. USA/UK. HBO Films in association with BBC Films. Sound, col. "Branagh Returns to a Labour of Love." 2005. Daily Telegraph. 17 May. Cartelli, Thomas, and Katherine Rowe. 2007. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Polity. Coursen, H. R. 2001. "Theme and Design in Recent Productions of Henry VI." In Henry VI: Critical Essays. Edited by Thomas A. Pendleton. New York: Routledge. 205-18. Coveney, Michael. 2007. "Macbeth (Chichester)." WhatsOnStage.com. September. Available online at: http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8821180951181 (http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8821180951181) [cited 4 December 2008]. Drakakis, John. 1988. "Theatre, Ideology, and Institution: Shakespeare and the Roadsweepers." In The Shakespeare Myth. Edited by Graham Holderness. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 24-41. Home Box Office. 2007. "Online Exclusive With Kenneth Branagh." Available online at: http://www.hbo.com/films/asyoulikeit/interviews/index.html (http://www.hbo.com/films/asyoulikeit/interviews/index.html) [cited 4 December 2008]. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781867/show 7/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Hoffman, Michael, dir. 1999. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Performers Kevin Kline, Dominic West, Anna Friel, Calista Flockhart, Christian Bale, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Michelle Pfeiffer. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Sound, col. Rich, Frank. 1988. "Jagged, Percussive Coriolanus from Steven Berkoff." New York Times. 23 November. Shakespeare, William. 1987. As You Like It. Edited by Ralph M. Sargent. New York: Penguin. "Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play in Time, Place Shakespeare Intended." 2007. The Onion. 2 June. Available online at: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/unconventional_director_sets (http://www.theonion.com/content/news/unconventional_director_sets) [cited 4 December 2008].

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The Lionesses and Olive Trees of Meiji-Era

(/current) Japan: A Consideration of Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It (/previous) SCOTT HOLLIFIELD, UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, LAS VEGAS (/about)

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ABSTRACT

In his film of As You Like It, Kenneth Branagh sets the action in Meiji-era Japan, incongruously situating Shakespeare's representation of feudal power struggles in a time and place noted for its relegation of feudal power struggles to the past. In this way, Branagh reduces Shakespeare's meaningful anachronism to incoherence and in the process, empties his chosen setting of historical and cultural significance.

As You Like It (2006). Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Shakespeare Association of America Annual Convention, San Diego. April 7, 2007. Performed by Bryce Dallas Howard (Rosalind), Romola Garai (Celia), David Oyelowo (Orlando), Brian Blessed (Duke Senior/Duke Frederick), Adrian Lester (Oliver), Kevin Kline (Jaques), Alfred Molina (Touchstone), Janet McTeer (Audrey), Alex Wyndham (Silvius), Jade Jefferies (Phoebe), Richard Briers (Adam), and Jimmy Yuill (Corin).

Perhaps taking a cue from his visually "textual" take on Hamlet (1996), with its book-lined inner rooms, amalgam of cinematic genres, and performative self-reflexivity, Kenneth Branagh's extra-textual front matter to As You Like It is determined to justify the film's setting on multiple levels. Let it not be said that Branagh neglects to establish the rules of his adaptation up front. A text prologue — which also attempts to justify the film's setting on physical and thematic levels — explains the encroachment of would-be European economic imperialists on Meiji-era Japan. These opening cards dissolve gently into an unruffled curtain. Syllable by syllable, a haiku www.borrowers.uga.edu/781870/show 1/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation appears: "A dream of Japan / Love and nature in disguise / All the world's a stage" (As You Like It 2006, 1: "Banished").

The tenuous nature of the film's setting, the play's key themes of romance and self-awareness waiting to be plucked from the green world, and Shakespeare's text itself are all too neatly incorporated into a unique Japanese form. The film represents its European-ideas-inscribed-on- Eastern-paper strategy with Jaques' writing desk, Touchstone's origami, and Orlando's kanji-rendered love manuscripts, a concept that finds further reciprocity in the film's ubiquitous ukiyo-e paintings and shoji door panels tumbled down and tossed aside like so many pages of play-text in the wordless, action movie opening. Though it effectively suggests a pseudo- Japanese, all-the-world's-a-stage setting before filmic conventions necessarily intrude, Branagh's production demonstrates progressively less interest in showing us its "dream of Japan," even in presenting itself as particularly Japanese.

Regardless of one's feelings about Branagh's film of Hamlet, it is difficult to argue that his situating of medieval Elsinore in a Blenheim palace populated with Victorianisms is less than unified. The film provides no textual prologue beyond its title, engraved on the plinth of a dramatically significant monument, and need do nothing more than afford a consistent backdrop for its famously "uncut" text. The setting, incongruous as it may seem at the outset — abetted as it is by frequent intrusions by non-Shakespearean actors — is visually consistent and often enhances textual themes when not providing visual analogues for the text itself. With As You Like It, by contrast, Branagh sets the feudal power struggle of the source-text in a place and time noted for its relegation of feudal power struggles to the past.1

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From the outset, Branagh converts Shakespeare's penchant for meaningful anachronism into incongruity. Having opened Japan to Europe and the West with an eye toward modernizing his country, the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito was content to contain and regulate the Western presence and influence in Japan. There were certainly independent factions — the Shinsengumi are one example — who fought Western incursion by persecuting Japanese who did business with Europeans, though it is difficult to imagine in a realistic context such an outnumbered group of outsiders turning on their own countrymen.

Keen perhaps on staging a classic Shakespearean fraternal conflict once and for all, Branagh opens with an armed coup. Ostensibly following Shakespeare's lead, Duke Frederick sports an Eastern-assimilated attitude to match his samurai warlord's armor. Using Japanese soldiers to usurp the family's isolated Eastern enclave from Duke Senior, his unassimilated brother, Frederick violently reclaims East from West. From this point forward, the film not only reorders scenes to turn comedic elements somber and, later, somber elements comedic, but also creates disjunctions by situating lines from other scenes wherever they might fit, seemingly in an effort to hit all the notes without accounting for the play-text in full. Rather than creating a unified, consistent take on the source material, this editorial strategy reduces key romances, relationships, and class contrasts while emphasizing the virtual disappearance of characters such as Duke Frederick and Oliver from the narrative until they regain dramatic necessity. Shakespeare, too, considered them incidental to the development of Duke Senior and Orlando, but his text and characters remain aware of the threat these characters represent, even in their stage absence.

Irreconcilable ambiguities permeate As You Like It's "dream of Japan" and severely impede its frequent movements toward the promised intercultural verisimilitude. Those most threatened by As You Like It's antagonists forget their courtly fears or replace them with utter ignorance of the pseudo- Japanese world beyond the court. The travelers — Rosalind as Ganymede, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781870/show 3/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Celia as Aliena and Touchstone at his most maladroit — encounter a Buddhist ascetic in the forest. As if a family of imperialists sufficiently well- established in their chosen territory to suffer a bloody coup on its behalf might be unaware of native custom, the trio perform an awkward, fearful obeisance. Could the saffron-robed monk — the very same master to whom Frederick pledges himself and whom Jaques seeks out at play's end — be an agent of the usurper poised to do them harm? Do they fear they might subvert unwritten Buddhist protocols?

The faintest awareness of Buddhism renders the first option as unlikely as Rosalind's masculinity and the second of no concern to the European Christian or offense to the Buddhist. In this extra-textual moment of dumbshow, either eventuality upsets the cultural balance suggested in the film's prologue and contradicts the high degree of assimilation demonstrated by Duke Senior in his tribute at a Buddhist shrine at the edge of the forest. By his very inscrutability, the ascetic may well represent the core of Branagh's adaptive vision; like the forest of Arden, such a silent spiritual guide exists to be discovered, illuminate possible paths, and foster reflexive self-discovery. If Branagh's Eastern-tinged illumination of Shakespeare's text were able to reconcile its attempts at thematic symmetry with its heavily-cut script, its reductions and substitutions might coexist in a more organic, less disjunctive fashion.

Presuming that the details are deliberate, Branagh and his production team have conjured a number of successful visual analogues for Shakespearean comedy. From the opening haiku superimposed on a curtain, the curtain is drawn, equating the onnagata of kabuki with the boy actors of early modern theater as well as with the transvestitism inherent to As You Like It's central romantic plot. Perhaps more significantly, Branagh's choices reveal the vast differences of purpose and performative modes between the theatrical traditions he invokes. The drawn curtain manifests as a visual motif throughout the film, which is suggested by a camera that repeatedly tilts from the treetops of Arden to the scene in progress. Oddly opposing this preoccupation with cinematic staginess, the film handles monologues www.borrowers.uga.edu/781870/show 4/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation through long lenses drifting through the foliage from left to right, shots identically constructed whether Duke Senior, Jaques, or Rosalind is philosophizing. This has the intriguing effect of visually contextualizing speaker and the spoken text within the Ardenesque environment that makes such self-aware monologizing possible, but the similarity of each tracking movement to the next forces the eye to wander around the frame in search of meaningful detail or the mind to wander away from the film. These repetitions suggest a number of possible readings, ranging from the film's desire to present the play's ideas as a context-free continuity, to the less generous notion that Branagh and Director of Photography Roger Lanser found every path a dead end in the pseudo-Japanese Forest of Arden. Editor Neil Farrell achieves bridges between acts through brief montages of the natural world, seemingly inspired by a similar imagistic technique in the films of Yasujiro Ozu.2 While in essence these moments function as thematic recaps, prefiguring what is yet to come within the context of what has gone before, they lose coherence when the filmmakers deviate from their stated purpose: With no textual or cinematic foundation whatsoever, one transitional montage places a thoughtful Duke Senior in the foreground — back against a tree as his converted brother will appear in the closing sequence — while his entourage performs the decidedly un-Japanese tai chi chuan behind him.

Where Shakespeare's text differentiates Rosalind and Orlando from the other, comically stereotypical romantic pairings, Branagh's adaptation emphasizes a physical sameness arrived at through emotional and spiritual change. Ultimately, his reading suggests a Shakespearean text rooted in the notion that lovers, necessarily operating within the generic limits of lovers' continuity, are inherently the same or interchangeable. The film also, sometimes inadvertently, supports such a reading. Bryce Dallas Howard's Rosalind and Romola Garai's Celia effectively demonstrate complementary difference throughout their shared screen time, yet look as disconcertingly alike when attired for marriage as Brian Blessed's estranged brothers resemble each other. When Jaques brightens after his encounter with the fool Touchstone — who, curiously, also practices Chinese tai chi — Kevin Kline's hair stands erect upon his head in seeming imitation of Alfred Molina's.

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While David Oyelowo and Adrian Lester could not look less like brothers — which synchronizes with Oliver's assessment of the hatred he bears Orlando — the appearance of middle brother Jaques renders the de Boys trio somehow identical. Curiously in this final sequence, when the film's technical aspects should be entrenched enough for even the most passive viewer to sort out these multiple filial and romantic pairings, the editing seems rushed or simply out of sync with the film that preceded it. This final incongruity suggests that Branagh's As You Like It, in spite of its May Day resolution, would rather not sort everything out, preferring the general ambiguity of doubled characters over the specific natures of their new, improved romantic identities.

A staging or cinematic adaptation that refuses fully to embrace its source text, even when it must by necessity excise 50% or more of it, reduces the end-product to appropriation or homage. Akira Kurosawa, rather than translating the Shakespearean text that defines Macbeth and King Lear, imported the concepts of Macbeth (Kumonosujô) and Lear (Ran) into Japanese www.borrowers.uga.edu/781870/show 6/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation mytho-history. Taking this approach to adaptation, Kurosawa retained a greater degree of Shakespeare's essence than did Kenneth Branagh's transplantation of Shakespeare's As You Like It to late nineteenth-century Japan. This is not to say that Shakespearean text refuses successful adaptation into other periods, mindsets, or media; Branagh himself has, by this point, arguably made a more significant overall contribution to cinematic Shakespeare than Laurence Olivier. But the text of As You Like It, firmly rooted in late-medieval romance, Spenserian pastoral, and Shakespeare's well-worn-by-1598 conception of stage comedy, with its many inherent dislocations and anachronisms, repeatedly proves itself incongruous with the setting of his film.

NOTES 1. For further insight to Meiji-era views of the West and Western representations of Meiji Japan, please see "Suggestions for Further Reading," below. 2. Banshun (Late Spring 1949) and Ukigusa (Floating Weeds 1959) offer excellent examples of Ozu's concise, evocative montage style in their early frames. Incidentally, a key theme of Banshun is the struggle of a daughter's love for her father against her own desire for autonomy, while Ukigusa observes the misadventures of a traveling theatrical troupe.

REFERENCES Anderson, Joseph L., and Donald Richie. 1982. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. As You Like It. 2007. Adapted and directed by Kenneth Branagh. DVD. 2006; New York: HBO. Dawson, Carl. 1992. Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hamlet. 2007. Adapted and directed by Kenneth Branagh. DVD. 1996; Burbank, Calif.: Warner Home Video. Keene, Donald. 2002. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World. New York: Columbia University Press. McClain, James L. 2002. Japan: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton. Miller, J. Scott. 2001. Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji Japan. New York: Palgrave. Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. 1998. Edited by Stephen Vlastos. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shakespeare, William. 2006. As You Like It. Edited by Juliet Dusinberre. Third Arden series. London: Thomson Learning. www.borrowers.uga.edu/781870/show 7/8 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

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Lumping in Fargo, book/lyrics by Bryan Reynolds,

(/current) music by Michael Hooker

KENT R. LEHNHOF, CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | | ONLINE RESOURCES (/about)

ABSTRACT (/archive) Collaging King Lear, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and several other Shakespeare plays, Lumping in Fargo tells the story of a wealthy misanthrope who falls in love with a singing furniture mover. Just as romance is beginning to blossom, accusations of incest jeopardize the couple's happiness. Drawing upon Shakespearean dialogue (approximately 75% of the script is taken in patchwork form from Shakespeare) as well as Shakespearean devices (ghosts, handkerchiefs, ring plots, and ill-fated, interest-free bonds), Reynolds creates an intense and irreverent musical that is rewarding on a number of levels.

Studio Theater, University of California, Irvine. June 5-7, 2008. Book/lyrics, Bryan Reynolds. Music, Michael Hooker. Director, Christopher Marshall. Choreographer, Lisa Naugle. Musical director, Gary Busby. Stage manager, Kevin Kreczko. Lighting designer, Lonnie Alcaraz. Sound designer, Michael Hooker. Scenic designer, Josh Steadman. Costume designer, Christa Mathis. Preview at UCI as part of the Los Angeles Festival of New American Musicals prior to traveling to Gdansk, Poland for the 12th International Shakespeare Festival.

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Lumping in Fargo is the latest production of the Transversal Theater Company, a group that has performed several plays written by co-founder Bryan Reynolds. For Lumping in Fargo, Reynolds draws upon his expertise as a scholar of early modern drama to turn out what is being billed as "a Shakespearean rock opera about an unorthodox romance in the all-too-normal world of Fargo, North Dakota" (website of the Festival of New American Musicals). By borrowing lines and lyrics from no fewer than twelve different plays, Reynolds manhandles Shakespeare's texts, making them tell his own tale. The language, which is instantly recognizable, lays out a story that is not. Lumping in Fargo offers several surprises, reversals, and revelations as it follows two parallel plots. One focuses on the improbable love affair between Leopold Wallersheim, a cynical multi-millionaire (played by Martin Swoverland), and Cathy Lynn Bommerbasch, a quirky furniture mover, or "lumper" (played by Sarah Moreau). The other treats the angsty tragedy of Jerry Lee Heilman, a melancholy widower (played by Daryn Mack), and his two teenage daughters, Betty Sue and Linda Lue (played by Stephanie Philo and Jennifer Schoch).

The production starts off, in the manner of The Tempest, with a menacing storm. Thunderclaps cue the opening number, a duet sung by Leopold, the sober-suited misanthrope, and Elvira, a frisky young thing wearing a black negligee, fishnet stockings, and a dog collar. Warbling — to Michael Hooker's infectious music — Amiens's song from As You Like It, Elvira invites Leopold to turn away from the storm and join her "under the greenwood tree." Leopold, on the other hand, resists her blandishments by singing Lear's lines on the heath, angrily urging the winds to "rumble thy bellyful." Although the lines are familiar, little else is. The convergence of storms (Prospero's with Lear's), the conflation of comedy and tragedy (As You Like It interlaced with Lear), and the unorthodox delivery of canonical lines (a musical Lear?) produce a degree of dizziness. This dizziness becomes downright vertiginous as we realize that the lingerie-clad Elvira is actually Leopold's poodle, a seductive pet that not only speaks, sings, and dances, but also ends up urinating on a few expensive antiques.

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Elvira (Stephanie Philo), Leopold (Martin Swoverland), and Verna Mary (Jennifer Schoch)

The next scene introduces Jerry Lee Heilman (played by Daryn Mack), a widower who starts awake, crying "Who's there?" and calling after an elusive apparition that resembles his dead wife. After reenacting a hodge-podge of material from the opening scenes of Hamlet, Jerry Lee jumps into The Tempest, calling for his daughter, carefully laying aside his magic cap (in which resides the lumper's art of "fitting large things into small places"), and rehearsing for her the story of how they came to live in the close, little cell that is their current apartment. This narration, though, does not feature usurping brothers. Instead, it strings together lines belonging to Hamlet, Old www.borrowers.uga.edu/781862/show 3/9 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Hamlet, and Macbeth — as well as lines of original dialogue written in the style of Shakespeare — to tell a story of catastrophe, loss, and guilt.

Leopold and Elvira

And so it goes.

The ingenuity of it all is impressive. Reynolds clearly knows his Shakespeare inside and out — and he clearly likes turning the inside part out, mashing together disparate plays, plots, characters, and manners. A recurrent device is to have one character speak in Elizabethan English ("Wilt thou?"), only to have the other respond in exaggerated Fargo ("Oh, yah betcha!"). The drama exults in its irreverent appropriations. And it's an apt maneuver for Reynolds, who was identified by the University of Alabama's Hudson Strode Program in 2004 as "one of the six most brilliant Renaissance scholars in the world under 40." What else would one expect of an enfant terrible but an Oedipal struggle with Shakespeare, an aggressive rewriting of the Bard?

For the most part, there's fun to be had in watching Reynolds mess with Shakespeare. He presses a bit with some of his allusions, but it's enjoyable to identify them and assess the irony of their redeployment, if for no other reason than to congratulate one's self on one's literary sophistication. During the show's early scenes, it's delightful merely to catch the reference, get the joke, and be in on it all. This rather pretentious form of pleasure, however, ultimately gives way to something greater, for Fargo goes beyond its gimmick. Before all is over and done with, the musical pastiche generates light as well as heat.

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Leopold and Elvira

At times, Lumping in Fargo aims at the quick and easy pleasure of violation — the pleasure of wresting Shakespeare's words into something anachronistic or outrageous — but it is astonishing to see how seamlessly Reynolds and Hooker translocate so many of Shakespeare's speeches, not merely into a modern social context but into a completely different genre, state of mind, and emotional register. Romeo's sentiments upon first meeting Juliet would seem to depend upon youthful passion and breathless innocence, but they work remarkably well when sung by a jaded, middle-aged man — with a banjo accompaniment, no less! It sounds slightly absurd, but it succeeds, www.borrowers.uga.edu/781862/show 5/9 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation testifying to what would appear to be an essential, undying power in Shakespeare's language.

While Lumping in Fargo capitalizes on this power, its relationship to Shakespeare is not simply parasitic. The musical takes, but it also gives. When Jerry Lee, for instance, deliberates on whether "to be or not to be" following his conviction for child molestation, his soliloquy invests the famous lines from Hamlet with especial intensity, for the distressing consideration of what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil — a consideration that remains rather abstract in Hamlet — is quite concrete in Fargo. We have witnessed Jerry Lee's guilt-ridden nightmares and know precisely what he has to fear, should dreams attend the sleep of death. The cumulative effect of Fargo's endless sampling is to show — if anyone needed showing — that we have not tapped out Shakespeare's texts. Shakespeare's meaning (perhaps all meaning) is forever in excess of its interpretation or enactment. The play's more penetrating insights, however, have to do with questions of character and identity, for at the same time the lumpers in Fargo are relocating and rearranging property, Lumping in Fargo is relocating and rearranging personhood.

Fargo assails certain notions of identity by ostentatiously lumping together characters and roles that are supposed to be individual and discrete, even diametric. This lumping occurs at several levels. On one level, each actor in Fargo (with the exception of Daryn Mack) is cast in multiple roles. The actor who plays Jerry Lee's oldest daughter, Linda Lue, also plays the chirpy interior decorator, Verna Mary. The actor who plays Cathy Lynn, the lovely singing lumper, also plays Lehmann, the defense attorney. But it does not stop here, because all of the characters we encounter in Fargo are themselves composites of other characters: Shakespearean ones. Leopold Wallersheim is not only Lear and Romeo, but also Portia and the Gravedigger. Jerry Lee takes turns at being Hamlet and Old Hamlet, as well as Feste and Lear, as well as Macbeth and Prospero. The musical's staging of character is thus quite complex. Each actor in the production constantly switches back and forth between multiple Fargoan personae, who are themselves constantly switching back and forth between multiple Shakespearean personae.

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Verna Mary and Elvira

For all this fluidity, the musical still functions. Character still emerges. (Indeed, the most unsatisfying moment in the production takes place near the end, when Verna Mary performs an action that seems out of character.) In this manner, Fargo indicates that identity is less an origination (the founding of a unique, unshared essence) or a discovery (the paring away of the imposed to find the authentic) than it is an accretion (the continual layering of pre-existing and pre-determined roles). The observation that selfhood is not unique, the position that subjectivity is constrained within the system that precedes it and from which it can never be free, might appear to deny the possibility of novelty or change. But Lumping in Fargo offers evidence to www.borrowers.uga.edu/781862/show 7/9 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the contrary. The musical's recombinatorial virtuosity demonstrates that meanings and identities are not fixed in place by the social scripts that pre-exist them. We may not be able to escape the cultural codes that dictate our actions and compose our identities, but we can recombine them. Just as Reynolds reorders the Shakespearean script to bring into being an alternate reality, each of us can reorder the social script to do the same.

But lest we take all this too seriously, there's the epilogue. Stephanie Philo, playing the part of a poodlish Puck, steps forward and proposes, "If we shadows have offended . . ." After pausing with a wry smile for the audience to place the allusion and chuckle appreciatively, Elvira runs through the rest of the speech, concluding with one final, profane appropriation: Give us your applause, if we be friends, If not, fuck you!

Even without the obscene invitation, I was prepared to applaud. Lumping in Fargo is clever, sophisticated, and provocative. And the Transversal Theater Company, under the direction of Christopher Marshall, makes the most of the material.

ONLINE RESOURCES Website for the Los Angeles Festival of New American Musicals. http://www.lafestival.org (http://www.lafestival.org). Information about the International Shakespeare Festival in Gdansk, Poland.http://www.gdansk-life.com/poland/shakespeare-festival (http://www.gdansk- life.com/poland/shakespeare-festival). Website (in Polish) for the International Shakespeare Festival. http://www.teatr- szekspir.gda.pl/article/miedzynarodowy_festiwal_szekspirowski/ (http://www.teatr- szekspir.gda.pl/article/miedzynarodowy_festiwal_szekspirowski/). Website for Bryan Reynolds and The Transversal Theater Company. http://www.bryanreynolds.com/ (http://www.bryanreynolds.com/). Information about the plays of Bryan Reynolds on Dollee.com. http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsR/reynolds-bryan.html (http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsR/reynolds-bryan.html).

PERMISSIONS All images courtesy of The Transversal Theater Company.

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Contributors

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Jonathan Baldo, Associate Professor of English in the Department of (/previous)Humanities, Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester), holds a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His book The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespearean Tragedy (Wayne (/about) State University Press) was published in 1996. His articles and reviews have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Drama, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Modern Language Quarterly, (/archive) Theatre Journal, Criticism, Shakespeare Studies, Semiotica, and Journal of the Kafka Society of America. He is currently completing a book on nationhood and memory in Shakespeare. His other recent work links parliamentary and theatrical representation in Shakespeare's history plays and explores the play of contentment and satisfaction in relation to the rise of capitalism and changing ideas of the subject in The Merchant of Venice.

Jennifer Clement is a Lecturer in English at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, NZ. Her research interests include Shakespearean adaptations, the writings of Elizabeth I, Reformation literature, gender studies, and early modern how-to manuals, such as herbals.

Páraic Finnerty is a lecturer in English at the University of Portsmouth. He was the first recipient of the Emily Dickinson International Society's Scholar in Amherst Award in 2001 and was a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College in 2004. In 2006, his book entitled Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. He has also published articles on Shakespeare's cross-dressing plays, Othello, and Oscar Wilde. He is currently researching transatlantic literary relations and ideas of English masculinity.

Since 2003, Elizabeth Gruber has been an assistant professor in English at Lock Haven University in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. She has published articles on Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptation and is particularly interested in feminist appropriations of Shakespeare.

Scott Hollifield, a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, earned a B.A. in Film Studies and an M.A. in English Literature from Wayne State University. An intense interest in the process of adapting Shakespeare to film led by mysterious logic to his dissertation-in-progress: www.borrowers.uga.edu/781842/show 1/3 11/26/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "'Myn auctour shal I folwen, if I konne': Shakespeare Adapting Chaucer," under the supervision of Dr. Evelyn Gajowski. His critical review of Feng Xiaogang's Ye Yan ("The Banquet," 2006) is also scheduled to appear in Borrowers and Lenders.

Parmita Kapadia has done extensive work on postcolonial Shakespeare in India. Her book (with Craig Dionne), Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage, was published by Ashgate (2008), and she is currently working on a project about diaspora and transnationalism. She is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University, where she specializes in Shakespeare studies and postcolonial literatures.

Elizabeth Klett is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Houston - Clear Lake. She has published articles in Theatre Journal, Shakespeare Bulletin, and the recent collection Shakespeare Re-Dressed. Her book, Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.

Kent R. Lehnhof is Wang-Fradkin Associate Professor of English at Chapman University in southern California. He has published articles on Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton in such journals at ELH, ELR, SEL, Milton Quarterly, and Milton Studies. His current research explores the interrelation of antifeminism and antitheatricalism in early modern England.

Kirilka Stavreva is Associate Professor of English at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where she teaches and writes about early modern literature, drama, and its performances across historical and cultural divides. Her essays on the drama, popular culture, and gender politics of the Renaissance, as well as on critical pedagogy, have appeared in book collections and journals, such as The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Pedagogy, and The Journal of Popular Culture. She is completing a book on the violent speech acts of women in early modern England.

Charles Whitney is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Francis Bacon and Modernity (Yale 1986) and articles on Bacon and on Renaissance drama published in The Journal of the History of Ideas, Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Medieval and Renaissance Drama, and elsewhere. His book Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge 2006) is the winner of the 2008 Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Prize from SEL and Rice University for the year's best book in Early Modern Studies.

Rachel Wifall is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Peter's College, New Jersey, where she teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature. Her research interests include gender and performance studies. She has written book reviews for Shakespeare Quarterly and performance reviews for Shakespeare Bulletin.

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