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Elaborating on Shakespeare Elaborating on Shakespeare A Study of the Assimilation and Rejection of Shakespearean Character Elaborations Bjørn Silas Dvergastein A Thesis Presented to The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages University of Oslo In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the MA Degree Spring 2014 ii Elaborating on Shakespeare A Study of the Assimilation and Rejection of Shakespearean Character Elaborations Bjørn Silas Dvergastein iii © Bjørn Silas Dvergastein 2014 Elaborating on Shakespeare: A Study of the Assimilation and Rejection of Shakespearean Character Elaborations Bjørn Silas Dvergastein http://www.duo.uio.no/ Print: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo iv Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Juan Christian Pellicer, for his immense patience, insightful comments, ever inspiring enthusiasm, and for his brilliant, spontaneous course on Stoppard. I am also thankful to Professor Nils Axel Nissen for taking the time to respond to my emails when I needed a friendly pointer in the search for applicable theories. Likewise, I am very grateful to Kjetil E. Albertsen for casually suggesting that I ought to read more Iser. I would also like to give thanks to all my friends, both at home and at university, who patiently listened to all my rambling, even when it did not make much sense. A very special thanks is also owed to my brother-in-law, Sæbjørn Dvergastein Dahle, for his invaluable help with the formatting and layout of this paper. Without his input this thesis would be a near unreadable mess. Thanks are also owed to my teachers at the University of Oslo for their love and knowledge of literature, and their willingness to pass it on to new generations of readers. Finally, I would like to thank the rest of my family (mom, dad, sis and bro) for their continued encouragement during my academic pursuits. You guys are awesome. v vi Table of contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... v Table of contents ........................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 1 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ................................................................................................ 10 1.1 Chapter introduction .......................................................................................................... 10 1.1.1 The origins of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern .............................................................. 10 1.1.2 Defining the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet .......................... 12 1.1.3 Receivers' response to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet ................................ 18 1.2 W.S. Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ................................................................... 24 1.2.1 About the Play .............................................................................................................. 25 1.2.2 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ................. 27 1.3 Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ................................................ 35 1.3.1 About the Play .............................................................................................................. 36 1.3.2 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ............... 40 1.4 Chapter conclusion ............................................................................................................ 50 2 Falstaff .................................................................................................................................... 52 2.1 Chapter introduction .......................................................................................................... 52 2.1.1 The origins of Sir John Falstaff .................................................................................... 53 2.1.2 Falstaff in the history plays .......................................................................................... 55 2.1.3 Receivers' response to Falstaff in the Henriad ............................................................. 65 2.2 The Merry Wives of Windsor ............................................................................................. 74 2.2.1 The origins of The Merry Wives of Windsor ................................................................ 75 2.2.2 Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor ....................................................................... 77 2.3 Robert Nye's Falstaff ......................................................................................................... 89 2.3.1 About the novel ............................................................................................................ 89 2.3.2 Nye's strategy of elaboration ........................................................................................ 90 2.3.3 Closing remarks on Nye's Falstaff ............................................................................... 94 2.4 Chapter conclusion ............................................................................................................ 95 3 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 97 3.1 Chapter introduction .......................................................................................................... 97 3.1.1 Defining character ........................................................................................................ 97 vii 3.1.2 Assimilation and rejection ........................................................................................... 99 3.1.3 Character and plot ...................................................................................................... 101 3.2 Closing remarks ............................................................................................................... 102 Works cited .................................................................................................................................. 104 viii Introduction Umberto Eco begins one of the sections in his essay “On Some Functions of Literature” with the matter-of-fact statement: “Characters migrate” (8). Character migration is, in other words, not a new notion to the literary world at large, and yet there seems to be curiously little interest in either the process of migration itself, or the implications inherent in its realization. But anyone taking the time to examine these “migrations” at a closer level should immediately be struck by the many interesting questions and issues that arise in conjunction with the phenomenon. As Eco states, “certain characters have become somehow true for the collective imagination because over the course of centuries we have made emotional investments in them” (10). He goes on to describe how characters or “literary entities […] exist like a cultural habitus, a social disposition” (11). Eco, willing to take this premise to its logical conclusion, confronts the reader with the following intriguing proposition: Just imagine that you are avidly reading War and Peace, wondering whether Natasha will finally give in to Anatoly's blandishments, whether that wonderful Prince Andrej will really die, whether Pierre will have the courage to shoot Napoléon, and now at last you can re-create your own Tolstoy, conferring a long, happy life on Andrej and making Pierre the liberator of Europe. You could even reconcile Emma Bovary with poor Charles and make her a happy and fulfilled mother, or decide that Little Red Riding-Hood goes into the woods and meets Pinocchio, or rather, that she gets kidnapped by her stepmother, given the name Cinderella, and made to work for Scarlett O'Hara; or that she meets a magic helper named Vladimir J. Propp in the woods, who gives her a magic ring that allows her to discover, at the foot of the Thugs' sacred banyan tree, the Aleph, that point from which the whole universe can be seen. Anna Karenina doesn't die beneath the train because Russian narrow-gauge railways, under Putin's government, are less efficient than their submarines, while away in the distance, on the other side of Alice's looking-glass, is Jorge Luis Borges reminding Funes the Memorious not to forget to return War and Peace to the Library of Babel. (12) At first glance this seems excessive, and yet we need look no further than Alan Moore's critically acclaimed graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which the characters Mina Harker, Alan Quartermain, The Invisible Man, Captain Nemo and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde,1 all are brought together in a shared universe populated by a veritable who's who of Victorian literature from Dr. Moreau to John Carter. The phenomenon is perhaps best accounted for in the following excerpt by Alastair Fowler from his Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes, which I choose to reproduce in its full length on account of its thoroughness: Rather more like genre is the epicyclic or elaborative type: groups of works that exploit the fictive world of some great or popular predecessor (Orlando Innamorato; Orlando Furioso). It is an important type, for it includes such masterpieces as Paradise
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