Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

ISSN 1554-6985 VOLUME VI · NUMBER (/current) 1

SPRING/SUMMER 2011 (/previous)

EDITED BY (/about) Christy Desmet and Sujata (/archive) Iyengar

CONTENTS

"The Eye of Anguish": Images of Cordelia in the Long Susan Eighteenth Century (/782784/show) (pdf) (/782784/pdf) Allen Ford

Yorick's Afterlives: Skull Properties in Performance Elizabeth (/782717/show) (pdf) (/782717/pdf) Williamson

Filming The Taming of the Shrew in Franco's Dictatorship: Juan F. La fierecilla domada (/782772/show) (pdf) (/782772/pdf) Cerdá

N OTE

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Found: Five Seconds of Michael P. Laurence Olivier's Film of Hamlet (/782724/show) (pdf) Jensen (/782724/pdf)

B OOK REVIEWS

Shakespeare in Children's Literature: Gender and Cultural Katie L. N. Capital, by Erica Hateley (/782726/show) (pdf) Grubbs (/782726/pdf)

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Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals, by Kathryn Prince Robert (/782684/show) (pdf) (/782684/pdf) Sawyer

Shakespeare and Biography, by David Bevington M. G. (/782687/show) (pdf) (/782687/pdf) Aune

C ONTRIBUTORS

Contributors (/782697/show) (pdf) (/782697/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2020

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"The Eye of Anguish": Images of Cordelia in (/current) the Long Eighteenth Century

SUSAN ALLEN FORD, DELTA STATE UNIVERSITY (/previous)

ABSTRACT | FRAMING CORDELIA | BRITAIN'S DAUGHTER | TATE'S LEAR AND ITS (/about) REVISIONS ON STAGE | FROM STAGE TO PAGE AND CANVAS | "POOR PERDU" | "MORE PONDEROUS THAN MY TONGUE" | "A SOUL IN BLISS" | "AWAY TO PRISON" | "DEAD AS EARTH" | "THE PROMISED END" | NOTES | REFERENCES (/archive)

ABSTRACT Nahum Tate's version of King Lear, the version that defined stage productions during the long eighteenth century, transformed Shakespeare's Cordelia from a figure who could contain the definitions of both dutiful daughter and Christ militant into a romantic and sentimental heroine circumscribed by contemporary conventions of ladylike behavior and filial relation. More varied interpretation was provided by representations in other media: paintings as well as prints designed to illustrate editions of Shakespeare's plays. The variety of available artistic modes — conversation piece, portrait, history painting — provided a range of different ways, from the sentimental and domestic to the sublime, of comprehending Cordelia, juxtaposing a passive and grief-stricken feminine piety with an energized, though emotional, feminine agency. These competing versions of Shakespeare's heroine — interacting, influencing, commenting on each other — discover a complex fidelity that the stage version could not.

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FRAMING CORDELIA After 4.1, in which Edgar discovers his blinded father and begins the journey to Dover, and 4.2, in which Goneril pivots from her dalliance with Edmund to her disgust with her husband, 4.3 comes as a scene without plot function (although providing a politic excuse for what would be the impolitic presence of the King of France at the head of an invading army).1 Two speakers, each with part of a story, set before us pictures of Cordelia and then Lear that anticipate what we will be shown in the scenes immediately following: Cordelia's concern and love in 4.4, Lear's madness in 4.6, and their reunion in 4.7. Eighteenth- century productions, in opposition to the editorial judgments of Pope and Johnson, cut this apparently inessential scene, even as they added other "Restorations from Shakespeare." Perhaps the tendency of Garrick and other actor-managers to swell Lear's role by cutting the lines of the supporting players accounts for the excision.

But there may have been other reasons, having to do with the complexity of the Cordelia described here. In this scene, one of King Lear's anonymous "Gentlemen," his elevated language set off by Kent's spare questioning, describes a scene of reading: the private spectacle of Cordelia, now returned as Queen of France at the head of an avenging army, reading letters relating her father's condition and her sisters' crimes against him: Gent. . . . [S]he took them, read them in my presence; And now and then an ample tear trill'd down Her delicate cheek: it seem'd, she was a queen Over her passion; who, most rebel-like, Sought to be king o'er her. Kent. O, then it mov'd her. Gent. Not to a rage: patience and sorrow strove Who should express her goodliest. You have seen Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears Were like a better day. Those happy smiles That play'd on her ripe lip seem'd not to know What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence As pearls from diamonds dropt. (Johnson 1778, 4.3) This depiction of Cordelia's sensibility and filial piety, defined through the high emotion of the gentleman's Petrarchan, but de-eroticized imagery, was thus lost from the play. Indeed, valuing these elements and recognizing their loss, Francis Gentleman, the editor of Bell's 1773 text of Garrick's performance edition, adds a substantial part of the

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description of Cordelia's tears, with the justification that "Cordelia's concern for her father is so delightfully depicted, that we must present our readers with the striking part of it" (Garrick 1981, 365 n.78).

The complicating, and indeed, competing image of the good daughter Cordelia as a powerful queen subduing a male rebel, even merely the personified passion, was perhaps discomfiting to the eighteenth-century audience. In fact, that image of the queen subduing the rebel who would be king is not a part of the bonus passage Bell's editor provides. But removal of this scene also softened the outlines of what could have been construed as Cordelia's anger. Kent's statement, "O, then it mov'd her" (in some editions, including Bell's, punctuated with a question mark) is clearly answered in the negative. To be "mov'd" encroaches on forbidden territories of unfeminine emotion that the gentleman's subsequent representation of Cordelia's speech elides: Kent. Made she no verbal question? Gent. Yes; once, or twice, she heav'd the name of father Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart; Cry'd, Sisters! sisters! — Shame of ladies! sisters! Kent! father! sisters! What? i' the storm? i' the night? Let pity not be believed! — There she shook The holy water from her heavenly eyes, And clamour moisten'd her: then away she started To deal with grief alone. (4.3; emphasis in original) The "clamour" of Cordelia's words is muted and sanctified by the gentleman's depiction. She speaks, or more properly is ventriloquized, only to be interpreted.

It is interesting, then, that even a scene that keeps Cordelia off stage until she can be represented and construed presents dimensions of the character that complicate the vision of the pious and victimized daughter. In Shakespeare's subsequent scene, also eliminated by Tate, Cordelia issues commands for the pursuit of her mad father: "A century send forth; / Search every acre in the high-grown field, / And bring him to our eye." In response, the Doctor prescribes simples, "whose power / Will close the eye of anguish" (4.4). That eye of anguish, of course, belongs to the father, whose "ungovern'd rage" (4.4), suffering, and guilt prevent him from seeing his own faithful daughter. Excised from the play during the eighteenth century, that eye of anguish might serve as an apt image for the re-shapings — the revisions — of Cordelia throughout the period. Shakespeare's Cordelia, defined both as the dutiful daughter on whose "kind nursery" (1.1) Lear can depend and as http://borrowers.uga.edu/782784/show Page 3 of 50 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

a figure of Christ militant ("O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about" [Shakespeare 1997, 4.4.24-25, 27-30]), contains within herself more complexity than Tate, his dramatic heirs, and their audiences would comprehend. That eye of anguish might also stand as an image of Cordelia herself, encapsulating her double status as seeing subject and suffering object. The ghostly nature of these passages, specifically their simultaneous textual erasure and marginal re-inscription, captures the way in which Cordelia simultaneously is defined by and manages to evade the nationalist type of the dutiful daughter. Cordelia's stage presence throughout the long eighteenth century was apparently circumscribed by contemporary conventions of ladylike behavior and filial relation. At the same time, however, more varied interpretation was provided by representations in other media: paintings as well as prints designed to illustrate editions of Shakespeare's plays. In these visual images, a passive and grief-stricken feminine piety and an energized, though emotional, feminine agency are juxtaposed. These competing versions of Shakespeare's heroine — interacting, influencing, commenting on each other — discovered a complex fidelity that the stage version could not.

BRITAIN'S DAUGHTER With the anointing of Shakespeare as national poet in eighteenth- century England, his plays took on a significance modified by the nation's changing political needs. In the eighteenth century, the family served as an icon of the state, representations of its relationships and changing definitions reflecting political and cultural tensions. In the 1770s and 1780s, as Harriet Guest puts it, there was "a new emphasis on the values of the private, domestic, and familial" with, for example, George III's "representation of himself as a paternal authority, governing the nation through bonds of affection that extend[ed] his private and familial role into his relation to his subjects and his colonies" (Guest 2000, 159). In the 1790s, of course, the family became a particularly contested image of the nation through which political relationships, indeed the national identity, were worked out in novels and on stage. Within the family, the daughter occupied a highly charged position at a time during which, in Linda Colley's words, "women first had to come to terms with the demands and meaning of Britishness" (Colley 1992, 281). The daughter's plot, revolving around her relationship to parental and especially paternal authority, defined a larger relationship to God and king. Her obedience to the father's law suggested either dreadful conformity or sacred duty; her rebellion enacted either individual courage and social renovation or moral and

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social chaos. And as Jean I. Marsden has argued, shifts in political mythology can be clearly seen in the re-definition of Shakespeare's daughter figures: "the dutiful daughter [became] the pattern of national honour . . . responsible for the honour and peace of the nation" (Marsden 1998, 20).

The increasing cultural significance of Cordelia can be discerned in the multiplication of her image. While Lear's mad scene in the storm was a favorite subject for illustration throughout the century, images increasingly depicted the Lear/Cordelia plot: Cordelia's expulsion from the court, Lear's awakening to find her restored to him, Lear and Cordelia in prison, and Lear carrying the body of the dead Cordelia. The awakening and the final scene were, of course, never played on stage during the century. Janet Bottoms has pointed out that elocution texts for boys and girls exemplified this shift in interest: while William Enfield's The Speaker (1774) included Lear's "Blow, winds" speech, The Female Reader (1789) "included three 'pathetic pieces' from the play, two of them focusing on Cordelia" (Bottoms 2002, 108). As Richard Altick suggests, "Popular taste . . . had decisively shifted away from the sublimity of storms . . . to the pathos of the heroine who is at once victimized by, and unshakably devoted to, an ungrateful father. . . . As far as most artists were concerned, this was her play" (Altick 1985, 310-11).

Perhaps as a consequence of the political and social turbulence exacerbated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars that followed, and the recurrent incapacity of King George, fictional and stage adaptations of King Lear proliferated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even in that context, the definition of Cordelia was a contested one. Charles and Mary Lamb's 1807 Tales from Shakespeare describes Goneril and Regan as "monsters of ingratitude," against whom Cordelia's "innocence and piety" shine as "an illustrious example of female duty" (Lamb and Lamb 1979, 161-62). The Lambs' version acknowledges that Cordelia's refusal to speak "did sound a little ungracious," but any hint of rebelliousness is erased from their prose narrative through the claim of how "extravagantly" she loved and her desire to "put her affection out of suspicion of mercenary ends" (146). But other adaptations acknowledged the narrative of the daughter's rebellion. As Diane Long Hoeveler has noted, Amelia Opie's 1801 novella, The Father and Daughter, A Tale in Prose presented a fallen Cordelia and itself sparked further adaptations: Agnese di Fitz-Henry, an opera by Ferdinando Paër, and two stage versions, Marie Thérèse Kemble's Tears and Smiles (1815) and Thomas Moncrieff's The Lear of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782784/show Page 5 of 50 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

Private Life (1820). These domesticated versions of Lear, Hoeveler argues, provided a stylized display of suffering that defined a "universalized humanity": "Citizens of Britain were able to recognize their shared humanity — their shared 'Britishness' — only when they could see demonstrated intense guilt about failed filial duty, extreme shame about sexual licence, and hyperbolic grief about causing madness in one's family members" (Hoeveler 2009, 172). Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) stands as yet another adaptation, an exploration of the daughter's resistance to paternal tyranny (Ford 2002) or a condition-of-England novel "that foregrounds the threats the new generation poses to the estate and the state" (Calvo 2005, 91).

TATE'S LEAR AND ITS REVISIONS ON STAGE Long before the flurry of adaptations at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, another adaptation had defined Cordelia for the eighteenth-century stage. Nahum Tate's 1681 revision of Shakespeare's play had attempted to align "a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht" into a production of more "Regularity and Probability" (Tate 1997, 295). To do so, Tate "improved" Shakespeare's verse, eliminated the Fool, and restored the happy ending of Shakespeare's source, Leir and His Three Daughters. On the way to that comic conclusion of Lear's reinstatement and reunion with the triumphant Cordelia, and in order to provide a "Probable" (295) motive for her refusal to speak her love for her father, who, in Tate's revision, would compel her to marry Burgundy, Tate added a love interest for Cordelia in the form of Edgar, Gloucester's "Rebel Son" (1.1.120).

Tate's alteration, intriguingly, offered more Cordelia than did Shakespeare's text, but in a conventionally feminine mode. As Frances Gentleman pointed out, "The great defect of Shakespeare's Cordelia is that she makes too inconsiderable a figure; is too seldom in view, and has not matter for a capital actress to display extensive talents in" (Gentleman 1770, 360). The Folio gives her only 115 lines, the Quarto 89 — fewer lines than Edgar, Kent, Gloucester, Edmund, the Fool, Goneril, Regan, or Albany (King 1992, 223-26). By eliminating Cordelia's exile and marriage to France, Tate not only kept Cordelia in England, where she could roam around the heath subject to the attack of ruffians, but also followed father and daughter into the prison. Tate's version increased Cordelia's part to 210 lines (plus 26 lines in the Epilogue), making her role more equal to those of the other characters. After this expansion, later versions such as Garrick's and Colman's, in the general push to magnify the role of Lear, did curtail some of

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Cordelia's lines.

Unsurprisingly, the Cordelia depicted most often engendered pathos through her submissiveness and passive goodness. According to Francis Gentleman, "Cordelia is most amiable in principles and should be so in features and figure. There is no great occasion for strength of countenance nor brilliancy of eyes; she appears designed rather for a soft, than sprightly beauty; yet considerable sensibility, both of look and expression, is essential" (Garrick 1981, 307 n. 41). Gentleman's judgment indicates a shift from the heroine as Shakespeare defines her to the sentimental heroine made over at the hands of eighteenth-century stylists. In Shakespeare's play, Cordelia leads armies, an active, salvific role: "O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about; / . . . / No blown ambition doth our arms incite, / But love, dear love, and our ag'd father's right" (Shakespeare 1997, 4.4.24-25, 27-30). In the Tate, Garrick, and Kemble versions, however, Cordelia's feminine powerlessness is valorized: "[A]s I may / With women's weapons, piety and prayers, / I'll aid his cause" (Garrick 5.1.73-75). Kemble's promptbooks define a Cordelia who "throws herself at King Lear's feet" in 1.2, kneels to Gloucester to entreat his care for her father in 3.2, and in the play's final scene successively "faints in [Edgar's] arms," "meets [the King] . . . , & throws herself at his feet," and finally is led by the King "into the centre of the stage — Edgar flies to meet her — they both kneel at the king's feet" (Kemble 1974; emphasis in original). This repository of the national honor is defined in terms of passive and feminine piety and prayers. In Thomas Davies's eyes, "[S]uch an example as Cordelia, of filial piety, except perhaps in the Grecian stage [in the role of Antigone], is not to be found in dramatic poetry" (Davies 1784, 2:329).

Tate's pleasingly feminine and submissive heroine solved one of the main problems of Shakespeare's play for some of the eighteenth- century audience. When Colman's production, restoring some of Shakespeare's play, eliminated the Cordelia/Edgar love plot, it deprived Cordelia, for viewers like Gentleman, of her only virtuous motive in refusing her father, thus "preserv[ing] that unjustifiable, cynical roughness, which Shakespeare has stamped upon Cordelia, in the barren, churlish answer she gives her father" (Gentleman 1770, 353). Tate's version of act 3, in which Cordelia kneels to Gloster to "intreat / Thy succour for a Father and a King / An injur'd Father and an injur'd King" (3.2.66-68), was for Gentleman particularly effective: "Cordelia is prettily introduced, and the sentiments she utters render her extremely amiable . . . her filial duty is pleasingly displayed" (359). As http://borrowers.uga.edu/782784/show Page 7 of 50 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

Peter Womack argues, the eighteenth-century felt uncomfortable with the "silence, opacity, disjunction" — the "transcendence" — of a play based on a sacred rather than secular worldview, and that discomfort was particularly located in the character of Cordelia: "the conventions by which [Cordelia's] role works are partly medieval: Shakespeare's complicated dramatic texture includes the stage image of a saint" (Womack 2002, 101, 104).

The transformation of Cordelia to romantic and sentimental heroine, the dutiful daughter caught in the marriage plot of romantic comedy, seems, for many eighteenth-century readers and viewers, to have been a welcome one. Johnson, of course, famously cast his vote with "the publick" for Cordelia's "victory and felicity," writing that "I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor" (Johnson 1968, 704). Although in his Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons James Boaden objected to the "inconsistency and absurdity" of Tate's version, he admitted to the effectiveness of the marriage plot, hinting at the cultural politics of the daughter's redefinition: "though it breaks upon the filial singleness of Cordelia's mind, and the lover takes his turn to reign with the father there, yet female interest should be had for our audiences if it can be admitted without serious injury to the work" (Boaden 1831, 235-36). Henry Fuseli, however, treated such perspectives on Shakespeare's play with scorn: When Shakespear, to lesson mankind, afflicts innocence and virtue, nor in the latitude of the ravings, crimes, follies, he exposes, can find any reward on this side the grave for them; when to warn fathers against the dotage of predilection, the fury of prejudice, and the destructive consequences of flattery, he destroys the family of Lear and wraps Cordelia in the storm; one gentle feeler changes her dagger to a husband, and adulterates the simplicity of filial piety with love, and another could not for all the world read the play a second time, till he turned commentator. . . . But could you expect worse from those, who, with the gravity of a Welsh goat, discuss, whether Lear's madness was owing to his abdication of power, or the ingratitude of his daughters? (Fuseli 1767, 67-69, note). Cordelia's plot, her very meaning, is at the center of interpretation of this play.

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The substitution on the stage of Tate's Lear for Shakespeare's was symptomatic of a larger trend. Gary Taylor has argued that, beginning with the Restoration and continuing through the eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays were mediated and reinvented both through theatrical adaptation and editorial intervention (Taylor 1989, 71). In particular, eighteenth-century publication of Shakespeare enacted the contest between the powerful physicality and temporality of theatrical representation, on the one hand, and the almost Platonic constructions of the individual imagination, freed from the particularities of actors' voices and bodies, on the other. Alexander Pope, the editor of the 1723- 1725 Tonson edition, for example, "set out to rescue Shakespeare from the theatre" (84). As a later eighteenth-century editor, William Warburton, put it, Shakespeare's "Works, left to the Care of Door- keepers and Prompters . . . struggled into Light . . . maimed and mangled" (1747, 1:vii).

This tension between the theatrical and the idealized notion of the play was grounded in a material difference. As Taylor suggests, Shakespeare's plays had been, throughout the seventeenth century, actions. They happened; they enacted a story temporally; they were acted out by particular persons from beginning to end; they acted upon an audience assembled in a certain place at a certain time. In the eighteenth century they became things; they became, primarily, books. Books are spatial, not temporal; any reader can skip backward or forward, dip in, pull out, pause, repeat. Books can be cut up and rearranged, as time cannot. (108) However qualified by Lukas Erne's argument that Shakespeare's plays "had a double existence, one on stage and one on the printed page" (Erne 2003, 23), Taylor's narrative expands Erne's contention that "performance tends to speak to the senses, while a printed text activates the intellect" (Taylor 1989, 23).

The urge toward illustration and painting of scenes and characters from Shakespeare's plays was essentially an invention of the eighteenth century and reflected this material shift from the theatrical to the ideal. Although the 1623 folio version of Shakespeare's plays included Martin Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare as a frontispiece, not until 1709 was an edition of Shakespeare with illustrations of scenes from the plays — Nicholas Rowe's Tonson edition — published. The 100 years following Rowe saw at least twenty illustrated editions of Shakespeare, some including only a selection of the plays or scenes from the plays. Book illustrations of Shakespeare began as depictions of stage http://borrowers.uga.edu/782784/show Page 9 of 50 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

performances or, as Don-John Dugas points out, as "what the engraver imagined the plays not in the repertory would have looked like in performance" (Dugas 2006, 145). As the century progressed and as stage productions of Shakespeare multiplied, those illustrations were less tied to representations of the stage. Gravelot's illustrations for Theobald in 1740 exemplified this change: "The works he illustrated he illustrated as literature to be read and not as plays to be visualized on stage" (Ashton 1991, 37). In Colin Franklin's formulation, this is "Shakespeare Domesticated" (Franklin 1991).

Figure 1. Hubert Francis Gravelot, King Lear (1740)

Paintings of scenes from Shakespeare seem to undergo a similar transformation. Mid-eighteenth-century paintings by William Hogarth, Francis Hayman, Benjamin Wilson, and Johann Zoffany, disseminated also as prints, were records of specific stage performances — even http://borrowers.uga.edu/782784/show Page 10 of 50 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

promotions of those performances. According to Geoffrey Ashton, " [t]he theatrical conversation piece was very largely the creation of David Garrick's insatiable appetite for publicity" (38). Benjamin Wilson's Mr. Garrick in the Character of King Lear (1762) is a conversation piece derived from the stage performance, if not from the actual set. Garrick's Lear manages to look simultaneously frail and powerful in his passion or, as Gentleman's note to the play describes him, of "enfeebled dignity" (Garrick 1981, 310, n. 80).

Figure 2. Engraving of Benjamin Wilson's Mr. Garrick in the Character of King Lear (1761) According to W. Moelwyn Merchant, "Garrick here is the King enraged and verging upon madness, with a rhetorical gesture, a stance and expression wholly of the theatre" (Merchant 1959, 195). There is no Fool in the scene (as there would not be on stage until 1834), and the figures are arranged at the front with the scenic drop behind them. The felled tree in the foreground, broken by the storm but already hollow, serves as a picturesque correlative for Lear. Storm clouds, lightning above the distant mountain, and winds lifting Lear's regal clothes and hair are elements repeated in later renderings. Stuart Sillars argues, however, that even within this painting, Wilson "mov[es] from the theatre into a fully-realised setting within the convention of Gothic landscape" (2006, 84).

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Two later portraits, John Mortimer's head of Lear (1776) and William Blake's watercolor Lear Grasping a Sword (ca. 1780), move away from stage production. Both present the king as storm-tossed. In Mortimer's portrait, Lear's hair and clothes are in motion, eyes and hand raised into the storm as his words engraved beneath challenge the elements: "Here I stand your Slave! / a poor infirm, weak and despised old man / but yet I call you servile ministers. . . ."

Figure 3. John Mortimer, Lear (1776) Blake's Lear, by contrast, embodies Lear's frailty: the king leans on his sword for support, bending his eyes on vacancy.

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Figure 4. Blake, Lear Grasping a Sword (ca. 1780) © 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Later painters moved even further away from recording stage performance. Commissioned for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, Benjamin West's history painting King Lear (1788-1806) like Benjamin Wilson's painting, focuses on the storm scene. But there's no suggestion of the stage here. The swirl of bodies and fabric as Lear tears off his "lendings" in the tumult of the storm evokes the sublime power and terror both within Lear and without.

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Figure 5. Benjamin West, King Lear (1788) © 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Artists such as James Barry and Henry Fuseli, influenced by Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists as well as by the valorization of the individual's experience of reading the play, adopted a kind of painting that attempted to capture a sublime or visionary moment in Shakespeare's poetic text. As Fuseli's Aphorism 96 asserted, "The middle moment, the moment of suspense, the crisis, is the moment of importance, big with the past and pregnant with the future" (quoted in Maisak 1996, 62).

In these paintings and illustrations, dramatic language (both Shakespeare's and Tate's), traditions of stage business, and the conventions of painting come together to inform the representation of Shakespeare's characters and scenes. Shakespeare's language, of course, not only gives cues to staging, but also describes landscape in the absence of scenery. Tate's language is particularly appealing to the eighteenth-century theatrical aesthetic. Barbara Murray notices that one of the features of Tate's "overblown" language is his creation of stage pictures or "emotional tableaux . . . in which emotional relationships are made visually clear" (Murray 2001, 163). Murray's example is Tate's act 3, in which Cordelia asks that Gloster . . . Convey me to his breathless Trunk, With my torn Robes to wrap his hoary Head,

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With my torn Hair to bind his Hands and Feet, Then with a show'r of Tears To wash his Clay-smear'd Cheeks, and Die beside him. (Tate 1997, 3.2.85-89) As Murray writes, "Cordelia despairingly creates a Pietà in the mind, a tableau in which special disposition, drapery and distinctive details are to be depicted, and that will be called for in the final act" (2001, 161- 62). Indeed, this invocation of and reliance on tableaux as a repetitive structuring device is one of the features of the sentimental drama of the eighteenth century.

Just as such language creates and highlights visual relationships repeated throughout the play, gesture and "points" had a similar pictorial and structuring effect. In the eighteenth century, the practice of pointing defined a speech or scene through certain expected gestures and business. Mrs. Siddons, for example, was urged by Sheridan not to put down her candle in Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking scene: "it would be thought a presumptuous innovation, as Mrs. Pritchard had always retained it in hers" (Campbell 1834, 135). Points could be repeated from one production to another as well as within a performance. According to William B. Worthen, "[t]he formal point voiced and structured a moment of intense emotion, coordinating the passions of actor, character, and spectator" (Worthen 1984, 72). That emphasis on the moment seems to be another version of "freeing" the play from its linear definition. Indeed, Christopher Baugh argues for a connection between such stage protocols and the illustration and painting of Shakespeare's plays: "audiences would eagerly await such crucial stage business . . . as they might the well-known speeches. Actors' 'points' began to provide the easel painter with an iconography of Shakespeare that was more potent than the poetry itself" (Baugh 2003, 30).

While one dramatic performance might imitate another, painting too drew on the practice of imitation. Paintings such as Wilson's Mr. Garrick in the Character of King Lear or Van Bleeck's Mrs. Cibber as Cordelia clearly owe their genesis to stage production; other artists relied more on the traditions of their own medium. As William L. Pressly suggests, even in painting Shakespeare, "the theory of imitation taught by the art academies encouraged artists to build on the works of past masters" (Pressly 1993, 10). Winifred Friedman has observed that in the paintings of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery painting, rather than theater, was the model: "there was only the slightest and most occasional reflection of actual stage production. . . . For the most part, it

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was history painting as produced by the Old Masters which obsessed or oppressed the Boydell artists" (Friedman 1976, 20). A reviewer from The Public Advertiser (6 May 1789) even congratulated the enterprise for avoiding the representation of stage pictures: "There was some reason to fear that our painters would have sought for and gathered their ideas from the theatre, and given us portraits of the well-dressed Ladies and Gentlemen. . . . But this has been avoided; the pictures in general give a mirror of the poet" (quoted in Friedman 1976, 75). Book illustration, too, was often — and curiously, in the case of Bell's performance editions — divorced from theater. As Ashton points out, Gravelot's images for Theobald's 1740 edition "are by an artist who might never have been to the theatre, and are in the full-flush tradition of early eighteenth century French book illustrations" (Ashton 1991, 37). And just as stage practice defined "points" for an actor that might become part of a tradition passed from one production to another, so many of the depictions of Lear and Cordelia reflect the history not only of stage production, but also of previous painted or engraved images.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, painting Shakespeare became a publicly defined project of nationalistic, artistic, and commercial import. In 1786, Alderman Joseph Boydell proposed and within three years opened his Shakspeare Gallery in Pall-Mall, an undertaking which aimed to create a new school of English history painting inspired by Shakespeare, England's national poet. The high-relief sculpture in front of Boydell's gallery (now in the Great Garden behind New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon) places Shakespeare on a rock that, at least in the engraving, mimics the shape of England, between the figures of Poetry, wearing the masks of both comedy and tragedy, and Painting.

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Figure 6. Shakespeare between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting Shakespeare listens to Poetry "with Pleasure and Attention" as she "celebrates his Praise on her Lyre," but his left hand rests on Painting. As the "List of the Large Plates" explains, "Painting . . . is addressing the Spectator, with one Hand extended towards SHAKSPEARE's Breast, pointing him out as the proper Object of her Pencil, while he places his Left-hand on her Shoulder, as if accepting her Assistance" (Santaniello 1968).

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Figure 7. The Alto Relievo in Front of the Shakespeare Gallery, Pall- Mall Until Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery folded in 1805, paintings were commissioned and displayed, and engraved prints were sold in a variety of forms: individually, in folio collections, or bound with the texts of the plays. A number of similar ventures followed: Thomas Macklin's Poet's Gallery (1787), Henry Fuseli's Milton Gallery (1799), and James Woodmason's Irish Shakespeare Gallery (1793), which transferred to London in 1794 as the New Shakespeare Gallery (Pressly 1993; Ashton 1991, 39). Eighteenth-century painting of Shakespeare was a lively endeavor.

Not everyone, of course, was enthusiastic about the proliferation of visual representation. Just as he was resistant to the power of theater to fetter one's imaginative figurings of Shakespeare's characters, Charles Lamb also objected to the confining power of painting as well as to the way that painting, quite explicitly in the Boydell project, appropriated

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Shakespeare to its own designs: What injury (short of the theatres) did not Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery do me with Shakspeare? To have Opie's Shakspeare, Northcote's Shakspeare, light-headed Fuseli's Shakspeare, heavy- handed Romney's Shakspeare, wooden-headed West's Shakspeare (tho' he did the best in Lear), deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakspeare, instead of my, and every body's Shakspeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! To confine the illimitable! (quoted in Shawe-Taylor 2003, 115) But in fact, the variety of artistic modes — conversation piece, portrait, history painting, book illustration — provided a range of ways, from the sentimental and domestic to the sublime, of comprehending Shakespeare's characters, including Cordelia.

Given this national, theatrical, and artistic context, the definition of Cordelia, the heroine of Shakespeare's bleakest national tragedy, is particularly vexed, burdened with often conflicting meanings. As Tate's revision transformed her on the stage from a tragic to a sentimental heroine, paintings and illustrations partook of both of those identities. But the power of that tradition was by no means unitary — though someone like Charles Lamb, for instance, might fear its force. Although certainly many images depicted the Cordelia defined on the eighteenth- century stage, what also emerges is a Cordelia whose visual presence is often more complex than that stage presence. While portraits (most often with some relation to the theater) tend to define Cordelia as a patient and pathetic suppliant, other images capture more of her energy and agency. The expulsion scene can present an active and resistant, though arguably fallen, Cordelia. While in the awakening and prison scenes, some artists emphasize the sweetly dutiful daughter, others depict a more powerful figure in contrast to a frail and diminished father. Even in scenes of her death, Cordelia's symbolic power can suggest her heroic stature.

"POOR PERDU" Many of the images of Cordelia, especially those derived from stage production, depicted a figure whose power was in her pathos, the soft heroine of sensibility that Gentleman described. Pieter van Bleeck's Mrs. Cibber as Cordelia (1755), like Wilson's painting of Garrick's Lear, envisions a moment from a stage performance in which Cordelia, out in the storm in search of her father, is attacked by Edmund's ruffians and rescued by the disguised Edgar, a scene, of course, from Tate.

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Although the lightning, clouds, and uneven ground suggest an imagined terrain, the arrangement and gestures of the figures are derived from the stage.

Figure 8. Pieter Van Bleeck, Mrs. Cibber as Cordelia (1755) Cordelia, dressed in blue and white, a depiction which becomes conventional, is here the sentimental and threatened heroine, holding onto her maid Arante for support. Mary Nash suggests that this posture is characteristic of the actress: "the figure of Susanna Cibber suggests her melting style. She is always touching, or reaching out for, or being supported by some other player" (Nash 1977, 246).

This definition of Cordelia as a powerless or supplicating heroine of sensibility is emphasized in two portraits, one by Angelica Kauffman and the other by Thomas Wageman. In Kauffman's image, Cordelia kneels alone in a picturesque landscape, hair unbound and waving, arms beseeching. Her storm-tossed hair is a more restrained version of her father's; this Cordelia is not permitted the liberty of madness, or even passion. She can only wait and pray.

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Figure 9. Angelica Kauffman, Cordellia (n.d.) Wageman's portrait of Mrs. W. West as Cordelia (1820) depicts an even softer, more powerless version. Lightly veiled, also with unbound hair, her hands and eyes raised in prayer, this Cordelia too is defined in terms of pious simplicity. Wageman's heroine simultaneously projects out of and is contained by the border, the portrait's three-quarter length and the tight framing preventing any hint of mobility.

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Such a passive definition seems to have been difficult to overcome, especially in portraits. Edward Francis Burney's apparent attempt at a more martial heroine, Miss Brunton in Cordelia, is unsuccessful: Cordelia, though wearing military plumes, standing before tents and over text signifying her military role, looks less like a warrior than a fashionable lady wondering which way to turn. Perhaps the title of this engraving suggests its real interest — more in Miss Brunton (who had not yet played the role) than in Lear's tender or untender daughter.

"MORE PONDEROUS THAN MY TONGUE" But despite the definition of Cordelia as passive and sentimental heroine, paintings and illustrations suggest not only the pious daughter, but also the strength and even the active energy of that piety. The expulsion scene is largely defined by Lear's power and Cordelia's resisting silence, perhaps a condition most easily interpreted as passivity. Two paintings, and I would argue two related paintings, of this scene vividly suggest a part of the range of possibilities. The unattributed Cordelia Championed by the Earl of Kent (1770-1780), which Richard Altick suggests "seems to have originated in a theatrical performance" (Altick 1985, 311 n.), depicts the pious and passive daughter, kin to the Cordelia of the portraits. Cordelia's body, clothed in white and blue, is oriented toward the front of the painting, but she turns at the waist back toward her father, head bent, eyes lowered, http://borrowers.uga.edu/782784/show Page 22 of 50 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

hands clasped at her heart.

Figure 12. Anonymous, Cordelia Championed by the Earl of Kent (1770-1778) The narrative dynamics swirl apart from her. Slightly right of center, in a region defined by its red tones, are Lear (reaching for his sword), two male courtiers (possibly Albany and Cornwall), and Lear's other daughters. The figures of Cordelia and Kent are balanced against them, with two dogs, quietly attentive symbols of fidelity, watching the dramatic scene. As the visual energy moves between Lear and Kent, whose upraised hand intercepts the king's glare, Cordelia is almost edged out of the painting. Despite her marginal position, however, the bright purity of her coloring, in contrast to the reds of the rest of the painting, draws the eye. Her piety and submission become an alternate focal point, set against the male passions of the rest of the painting.

Fuseli's King Lear Casting Out His Daughter Cordelia (1785-1790), commissioned for Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery and at 8.5 x 12 feet its largest canvas (Maisak 1996, 66), transforms this scene into an image of the sublime power of Lear's repudiation of his daughter.

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Figure 13. Henry Fuseli, King Lear Casting Out His Daughter Cordelia (1803) Fuseli's Cordelia is likewise a more substantial and more active emotional presence. As if underscoring the difference in his vision, Fuseli retains from the earlier painting the throne and curtains, the outlines of Lear's face, and the position of Cordelia's body. He moves his energetic and tyrannical Lear to the exact center of the painting. Kent's role in restraining Lear, as opposed to the histrionic gesture of the previous painting, is physical and emotional, his redemptive and heroic function, Sillars suggests, indicated by the folds of his cloak (Sillars 2006, 126). The force of Lear's curse, as expressed in the energy of his pointing finger, seems almost to push Cordelia back into the arms of an attendant while an adjacent dog, another visual echo of the previous painting, seeks comfort. But rather than bowing in the face of injustice, Fuseli's Cordelia turns away from conventional solace and back toward Lear with eyes of gentleness, love, and perhaps, as Petra Maisak suggests, pride (Maisak 1996, 67). Although the emotional content of this scene is highlighted, Fuseli also implies its political significance: the train of Cordelia's robe flows into the map of the kingdom, on which Lear tramples. This resistant and dutiful daughter signifies Britain.

The power and monumentality of Fuseli's vision, however, were not universally admired. Humphry Repton, in his catalogue to the

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Shakespeare Gallery, termed Fuseli's painting "one of the boldest effusions of a daring pencil," but also expressed reservations: "Shakespeare makes [Cordelia] bear her fate in silence; therefore the violence here is not warranted by the text. But there is an enthusiastic ardour in this astonishing Artist, which, while it delights, will sometimes 'o'erstep the modest bounds of nature'" (Repton 1789, 48). Ludwig Tieck saw an "affected and mannered" demonstration of "academic mastery" rather than poetic or psychological truth, objecting not only to Fuseli's depiction of Lear as an enraged giant "with no trace of the weak and childish old man as described by the poet," but also to his Cordelia: "Cordelia, whom the poet describes as meek and loving, is the basest creature in this assembly" (quoted in Maisak 1996, 68). Perhaps the very substance of Cordelia's body, as well as the directness of her gaze back at her father, troubled Tieck. An article in the Analytical Review, which Sillars attributes to Fuseli, seems to anticipate the discomfort of his viewers at this conception of the pious daughter: Goneril and Regan, with unblushing fronts, stand erect; but we own we expected to see the gentle Cordelia with down cast eyes, shrinking from the anger which terrified, even while it wounded, her ingenuous mind. The contempt which the hypocrisy of her sisters inspired, might naturally dictate her answer; but, at the moment the painter has chosen, she may be supposed to be overwhelmed with fear and tender compassion, for her still dear but mistaken father. (quoted in Sillars 2006, 128-29) Fuseli imagines and captures the pregnant moment, but its palpability is too gross for an audience wanting a more spiritual and conventional heroine.

Two other treatments of 1.1 narrow to the domestic, but even so they suggest a Cordelia who is more than simply pathetic. In Smirke's painting of the end of this scene, Cordelia takes leave of her sisters and their husbands.

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Figure 14. Robert Smirke, Cordelia Departing from the Court (1802) Though she is gently assisted by France, who holds her fingertips in his hand, she depends on her own power rather than his support. Smirke's composition, as the two move away from the static group of sisters and husbands, recalls the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden. That precedent image might even hint that Cordelia is somehow fallen, a disobedient daughter, however virtuous. Gardiner's 1798 engraving shows a Cordelia without France (and with a rather oddly drawn arm pointing her way). Through her energy, light, and bulk — achieved through traveling cloaks and hat — she dominates the twined and recessed sisters she leaves behind.

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Figure 15. William Nelson Gardiner, King Lear (1798)

"A SOUL IN BLISS" Lear's awakening to discover his forgiving daughter was a favorite scene both in terms of representation and performance, most probably because of its appeal to sentiment. Garrick's production began act 5 with lines from Tate, as Cordelia and attendants watch "Lear asleep on a Couch": "His sleep is sound and may have good effect / To cure his jarring senses and repair / This breach of nature" (Garrick 1981, 5.1.1- 3). According to Francis Gentleman's note, "in this short scene, where Lear appears so much enfeebled, both in mind and body, that mind and limbs scarce appear of any use, there are some as fine strokes for a good actor to lay hold of a feeling audience by, as any in the play" (Garrick 1981, 376 n.). Two main issues determine the impact of the scene: how enfeebled the father-king is and how powerful the daughter. In Gravelot's rococo 1740 engraving to Theobald's edition (see Figure 1), the king's significance is not threatened by the daughter. Lear, http://borrowers.uga.edu/782784/show Page 27 of 50 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

debilitated but still enthroned, is the focal point. Though Cordelia protectively moves to encircle him with her arms, she is one among several figures involved in a similar motion. Cordelia here almost merges into the group of courtiers that surround Lear. Blake's watercolor Cordelia and the Sleeping Lear (ca. 1780) intensifies this encircling motion, but uses it to somewhat different effect.

Figure 16. Blake, Cordelia and the Sleeping Lear (ca. 1780) © 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Lear's head and arm rest directly upon his daughter's lap, his profound slumber contrasting with her sorrowful face. The lines of hair and arm move the eye around the oval in a way that creates participation in this intimate scene. Although Cordelia is on top, because of that movement, neither Cordelia nor Lear is the focal point, neither dominant. Blake's image of father and daughter is really about the emotional character of that relationship and the viewer's engagement in it.

Fuseli's Lear Awakens to Find Cordelia Beside His Bed (1784), known only from an engraving, explores a very different kind of emotion. Fuseli invests the moment of awakening with an electric and erotic charge and returns the power to Lear. Lear's body, extended along his couch, rises and twists so that his face approaches from above the kneeling Cordelia, his hand extended to cover hers.

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Figure 17. Henry Fuseli, John Raphael Smith, engraver, Lear Awakens to Find Cordelia Beside His Bed (1784) The two figures almost merge in an area of light that defines the painting's focus. Illness and madness seemingly forgotten, he is powerful and energetic; she is loving and receptive, her lower position and kneeling posture suggesting a happy submission. The visual intersection of Lear's chain and the band around Cordelia's wrist suggests a linkage between the father and daughter that hints even at bondage. While Fuseli's painting restores the image of the father/king's power, its erotics insinuate its troubling character, the daughter's problematic submission.

As if to suggest the attraction of two very different models of womanhood and daughterly care, later images of the awakening scene alternate between Cordelia's pathos and her power. Robert Smirke's The Awakening of King Lear (1792) and Benjamin West's Lear and Cordelia provide a vivid example of this contrast. In Smirke's painting for Boydell, Cordelia is defined in terms of pathos.

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Figure 18. Robert Smirke, The Awakening of King Lear (1792) The father is a weakened though still kingly Lear, who has awakened in a throne rather than a bed. One hand grips the chair while the other hovers over Cordelia; his eyes stare into the void. Figurally, Cordelia functions to draw the eye back to the seated old man. Visible only in profile, her body leads the eye to Lear's face. Dressed again in blue and white, here recalling even more clearly the colors of the Virgin, her kneeling figure merged with her father's, she is less an individual than the figure of the comforting daughter.

West's painting, by contrast, is all energy, and that energy belongs to Cordelia. Pressly points out that West worked out the construction in two earlier versions but that here the lines "position the viewer in front of Cordelia, whose pose carries the eye from left to right to focus on the distressed old king" (Pressly 1993, 154).

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Figure 19. Benjamin West, King Lear and Cordelia (1793) Sillars points to the compositional resemblance between this painting and West's The Grecian Daughter Defending her Father as a key to its meaning: "Cordelia is by implication shown as possessing the heroic virtue of loyalty to her father" (Sillars 2006, 186). Cordelia's heroic stature is magnified by Lear's diminution. The weak and pathetic Lear, his flaccid, skeletal hands a metonymy of his condition, seems almost to cower in his chair while Cordelia is foregrounded, brighter and bigger than Lear, gesturing to herself as if in the midst of speech and grasping his hand in passionate and active attachment. Like Smirke's Cordelia, West's also wears white, but the effect is very different: she is also partly in and partly out of a flowing red robe, adding to the passion of the moment — a passion that belongs to Cordelia.

Other later images do capture some of the power of West's Cordelia, but even so that power is subtly modified: Buck's engraving of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons depicts Cordelia kneeling and a Lear, despite his semi- recumbent posture, more powerful and conscious than others. The composition, however, balances the two so that neither dominates, suggesting Mrs. Siddons's characteristic power and equal theatrical status.

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Figure 20. Adam Buck, Mr. Kemble and Mrs. Siddons as Lear and Cordelia (1801) Her early biographer Thomas Campbell, in fact, pointed out that Mrs. Siddons took on the role of Cordelia only "for the benefit of her brother" (Campbell 1834, 119), and Thomas Dutton declared that she did not suit it: "For the representative of the lovely Cordelia, Mrs. Siddons is much too old, matron-like, and weather-beaten" (Dutton 1801, 74; emphasis in original), though perhaps what Dutton is getting at is an absence of girlishness. While in Buck's image Cordelia seems to be speaking, the caption gives Lear's lines: "I think that Lady, / To be my child Cordelia." This elaboration stresses the paternal recognition of the daughter, shifting the power subtly back to the father. John Thurston's image of Lear's awakening shows a more conventionally feminine Cordelia, but the composition focuses on her strength. She supports the supine and sleeping Lear, holding him to her.

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The glimpse of ermine on Lear's collar is a reminder of his kingliness, but Cordelia's arms, her body contain it. Beneath her feet, in a monumental-looking space, are Cordelia's lines praying for her father's "restoration." Cordelia, with "medicine on her lips," is here defined as a gentle, nurturing, life-giving figure (Shakespeare 1997, 4.7.26, 27).

Two final versions significantly weaken the image of Cordelia. Corbould's engraving features a Cordelia watching over her father with daughterly concern. The king, wrapped in his ermine robes, sleeps; Cordelia, though seated on his couch, does not touch him or even move into the space defined as his by the painting. Further, the figure of the doctor, more prominent than in any of the other images, stands above Lear, as if presiding, at the top of the image's pyramidal composition. Beneath the image are engraved the lines from Tate's version: "His sleep is sound and may have good effect to cure his jarring senses." Cordelia here is defined by watchful passivity. Wright's version returns to the submissive Cordelia depicted by Smirke. But while Smirke's Cordelia embraced her father from a kneeling position, Wright's Cordelia, with a Lear who seems even more shattered and lost, kneels over her father's hand, bathing it with her tears. This Cordelia is a perfect type of sweetly submissive filial devotion.

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Figure 23. John Macey Wright, King Lear: I pray, weep not (n.d.)

"AWAY TO PRISON" The expulsion and awakening scenes provide occasion for a Cordelia who resists or a Cordelia who nurtures. Such potential for action seems absent from the prison scene, where Cordelia's role calls for her rescue. Images of the prison scene, taken directly from Tate's version (5.6), would seem to define a more passive and pathetic Cordelia. The scene begins with "Lear asleep, with his Head on Cordelia's Lap" while Cordelia wonders, "What Toils, thou wretched king, has Thou endur'd / To make thee draw, in Chains, a Sleep so sound?" (5.6.1-2). When the Captain and the officers enter to kill them, Cordelia calls for help and pleads with the Captain to let her die first. It is Lear who moves in the space of a few speeches from sleep to the energy required to seize the

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officers' partisans and kill two of them. Jean Marsden notes that in Garrick's version, based on Tate, this scene "provides a vision of majesty restored. No longer pathetic or infirm, this Lear regains his vigour and his role as patriarch by defending his daughter" (Marsden 1998, 23). Kemble's promptbooks describe a Cordelia who "starts up speechless" as the ruffians lay hands on the king and then "[r]uns to the Captain." When Edgar enters, however, she "faints in his arms in the centre of the stage" (Kemble 1974). But interestingly, both images of the prison scene define an active or even dominant vision of the heroine. A 1767 engraving from the Universal Magazine depicts a moment from the play "as Perform'd by Mr. Barry & Mrs. Dancer at the Theatre Royal in the Hay Market."

Figure 24. King Lear, Act V. Scene the Prison, as Perform'd by Mr. Barry and Mrs. Dancer (1767) Lear, still holding his weapon, supports himself against the prison wall, his body shielding Cordelia from the two officers he has killed, but also setting up a center point on which to balance Cordelia against the officers. Rather than cowering, an exotic-looking Cordelia sits upright in her niche, brandishing a handkerchief with almost a swashing and a martial air. Indeed, she is the most aggressive-looking character in the frame.

Blake's 1779 watercolor depicts the opening moments of the scene.

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Figure 25. William Blake, King Lear and Cordelia in Prison (1779) © Tate, London 2011 This painting, of course, owes more to the stage than does Blake's Cordelia and the Sleeping Lear (Figure 16). Although there is no real opportunity for action here, Cordelia's position is protective and nurturing. She is also more dominant than might be expected: she bends over Lear's prone mass, and her flowing mantle hovers above him, allowing her to occupy horizontal as well as vertical space.

"DEAD AS EARTH" For images of Cordelia's death, artists turned, of course, back to Shakespeare's play. Although the scene in which Lear entered cradling the dead body of Cordelia was not played on stage until 1823, and then only temporarily, the Cordelia represented on stage might certainly help determine her incarnation on canvas. Visions of this scene could feature some version of Shakespeare's inscrutable and heroic Cordelia or even Tate's sentimental heroine, wandering as if by accident into the wrong plot. And yet, even while depicting Cordelia at the moment she is most a victim, artists could emphasize her symbolic power and very physical presence. James Barry's versions of the scene are both the earliest and among the most interesting. His 1774 King Lear Mourns the Death of Cordelia was expanded at the request of Boydell in 1786-1788 as King Lear Weeping Over the Dead Body of Cordelia.

For the earlier painting, Barry modeled the positions of Lear and

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Cordelia after Annibale Carracci's Pietà and Mourning Over the Dead Christ. Given that allusive composition, Cordelia becomes the salvific (though failed) heroine, Lear the father of sorrows. Soldiers in the background look up at Lear's anguished face, tears on the cheek of the forwardmost. At the center of the painting, Cordelia's body — clad in white, pale gold, and dark blue — has weight.2

Figure 26. Archibald Macduff's etching of Barry's King Lear Mourns the Death of Cordelia (1774, 1776) Yet for all its dramatic power, this painting was not derived from the stage. Depending on the viewer's critical perspective, that isolation from the stage either created or undermined the painting's iconic effect. For at least one viewer, a writer for the Morning Chronicle, its transcendence of the theatre defined its impact: A painter of less original genius than Mr. Barry would have made Mr. Garrick his model for Lear and by that method would have played up to the imagination of the public, by making them umpires how far he had succeeded in the likeness or not; but Mr. Barry considered Shakespeare as the poet of Nature, who drew his

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characters without intending them for particular individuals. (quoted in Messina 2003, 61; emphasis in original) A 1774 review in The Public Advertiser, however, cited with outrage what the writer saw as Barry's deviation from Shakespeare's vision: Had Shakespeare's Ideas been as demoniac and extravagant as Mr. Barry's, we should never have enjoyed those artless Scenes which compose his inimitable Lear. The Artist certainly meant it as a Burlesque: Cordelia represented by a Fat Billingsgate Fish-woman overpowered with Gin, and Lear personated by an old Cloaths- man, or Jew Rabbi picking her pocket. Even this can carry no Idea of the Extravagance of this Production. (quoted in Pressly 1993, 11) The physicality of Barry's painting did not suit all tastes. The solidity of the bodies — and particularly what Maria Grazia Messina has described as "the slumped abandon" of Cordelia's body (Messina 2003, 74) — cancels the diminutive and feminine ("artless"?) character necessary to the safely beautiful. Barry captures the sublime: Cordelia as Christ without possibility of resurrection in this world.

During the next decade, Barry's massive revision for Boydell depicts a warrior's death, and in this version the national context is more developed. In contrast to the intimacy of the earlier painting, with its focus on the faces of the figures and only a suggestion of stormy sea and sky in the background, in the revised version there is much more within the frame — figures as well as landscape.

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Figure 27. James Barry, King Lear Weeping Over the Dead Body of Cordelia (1786-1788) © Tate, London 2011 This new version recalls not only the Pietà, but also heroic paintings like Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe or John Singleton Copley's The Death of Major Pierson. Cordelia is given the stature of a fallen military hero, a soldier in the cause of British identity. The vanquished are represented, but all but disregarded in the face of the larger tragedy: Cordelia is elevated, while the dead Goneril and Regan lie almost underfoot, and Edmund's body is lowered head first out of the painting. Repton admired "[t]he landscape, representing a Camp near Dover, when Druidical Temples might be supposed standing" (1789, 51). The presence of a Stonehenge-like structure in the background, above Cordelia's head, highlights this drama's national significance and Cordelia's connection to it. Sillars suggests that this setting "tighten[s] the link between historical and literary painting and, in locating the scene within a specific temporal plane, simultaneously reveal[s] a contemporary concern for national identity and assert[s] as a part of that identity the universal heroic values of Shakespeare" (Sillars 2006, 92). It also seems to assert the heroic values — heroic in a national sense — of Cordelia.

Even this image of Cordelia as fallen warrior, however, is qualified. Scott Paul Gordon reads Barry's revised version as a "patriot" narrative of the end of monarchy and its replacement by a "fraternal, republican order" represented in the persons of Albany and Edgar, who now occupy the center of the painting (Gordon 2003, 493, 495). Cordelia's body, Gordon argues, "forge[s] bonds between important men," but Cordelia herself is less significant than the nature of those bonds, the revolutionary transfer of political power that the painting celebrates (504, 505).

Book illustrations of this scene cannot achieve the monumental power of Barry's history painting. Richter's 1790 engraving of Lear Bearing Cordelia, set within a decorative, Gothic-style ruined arch, reasserts Cordelia's dead and pretty passivity and frames the death as picturesque.

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Figure 28. Henry James Richter, Lear and Cordelia (1790) This Cordelia is the girlish heroine. Though Lear carries Cordelia's body awkwardly, the disposition of her body is artful, unlike the sprawl of Barry's Cordelia. A third person enters the scene, his hands suggesting surprise or horror, but in this decorative version it is not a horror the viewer can share.

Fuseli's image for an 1805 edition of the plays, however, aims at the sublime. In his fourth Lecture, Fuseli argued that "each individual form to be grand, ought to rise upward in moderate foreshortening, command the horizon, or be in contact with the sky" (quoted in Messina 2003, 63).

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Lear, alone on a barren promontory, strains under Cordelia's massiveness. Her breasts, her arms, her thighs are weighty, pushing the focus to earth. Lear, however, muscles straining, looks up at the sky, and his cloak floats above. In fact, this image is more about Lear than about Cordelia, as its caption (providing the stage direction and Lear's "Howl! Howl! Howl!") suggests.

Finally, Howard's version returns to the image of the Pietà, referring to Barry's painting for Boydell, but unable to achieve any portion of its power.

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Figure 30. Henry Howard, Lear (1807) Lear's hair, the lightning on the distant mountain, and even the suggestion of a Druid temple in the distance recall not only Barry's painting, but picturesque leanings toward sublimity. The static, even orderly, disposition of the figures, and especially of Cordelia's body, however, works against the sublime or even the nationalistic. While the focus is on the conjunction of Cordelia's and Lear's faces, the dead daughter here seems to have been robbed of any larger portent. It is as if Howard's goal is to reproduce the familiar (Barry's imagery), leaving only a diminished version of the pathos the dead heroine might generate.

"THE PROMISED END" Eighteenth-century stage productions of Lear were unable to comprehend a vision in which the good daughter's virtue was not rewarded. Samuel Johnson, of course, held that Cordelia's death was "contrary to the natural ideas of Justice." Not only was Tate's revision, http://borrowers.uga.edu/782784/show Page 42 of 50 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(19 PM

he asserted, validated by its audience's vote of approval, but the effect of such a violation was too shocking to bear (Johnson 1968, 704). Charlotte Lennox argued that "Had Shakespear followed the Historian, he would not have violated the Rules of poetical Justice; he represents Vice punished, and Virtue rewarded; in the Play one Fate overwhelms alike the Innocent and the Guilty, and the Facts in the History are wholly changed to produce Events, neither probable, necessary, nor just" (Lennox 1753, 3:290-91). Thomas Davies agreed about the discomfort produced by Shakespeare's play, seeing it even as dangerous: If these scenes are really so afflicting to a mind of sensibility in the closet, what would they produce in action? What exquisite grief and unutterable horror would such a painter as Garrick, in the last scene of the play, have raised in the breast of a spectator? Who can endure to look for any considerable time at the agonizing woe in the countenance of Count Ugolino drawn by the inimitable pencil of Reynolds? But were you to produce that subject on the stage, in action, none but a heart of marble could sustain it. (Davies 1784, 2:265-66) For Davies, painting seems less dangerous because it is more subject to the viewer's control than the less escapable power of the theater. But, in fact, I have not located any paintings or illustrations of Tate's happy ending, in which Cordelia and Edgar, rewarded for filial piety with the promise of a crown, "kneel at the king's feet" (Kemble 1974).

Even given the contested definitions of female identity and of family relationships in the long eighteenth century, visual representation of Shakespeare seemed to be able to do what stage performance could not: find a space for Shakespeare's bleaker vision. Marsden argues that the "good daughters" of the eighteenth century "represent the ideal subject: worshipful, obedient and loyal" (Marsden 1998, 29). Perhaps the erasures of stage performance, with its corollary depiction of the receptive Cordelia given as a reward to Edgar ("take her crown'd / The imperial grace fresh blooming on her brow" [Tate 1997]), required an opposite cultural representation: not only the pious and deserving daughter, but Cordelia as the strong, militant, loving, wronged, forgotten, sacrificed subject. The eye of anguish that eighteenth-century theater audiences turned away from the spectacle of the wronged daughter could sometimes be opened in the closet, the library, or the public gallery to discover both her heroism and the enormity of her injuries.

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NOTES 1. This essay has developed over a long period of time, and my debts of gratitude are correspondingly large. Georgianna Ziegler and Erin Blake of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Annette Fern of the Harvard Theatre Collection were particularly helpful at the early stages of this project. Members of the 2004 SAA seminar on Comparative Visual Cultures, led by Evelyn Tribble, and Hilary Schor and Paul Saint- Amour, co-directors of "Adaptation and Revision: The Example of Great Expectations," a 2007 NEH Summer Seminar, suggested very profitable avenues for investigation. Dorothy Shawhan, Jeanne Addison Roberts, Beverly Moon, Antje Anderson, and Laurie Kaplan not only read and commented on earlier drafts, but also shared my excitement about these images. Christy Desmet provided a careful and challenging reading, as well as most helpful and substantive suggestions for revision. John R. Ford has generously read and reread this essay in its many incarnations with inspiring insight. The author and general editors gratefully acknowledge as well the invaluable assistance of Allison Kellar Lenhardt in locating the rights-holders and obtaining permissions for the images in this essay. 2. The 1774 painting by James Barry is in a private collection. See Permission note for Figure 26 for more information.

REFERENCES Altick, Richard D. 1985. Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ashton, Geoffrey. 1991. "The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery: Before and After." In The Painted Word: British History Painting, 1750-1830. Edited by Peter Cannon-Brookes. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell. 37-43. Baugh, Christopher. 2003. "'Our Divine Shakespeare Fitly Illustrated': Staging Shakespeare, 1660-1900.'" In Shakespeare in Art. Edited by Jane Martineau et al. London: Merrell. 29-39. Boaden, James. 1831. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons. Second edition. Volume 2. London. Bottoms, Janet. 2002. "'Look on Her, Look': The Apotheosis of Cordelia." Shakespeare Survey 55: 106-13.

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Calvo, Clara. 2005. "Rewriting Lear's Untender Daughter: Fanny Price as a Regency Cordelia in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park." Shakespeare Survey 58: 83-94. Campbell, Thomas. 1834. The Life of Mrs. Siddons. Volume 2. London. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale University Press. Davies, Thomas. 1784. Dramatic Miscellanies: Consisting of Critical Observations on Several Plays of Shakspeare. 3 vols. London. Dugas, Don-John. 2006. Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660-1740. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Dutton, Thomas. 1801. The Dramatic Censor. Vol. 4. London. Erne, Lukas. 2003. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ford, Susan Allen. 2002. "'Intimate by Instinct': Mansfield Park and the Comedy of King Lear." Persuasions 24: 177-97. Franklin, Colin. 1991. Shakespeare Domesticated: The Eighteenth Century Editions. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Friedman, Winifred H. 1976. Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. New York: Garland. Fuseli, Henry. 1767. Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J. J. Rousseau. London. Garrick, David. 1981. King Lear. 1756. In Garrick's Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1744-1756. Edited by Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann. Volume 3 of The Plays of David Garrick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 301-90. Gentleman, Francis. 1770. The Dramatic Censor. Volume 1. London: Bell. [Gentleman, Francis, ed.]. 1773. King Lear . . . as performed at the Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane, Regulated from the Prompt-Book. London: Bell. Gordon, Scott Paul. 2003. "Reading Patriot Art: James Barry's King Lear." Eighteenth-Century Studies 36.4: 491-509. Guest, Harriet. 2000. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750- 1810. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Hoeveler, Diane Long. 2009. "Gothic Cordelias: The Afterlife of King Lear and the Construction of Femininity." In Shakespearean Gothic. Edited by Christy Desmet and Anne Williams. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 155-77. Johnson, Samuel, and George Steevens, eds. 1778. King Lear. Volume 9 of The Plays of William Shakespeare. London: Bathurst et al. 347-573. Johnson, Samuel. 1968. Johnson on Shakespeare. Edited by Arthur Sherbo. Volume 8 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kemble, John Philip. 1974. John Philip Kemble Promptbooks. Edited by Charles H. Shattuck. Volume 5. The Folger Facsimiles. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. King, T. J. 1992. Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, Charles, and Mary Lamb. 1979. "King Lear." Tales from Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. 143-62. Lennox, Charlotte. 1753-74. Shakespear Illustrated: or the Novels and Histories on which the Plays of Shakespear are Founded, Collected and Translated from the Original Authors. 3 vols. London. Maisak, Petra. 1996. "Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) — 'Shakespeare's Painter.'" In The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. Edited by Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick. Bottrop: Pomp. 57-74. Marsden, Jean I. 1998. "Daddy's Girls: Shakespearean Daughters and Eighteenth-Century Ideology." Shakespeare Survey 51: 17-26. Martineau, Jane, et al., eds. 2003. Shakespeare in Art. London and New York: Merrell. Merchant, W. Moelwyn. 1959. Shakespeare and the Artist. London: Oxford University Press. Messina, Maria Grazia. 2003. "Shakespeare and the Sublime." In Shakespeare in Art. Edited by Jane Martineau et al. London and New York: Merrell. 61-63. Murray, Barbara A. 2001. Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Nash, Mary. 1977. The Provoked Wife: The Life and Times of Susannah Cibber. Boston: Little, Brown.

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Pressly, William L. 1993. A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library: "As Imagination Bodies Forth." New Haven: Yale University Press. [Repton, Humphry]. 1789. The Bee; or, a Companion to the Shakespeare Gallery: Containing a Catalogue-Raisonné of all the pictures with comments, illustrations, and remarks. London: Cadell. Santaniello, A. E., ed. 1968. The Boydell Shakespeare Prints. 1802; 1805. New York: Benjamin Blom. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. Shawe-Taylor, Desmond. 2003. "Theatrical Painting from Hogarth to Fuseli." In Shakespeare in Art. Edited by Jane Martineau et al. London and New York: Merrell. 115-19. Sillars, Stuart. 2006. Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720- 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tate, Nahum. 1997. King Lear. In Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. Edited by Sandra Clark. London: Dent. 291-373. Taylor, Gary. 1989. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Warburton, William, ed. 1747. The Works of Shakespear. 8 vols. London. Womack, Peter. 2002. "Secularizing King Lear: Shakespeare, Tate, and the Sacred." Shakespeare Survey 55: 96-105. Worthen, William B. 1984. The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PERMISSIONS Figure 1. Hubert Francis Gravelot. King Lear. In King Lear, edited by Lewis Theobald. Second edition. London, 1740. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 2. Benjamin Wilson, James McArdell, engraver. Mr. Garrick in the Character of King Lear. London 1761. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 3. John Mortimer. Lear. From Shakespeare's Characters. [London], 15 March 1776. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Figure 4. William Blake. Lear Grasping a Sword. ca. 1780. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Figure 5. Benjamin West. King Lear. 1788. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Figure 6. Shakespeare between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting. Stratford-upon-Avon. Property of the author. Figure 7. Thomas Banks, Benjamin Smith, engraver. The Alto Relievo in the Front of the Shakespeare Gallery, Pall-Mall. Represents Shakespeare seated between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting, who is pointing him out as the proper Subject for her pencil. London. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 8. Pieter Van Bleeck. Mrs. Cibber as Cordelia. 1755. Yale Center for British Art. Figure 9. Angelica Kauffman. Cordellia. n.d. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 10. Thomas Charles Wageman. Mrs. W. West as Cordelia. In The New English Drama, edited by William Oxberry. Volume 10. London, 1820. Harvard Theatre Collection. Figure 11. Edward Francis Burney. Miss Brunton in Cordelia. 29 December 1785. Bell's British Library. London, 1788. Victoria and Albert Museum. Figure 12. Anonymous. Cordelia Championed by the Earl of Kent. 1770- 1780. Yale Center for British Art. Figure 13. Henry Fuseli. King Lear Casting Out His Daughter Cordelia. Engraving. 1 August 1792. In Dramatic Works of Shakespeare. London: Boydell, 1803. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 14. Robert Smirke. Cordelia Departing from the Court. Engraving. In Dramatic Works of Shakespeare. London: Boydell, 1802. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 15. William Nelson Gardiner. King Lear. London: Harding, May 1798. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 16. William Blake. Cordelia and the Sleeping Lear. ca. 1780. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Figure 17. Henry Fuseli, John Raphael Smith, engraver. Lear Awakens to Find Cordelia Beside His Bed. London: Smith, 1784. The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 18. Robert Smirke, The Awakening of King Lear. 1792. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 19. Benjamin West. King Lear and Cordelia. 1793. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 20. Adam Buck. Mr. Kemble and Mrs. Siddons as Lear and Cordelia. London: Roach, 1801. Harvard Theatre Collection. Figure 21. John Thurston. King Lear: O my dear father . . . 16 April 1805. In King Lear, edited by E. Manley Wood. London: Kearsley, 1806. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 22. Henry Corbould. King Lear: His sleep is sound . . . In King Lear. London: Longman, 1817. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 23. John Masey Wright. King Lear: I pray, weep not. London: n.d. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 24. King Lear. Act V. Scene the Prison, as Perform'd by Mr. Barry and Mrs. Dancer. The Universal Magazine, September 1767. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 25. William Blake. King Lear and Cordelia in Prison. ca. 1779. Tate Gallery, London. Figure 26. Archibald Macduff, King Lear Mourning over the Body of Cordelia. Etching and aquatint, 1776. Interpretation of the original painting by James Barry, King Lear Weeping over the Body of Cordelia, 1774. The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, 2011. Figure 27. James Barry. King Lear Weeping Over the Dead Body of Cordelia. 1786-1788. Tate Gallery, London. Figure 28. James Richter. Lear and Cordelia. 1 April 1790. In King Lear. London: Bellamy and Roberts, 1791. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 29. Henry Fuseli. Enter King Lear Supporting the Dead Body of His Daughter. In Plays of William Shakespeare. Volume 8. London: Rivington, 1805. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 30. Henry Howard. Lear. In King Lear, edited by Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, and Isaac Reed. London: Longman, 1807. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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ABSTRACT | FRAMING CORDELIA | BRITAIN'S DAUGHTER | TATE'S LEAR AND ITS REVISIONS ON STAGE | FROM STAGE TO PAGE AND CANVAS | "POOR PERDU" | "MORE PONDEROUS THAN MY TONGUE" | "A SOUL IN BLISS" | "AWAY TO PRISON" | "DEAD AS EARTH" | "THE PROMISED END" | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2020

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Yorick's Afterlives: Skull Properties in (/current) Performance

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON, THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE (/previous)

ABSTRACT | SKULLS AS STAGE RELICS | NINETEENTH-CENTURY SKULLS: (/about) DESTABILIZING THEATRICAL LINEAGE | TWENTIETH-CENTURY SKULLS: STAGING AUTHENTICITY | NOTES | REFERENCES

(/archive)

ABSTRACT Hamlet's address to Yorick's skull is at the heart of the Shakespearean canon, but is often conflated with the equally famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy in act 3, scene 1. This article reasserts the importance of the skull property by examining its afterlife on the modern stage, arguing that the use of real human remains in productions of Hamlet reveals a strong desire on the part of actors and theatergoers to be part of a kind of sacred lineage. The play text makes it clear that we can never be entirely sure whose skull it is that the gravedigger hands to Hamlet; it might be that of the prince's jester, a great lady, or a horse thief. The use of actual skulls — many of which have their own complicated life histories — as stage properties underscores the transgressive potential of the scene and testifies to the theater's ambivalent relationship to narratives of transcendence.

Hamlet is famous for, among other things, being the first early modern play to bring the human skull on stage as a property.1 Yorick's skull is perhaps the most concrete token of remembrance in a play devoted to the vagaries of memory, and Hamlet's famous apostrophe has become a

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metonym for the entire work, if not for the Shakespearean canon itself (Holderness 1988, 8). This paper examines the after-life of Yorick's skull on the modern stage, arguing that the property calls attention to the tension between the transitory nature of the theatrical medium and the desire — expressed by both actors and audiences — to preserve the performance experience. In a surprising number of cases, the skull chosen to represent "Yorick" has a real human being behind it, a human being whose connection to the theater survives the death of the mortal body. The reverent treatment of such skulls resists the play's own warnings about the anonymity of death, but it also attempts to resist the impermanent quality of the theatrical medium itself.

The use of real skulls in productions of Hamlet has become such a common feature of the play's history that the creators of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Slings and Arrows were able to spoof the practice in the opening episodes of the show's first season. The series, which pokes fun at the Shakespeare industry (especially as practiced in Stratford, Ontario) focuses on the misadventures of a brilliant, but mentally unstable actor who finds himself suddenly called upon to take up the artistic directorship of Canada's leading Shakespeare company, for which he was once the lead performer. In assuming the role of prodigal son he must also fulfill the last request of his famous mentor, whose ghost demands that his skull appear in the company's production of Hamlet. The ghost's appearance confirms Marvin Carlson's assertion that "our theatrical memories are haunted by Hamlet," but the conflation of the figures of Hamlet's father and Yorick, together with the comic tone of the ghost's fatherly complaints, also make the skull a symbol of the actor's unwillingness to follow in his mentor's footsteps (Carlson 2001, 79). Thus, the protagonist's ambivalent attitude towards the skull mirrors the show's mixture of affection for and frustration with the Shakespearean establishment.

For some scholars, the satirical approach taken by these and other metatheatrical comedies such as Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale (1995) has tended to overshadow our experience of Hamlet. Noting the degree to which the skull has become a clichéd stand-in for the entire plot, Phoebe Spinrad complains that Yorick has become "nothing more than a box office gimmick designed to draw laughter or screams from the audience." For Spinrad, the skull has been devalued, lumped in with "plastic Halloween masks . . . articulated cardboard skeletons" and other forms of "low class gore" (Spinrad 1984, 8-9). This approach, however, underestimates the continued seriousness with which the scene is treated by both playgoers and actors. Simultaneously an object http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 2 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

of disgust and the anchor for Hamlet's strongest childhood memories, the skull hints at the power of the theatrical narratives that give life to dead objects. And however flattened out Hamlet has become as an icon of the canon, Yorick's skull continues to hold sway over our imaginations, particularly because it appears to offer us a kind of permanent cultural placeholder.

The graveyard scene in Hamlet, in which the prince is brought face to face with the skull of his dead playmate, entertains the possibility that bodily remains can connect us to those we have lost. What the iconic image of Yorick makes us forget, however, is that the rest of the gravedigger scene is more or less consumed with death's anonymity.2 With the face intact, the head is the one body part that should be instantly recognizable, but with the flesh gone, we cannot even tell the skull of a man from that of a woman, as the initial exchange between Hamlet and the gravedigger makes clear. Hamlet debates the skull's identity with Horatio, playfully assigning it to politicians, courtiers, lawyers, and landowners, and the gravedigger eventually concedes that its owner is "one that was a woman, sir; but rest her soul, she's dead" (5.1.127).3 Sensing Hamlet's need for a story, a name to attach to the heads rolling around on stage, the gravedigger at last produces evidence to contradict the anxiety inspired by the preceding lines. Holding up a new skull or possibly pointing to the first one, the gravedigger announces its provenance: "Here's a skull now hath lien you i'th' earth three and twenty years" (163-64). After a brief, tantalizing pause, he produces a name. "This same skull, sir," he tells Hamlet, "was Yorick's skull, the King's jester" (170-71). Finally, we have a positive identification, allowing Hamlet to launch into the monologue in which he literally puts the flesh back on the bone, pointing to the lips that once hung around the gaping mouth (178-79).

If we believe the dialogue, however, at least two skulls remain on stage to remind Hamlet of his own approaching death, and according to Steven Urkowitz, the script justifies at least four or five (Urkowitz 1986, 59). As Hamlet himself points out early in the scene, what is most disturbing about this plurality of skulls is that they are unidentifiable, and thus subject to abuse. "That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once," Hamlet insists. "Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with 'em? Mine ache to think on't" (5.1.71-72, 86-88).4 Pascale Aebischer has argued that the most disturbing aspect of this scene is the irreverent way in which it treats mortality.5 Behind the fooling, however, there lies a deeper problem — not just that the skulls are being knocked about, but that this treatment http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 3 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

is justified by the fact that we have no idea whose skulls they are.

Recent discussions of this scene have tended to focus on the way in which the skull property creates a slippage between subject and object.6 In Marjorie Garber's formulation, the memento mori reminds us of what we will one day become, but Yorick's skull tells us that this is what we are now, suggesting that the distinction between dead objects and live subjects is not as straightforward as we might think (Garber 1981). Andrew Sofer's reading of the play draws on Garber's, but places an even stronger emphasis on the personhood of the skull, arguing that, like the holographic object in Hans Holbein's Ambassadors, it is anamorphic, slipping back and forth between mere thingness and uncanny vitality. The object stubbornly refuses to stay dead, while turning Hamlet and his companions into mere props through its evocation of their fragile fleshiness (Sofer 2003, 94). Both Sofer and Garber note that Yorick's appearance introduces an important "turn" in the scene; the theoretical discussion of death's ravages has suddenly become real, and Hamlet is confronted with an object that reminds him of his own mortality.

The skull's uncanny subjectivity does not, however, imply that we must take it seriously as Yorick. On the contrary, the doubling and tripling of skull properties in the scene, together with the joking dialogue that surrounds Hamlet's speech, undermine the notion that we can firmly connect any one of them to a single individual.7 Sofer accuses the prince of transforming the skull into a trope of courtly corruption and thereby refusing to see his own mortality in it, but it is no wonder that Hamlet fails to make the connection between the skull and his own person when confronted with such a profusion of riddles and bones (Sofer 2003, 96). As Kenneth Branagh muses in his notes on his film version of the play, "if there were any more of these bloody things [the Gravedigger] could set up a skull shop" (quoted in Aebischer 2004, 95).

The unreliability of the gravedigger, a fictional character, is of course as difficult to prove as his claims about the skull's identity. Equally challenging is the task of discovering whether or not actual skulls were used as properties in seventeenth-century productions of the play. We do, however, have a preponderance of evidence for the appearance of real skulls on the post-Reformation stage. By 1755, theater critic Paul Hiffernan was already complaining about the regular use of "real Skulls and bones in the Gravedigging Scene of Hamlet, to which a wooden Substitution might be easily made." One hundred years later, a writer for The Theatrical Journal described the actors' mistreatment of human

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remains as "highly indecent, at the same time repulsive to the audience" (quoted in Sprague 1963, 173-74). In addition to their unseemliness, actual body parts duplicate the problem raised in Hamlet's script: playgoers are left to wonder where they came from and whose lips hung there before the worms ate them. When not confronted with blank anonymity, the audience is left with the possibility of an unruly substitution; the skull may carry with it identities that predate its arrival in a given role, identities which complicate its role as the prince's jester. Though the graveyard scene problematizes the idea of human remains as accurate preservers of memory, the skulls that move through and between modern productions of the play are expected to do just that: to keep theatrical memories, and theatrical fame, alive.

SKULLS AS STAGE RELICS The increasing use of human skulls in productions of Hamlet coincides with the development of the Shakespeare industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the appearance of "stage relics," objects made sacred within the community of collectors and theatergoers through their connection to productions of Shakespeare's plays.8 Like the main character in Slings and Arrows, who eventually concedes to his dead friend's request, the actors and collectors who traded in stage relics were rewarded for believing in the provenance of such objects by having their faith in the power of theater restored. Many stage relics took on a vital role within an intra-theatrical economy, establishing a pattern of lineage that we can trace back at least as far as David Garrick, though they also tended to show up in commercial auction lots as well.9 In either case, they help to demonstrate the degree to which an involvement in Shakespearean productions elevates the status of "ordinary" human beings and, even more explicitly than in other artistic forms, creates a cult of memory around them; in fact, eighteenth and nineteenth-century inventories and newspaper articles explicitly used the language of the "relic" to describe these otherwise secular items. We can define stage relics, then, as items that would not necessarily be of any special value to players or playgoers during the moment of performance, but that accrue meaning, both affective and economic, as traces of that performance once the run has ended. Whether stage properties enshrined as mementos of a particular performance or personal effects of an individual actor, stage relics capture something of the ephemeral quality of theatrical performance in a material object — as long as the narratives surrounding them survive intact.

Like Catholic relics, these objects drew their value from their proximity

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to the actor's body and gained additional meanings as they moved from hand to hand in what Barbara Hodgdon calls "the Shakespearean exchange economy" (Hodgdon 1998, 191). The tooth of actor George Frederick Cooke was given to Edwin Booth, one of the century's most famous Hamlets, and a lock of Edmund Kean's hair cut in 1833 passed through Henry Irving to a London playing company, who listed it in their inventory of 1896 (The Players 1905, 8; 1896, 6). More recently, a sword originally used by Kean in his production of Richard III, which had passed from Irving to Terry to Gielgud, was given by Gielgud to Olivier (Sher 2007). These examples help reinforce the ways in which the concept of theatrical lineage enhances the value of stage relics; they transcend the gap between past and present and promise a kind of immortality to the actors associated with them. Muriel Bradbrook once imagined "a moment from Hamlet's first performance where, at Ophelia's graveside, Armin and Richard Burbage stand, each with a hand on Tarleton's skull — the present leading players remembering, and touching upon, their heritage" (quoted in Thomson 1983, 111). This fanciful reconstruction is informed, at least in part, by the fact that the generations of actors who came after Burbage and Armin might well have been tempted to indulge in a similar moment of metatheatrical remembrance — a moment, as Hodgdon puts it, in which "the theatre talks of itself to itself" (quoted in Hodgdon 2006, 136). A publicity image from the 1992 BBC radio Hamlet, for instance, shows Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet holding a skull, with Derek Jacobi (Claudius) and John Gielgud (Ghost) looking over each of his shoulders. The older actors appear to be in character, but their positioning also registers as a gesture of approbation, framing Branagh within the context of great English Hamlets.

The skull currently owned by the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library at the University of Pennsylvania bears its lineage on its surface, having been signed on the cranium by all the major nineteenth- century actors who played Hamlet in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre: Kean, Macready, Kemble, Booth, Forrest, Cushman, Davenport, Murdock, and Brooks (figure 1).

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Figure 1. Skull, Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library The exhibition card attached to the object begins with the famous lines from Hamlet's monologue on the skull and goes on to assert that the item once belonged to a licensed pharmacist named Mr. Carpenter, "who had loaned it to many actors." The signatures, which are still legible, act as proof of this claim just as the lines from the play somehow evoke those monumental performances (Traister 2000, 76). Marvin Carlson reminds us that the "expectations an audience bring to a new reception experience are the residue of memory of previous such experiences," but in this case it is the actors, and not just the audience, whose participation in the play is mediated by the remainders of previous performances (Carlson 2001, 5). As far as the exhibition card is concerned, the skull belongs to the actors who played Hamlet with it and has no prior life history. Whoever it originally belonged to, the Furness skull functioned like the stage relics circulated between great performers; it was meant to endow each of them with his predecessor's spirit and to serve as a memorial to all the great performances of Hamlet that would endure in the popular imagination long after their run had ended. This is the irony of dedicating a museum to the theater: its entire aim is to try to resist the conclusion that the power of drama exists in the moment of performance, not in any record or memorial preserved for the sake of history.10

In one sense, then, Furness's project is identical to the one

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problematized in the graveyard scene, whose collection of undifferentiated bones suggests that Yorick's skull cannot, in fact, be distinguished from all the others that have accumulated since the death of Alexander. Despite the best efforts of Furness and other denizens of the Shakespeare establishment, the presence of real skulls on the stage often helps to draw out, rather than smooth over, the complex questions about the anonymity of death that are raised in the script. Joseph Roach's definition of performance as a set of actions that "hold open a place in memory" has become incredibly useful to scholars of performance who want to describe the reiterative power of both theater and ritual. Importantly, however, the space opened up by performance is one "into which many different people may step according to circumstances and occasions" (Roach 1996, 36). As in Judith Butler's work, which emphasizes the potential for failure in a performance that must be created over and over again on a daily basis, the attempt to use human skulls to cite continually the lives of famous actors inevitably falls victim to the vagaries of chance and human subjectivity. Fortunately, these moments of failure also provide a place where theater breaks free of the elitist rules that determine who is and who is not worthy to speak Shakespeare's words. Carol Chillington Rutter remarks that "Shakespeare is the birthright, in the blood, of every English actor," but the material presence of the skull opens up the script to the addition of surprising new players (Rutter 2006, 176). The graveyard scene in Hamlet resists the actor's desire for connection and immortality, while the play's immense popularity appears to satisfy it by authenticating the lineage linking all the performers who have starred in the title role. Mirroring this paradox, the slippery nature of the skull's personhood — which rests on its tenuous identification as Yorick — points to the ways in which the theater can make room for bodies and stories that might ordinarily be exiled from the Shakespearean establishment. In what follows, I draw upon a number of nineteenth-century accounts of the use of real skulls in Hamlet in order to demonstrate the difficulty of anchoring a coherent Shakespearean lineage in a series of material objects with their own complicated life histories.11

NINETEENTH-CENTURY SKULLS: DESTABILIZING THEATRICAL LINEAGE By contrast with the tradition of the stage relic as bearer of cultural memory, the practice of using real human skulls on stage seems to have originated with actors who wanted to shock or surprise their audience by playing with the idea of what it would mean to bring real death on stage. The Anglo-American actor George Vandenhoff tells the story of a http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 8 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

troupe of players traveling in Lancashire in the mid-nineteenth century who discovered that they were performing in a converted chapel formerly associated with a local preacher named Dr. Banks. Midway through 5.1, the actor playing the gravedigger became fed up with the especially pompous Hamlet and decided to teach him a lesson, announcing that "[t]his skull sir . . . This was DOCTOR BANKS'S skull!" The tragedian was incensed, but endeavored to keep the dialogue going, insisting that it was in fact Yorick's. "No," the gravedigger laughed, picking up another skull prop, "[t]his is Yorick's skull, the king's jester; but t'other's Doctor Banks's, as I told you" (Vandenhoff 1860, 100; emphasis in original). The actor's improvisation hints at the idea of bringing an actual relic, the skull of a churchman, into the performance. Perhaps more importantly, the identification of the stage property as an actual skull serves to further undercut the suggestion within the fiction that the skull Hamlet addresses can be linked to Yorick in any definitive way. This anecdote aptly demonstrates the ease with which human remains, each carrying its own messy history, can further complicate the fictional narrative.

Sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, the Irish-born actor George Frederick Cooke is said to have made a noteworthy post mortem appearance in Hamlet, followed by an after-party in which Cooke's admirers established to their satisfaction the authenticity of the relic, using the latest scientific methods. The following is from the memoirs of John Doran, though other accounts give the anonymous prop manager credit for acquiring the skull from one Dr. Francis: A theatrical benefit had been announced at the Park, and "Hamlet" the play. A subordinant [sic] of the theatre at a late hour hurried to my office, for a skull. I was compelled to loan the head of my old friend, George Frederick Cooke. "Alas, poor Yorick!" It was returned in the morning; but on the ensuing evening, at a meeting of the Cooper Club, the circumstance becoming known to several members, and a general desire being expressed to investigate, phrenologically, the head of the great tragedian, the article was again released from its privacy, when Daniel Webster, Henry Wheaton, and many others who enriched the meeting of that night, applied the principles of craniological science to the interesting specimen before them . . . Cooke enacted a great part that night. (Doran 1865, 386) According to the theater critic Dutton Cook, who retells the latter part of this story in more detail, "[t]he head was pronounced capacious, the function of animality amply developed; the height of the forehead http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 9 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

ordinary; the space between the orbits of unusual breadth," all of which confirmed what Kean, Booth, and the other connoisseurs of Cooke's acting already knew about his innate talents, just as Hamlet's examination of Yorick's skull seems to provide evidence of the gravedigger's claims. The phrenological tests, which Cook describes as contributing to the "variety and gratification of that memorable evening," allowed this group of famous men to reestablish Cooke's status as one of their own (Cook 1883, 1:225).

The narratives presented so far illuminate two distinct viewpoints about the use of actual human skulls on stage. In the case of the Walnut Street Theatre skull, it seems not to matter whose skull the actors were using. The point in this case is that great men have signed the skull, making it theirs and therefore part of the sacred apparatus of the Shakespearean establishment. In the case of George Frederick Cooke, on the other hand, it matters profoundly whose skull Hamlet is holding. We might even argue that the phrenological exhibition was not a mere formality, but rather the only appropriate response, after Betterton had made his famous friend the object of a disquisition on the fragility of memory. A more ambiguous case is that of a performance in Wilmington, Delaware, which took place on the site of an old potter's field. The stage manager, "a wild Irishman," brought out two real skulls for the actors to use from the heap of bones that were lying just under the stage (Ellsler 1950, 71). The actors decided not to mention the provenance of the skulls to the audience, perhaps because the skulls they unearthed belonged to unnamed paupers, but later they did describe the use of these local properties as a notable feature of the production. It is no accident, I think, that the Furness skull is stabilized by its presence in a museum and that the Cooke skull received a similar treatment in a gentleman's library; when it comes to accounts of actual performances, like the ones in Lancashire and Delaware, there is a much greater possibility of a disjunction between the identity of the skull and an idealized Shakespearean lineage. My next set of anecdotes suggests that the use of real skulls often entails doing a certain violence to their original owners, removing any unsightly personal details in order to make them suitable company for the great actors of the nineteenth- century stage.

According to legend, one of Junius Brutus Booth's prized possessions was the skull of a notorious horse thief named Fontaine. The two met in jail, where Booth was sobering up from a bout of drunkenness, and Fontaine later willed Booth his skull — because, of course, he wanted to appear in Hamlet along with his idol. I have yet to find documentary http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 10 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

proof that Booth fulfilled this request, but a skull did pass from Junius Booth to his son Edwin, and like the Furness skull, this head bears the younger actor's signature as evidence of its participation in his performance. In an unusually democratic move, it was also signed by the man who played the gravedigger in 1890, Owen Fawcett (Ellsler 1950, 73).

Like the skulls in the graveyard scene, this narrative tends to multiply, and in his 1903 recollection, The Ponkapog Papers, poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich tells a far stranger version of the story. In this account, the anonymous horse thief is described as a man to whom Booth lent money while on tour "somewhere in the wild West." His good deed done, the actor never gave the man another thought, until he reappeared one morning in Kentucky: As the elder Booth was seated at breakfast one morning in a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, a negro boy entered the room bearing a small osier basket neatly covered with a snowy napkin. It had the general appearance of a basket of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as such it figured for a moment in Mr. Booth's conjecture. On lifting the cloth the actor started from the chair with a genuine expression on his features of that terror which he was used so marvelously to simulate as Richard III in the midnight tent-scene or as Macbeth when the ghost of Banquo usurped his seat at table. In the pretty willow-woven basket lay the head of Booth's old pensioner, which head the old pensioner had bequeathed in due legal form to the tragedian, begging him henceforth to adopt it as one of the necessary stage properties in the fifth act of Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy of "Hamlet." "Take it away, you black imp!" thundered the actor to the equally aghast negro boy, whose curiosity had happily not prompted him to investigate the dark nature of his burden. (Aldrich 1903, 134-35) Here the amusing notion of using a horse thief's skull as Yorick becomes unsavory, in part because the presence of the African American child draws out the barriers of class and race separating the various participants in the transaction from one another. The head, not yet stripped of its flesh, is all too recognizable as the old pensioner, and its proximity to the "dark" youth only underscores its unsuitability for the Shakespearean stage. Intriguingly, the force of the actor's passion is measured by its similarity to Booth's depiction of various Shakespearean characters: real death has produced a theatrically memorable performance. Aldrich goes on to say that Booth finally came to see the humor in the request, presumably after the skull had http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 11 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

been thoroughly cleaned, and agreed to fulfill it. But after a few turns as Yorick, the skull became an official stage relic, and Edwin Booth made a papier maché cast of it to preserve the real one from receiving a regular buffeting on stage (Aldrich 1903, 135).

This second narrative closes off the possibility that the play so gleefully explores — the idea that any of us could play Yorick. And despite the fact that Booth eventually agreed to use the head brought to him in the fruit basket, Aldrich and others came to associate it with the Booth family and their part in the greater Shakespearean lineage, not with the unnamed criminal or the horrified boy who became the unfortunate object of Booth's rage. For Aldrich, the skull is Yorick, and when, like Hamlet, he imagines its past lives, it is Shakespeare's character who plays an active role in his fantasies: "Edwin Booth had forgotten, if ever he knew, the name of the man; but I had no need of it in order to establish acquaintance with poor Yorick" (Aldrich 1903, 136). His insistence on giving the skull its own personhood helps to erase its unpleasant pre-Shakespearean history, which is marked by barriers of both class and race.

A slightly less repugnant version of this story appears in the memoirs of John Adams Ellsler, a friend of Edwin Booth. According to Ellsler, in the middle of a tour the senior Booth decided that plaster skulls were no longer acceptable in his production and demanded a real one. His son, who was then traveling with him, appealed to one of the locals, again a young African American, who provided the necessary item for a reasonable fee, but asked for the object back at the end of the run. Admitting that he did not know "the market price of such commodities," Edwin Booth offered to buy the object from him, to which the boy replied: "[a]h can't sell dat, nohow; dat skull 'longs to my ole man, an — an — an [ah] just borrowed, from de grave, fer yo to use" (Ellsler 1950, 71-72). Two elements of this narrative provide a dramatic contrast to Aldrich's. The first is that Ellsler links the African American boy with the skull directly, by way of lineage, and makes his attempt to restore the sanctity of his father's gravesite the punch line, a kind of modern analogue to Hamlet's own delayed revenge. While Aldrich is quite happy to forget that there ever was a "dark" subject behind the Booth skull, Ellsler makes us remember that, "that skull had a tongue in it" (5.1.74). Here again, but for very different reasons, it matters profoundly whose skull the actor playing Hamlet is holding.

The second noteworthy aspect of this story is that it deprives Booth of the chance to reject the idea of using an African American skull in his

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production. William Charles Macready, who was on tour in Virginia in 1848, was not given the same opportunity and complained of this oversight after the fact. In his personal diary, he blames the failure of one of his performances on the stagehands, who provided him with the skull of "a negro who was hung [sic] two years ago for cutting down his overseer" (Macready 1976, 257). Pascale Aebischer labels the substitution an act of symbolic revenge, and it does underscore the transgressive potential embedded in the scene (Aebischer 2004, 85). This substitution deserves closer attention, however, especially in light of the phrenological examination carried out on the skull of George Frederick Cooke. What would it have meant, in late nineteenth-century America, to use the skull of a black man in Hamlet? Could such a skull really be distinguished from that of a white actor with a more developed function of "animality"?

A racialized society, as Paul Gilroy argues, results from the intermixing of "science and superstition" (Gilroy 1998, 843). Like phrenology, the discourse of race allows those who wield power to project their understanding of the world onto other human beings through the use of labels and categories. Gilroy suggests that the primary technology for establishing racial identities is a process he calls "epidermalization," the notion that individuals can be made intelligible through an analysis of their skin. On one level, the skull seems to escape the discourses of race that have poisoned western history: there is no skin to be found, and thus no obvious racial marker. On the other hand, the skull cannot escape the technology closely associated with epidermalization, the study of cranial features. Whether in the sixteenth century or the twenty-first, Hamlet reminds us that we will continue to cling to the apparent visual differences between subjects and others as long as there is physical evidence to examine; the recurrence of the argument that individuals of African descent have inherently lower IQ scores is only a thinly veiled version of this same instinct. We have seen that the play allows for a radical critique of class hierarchies by refusing to let the skull sustain any kind of stable identity, but as these anecdotes demonstrate, audiences' ability to access that moment of resistance is limited by the historical moment in which the play is performed.

At the beginning of this section, I suggested that the affective value of the Furness skull resulted from its affiliation with the nineteenth century's most famous Hamlets, but it, too, may have had its own life outside the theater. In 1889, Charles Dickens recorded the story of John Reed, employed as a gas-lighter at the Walnut Street Theater for forty- four years, who requested in his will that in honor of his many years of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 13 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

service, his head be removed from his corpse, bequeathed to the company, and be used to "represent the skull of Yorick" (Dickens 1889, 178).12 The choice of the term "represent" calls attention to the mimetic quality of the enterprise — John Reed is not Yorick, but his skull will materialize the idea of Yorick. This language betrays a certain uneasiness not only about the idea of using human remains, but also about the class difference between himself and the men who will be handling his skull. This difference mimics the gap in status between the jester and the prince, the tragedian and the gasman, but it also suggests that the two-fold transformation these objects undergo — first in the dramatic fiction, and later in the intra-theatrical economy — makes room for a multiplicity of bones.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY SKULLS: STAGING AUTHENTICITY Nineteenth-century American anecdotes about the use of real skulls in Hamlet open up the possibility that Yorick could be represented by a lower class or racial other, contributing an even more powerful emotional charge to the already controversial image of the prince caressing the skull of his servant. These same narratives, however, tend to close down such possibilities almost immediately. Only the Ellsler story points in a different direction, giving the young man the chance to reassert control over his father's remains rather than allowing his identity to be subsumed by the purifying project of Shakespearean lineage. By contrast, twentieth-century examples of this particular theatrical phenomenon appear to transcend, or perhaps to avoid, the themes of otherness that emerged in earlier decades. Rather than worrying about whether the skull at hand is worthy of the role of Yorick, modern actors confronted by actual skulls seem concerned with the philosophical problem of what it means to bring something real into a theatrical fiction. Peter Hall, for instance, wrote in his diary in 1975 that the use of a human skull in rehearsal made "the actuality of the scene" more palpable to the actors, just as the horse thief's skull caused the elder Booth to experience a genuine sense of horror (Hall 1984, 189). Similarly, the protagonists in the following narrative attempt to sustain the boundary between fiction and reality by rejecting presentation — the uncanny presence of actual death — in favor of representation.

In 1980, a concert pianist named Andre Tchaikovsky went to the Royal Shakespeare Company to see Hamlet. He fell in love with the play, and on his deathbed asked that his skull be donated to the company so that it could appear as Yorick in the graveyard scene. Upon Tchaikovsky's

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death, his executor sent the skull to Terry Hands, the RSC's artistic director. Hands, in turn, passed it along to the Property Department, much to the alarm of its manager. There the skull languished for nine years until Mark Rylance began to inquire about using it in his production of the play. Rylance's cast, however, eventually became unsettled by the notion of seeing human remains knocked about with a shovel. Claire van Kampen writes that the actors felt "privileged to be able to work the Gravedigger scene with a real skull," but agreed that using Tchaikovsky's head in the theater would upset "the complicity of illusion between actor and audience." She goes on to reflect that "some of us felt a certain primitive taboo about the skull, although the Gravedigger, as I recall, was all for it" (quoted in Aebischer 2004, 86).

The company's proposed solution to the problem on their hands was to honor Tchaikovsky by using a replica Tchaikovsky, and they found comfort in duplicating the details that made the skull identifiable as belonging to a specific person. "We are no longer using the real skull as Yorick," the actors told the Property Manager, "but would like to use a cast of it (complete with [gold] teeth)" (quoted in Aebischer 2004, 87).13 By insisting upon using a copy of the skull in their performance, the actors seemed to be displaying the kind of squeamishness that Phoebe Spinrad claims characterizes our modern avoidance of death. In this case, however, the act of copying the body part was an attempt not to degrade, but to preserve what was valuable about the original, just as Edwin Booth made a papier maché cast of his father's favorite skull in order to preserve the real one. For Booth, the skull was sacred, and thus unusable, because of its association with the Shakespearean lineage, not because it once belonged to a horse thief. The RSC actors, by contrast, were unwilling to use the skull because they could not forget that it once sat on the shoulders of a pianist named Tchaikovsky.14

The most recent appearance of Tchaikovsky's skull, which was chosen to play Yorick alongside David Tennant's Hamlet in a 2008 production at the RSC, replicates the ontological problem of bringing "real death" on stage while emphasizing the surprising persistence of this unusual stage relic. Gregory Doran, the director, spoke familiarly and affectionately of the object in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, downplaying the potentially grotesque nature of Tchaikovsky's bequest: "It was sort of a little shock tactic. Though, of course, to some extent that wears off and it's just Andre, in his box" (Smith 2008). Here again, however, the business of fulfilling the dead pianist's request proved more difficult than it first appeared. The company was unable to secure permission from Human Tissue Authority to use the skull for the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 15 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

previews, and so Tennant reverted to the RSC's resident fake skull. As Jonathan Bate's commentary on the production aptly points out, this object had its own kind of sacred charge, perhaps greater than that of the hapless pianist, because it had been handed down from actor to actor since the days of Edmund Kean. "There is a rumour," Bate reports, "that when the precious relic was first brought out, Tennant was so nervous that he dropped it" (Bate 2008).15 Because of its association with famous Shakespearean actors, the fake quality of the skull never prevented it from becoming a cherished memento in its own right.

As with all rumors, and all stories about relics, this narrative becomes less interesting once we attempt to ascertain whether or not it is true. What matters here is that Bate found it plausible that the aura of dead performers would give the prop skull a kind of electric charge, more so even than a piece of an actual human body. When they finally did succeed in gaining permission to use Tchaikovsky's skull instead of the RSC's fake skull, Doran decided to keep this information from the public, thinking it would overshadow the play itself. And when the news did emerge, just ahead of the production's move from Stratford to the West End, the papers were full of gossip about the skull and its origins — more or less ignoring, to Bate's frustration, the quality of Tennant's performance. The skull was eventually cut from the bill when its fame began to compete with that of Mr. Tennant, best known as the star of the popular television show Dr. Who. A prop skull once handled by Kean might be too volatile for the actor who knows the significance of that lineage, but the real skull was far too lively a subject to be brought onto the London stage. It is possible to see the entire story, including Bates's defense of the acting as the real theatrical attraction, as a very successful publicity ploy. Whether or not all these revelations were intentional, what matters is that the play's investigation of death still intersects in surprising ways with the actor's own desire to be part of a kind of institutional immortality. While my nineteenth-century anecdotes are characterized by a simultaneous obsession with and inability to police the identity of the real human skulls used on stage, the twentieth-century actors described above seem far more comfortable with the use of fake skulls, relying on the power of the theatrical fiction to endow the object with meaning.

I have argued that in foregrounding the anonymity of death, the graveyard scene in Hamlet undermines the prince's recognition of the skull as definitively belonging to Yorick, but the play does leave room for a different of type of faith in the power of objects. If we see the skulls not as inherent bearers of meaning but as anchors for the stories http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 16 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

theater practitioners tell about each other, it is less easy to dismiss Hamlet's decision to address the skull by the name of "Yorick." In that moment, within the context of the tragedy, Hamlet is successfully memorializing his dead friend. Whether or not the skull can be properly identified does not change the fact that it functions, in this moment, as a memory aid. It is this lack of concern about the authenticity of the relic in question, bolstered by a certain kind of faith in the theater itself, that characterizes my final narrative involving the afterlife of human skulls.

This story begins in 1999 with death of Del Close, an American actor famous for his improvisational skill and for his work in the Chicago improv scene with superstars such as Bill Murray and Mike Myers. The comedian's dying wish was to have his head donated to the Goodman Theater so that his skull could appear as Yorick, and soon after Close's death, the actors at the Goodman accepted the gift of the skull at the hands of his long-time partner, Charna Halpern. Although they have yet to cast it in Hamlet, company members have dutifully carried it on stage in productions of Pericles and Stoppard's Arcadia. In subsequent years, however, a controversy arose over the skull's authenticity when Chicagoans demanded proof that the skull was in fact Close's. An investigative article in the Tribune pointed out that the skull was held together by rusty screws, and that other distinguishing marks suggested it had had a prior life as part of a teaching skeleton.

Under mounting pressure, Halpern admitted that she had in fact perpetrated a hoax. The trouble, she explained, was that it was impossible to find a doctor willing to remove and clean the head, and so she went shopping for a replacement that would "match Del's big brain cavity and nice, high cheekbones" (Friend 2006). The transformation of an ordinary teaching skull into the skull of a famous comedian is perhaps the best example of how stage relics gain meaning through their connection with the theater. Rather than duplicating the real skull as Edwin Booth and the RSC cast members sought to do, Halpern replaced it with a skull that had similar physical characteristics. Ironically, she found herself relying on a kind of phrenology, but without the pretense of using it to confirm an exact lineage. Even as a hoax, however, Halpern's solution was short lived; the skull had teeth, whereas Close wore dentures, and removing the molars proved to be more difficult than expected. A handful of teeth remained, later serving as evidence that the skull was not that of Del Close. Halpern was undaunted by the revelation, though, and was even briefly tempted to take a page out of the Lancashire gravedigger's book. She imagined she might present the theater with a second, more convincing head and, http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 17 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

while admitting that she had fooled them the first time, assure them that this was in fact the "real" Close. Apart from the extraordinary spirit of playfulness that characterizes this entire narrative, I am intrigued by the fact that a contemporary American actor with few professional links to the Shakespearean stage was so committed to appearing posthumously in Hamlet. Close's bequest provides further proof of our national fascination with Shakespeare, but I would also like to think that he shared my reading of the graveyard scene. Who else but a professional comedian would understand the irony of asking to be immortalized in a scene that deals so rudely with human remains?

In posthumously joining the cast of Hamlet, minor celebrities such as Close and Tchaikovsky are linking their material remains to an institution that will survive, in one form or another, long after their bones have become unrecognizable. "As a working actor," Del Close once told the manager at the Goodman, "I'll accept any role — even if you just toss me into a desert scene with other vulture-picked bones, that would be great" (Friend 2006). Close's story makes clear that it is not the individual character, or even the playwright, who matters so much as being a part of a living theatrical enterprise. Skull relics escape namelessness because of Shakespeare, but also because we, the audience, accept each one as a token pointing toward something we collectively accept as "Yorick." That dramatic identity contains within it an entire stage history, not always as visible or as coherent as the signatures on the cranium of the Furness skull, but nonetheless a vital part of the narrative that sustains the play's hold over us. By attracting individuals who were not members of the Shakespearean establishment during their lifetimes, the skull invites, and simultaneously disrupts, the desire of actors and audience members to become part of an exclusive theatrical lineage.

Though he is something of an outlier in the narratives I have collected, I am compelled by Del Close's interest in shaking up, rather than propping up, the Shakespearean lineage — the same interest that may have inspired the unnamed actor in Lancashire to taunt his Hamlet with the specter of Dr. Banks. Theirs is a different type of transcendence, one rooted in the theater's ability to lend new meanings to old objects, making them relics through use rather than preservation. Despite our collective cultural fantasies, these objects point not to a single moment in history, but to a theatrical tradition that embraces a multiplicity of bodies and eventually subsumes them. Hamlet's skulls teach us that immortality comes not from the stability of individual identity, but from the willingness to offer oneself up the profound ephemerality of http://borrowers.uga.edu/782717/show Page 18 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

dramatic performance.

NOTES 1. I am grateful to Peter Berek, Jane Hwant Degenhardt, Adam Zucker, Arthur Kinney, and all the members of the Five-College Renaissance Seminar at the University of Massachusetts for their thoughtful responses to an early version of this paper. I am also indebted to John Pollack, Peter Stallybrass, Dan Traister, and the entire staff at the Annenberg Rare and Manuscript Books Library at the University of Pennsylvania, for introducing me to my first skull. 2. As Margreta de Grazia points out, "it is the very anonymity of the remains which frees Hamlet to flesh them out." She also provides an elegant analysis of the scene's engagement with class hierarchies, a dynamic which is exacerbated, rather than smoothed over, in the nineteenth-century narratives I have collected below (de Grazia 2007, 136; 129-57). 3. Skulls properties appear in The Revenger's Tragedy, The Atheist's Tragedy, and The White Devil. For a full list, see Dessen and Thomson 1999. Later plays such as The Revenger's Tragedy pushed the conceit of re-animating bodily remains to its furthest extreme and eventually fell out of favor with post-Restoration audiences, but Hamlet's more subtle treatment of the subject became increasingly popular as the centuries wore on. Textual references to Hamlet are to the Arden 3 edition. 4. In addition to the broader theme of death's attack on individuality, the scene seems to be addressing one of the particular problems associated with bodily remains in Shakespeare's London. As in other early modern cities, bones were frequently moved from dirt graves to charnel houses to make room for fresh corpses. The bodies of aristocrats were generally kept safe from such violation, surrounded by layers of stone and brass, though in the case of the unfortunate Ophelia, anxieties about her unceremonious funeral are echoed by the prince's mistreatment of Polonius's corpse and by the violation of Ophelia's grave. All these abuses are, in turn, shown up as abuses by Hamlet's remark about the way the gravedigger degrades the seriousness of his work: "How the knave jowls it to th' ground, as if 'twere Cain's jawbone, that did the first murder" (5.1.72-73). 5. My thinking about the stage history of Hamlet is very much indebted to Aebischer's work on the play. 6. For a broader semiotic reading of the skull's function, see Teague 1991. Teague argues persuasively that the skull takes on multiple resonances

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in the scene, the memento mori being only one of them (23-25). 7. Graham Holderness has pointed out that the skull property in Hamlet is not an anonymous memento mori but "an individualized skull, the recognizable remains of someone known and loved" (Holderness 2007, 227). This gloss on Garber's reading is an important one, but I remain unconvinced that in performance, the skull is necessarily individualized as Yorick. 8. See Holderness 1998 and Hodgdon 1998. 9. Garrick is considered the founder of modern bardolatry. He celebrated the first Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford in 1769. For a more detailed discussion of nineteenth-century stage relics, see Williamson 2007. 10. Acknowledging this tension, the rare books librarians at the University of Pennsylvania lent the skull out to a group of students in the mid- 1990s for a production of The Revenger's Tragedy (Traister 2000, 76). 11. I am thinking here of Igor Kopytoff's discussion of an object's life history (Kopytoff 1986). 12. Recent conversations with Daniel Traister suggest that John Reed's skull is identical with the Furness skull. The object is now "on view at the Walnut Street Theatre downtown, where it memorializes its donor, who, when alive, wanted his skull, at least, to achieve stage immortality" (private correspondence January 6, 2009). In the 1990s, another outsider, Jonathan Hartmann, willed his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company after being refused admission as an actor. He specified that his skull was to have its own billing: "the skull of Yorick is played by the skull of Jonathan Hartmann" (Lister 1995). 13. As Howard Marchitello argues, "[i]n playing Yorick, Tchaikovsky's skull will achieve such an immortality — but only to the degree to which the skull continues to embody Tchaikovsky" (Marchitello 1997, 125). 14. Some productions, such as Kenneth Branagh's 1999 film version, even go so far as to consciously alter the skull property to indicate its uniqueness. Branagh provides a flashback of young Hamlet sitting on the clown's lap, and gives Yorick's skull buck teeth to match those of the actor, Ken Dodd. Clearly separated from the five ordinary skulls strewn about the graveyard, Yorick's head gets its own close-up, so that neither Hamlet nor the audience can sustain any doubts about its provenance. Behind Branagh's personalizing of the skull property is the desire to privilege the spirit of Hamlet's monologue, to assert that objects will somehow retain the traces of living persons — especially Shakespearean persons. But the life history of Ken Dodd's skull did not end here; after the shoot, the producers presented Dodd with the skull as a memento (Aebischer 2004, 96). Thus the manufactured skull

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became the relic of a particular performance, associated not only with Ken Dodd but with Branagh himself, and through Branagh with the entire pantheon of Shakespearean acting. 15. Bate also picks up on the presence of multiple skulls on stage, remarking that "[t]o focus on whether this one skull is real or not is to forget that at least three skulls are called for by the text" (Bate 2008).

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale. 2004. Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. 1903. Ponkapog Papers. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. Bate, Jonathan. 2008. "How David Tennant's Hamlet skullduggery backfired." Guardian Theatre Blog. 3 December. Access World News. Carlson, Marvin. 2001. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cook, Dutton. 1883. "On the Stage: Studies of Theatrical History and the Actor's Art". 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington. de Grazia, Margreta. 2007. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 3 Dessen, Alan, and Leslie Thomson. 1999. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickens, Charles. 1889. All the Year Round. 23 February. Doran, John. 1865. "Their Majestie's Servants": Annals of the English Stage from Betterton to Edmund Kean. New York: W. J. Widdleton. Ellsler, John Adams. 1950. The Stage Memories of John A. Ellsler. Edited by Effie Ellsler Weston. Cleveland: The Rowfant Club. Friend, Tad. 2006. "Afterlife Department: Skullduggery." New Yorker. 9 October. 29-30. Garber, Marjorie. 1981. "'Remember Me': Memento Mori Figures in Shakespeare's Plays." Renaissance Drama 12: 3-25.

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Gilroy, Paul. 1998. "Race Ends Here." Ethnic and Racial Studies 21.5: 838-47. Hall, Peter. 1984. Peter Hall's Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle. Edited by John Goodwin. London: Petard Productions. Hodgdon, Barbara. 2006. "Shopping in the archives: material memories." In Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance. Edited by Peter Holland. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 135-67. Hodgdon, Barbara. 1998. The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Holderness, Graham. 2007. "'I Covet Your Skull': Death and Desire in Hamlet." Shakespeare Survey 60: 223-36. Holderness, Graham. 1988. The Shakespeare Myth. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process." In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 64-94. Lister, David. 1995. "Yorick, I'll play his skull!" The Independent. 1 March. Access World News. Macready, Charles. 1976. The Journal of William Charles Macready, 1832-1851. Edited by J. C. Trewin. London: Longman's. Marchitello, Howard. 1997. Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Players, The. 1905. Catalogue of relics in safes belonging to The Players. New York: Devinne Press. Players, The. 1896. Catalogue of relics in safes belonging to The Players. 23 April. New York: Devinne Press. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Rutter, Carol Chillington. 2006. "'Her first remembrance from the Moor': Actors and the Materials of Memory." In Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance. Edited by Peter Holland. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 168-206.

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Shakespeare, William. 2006. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London and New York: Routledge. Sher, Antony. 2007. "You don't have to be mad to be a great actor . . . but it helps." The Guardian. 24 May. Access World News. Smith, David. 2008. "Pianist's skull plays the jester." The Observer. Access World News. Sofer, Andrew. 2003. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Spinrad, Phoebe. 1984. "Memento Mockery: Some Skulls on the Renaissance Stage." Explorations in Renaissance Culture 10: 1-11. Sprague, Arthur Colby. 1963. Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Business in His Plays, 1660-1905. New York: Russell & Russell. Teague, Frances. 1991. Shakespeare's Speaking Properties. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Thomson, Peter. 1983. Shakespeare's Theatre. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Traister, Daniel. 2000. "The Furness Memorial Library." The Penn Library Collections at 250: From Franklin to the Web. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Library. 61-79. Urkowitz, Steven. 1986. "'Well-Sayd Olde Mole': Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions." Shakespeare Study Today: The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Lectures. Edited by Georgianna Ziegler. New York: AMS. 37-70. Vandenhoff, George. 1860. Leaves from an Actor's Note-Book; with Reminiscences and Chit-Chat of the Green-Room and the Stage, in England and America. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Williamson, Elizabeth. 2007. "Useful and Fancy Articles: Relics of the Nineteenth-century Stage." Shakespeare International Yearbook 7 (Fall): 233-55.

ABSTRACT | SKULLS AS STAGE RELICS | NINETEENTH-CENTURY SKULLS: DESTABILIZING THEATRICAL LINEAGE | TWENTIETH-CENTURY SKULLS: STAGING AUTHENTICITY | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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© Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2020

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Filming The Taming of the Shrew in Franco's (/current) Dictatorship: La fierecilla domada

JUAN F. CERDÁ, UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA (/previous)

ABSTRACT | THE PEOPLE BEHIND LA FIERECILLA DOMADA | FILMING THE TAMING OF (/about) THE SHREW IN FRANCO'S DICTATORSHIP | (A) INITIAL (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS | (B) AN EXTRA WEDDING SCENE AND CATALINA'S DECENCY | (C) A KISS TO PROVE A WOMAN | (D) TAMING PROCESSES: THE RIVER AND CAVE SCENES | VISUAL (/archive) PLEASURE, INTERPELLATION, AND IDEOLOGY IN LA FIERECILLA DOMADA | CODA | FILMOGRAPHY | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES

ABSTRACT In Sam Taylor's film of The Taming of the Shrew (1923), Mary Pickford winked at the camera after Kate's submission speech, linking the start of Shakespeare's sound film career to a tradition of interpreting The Taming of the Shrew within the boundaries of modern sexual correctness. As films and theater productions started to mitigate or expose Katherina's denigrating submission, in 1956 Spain provided the optimal context for an overtly doctrinal and regressive rewriting of the initial text. This essay describes how La fierecilla domada appropriates Shakespeare's play to reinforce a conservative view of national, social, religious, and sexual identity under the Franco dictatorship. The essay explores some of the connections between the film's production team and the regime, then analyzes the filmic text's (re)vision of Shakespeare within the context of the Spanish dictatorship.

"Set Speeches, high expressions; and what's worse, / In a true Comedy, politique discourse." — John Fletcher, Prologue to The Woman's Prize http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 1 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

Analysis of The Taming of the Shrew's representation of gender and power has been enlarged by critical works that have put a renewed emphasis on contextualizing Shakespearean drama within standing ideological parameters at the time of production.1 Still, investigation of male/female relations within the established order of Elizabethan rule have led to a multiplicity of critical positionings. In this way, contrary to the new historicist perception of Shakespeare's Shrew as an ideological vehicle for the perpetuation of dominant patriarchal discourses, a number of critics have underlined those elements that characterize the play as a much more subversive cultural product. By focusing on the play's farcical elements, Katherina's exposure of marriage as "a sexual exchange in which women are exploited for their use-value as producers" (Newman 1986, 94), the possibility of an ironical reading of Katherina's submission speech, the open-endedness of the play's incomplete metatheatrical frame, the ambivalent overtones provided by boy actors on the Elizabethan stage, and the ambiguous meaning of Lucentio's closing line — to name just a few elements at work in the play's characteristic polysemy — The Taming of the Shrew has been made to illustrate a more complex gender scenario than that advanced initially by new historicism.2 In agreement with Terry Eagleton's definition of ideology as "never a simple reflection of a ruling class's ideas," but a "complex phenomenon, which may incorporate conflicting, even contradictory, views of the world" (1976, 6-7), critics have subsequently privileged the idea that The Taming of the Shrew is capable of containing disparate ideological messages.3

While the discussion seems far from closure, in the meantime, questions raised regarding the function of the play within Elizabethan gender parameters may serve as point of departure for a broader exploration of how cultural objects relate to the conditions in which they were produced. In this way, recent debates regarding the contextualization of Shakespeare's play may prove central to an analysis of Antonio Román's La fierecilla domada, a rewriting of The Taming of the Shrew that was produced in 1955 and premiered in Spanish movie theaters in 1956. The relationship between La fierecilla domada and the dominant political configuration at the time of production is at the heart of this essay, which seeks to explain not only how the film rewrites Shakespeare's play by privileging its regressive potential, but also how it participates in the promotion of the dominant falangist ideology — that is, how the film can be seen as a product of its Francoist context.4

Stephen Greenblatt's statement that "Shakespeare's theatre was not isolated by its wooden walls, nor was it merely the passive reflector of social and http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 2 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

ideological forces that lay entirely outside it" (1992, 97) can be extended to La fierecilla domada as an active cultural agent in the context of Franco's regime. At the same time during Franco's dictatorship, other cultural objects were challenging the regime's ideological parameters. La fierecilla domada, however, proves symptomatic of the early stages of a regime so unthreatened by social pressure that it allowed almost no space for cultural subversion. It is, then, the ultimate aim of this essay to arrive at an interpretative scenario that accounts more precisely for how, in 1955, the Spanish dictatorial regime provided the optimal context for a singularly patriarchal film version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

In order to support my argument, I will first consider the conditions under which the film was produced, contextualizing La fierecilla domada within the Francoist film industry. To illustrate the ideological boundaries within which the film was produced, the discussion will take into account other works by La fierecilla domada's director (Antonio Román), producer (Benito Perojo), set designer (Siegfried Burmann), and scriptwriter (Alfonso Paso) to establish the film as characteristic of the consenting post- Civil War first wave cinema, prior to the mild cultural apertura or relaxation of control of cultural production during the late 1950s and 1960s. The essay continues with discussion of the film's representation of gender roles within the boundaries of Francoist ideology. This section considers how the film mediates some of the concerns of Franco's administration, particularly its policies on gender and morality, and analyzes how within these parameters, the film functions as an ideological vehicle. Analyzing La fierecilla domada through seminal works by Louis Althusser and Laura Mulvey, the essay closes with a revision of some of the questions raised throughout the discussion and reconsiders the extent to which the film participates in the circulation of the Franco dictatorship's dominant gender models.

THE PEOPLE BEHIND LA FIERECILLA DOMADA The film credits of La fierecilla domada reveal a large team of scriptwriters: José Luis Colina and the director himself, then M. Villegas López and J. M. Arozamena (secondary position in the title credits), and finally, Alfonso Paso and Mariano Ozores for "additional dialogue." Bearing in mind that it took up to six writers to deliver the script, together with over fifty other people (twenty-one actors and actresses, and another thirty-one people, including technicians and the production team), it would be hard to argue that La fierecilla domada is one man's vision of Shakespeare's Shrew. From this perspective, La fierecilla domada should be seen as a collaboration by many individuals and, inevitably, as a product

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of the social, political, and cultural conditions at the time of production.

The conditions of the Spanish film industry during Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975) call for an examination of the relationship between the film's collective authorship and the socio-political structure of Spanish systems of cultural production. Franco's dictatorial regime imposed a production system in which the hiring of actors and technicians would necessarily go through the Guild of Cinematography while, at the same time, the Censorship Committee supervised, and could alter, cut, or prohibit the release of a film (Moreno Sáez 1999, 185). Without clear censorship rules or guidelines, filmmakers were left to square their own artistic interests with a range of ideological pressures long before the films were approved, at a later stage in production. In this way, the production of the film from the beginning of the creative process in 1955 to what Spanish cinemas showed in La fierecilla domada's premiere of 1956 can be seen as a negotiation with both the English text and socio-political conditions in Spain after the Civil War. Thus, the relatively autonomous status traditionally attributed to art within the ideological context in which it is produced was, in this context, mediated by the state's control of cultural production. The administration's control over and regulation of the Spanish film industry initially resulted in the concentration of cultural production in the hands of a limited group of people, a model that paralleled the autarchic distribution of power at the state level.

Antonio Román, director of La fierecilla domada, was — together with fellow directors José Luis Sáenz de Heredia and Rafael Gil — part of the "important trio of Spanish post-Civil War filmmakers"(Pérez Gómez et al. 1978, 273; emphasis in original). Román's partnership with Sáenz de Heredia, a central figure of Spanish cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, and his affinities with the dictatorial regime enabled Román in these two decades to direct over twenty films and to work on several scripts, short films, and other collaborations. For example, in 1941, together with the head of the state, Caudillo5 Francisco Franco, Román co-wrote the script of Raza (Race, 1942), the dictator's personal project, which was directed and also co-written by Sáenz de Heredia. Other war films by Antonio Román include Escuadrilla (Squadron/Troop, 1941), Boda en el infierno (Wedding in Hell, 1942), and Los últimos de Filipinas (The Last Ones in the Philipines, 1945), all examples of triumphalist propaganda that earned Román both awards and public funding. These war movies were promptly considered "of national interest," an exclusive category for those films that embodied the regime's idea of nation and national culture, which helped to subsidize the director's prolific career within the post-Civil War film industry. Like most productive directors of the time, Román's filmography http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 4 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

is varied, ranging from war films to literary adaptations, crime thrillers, bull-fighting movies, or light comedies such as Congreso en Sevilla (also 1955), a film devoted to showing the potential of Southern Spain for foreign tourism that starred Carmen Sevilla, the leading actress of La fierecilla domada.6

Benito Perojo, producer of La fierecilla domada, began his career adapting novels and plays for the silent screen in the 1910s and 1920s. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Perojo directed three of the five films produced by the Bando Nacional, the victorious faction of the Spanish conflict led by the future dictator Francisco Franco. Perojo shot these films at the UFA studios in Berlin during Hitler's dictatorship, and they premiered in Spain after the Civil War had ended (Caparrós Lera 1983, 25). As producer, Perojo released Sangre en Castilla (1950), one of the many pseudo-historical films that addressed Spain's War of Independence against France as a means of reconstructing the national past, a "clear-cut nationalist reference in tune with the xenophobic mind-set that characterises the administration's preferences" (Heredero 1993, 179).7 Together with other early 1950s films such as Agustina de Aragón (1950), La leona de Castilla (1951), and Alba de América (1951), Perojo's Sangre de Castilla (1950) exemplifies the consolidation of the national-historical genre: The victors have to reassert themselves in their victory and not let anyone forget. Even more so in the case of Spain, where the war was fought against other Spaniards who would continue to be a part of the country. Post-Civil War cinema had to insist on victory, make it palpable and constant. (Vizcaíno Casas 1976, 105)8 Like a number of English and Soviet post-World War II films, these productions idiosyncratically focus on rewriting past events of Spanish history — namely, the expansive and culturally prestigious Spanish sixteenth century, the War of Independence against France, and the recently concluded Civil War itself (Caparrós Lera 1983, 33).

German artistic director Siegfried Burmann, who arrived in Spain in the 1910s and also worked in the UFA studios in Berlin during the Spanish Civil War,9 was responsible for the set designs in all the national-historical films mentioned above, and also those of La fierecilla domada. Burmann's aesthetics and his use of architecture have been harshly described as the key "imperial set designs in the moribund historical-patriotic films of the Spanish autarchy" (Heredero 1993, 143).10 Alfonso Paso — one of the six scriptwriters credited in this film — was a prolific playwright. In his early phase during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Burmann wrote drama with http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 5 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

certain social aspirations; after the Civil War, his plays exhibit a moralizing tone that exhibits a degree of servility to the ideological standards of the regime. As late as 1974, only a year before the end of Franco and his regime, Alfonso Paso wrote a discourse titled Falange y futuro (Ríos Carratalá 2003, 135, 142).11

The cases of Siegfried Burmann and Alfonso Paso illustrate that the connections established in this essay between those involved in the production of La fierecilla domada and Franco's administration do not necessarily suggest personal political affiliations. In the same way that Paso addressed social concerns before the Civil War, Burmann spent most of the 1910s, '20s, and '30s building set designs and collaborating with playwrights and theater directors of different backgrounds and ideologies.12 The underlining of connections between the film's production team and different layers of the regime is intended not to establish private political inclinations, but to illustrate the relationship between the film's conditions of production and the regime's control over the system of cultural production. Ultimately, this circuit can be seen to have a direct relation to the film as artistic product, for the evident ties between Antonio Román (director and script writer of La fierecilla domada), Benito Perojo (producer), Siegfried Burmann (set designer) and Alfonso Paso (additional dialogue) and the established ideology of the dictatorship (or the dictator himself, as in the case of Román) are typical of the configuration of the Spanish film industry at the time.

In 1938, a year before the end of the Civil War, Franco's alternative illegitimate government (Junta Técnica del Estado Español), a self- imposed shadow administration during the period of the Spanish Republic, had already created the National Department of Cinematography.13 Two of the main functions of this department were to make sure that films were produced according to the "spiritual values of our country" and to supervise the production of news broadcasts and propaganda documentaries (Fernández Cuenca 1972, 238). After Franco won the Civil War and the Junta Técnica del Estado Español became Spain's only government, this Department of Cinematography supervised every Spanish film production. Thus, Spanish film production during the 1940s and 1950s may be analyzed in terms of the regime's dominant discourses, since films, like other objects in post-Civil War Spanish culture, were controlled by the selective mechanisms enforced by the administration. Reactions to this situation, significantly, are rare. Surcos (Furrows), a film directed by José Antonio Nieves Conde in 1951, has been credited as the only Spanish film in this period to address the problems of Spanish society (rural immigration to the cities, poverty, the black market, and prostitution; Aragüez Rubio http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 6 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

2005, 130). Together with Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist, 1955), Nieves Conde's film can be seen as a singular attempt to test the boundaries of the regime, for only during the late 1950s and 1960s did filmmakers like Carlos Saura and Luis García Berlanga start providing alternative aesthetic and ideological discourses to mainstream Spanish cinema.

At the same time, La fierecilla domada can be seen as a vehicle for one of the most successful actress-singers of the time. The film is a product explicitly designed for and directed at an audience of devotees, eager to watch Carmen Sevilla sing and perform on the screen. Sevilla belonged to "the forefront of a kind of cinema rooted in the public's taste and, above all, in the administration's preferences" (Heredero 1993, 93).14 Sevilla and actresses like her monopolized both the film and the music industry, with their songs being played constantly on the radio at a time when Spanish television was only in its early stages, and not yet accessible to most Spanish families.15 La fierecilla domada's poster — where Carmen Sevilla is twice the size of her male counterpart, Alberto Closas — evokes the paradoxical matriarchy of the Spanish star-system within the patriarchal system of film production, where the popularity of prominent female figures during the first half of the 1950s exceeds that of any other actor or singer at the time. These actress-singers often play well-differentiated roles within the cultural parameters of the Franco dictatorship. In constrast to Lola Flores, a folk/flamenco singer and dancer from the Gypsy ethnic http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 7 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

community known for her intensity and racialized sensuality, Carmen Sevilla has been described as a "prodigy of feminine honesty" (Taibo 2002, 196). Both figures, however, were useful to the regime for their iconic potential: Carmen Sevilla portrayed the chastity of the decent Spanish girl of Catholic morals, the regime's model of femininity, while Lola Flores embodied the (stereotypical) representation of the Spanish gypsy-woman, a type that embodied romantic clichés ranging from dissident wildness to subversive passion. Flores provided the sort of controlled subversion that the dictatorship was willing to allow when she became, in 1954, the first woman to show a hint of the shape of her breasts after the film's director reached an agreement with the Censorship Committee.16 In turn, as an iconic embodiment of prudish morality, chaste love, and measure, Carmen Sevilla's public image was appropriated by the Franco administration when the actress visited the Spanish troops deployed at Sidi Ifni (Morocco) at Christmas in 1957. The contrast between Sevilla's eroticism, in this context, and her role as Spain's chaste sweetheart is central to La fierecilla domada.

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FILMING THE TAMING OF THE SHREW IN FRANCO'S DICTATORSHIP In a tradition that goes as far back as Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio, La fierecilla domada includes no Induction, framing devices, or alternatives to the Sly character, while the Bianca plot is rewritten as a short side-story, so that practically the whole film — running time a little under ninety minutes — centers around the relationship between Catalina and Beltrán, the film's equivalents for Katherina and Petruchio. This "free version of the work of William Shakespeare" (title credits) includes practically none of Shakespeare's lines. The writers devised a script that contains only a few verbal echoes of the English source, as in Catalina and Beltrán's debate about the sun and the moon from Shrew's 4.5.17 In turn, parallels with the play are provided at the level of plot, Shakespeare's Shrew being the source for some of the film's dramatic scenarios, such as Beltrán's odd appearance and behavior at his return for the wedding, Catalina's starvation and insomnia during the taming process, or the rewriting of some of the play's quarrels between the two main characters. At the same time, La fierecilla domada alters The Taming of the Shrew's historical setting and location. Through a mixture of Burmann's studio settings and outdoor locations, costumes, and the occasional use of certain archaic inflections of the Spanish language, La fierecilla domada places the narrative sometime during the Spanish late-Middle Ages. As the characters disclose at several points in the film, the action is also set in the east of Spain. In this fictional journey back from the 1950s, perhaps the closest available points of reference for the audience were precisely the national pseudo-historical films by Perojo — which bear some aesthetic resemblance to La fierecilla domada and which were produced within similar material conditions — or the historical Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s shown in Spanish movie-theaters of the time.

(A) INITIAL (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS

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La fierecilla domada starts with Beltrán (Petruchio) leaving for Gandía to meet with the merchant Bautista of Martos after saying good-bye to three young women, possibly transitory partners from Beltrán's previous night in town. Even his squire's one-night stand falls in love with Beltrán when she meets him briefly, just before he resumes his journey onto Bautista's household. These opening moments are charged with harmless sexual innuendo that sets an initial pseudo-erotic tone, which will increase moderately as the film develops. Right after the opening scene — running time three minutes — La fierecilla domada presents Beltrán/Petruchio and Catalina/Katherina's first encounter: Beltrán finds a deer lying by a tree; when he intends to take the prey, a figure in the distance shoots an arrow and approaches to fight Beltrán and claim the deer. After they wrestle on the ground, Beltrán discovers his enemy's identity: Beltrán: You are a woman! Catalina: Just as if I were a man! (She gets on top of him and threatens Beltrán with a knife to his throat.) And now, do you think I need to be a man to win this game? Insolent idiot: I could kill you. Beltrán: If you want to kill me, put the knife away and keep staring at me. That would be enough. Catalina: Keep your compliments to yourself. I'm not one of those who melts with a few words.18

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From the perspective of gender power relations, this first encounter represents a subversion of the patriarchal model, as Catalina is shown wearing men's clothes, skilfully riding her horse, and defeating Beltrán in physical confrontation. Furthermore, Catalina's initial representation is constructed through a re-enactment of the myth of Diana (she is shown carrying a bow and arrows, hunting deer with her hounds, and riding a horse). Through the film's initial presentation of Catalina through the symbolism of the goddess of hunting, the character can be perceived as incorporating features associated with the goddess of chastity, all of which can be related to the casting of Carmen Sevilla, with her status as icon of modest femininity, in the role of Catalina. Shakespeare's Shrew, in fact, contains a passage in which Petruchio compares Katherina to Diana: Petruchio: Did ever Dian so become a grove As Kate this chamber with her princely gait? O be thou Dian, and let her be Kate, And then let Kate be chaste and Dian sportful! (2.1.248-51) Catalina's presentation reverses the sexual connotations in Petruchio's lines. Identifying Catalina and Diana, the film reinforces the assumption of Catalina's virtuous nature.

In the next scene, as Catalina rides boastfully into her father's castle, screaming for the servants to attend her, Bautista (Baptista) informs her that a lord — Don Mario de Acebedo — is asleep waiting for Catalina's return in order to marry her. This addition to the Shakespearean plot allows the film to demonstrate Catalina's rebelliousness when, once in her chamber, she explains to her maids how she has no intention of marrying: Maid 1: With all the gentlemen that you have rejected in a month, there'd be plenty to please every single woman in this kingdom. Maid 2: And that Don Mario de Acebedo looks no worse than the other suitors. Catalina: What do I care about his looks? Handsome or ugly, cross-eyed or bowlegged, he'll turn out to be like the rest: a man. And what is a man? Maid 1: I, madam, only know by hearsay. Maid 2: And I've only been told about it. Maid 3: And these two have told me. (They giggle.) Catalina: Men think that they were born to rule women, but if we know how to win the first battle we will always have them at our feet. Maid 1: (Sighing.) I would like to be ruled. Maid 2: (Sighing.) That must be so beautiful.

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Maid 3: (Sighing.) Yes, indeed. Catalina: You fools! The most beautiful thing is to defeat a man who insists on ruling us. Only if you knew what I just did . . .19 In the context of the Franco dictatorship, the film's initial scenes can be seen as a subversive vindication of female independence, constructing Catalina as a character who exceeds the boundaries of gender and social conventions. Catalina's words during her first confrontation with Beltrán and throughout the scene with her maids actually go beyond the initial Shakespearean source, for the English text contains no such patent inscription of feminine assertiveness (it may even contain misandry). Partly due to Shakespeare's investment in multiple plots, Katherina does not focalize representation as much as Catalina does in La fierecilla domada. In the play, the Bianca sub-plot has a more predominant role but, more significantly, Petruchio delivers almost twice as many lines as Katherina. In fact, the male suitors of Shakespeare's play double their feminine counterparts in text lines. By doing away with Sly's Induction and reducing the Bianca sub-plot, La fierecilla domada provides a more formally balanced exploration of the Catalina/Beltrán relationship.

In her role as Catalina, Carmen Sevilla monopolizes the screen at several points in the film. For example, during the scene between Catalina and her maids, Carmen Sevilla strips out of her Amazon clothes while she delivers a feminist manifesto. There is just a suggestion here of nudity as her body,

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which is first covered by a sheet and then hidden behind a folding screen, is washed by her servants. As she grows more and more animated explaining how she subdued Beltrán, the extremely long towel enwrapping her body slips back to reveal her shoulders. Apparently, the scene contains nothing that the Censorship Committee would find reprehensible: Catalina's words are moderate and demure, the big sheet — more like a Roman toga — reaches her ankles; her maids, arguably acting as a choir of overdressed nuns, add little to the erotic potential of the scene. Still, the film's negotiation of sexual innuendo and rigid morality is difficult to assess from a contemporary point of view. Bearing in mind the limited room for maneuver in the Spanish film industry and the film's repeated investment in framing Carmen Sevilla's body, it can be argued that this scene — together with the river and the cave scenes — stands close to the margins of the censorship standards while, at the same time, revealing a certain prudishness in the way the actress struggles to keep the towel in its place. In any case, so much for progressive discourse: just as Catalina finishes explaining to her maids how she confronted and defeated Beltrán, one of them asks: Maid 1: That's terrible, madam! Was he very strong and brave? Catalina: I barely noticed him. I only remember that . . . (Pause. With a tender expression on her face.) . . . that he was tall, brown- haired, green eyes, with a beaked nose, well-defined eyebrows, and a mole. (Pointing.) Right here, under this ear. Maid 2: Oh, madam, what things would you say . . . (Ironically.) if you had noticed him. Catalina: (Angrily.) Now, that's enough!!20 Only ten minutes into the film, Catalina accidentally reveals her true feelings: to her own surprise and distaste, she has fallen for the macho Don Juan.

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The concept of women and their place in Spanish society in the eyes of those in power during Franco's dictatorship has been widely covered by recent Spanish social historiography. In 1939, the dictator Francisco Franco delegated the education of women to an organization called Sección Femenina (Feminine Section/Faction).21 Spanish Civil War specialist Encarna Nicolás Marín define three fundamental principles underlying this organization's ideology: (a) A specific political education, promoting learning guided to create good housewives, differentiating educational contents for men and women. (b) Religious and political indoctrination since, together with Catholic and Falangist principles, there is a practical goal: to make women useful to the system through their work within the family, the basic cell for the continuity of the dictatorial regime. (c) The reiterative circulation of a feminine model characterized by its political passivity and absolute withdrawal from public life, arguing that women's only natural activity is to look after their loved-ones. Politics and labor were the sole province of men. (Nicolás Marín 1991, 32)22 Beltrán's reaction to Catalina's initial threat during their first confrontation can be explained within this context. While Catalina holds the rapier to his throat, the broad grin on Alberto Closas's face, together with his scripted

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answer — "'if you want to kill me, put the knife away and keep staring at me" — shows how, despite her initial assertive representation, Catalina has been constructed to convey no serious threat within the patriarchal narrative of the film. It is, in fact, Beltrán's deep-voiced, disempowering response that constitutes a threat to Catalina's rebellious aspirations. Even though Carmen Sevilla will maintain a confrontational and self-assertive tone in the next scene and throughout, only ten minutes into the film the disclosure of her feelings towards Beltrán undermines the premise that this shrew can maintain her independence.

(B) AN EXTRA WEDDING SCENE AND CATALINA'S DECENCY Before Catalina and Beltrán continue the gender battle initiated in the film's first scene, Román's version of The Taming of the Shrew introduces an addition to Shakespeare's plot. Right after the initial hunting scene, at her return to the household castle, Catalina is informed that her father has arranged her marriage to Don Álvaro de Acebedo. This scene continues to build on Catalina's impersonation of chastity and Catholic morality while it explores the titillating potential of the actress on the screen. For the wedding scene, Carmen Sevilla is dressed in a luxurious white bridal gown, in which she finally shows both her shoulders and the upper part of her breasts. Don Álvaro approaches Catalina, kisses her hand, then begins moving up along her arm; to prevent Don Alvaro touching her skin, Catalina stops him right around the end of her glove. Then, just as she is about to be married, she decides to test Don Álvaro by making up a story and observing his reaction. Catalina explains that her father had previously sold her to a Moorish King in exchange for a large stock of wine: Catalina: The blackest truth, the most frightening: six long years at the Caliph's harem, subdued to his caprice, undergoing the most shameful humiliation. How scared I was when night came until my escape put an end to my torture. Bautista: But Catalina, my child, behave! What are these gentlemen going to say? Don Álvaro's father: We are going to say that, whether the Caliph story is true or not, our noble Castilian lineage will not tolerate dishonour or mockery. Don Álvaro: Father, hold! Dishonour and mockery I can stand, but if her honour is stained . . . Catalina: The stain will be on your face, you rogue! (Throws an inkwell at Don Álvaro.) To believe such a story. . . How dare you suspect my good name, you crook!23 In her role as Catalina, Carmen Sevilla is living up to both her audience's

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and the regime's expectations of her as an icon of chaste femininity. Her selection for the part, together with the way in which the Shakespearean text is rewritten, establishes an intimate relationship between the film and the social requisites of the dictatorial regime, since sex had always been one of the main taboos for the administration, mostly due to the abiding influence of the Catholic Church on Spanish morality. As Nicolás Marín points out, "civil and church governors shared the vigilance over morality, prohibiting balls and dances during the Carnival and other festivities, films with distasteful scenes, and inspecting dark corners in parks and public gardens so that couples would not commit indecorous acts" (Nicolás Marín 1991, 84; emphasis in original).24 Female morality was fundamental for the dictatorship, so while the educational system, media, and ecclesiastical authorities constantly promoted prototypical images of femininity, the administration enforced laws to underwrite this model. For example, in 1938 the Birth Rate National Prizes promoted procreation within married couples; in 1941, the regime passed severe laws against abortion and pro- abortion groups and in 1944, laws against adultery; in 1958, women were allowed to be witnesses in a judicial process, and remarried widows regained parental rights over previous children, but the law did not change those articles that forced women to owe obedience to their husbands and follow them wherever they wanted to settle the household, while husbands continued to be the only possible legal representation of married women before a judge (Sánchez López 1990, 44). From the pulpits, sermons were read against lipstick, short skirts, nail polish, indecent hairdos, bike-riding, and figure-skating: sexuality — always restricted to the marital institution — was, in essence, a necessary evil limited to procreation, a conception that stigmatized female sexual pleasure completely (Ruiz Carnicer 2001, 122). This anxiety to restrict the social role of women to procreation and domesticity is manifest at different moments in La fierecilla domada. It is perhaps best exemplified at the point where Bautista (Catalina's father) addresses the issue by accusing Catalina: "Only a woman like you can refuse to make me a grandfather."25

(C) A KISS TO PROVE A WOMAN After Don Álvaro doubts her chastity, Catalina destroys the wedding banquet, throwing plates at her failed suitor, smashing a cream pie in his father's face, and throwing a copper tray at the wedding official. In the meantime, Beltrán has arrived at the castle and has been watching Catalina's brutish manners, yet while everyone else is terrified by Catalina's violent rampage, he continues to show a smile on his face. After settling business with Bautista, Beltrán ignores Catalina, walking past her to leave the castle. But just when he is about to reach the exit without looking at

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Catalina, she says: Catalina: Father, let him go. His throat is still delicate from being close to my cold steel. Beltrán: Well, it is you, the forest hunter! Forgive me if I didn't recognize you, since you're wearing women's clothes. Catalina: Well, I am a woman! Beltrán: That we'll have to see. (Goes up the stairs and kisses Catalina. Shift in music.) Well, yes. She is a woman. Good-bye, gentlemen! (Turning to Catalina.) And let the party continue.26 In the scene, Beltrán kisses Catalina while she tries to resist. Then, the extradiegetic music changes from the theme used in action scenes — bearing overtones of tension and distress — to the joyous main theme of the film, just as Catalina gives in to her repressed feelings for Beltrán and passionately kisses him back. Reenacting this contradictory combination of pseudo-eroticism and rigid morality, after Catalina moves from resistance to submission the film shows a reaction shot of her anger and guilt as Beltrán leaves the castle. Thus, the scene reveals to the audience that Catalina does not accept that her feelings for Beltrán are stronger than her desire to be a freely independent woman. In this way, the relationship between Catalina and Beltrán is not represented as a mutual understanding between the couple, but as the woman's inability to maintain her independence when confronted with the male figure.

Catalina's desires are represented as being in conflict with her rebellious attitude, yet these moments of weakness are initially constructed in the film as brief attacks of temporary insanity. They, of course, undermine Catalina's capacity to stand as a representative of a truly independent womanhood, yet her aggressiveness is maintained throughout the film, prompting a serious confrontation between the two main characters. This portrayal of Catalina can be seen as an especially perverse variant of gender relations, since by portraying her overall as an independent woman http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 17 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

with occasional outbreaks of repressed feelings towards Beltrán, the film is showing how Catalina is betraying her true dependent and submissive self. Catalina's submission and dependence on Beltrán are not presented as a matter of social circumstance — she belongs to a wealthy family with plenty of resources for her to live independently — but as an outcome of women's true essence: their very need for male discipline, support, and dependence. As one of the texts written by the Sección Femenina affirms: Nothing is more pleasing to male psychology than women's submission, and nothing is more pleasing to female psychology than submissive surrender to male authority [. . .] Let us conceal or diminish our presence at work. Let us be little ants, graceful and kind [. . .] Men have been very competent at work and have already formed an opinion about things [. . .] Why try to impress them with our improvised achievements, if we know we are offending their judgement and their tradition of superiority? (Werner 1942, 55-57)27 In La fierecilla domada, the taming process and the submission scene are rewritten through such a direct and unequivocal depiction of male supremacy/female dependence that the absence of fissures in the film's patriarchal narrative arguably exceeds both Shakespeare's initial text and many subsequent twentieth-century productions of The Shrew.

(D) TAMING PROCESSES: THE RIVER AND CAVE SCENES La fierecilla domada's rewriting of Shrew is developed further by providing different comic scenarios while the fight between Catalina and Beltrán continues. After a series of slapstick incidents, Beltrán finally marries Catalina, and in the meantime, Blanca announces her wedding with Lisardo, a servant who turns out to be a lord in disguise. Pretending to be mad, Beltrán takes Catalina to his castle after the wedding to start the taming process. Their confrontation continues when Beltrán harmlessly wrestles Catalina in a hay-barn, providing in the last few minutes of the film one final scene of dispute and erotic innuendo. Catalina's resistance to Beltrán is transformed into an erotic game of possession when, in the "river scene," Catalina finally surrenders herself: half-naked behind the riverside reed-bed, Catalina asks her husband to join her.

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At this point, La fierecilla domada takes yet another detour from Shakespeare's plot line as Beltrán, after some hesitation, rejects Catalina. The film shows that Beltrán, who has been portrayed as a womanizer at different moments in the film, is reluctant to give away his autonomy and settle into the committed monogamy of marriage. Now, it is Florindo (Grumio) who acts as moral chorus when — very much in tune with the regime's prohibition against divorce — he complains: "But she is your wife, before God and men."28 Still, Beltrán has decided to take Catalina back to her father, which will only prolong the taming process. While Shakespeare's play ends with the public wager scene, for its last ten minutes La fierecilla domada moves to a solitary cave to concentrate on the Catalina/Beltrán relationship. Dispensing with the rest of the characters, the film articulates Catalina's unequivocal capitulation through a conflated version of Shrew's 4.5, which includes Petruchio and Katherina's argument over the sun and the moon and the submission speech: Catalina: You could not rule me because I would only give up my fierceness for something you could never give me: a love so great, so excessive, so fierce that your soul would not be able to contain it. (She sobs.) Beltrán: You know, I had almost believed you, but I know you too well. You would never tame your pride for ten times the love you have just described. In any case, if you really fancy this business, start by submitting to your husband. You hardly have any time: from here to Gandía. http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 19 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

[. . .] A woman who trusts her own eyes better than her husband's will never be a good wife. [. . .] Catalina: Beltrán, I don't like going back. I don't want to go back, you know? Beltrán: Why? Catalina: It is not right. No, it is not right. They [in general; the people] will slander me. They will say I am no good as a married woman. They will, I am sure. Beltrán: Well, that everyone assumed already. Catalina: Why? Beltrán: Because you are no good as a married woman. Catalina: As good as the next. Beltrán: Oh, no. What would you think of a man who ran away from risks, who wouldn't know how to fight, who didn't have a beard? Catalina: I'd think he is not a man. Beltrán: Then, what would you think of a woman who, after getting married, didn't behave as a married woman in the least. Catalina: (Caressing his face; enchantedly?) You have a beard. Beltrán: Of course. A nightingale doesn't caw. A lion doesn't cluck. A woman should not be humiliated for being a woman. To be a woman, Catalina, is to be weak, is to yearn for protection, is to know how to cradle a child, to look gently. To be a woman, Catalina, is . . . is to be frightened by a mouse. (They kiss.) [. . .] (Still raining.) Beltrán: The sun is shining brightly. Catalina: Yes, Beltrán, it is daylight now. Now I see that it's a spring morning, with the sun, the birds, and flowers. (Beltrán gives a thistle to Catalina.) And if you say that this is a rose, for me this is a rose. (They kiss.)29 For this last scene, the tone of the film, the music and the acting have transformed from the comical/farcical to the melodramatic. The film's submission scene leaves no room for alternative interpretations as the

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last ten minutes of the film are solely devoted to staging Catalina's unfaltering resignation from independent womanhood. The film's last image is a shot of the thistle — in Spanish cardo, referring to the flower but also meaning "unsocial" or "unfriendly" person — which progressively fades out into a rose right before the final credits.

By rewriting the characters of Bianca and Petruchio, as well as that of Katharina, La fierecilla domada provides two additional taming processes. The film establishes a contrast between Catalina and Blanca through their relationship with their father. In an early scene, Bautista complains about Catalina's unwillingness to marry when Blanca retorts: "I assure you that, if you give me the chance, I will give you grandchildren as frequently as nature allows."30 Taken literally, Blanca's request resembles the sermons from the Spanish Catholic Church, but the film provides evidence to doubt the reliability of Blanca's comment. The tone in the delivery of these lines and a quick close-up of Blanca's suspicious face at the end of the banquet scene discloses that she has a hidden agenda. Finally, when Bautista and Catalina leave the room, Blanca runs to meet her secret lover. In this way, just as Catalina is represented as the hallmark of chastity and decency, Blanca is portrayed through a certain lustful inappropriateness. In contrast with the potential eroticism of Carmen Sevilla — merely an "object of desire" depicted through the passive exhibition of her body — Blanca's active sexuality is, from the standpoint of the 1950s dictatorial morality, perverse and reprehensible. Subsequently, however, Blanca is redeemed and readjusted through her marriage with Lisardo. When her suitor turns out to be a lord in disguise, she is allowed to marry within her social scale and thus conform to social stability or moral convention. Thus, what the film initially presents as a truly independent, sexually autonomous character is redirected within the film's social and moral system.

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Together with Catalina's domestication and Blanca's social readjustment, Beltrán's licentiousness is also reshaped according to the permissible parameters of Francoist morality. From the beginning of the film, Beltrán has been depicted as a promiscuous womanizer, and when Catalina finally surrenders in the final twist in the film's plot, he is hesitant about accepting her. This allows the film to extend Catalina's submission, but also to stage Beltrán's redemption. In conformity with sexual standards during Franco's administration, Beltrán's sexuality is not depicted negatively, yet at the end he faces one final dilemma: having finally tamed Catalina, he has to decide whether or not he will commit to faithful marriage.

Spanish authorities in the 1950s were familiar with this kind of problematic; although much has been written about the sexual repression of women during the dictatorship, there is also a conversely distributed pattern of male sexuality during the Francoist dictatorship. The church's official guideline on male sexual education was abstinence during bachelorhood and fidelity in married life, yet the existence of a double standard for men and women was "exemplified by the existence of brothels, or Casas de Tolerancia (Tolerance Houses), which were sanctioned by the administration and considered natural outlets for men's tensions, in contrast to the prescribed purity of women, who were destined to the higher goal of taking responsibility for the future of the Spanish race" (Ruiz Carnicer 2001, 94).31 Beltrán's readjustment can be seen as an idealization of Catholic morality over the active conditions of male sexual

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conduct. In this light, with his entrance into a valid, stable partnership, Beltrán's final commitment to marriage provides the male Spanish audience with yet another model of moral readjustment. It is only then that Beltrán and Catalina are allowed to spend the night together, which is shown eloquently in the film by a shot of their clothes scattered on the floor.

In this way, La fierecilla domada provides a dogmatic reinterpretation of Shakespeare's text, where the characters and the narrative are constructed through unequivocal representations of commitment, fidelity, chastity, procreation, and submission, which were the cornerstones of the Franco regime's moral programme. Despite those critics who describe Spanish cinema in the 1940s and 1950s as purged of political discourse (Caparrós Lera 1983, 30-32), the ascription of Catholic and Francoist morality characterize La fierecilla domada as an overtly ideological cultural product. In the 1940s and '50s, religion and politics were an underlying presence in public events, so to underplay the political-religious-moral relevance of the dictatorship's cultural products would reinforce the denial that traditionally had characterized critical revision of the Spanish dictatorship, which only recently has been corrected by modern historiography. It is perhaps symptomatic that the only Spanish film version of a play by Shakespeare from the period is a patriarchal rewriting of The Shrew; considering socio-political conditions after the Civil War, it is hard to think of a better choice from the Shakespearean canon to both entertain and distract a society being reconstructed after severe fracture while simultaneously lecturing the Spanish audience with a solid moral discourse to take back home with them.

VISUAL PLEASURE, INTERPELLATION, AND IDEOLOGY IN LA FIERECILLA DOMADA La fierecilla domada presents a compensated distribution of screen time and lines of dialogue for the representation of the main characters' relationship, yet despite this formal equilibrium, the film outlines two clearly unbalanced trajectories regarding the characters' autonomy within the narrative. At the narrative level, both Catalina and Beltrán are initially represented as active agents. On the one hand, during his journey to Gandíla, Beltrán is shown as engaging in commercial activities after having seduced several women; on the other, Catalina is shown riding a horse and hunting deer with her hounds in a reenactment of the myth of Diana, and later, breaking up the frustrated wedding banquet in what proves to be her last active and autonomous scene — a little over eighteen minutes into the film. After the wedding banquet, the film's balanced narrative treatment of the two characters — already undermined by Catalina's admission of her

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attraction to Beltrán — ends. From there on, the film maintains Catalina's disempowered and passive position within the narrative.

La fierecilla domada supports Laura Mulvey's idea that, in classical or traditional cinema, a film's "narrative structure" is controlled by "an active/passive heterosexual division of labor" (2000, 488). In La fierecilla domada, this "division of labor" is literal, for Catalina's taming process entails a readjustment of the character to the duties prescribed for women during the dictatorship, which confined them to the space of the household while men provided economic sustainment. For Mulvey, this dichotomy stands at the very base of both the cinematic reification of femininity and the audience's experience of the film. Thus, although the screen time of Catalina and Beltrán is much more balanced than Katherina and Petruchio's participation in Shakespeare's play, the camera treats Carmen Sevilla and Alberto Closas in significantly different ways: that is, in La fierecilla domada Catalina is represented both narratively and visually as a passive partner to Beltrán.

Through the way in which Carmen Sevilla's body is captured by the camera, La fierecilla domada demonstrates what Mulvey refers to as cinema's recursive "highlighting [of] a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness" or ability to turn actresses into "the spectacle itself" (2000, 493). This can be observed through many of Carmen Sevilla's reaction shots, different fragments of the wedding banquet, and especially the river scene, where the film's action freezes and the camera concentrates on her performance of the film's theme song through three close-up shots of fifteen, twenty, and thirty seconds long, respectively. This visual treatment of femininity can be extended, as it is by Mulvey, to Hollywood productions of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s and to "all the cinema that fell within its sphere of influence" (2000, 484). Although previously modified by the censorship committees, Hollywood cinema in fact offered an alternative to national productions in Spanish cinemas and provided an active model for much of the Spanish film production of the time. The patriarchal gaze of traditional cinema includes a large number of film productions in these decades both in Spain and abroad, yet the film's representation of Catalina can be seen as an extension of the regime's specific social configuration, concurring with the idea that "the image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man [is taken] into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form — illusionistic narrative film" (493). Through its visual representation of the film's characters, La fierecilla domada can be related to the dominant ideological discourses at work during the time of production. According to Mulvey, cinema offers the spectator the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 24 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

possibility of a "process of identification," which can be "associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of established morality" (491). Thus, through the interrelation of two of the mechanisms involved in the spectator's experience of a film — two variations (voyeuristic and narcissistic) of Freud's notion of scopophilia — the audience is invited to obtain pleasure (a) by "using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight," or (b) through "identification with the image seen" (487). Her approach is relevant for this discussion as much for the relationship established between the spectator and the screen as for the socio-political implications of that relation. If La fierecilla domada is seen in light of Mulvey's description of the viewer's experience, the gender roles represented on screen can be understood as interrelating with the spectator's voyeuristic aspiration to/identification with the images and characters represented onscreen. In this way, male and female spectators are invited to engage with the film through these mechanisms of desire and identification while, at the socio-political level, La fierecilla domada can be argued simultaneously to establish what Louis Althusser refers to as the "ideological recognition function" (1971, 172), a central concept in his notion of interpellation, where dominant ideology is characterized by its attempt to obtain the subject's recognition that he or she "occup[ies] the place it designates for them as theirs in the world" (178). In this way, La fierecilla domada provides a network of interpellative relations that permit the audience to assume the subject position of dominant discourse. The pleasurable relation that the film offers for the spectator — through identification with/admiration of its main characters, narrative structure, and visual representations of femininity — and the network of ideological gender relations offered to the spectator are precisely those of the dominant falangist and Catholic discourses.

Although La fierecilla domada interpellates its audience into the subject position of dominant patriarchal ideology, the film also offers marginal spaces that escape the tight corset of strict Catholic morality. On the narrative level, La fierecilla domada — like, to a certain extent, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew — offers an inescapably conflicted structure of readjustment, where a transitional state of disorder is needed in order to provide a fiction of corrective transformation. In this transitional state, the audience is provided with a space for subversive identification, and although La fierecilla domada's resolution establishes a moralizing closure of social readjustment, it is debatable whether the ending neutralizes the conflicting signifiers constructed throughout the film. Although at the end the main characters are transformed into morally acceptable gender models within the boundaries of the regime, for the most part of the film's narrative, Blanca is represented as an inappropriately http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 25 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

active — even lustful — model of femininity, while Beltrán, in contradiction to the Church's agenda of abstinence and fidelity, is constructed as a promiscuous womanizer. Furthermore, Catalina's rebelliousness is maintained throughout much of the narration, offering disruptive models of femininity in the "Diana scene," the "wedding banquet scene," and other confrontational moments in the power struggle between her and Beltrán. In an alternative (heterosexual) reading of the film, for a male audience La fierecilla domada offers the counter-possibility of identifying with Beltrán's promiscuity, while the camera's capturing of Carmen Sevilla's body promotes sexual responses that exceed Catholic decorum. The female spectator is offered the possibility of identifying with Blanca's inappropriate sexuality or of responding to Beltrán's adulterous appeal. Then also, female audiences might reassert themselves through Catalina's shrewish behavior or relate to Carmen Sevilla's emergent presence as the Spanish equivalent to the relatively progressive model of Hollywood actresses.

Carmen Sevilla's dominance of the camera's gaze and the relatively daring construction of some of the film's passages open up the experience of watching La fierecilla domada to a number of potentially unsuitable audience reactions, associations, identifications, and desires. Mulvey's historicization of the camera's patriarchal gaze within the Hollywood films of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s applies to La fierecilla domada, for Catalina is visually constructed through "traditional Hollywood" conventions, "highlighting" her "to-be-looked-at-ness." Contextualized within the ideological idiosyncracy of the authorities, paradoxically some of these cinematic conventions proved unacceptable for the regime's moral standards. Thus, censorship not only controlled messages articulated through a film's language — hence, Franco's law for compulsory dubbing of all films screened in Spain after 1941 — but American movies from this period were also stripped of uncomfortable visual material, such as representations of sexual intimacy. In this context, some of Carmen Sevilla's titillating scenes can be characterized as potentially subversive.

CODA La fierecilla domada is quintessentially a product of the Franco regime's control of culture. The film's script presents several passages in which the dominant gender policy — that of the church or sección femenina — is rearticulated in the characters' dialogues. On the narrative level, La fierecilla domada presents a triple process of readjustment, in which the behavior of Catalina, Blanca, and Beltrán are corrected to make them fit into the dominant socio-ideological models of behavior. Elements in

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Shakespeare's play that have allowed modern criticism to relativize The Taming of the Shrew's gender discourses are excluded, blocking the film's potential to readdress the narrative of Shrew. In this way, La fierecilla domada is symptomatic of the administration's influence on cultural discourses, which especially affected the field of dramatic and cinematic production. As the TRACE (Censored Translations Database) research project shows, the "vast majority" of films and theater productions during the Franco administration were modified — voluntarily or coercively, to various degrees — in order to conform to the regime's cultural standards. Raquel Merino, member of the TRACE project, extends this analysis to all cultural production in the period: "No cultural or textual activity remained free from the omnipresent influence of censorship, since the translation of foreign texts, original production, and [. . .] adaptations were all originally conditioned by the existence of a [. . .] filter for any cultural product, which was ultimately offered in a modified state to the public.32

In Althusserian terms, this scenario shows a radicalization of the dependent relation between the RSA or Repressive State Apparatuses (those operating through "violence" or "force," in institutions such as the government, administration, the army, police, courts, and prisons [Althusser 1971, 142- 43]) and ISA or Ideological State Apparatuses (operating through "ideology," in institutions such as religion, education, family, and culture [173]). In his work, Althusser suggests that: Whereas the (Repressive) State Apparatus constitutes an organized whole whose different parts are centralized beneath a commanding unity, that of the politics of class struggle applied by the political representatives of the ruling classes in possession of State power; the Ideological State Apparatuses are multiple, distinct, "relatively autonomous," and capable of providing an objective field to contradictions. (1971, 149) In the context of the Franco dictatorship, the State's social control over the relative autonomy of cultural production is intensified as it intervenes directly in cultural production through the use of censorship mechanisms, marginalizing cultural objects such as Surcos and Muerte de un ciclista as members of the subaltern, repressed expressions of latent social tensions. This relationship accounts for the central signifiers in La fierecilla domada. Still, La fierecilla domada provides spaces for marginal subversive signifiers through both formal (internal) and contextual (external) factors.

Like The Taming of the Shrew, La fierecilla domada is constructed as a narrative of passage. Despite the film's erasure of metatheatrics and self- referentiality or the transformation of those passages in which the play http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 27 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

opens the Katherina/Petruchio relationship to a plurality of signification through the rewriting of the narrative, La fierecilla domada does not suppress the representation of the subversive previous to the characters' social readjustment. Although the film presents a narrative conclusion that works to control subversive signifiers, the narrative of passage provides a marginal space for the resonance of these elements of dissension. La fierecilla domada's potential challenge to dominant social roles is reinforced by external factors that affected the production of films in Spain during the dictatorship, where the assimilation of film modes imported from Hollywood contradicted the cultural control imposed by the regime. In the following years, Carmen Sevilla would continue to establish herself as a Hollywood diva.33 Just as La fierecilla domada can be formally seen in the light of 1930s Hollywood films, Carmen Sevilla can be seen as bringing overtones of Greta Garbo to Queen Christina (1933), or resonating, in the maid's scene, with Viven Leigh in Gone with the Wind's famous dressing scene (1939).

Early new historicist accounts accepted that "there is always a gap between what discourse authorizes and what people do" (Howard 1986, 26) and that "there is no necessary relationship between the intentions of actors and the outcomes of their actions" (Montrose 1986, 10). Hence, the processes of production and reception must be distinguished in the case of La fierecilla domada. From the perspective of production, there are differences between Y me tengo que callar, Surcos, or Muerte de un ciclista, where the central signifiers bring into question or expose the standing ideological tensions at the moment of production, and a film like La fierecilla domada, whose potentially subversive content comes from reading against the grain of the film; a number of marginal ideological tensions arise from what Raymond Williams has described as the fluent "interrelations between movements

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and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominance" (1977, 121). In this way, La fierecilla domada can be ideologically circumscribed within the boundaries of dominant ideology as the "conscious and direct product of one power group or class's attempt to control another group or class by the misrepresentation of their historical condition" (Howard 1986, 28). As a result, in 1956 the Guild of Cinematography — the same institution that regulated contracts for the production of films during the dictatorship— gave Carmen Sevilla the best actress award for her role in La fierecilla domada. In hindsight, this prize can be seen as a self-congratulatory strategy designed to perpetuate the regime's modes of cultural production. In 1955, representatives of the Spanish film industry had gathered in the Salamanca Talks to address the economic, aesthetic, and intellectual problems of Spanish film production, yet emerging social dissent would take its time to make its way into the Spanish culture landscape. It is not until the 1960s and 1970s that the Spanish cultural context allowed other modes of contestation.34

Very much rooted in the dominant ideological discourses of 1955, La fierecilla domada stands as a product of Franco's dictatorship, which found Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew to be a productive template for the representation and dissemination of dominant ideology. Yet, while transforming Shakespeare's play into a vehicle for the administration's paradigms of gender and family, the film also provides a glimpse of Hollywood's eroticism. In this way, it is opened to alternative readings from the perspective of production and reception. Thus, La fierecilla domada makes use of romance and eroticism to project an orthodox and patriarchal image of Francoist gender and familial relationships. At the same time, despite the administration's enforcement of dominant ideology through the control of cultural production, the film offers spaces for the spectator to ignore its patriarchal framework and privilege its titillating wrinkles.

FILMOGRAPHY Agustina de Aragón. 1950. Dir. Juan de Orduña. CIFESA. Alba de América. 1951. Dir. Juan de Orduña. CIFESA. Antony and Cleopatra. 1971. Dir. Charlton Heston. Folio Films/Ízaro Films. Boda en el infierno. 1942. Dir. Antonio Román. Hércules Films. Congreso en Sevilla. 1955. Dir. Antonio Román. Producciones DIA. Don Juan. 1956. Dir. John Berry. Producciones Benito Perojo. Dos novias para un torero. 1956. Dir. Antonio Román. Atenea Films/Mier y Brooks.

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Escuadrilla. 1941. Dir. Antonio Román. Productores Asociados S. A. From This Day Forward. 1946. Dir. John Berry. RKO Radio Pictures. Fuenteovejuna. 1947. Dir. Antonio Román. Alhambra Films/CEA. Gone with the Wind. 1939. Dir. Victor Fleming. Selznick International Pictures/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). King of Kings. 1961. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Samuel Bronston Productions. La danza de los deseos. 1954. Dir. Florián Rey. Suevia Films. La fierecilla domada. 1956. Dir. Antonio Román. Producciones Benito Perojo/Vascos Films. La leona de Castilla. 1951. Dir. Juan de Orduña. CIFESA. Los clarines del miedo. (1958). Dir. Antonio Román. Procusa/PCU/Producciones Barbachano Ponce. Los últimos de Filipinas. 1945. Dir. Antonio Román. Alhambra-CEA. Miss Susie Slagle's. 1946. Dir. John Berry, Paramount Pictures. Muerte de un ciclista. 1955. Dir. Juan Antonio Bardem. Suevia Films/Guión Producciones Cinematográficas/Trionfalcine. Pacto de silencio. 1949. Dir. Antonio Román. Emisora Films. Queen Christina. 1933. Dir. Rouben Mamoulian. Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer (MGM). Raza. 1942. Dir. José Luis Sáenz de Heredia. Cancillería del Consejo de la Hispanidad. Sangre de Castilla. 1950. Dir. Benito Perojo. Filmófono S. A. Surcos. 1951. Dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde. Atenea Films. Último día. (1952). Dir. Antonio Román. Velázquez P. C./CIFESA.

NOTES 1. I am greatly indebted to Keith Gregor, Manuel Gómez Lara, Clara Calvo, Jean Howard, and Kathleen McLuskie for their feedback and support at different stages of the writing process. The research of this article was done under the auspices of the research projects BFF2002-02019 and HUM- 2005-02556/FILO, financed by the Ministerio de Educación and Feder. 2. As an example, Karen Newman concludes her analysis by establishing that female transgression in the play "is no more than a release mechanism" and that "by transgressing the law of women's silence, but far from subverting it, Shrew reconfirms the law" of dominant ideology. Yet in her final paragraph, she argues that the presence of boy actors finally "deconstructs [the play's] own mimetic effect" and, by foregrounding this "artifice," the "indeterminateness of the actor's body [. . .] therefore subverts the play's patriarchal master narrative" (1986, 100). 3. See John Bean (1980), Graham Holderness (1989, 20-25), or Ann

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Thompson's revision of her second edition of the play for the New Cambridge series (2003, 42-49). For a parallel (and yet unresolved) dispute on the space for female subjectivity in film adaptations of the play, see Henderson (1997, 2003) vs. Hodgdon (1998). 4. Although tempted to replace the word falangist with "fascist" in order to provide an immediately close synonym for the English reader, for the sake of accuracy I will continue to use Falange and falangist to refer to this political party and its members. I believe that obvious similarities between falangism and fascism would obscure the religious connotations associated with the Falange, a Catholic interpretation of revolutionary syndicalism, or national syndicalism, as it was called in Spain. In any case, the Falange, the political party founded in 1933 by the son of the preceding dictator Primo de Rivera, was assimilated after the Spanish Civil War within the Movimiento Nacional, a totalitarian mechanism inspired by fascism and the only Spanish political party during Franco's dictatorship. 5. Caudillo is the Spanish equivalent of the German Führer or the Italian Duce. Parallelisms and contrasts among Franco's, Hitler's, and Mussolini's regimes, together with the dictators' personal meetings, have been widely researched (see Nicolás Marín 1991, Sánchez López 1990, Moreno Sáez 1999, Ruiz Carnicer 2001). 6. Together with "folklore films" (a typically Spanish genre that mixes techniques and structures from both musicals and melodramas), films constructed around the character of the bullfighter constitute one of the most distinct sub-genres of Spanish post-Civil War cinema (Heredero 1993). Román's bull-fighting films are Dos novias para un torero (1956) and Los clarines del miedo (1958). There are also literary adaptations/versions: Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna (1947) and Shakespeare's La fierecilla domada (1955); and crime thrillers: Pacto de silencio (1949) and Último día (1952). 7. All translations from Spanish sources are provided by the author: "Nitida referencia nacionalista como aval para conectar con el talante xenófobo que distingue las preferencias de la administración." 8. "Los vencedores tienen que reafirmarse en su victoria y no hacerla olvidar. Más aún en un caso como el español, en el que la guerra se debatíó contra otros españoles, que permanecieron luego en igual medida formando parte del país. El cine de posguerra debía por tanto, insistir en la victoria, hacerla palpable y constante." 9. For more on Spanish-German filmmaking relations during the Civil War and the early years of Francoism, see Nicolás Meseguer's unpublished Ph.D. thesis (2008). 10. "Escenografías imperiales del agonizante cine histórico-patriótico de la autarquía."

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11. See note 4. 12. Before the breakout of the Civil War, Burmann had worked with some of the most progressive theater practitioners in Spain, such as Gregorio Martínez Sierra, and had helped introduce the aesthetics of German expressionism to Spain. During the 1940s, Siegfried Burmann was also hired as set-designer for the Teatro Español (Spanish National Theatre) by artistic director Cayetano Luca de Tena. See Burmann and Burmann 2006 and Dougherty and Vilches 1992. 13. One of the Department's first directors was José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, cousin of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, former Spanish dictator (1923- 1930) and co-writer of the film Raza, together with Antonio Román and Francisco Franco. 14. "Abanderadas de un cine asentado en los gustos populares y, sobre todo, en las preferencias de la administración." 15. After several technical tests, a daily schedule for Spanish television was finally broadcast in October 1956. 16. La danza de los deseos (1954), directed by Florián Rey. See Taibo 2002. 17. References to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew are from Thompson 1986. 18. Beltrán: ¡Pero si sois una mujer! Catalina: Para el caso como si fuera un hombre. ¿Y ahora, crees que me hace falta ser hombre para ganar la partida? Estúpido insolente: podría matarte. Beltrán: Si quereis matarme, apartad el puñal y seguid mirándome. Será suficiente. Catalina: Guarda tus cumplidos. No soy de esas que se enternecen con cuatro palabras. 19. Maid 1: Con los caballeros que habeis despreciado en un mes habría para complacer a todas las solteras del reino. Maid 2: Y el tal Don Mario de Acebedo no parece menos apuesto que los demás pretendientes. Catalina: ¿Qué me importa su apostura? Guapo o feo, bizco o patizambo será como todos: un hombre; nada mas que un hombre. Y vamos a ver, ¿qué es un hombre? Maid 1: Yo, señora, solo lo sé de oidas. Maid 2: Y yo por referencias. Maid 3: Y yo cejas. Catalina: El hombre cree que ha nacido para dominar a la mujer, pero si sabemos ganarle la primera batalla siempre lo tendremos a nuestros pies. Maid 1: A mi me gustaría ser dominada. Maid 2: Con los hermoso que debe de ser eso. Maid 3: Ay, sí. Catalina: Que bobas. Lo más hermoso es vencer al hombre que se empeña en dominarnos. Y si supierais que me acabo de dar ese gusto . . . 20. Maid 1: ¡Qué horror, señora! ¿Y era muy fuerte y gallardo? Catalina: Apenas me fijé en él. Sólo recuerdo que . . . que que era alto, de pelo castaño, ojos verdes, nariz aguileña, las cejas bíen dibujadas, y un lunar. Aquí debajo de esta oreja. Maid 2: Oh, mi ama. Qué cosas no diríais de él . . . si os llegáis a fijar. Catalina: ¡Bueno, basta! 21. Sección Femenina, which has been compared to the Italian Fasci

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Femminili, was a part of the only Spanish political party during Franco's dictatorship, Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista. Anticipating the level of violence that would surround Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founding member of the party and son of Spain's earlier dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, initially banned women's participation. A year later (1934), women were integrated within the Falangist political structure through Sección Femenina under the condition that their functions were always subordinated to male decisions. The Falange considered woman as "a weak and frail being, who should be protected from the dangers of life and political activity" (Sánchez López 1990, 19). 22. (a) Una política de adecuación específicamente femenina, potenciadora de las enseñanzas encaminadas a crear buenas amas de casa, diferenciándose los contenidos compartidos para ambos sexos. (b) El adoctrinamiento político y religioso, ya que junto con la difusión de los principios falangistas y católicos se pretende lograr una finalidad práctica: hacer mujeres útiles al sistema mediante su labor en la familia, célula básica para la continuidad del régimen dictatorial. (c) La difusión reiterada de un modelo de mujer caracterizado por la pasividad política y el absoluto alejamiento de la vida pública, alegando que la mujer tiene en el cuidado de los suyos la única actividad que le correspondo por naturaleza. La política y la vida laboral eran ámbitos de exclusivo acceso masculino. 23. Catalina: La verdad más negra, más espantable: séis largos años en el harem del califa, sometida a su capricho, soportando la más vergonzosa humillación. ¡Cuánto temor veía al llegar la noche, hasta que la fuga puso fin a mi tormento! Bautista: Pero Catalina, hija mía, ¡repórtate! ¿Qué van a decir estos caballeros? Don Álvaro's father: Vamos a decir que, sea o no cierto lo del rey moro, nuestra alcurnia de nobles castellanos no tolera el deshonor ni la mofa. Don Álvaro: Teneos, padre. Por la bufa y la mofa aún pasaría, más "si en el honor a caído alguna mancha . . ." Catalina: La mancha va a caer en tu cara. ¡Sinvergüenza! Haber creído semejante historia . . . ¿Cómo te atreves a sospechar de mi buen nombre? 24. "Gobernadores civiles y eclesiásticos compartían la vigilancia de esta moral que prohibía los bailes de carnaval y otras festividades, las películas con escenas escabrosas, inspeccionaba los lugares oscuros en parques y jardines para que las parejas no cometieran actos indecorosos." 25. "Sólo una mujer como tú puede negarse a convertirme en abuelo." 26. Catalina: Padre, dejadle que se vaya. Su garganta está delicada por haber sentido cerca el frío del acero. Beltrán: Ah, pero sois vos, el cazador del bosque. Perdonad que no os haya reconocido; como ahora vais vestido de mujer. Catalina: ¡Es que soy una mujer! Beltrán: Eso habrá que verlo. Pues, sí, es una mujer. ¡Abur, señores! Y que siga la fiesta.

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27. "Nada complace tanto a la psicología masculina como la sumisión de la mujer, y nada complace tanto a la psicología femenina como la entrega sumisa a la autoridad masculina [. . .] Disimulemos o disminuyamos nuestra presencia físíca en el trabajo. Seamos hormiguitas graciosas y amables [. . .] El hombre lleva muchos siglos de 'oficio' en el trabajo y tiene su criterio hecho [. . .] ¿A qué tratar deslumbrarlos con nuestro improvisados éxitos, si sabemos que ofendemos su criterio y tradición de superioridad? 28. "Pero es vuestra esposa. Ante Dios y ante los hombres." 29. Catalina: No me someteríais nunca porque yo sólo rendiría mi fiereza por algo que no habéis sido capaz de darme: por un amor tan grande, tan desmedido, tan fiero, que no cabría en vuestra alma. Beltrán: Sabes, he estado a punto de creer en tus palabras. Pero ya te conozco demasiado. No amansarías tu soberbia ni a cambio de diez amores como ese que acabas de describir. Y en todo caso, si de verdad te gusta el negocio, empieza por someterte a tu marido. Apenas tienes ya tiempo: de aquí hasta Gandía. Beltrán: Una mujer que se fía máls de sus ojos que de su marido, nunca será buena esposa. Catalina: Beltrán, no me gusta volver. No quiero volver, ¿sabes? Beltrán: ¿Por qué? Catalina: No está bien. No, no está bien. Me difamarán. Dirán que no sirvo para mujer casada. Lo dirán, estoy segura. Beltrán: ¡Bah! Eso ya se lo suponía. Catalina: ¿Por qué? Beltrán: Porque no sirves para mujer casada. Catalina: Como cualquier otra. Beltrán: Ah, no. ¿Qué pensarías de un hombre que huyera del peligro, que no supiese combatir, que no tuviera barba? Catalina: Que no era un hombre. Beltrán: Pues entonces qué pensarías de una mujer que después del matrimonio no se hubiese comportado como casada en ningún sentido. Catalina: Tienes barba. Beltrán: Claro. El ruiseñor no grazna. No cacarea el león. La mujer no se humilla por serlo. Ser mujer, Catalina, es sentirse débil, tener ansias de protección, saber acunar un hijo, mirar dulcemente. Ser mujer, Catalina, es . . . es asustarse de un ratón. Beltrán: Qué fuerte esta el sol. Catalina: Sí, Beltrán, ahora sí es de día. Ahora veo que es una mañana de primavera, con sol, con pájaros y flores. Y si tu dices que esto es una rosa, para mí esto es una rosa. 30. "Os aseguro que, si me dáis la ocasión, yo os daré nietos con la frecuencia que per mita la naturaleza." 31. "Ejemplificada en la existencia de lupanares o 'casas de tolerancia' permitidos por el Estado y considerados un desahogo natural del hombre, frente a la obligada pureza de la mujer, llamada a altos destinos como responsable del futuro de la raza española." 32. See Merino 2001 and Rabadán 2000. For exhaustive work on the censorship of Shakespeare's plays during Franco's regime, see Bandín's unpublished Ph.D. thesis of 2007: "Ninguna actividad cultural o textual

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quedó libre de la influencia de esta omnipresente censura, pues tanto la traducción de textos extranjeros, como la creación original, y la adaptación de textos en español (catalán, gallego o vascuence) estaban desde su origen condicionadas por la existencia de un filtro universal para todo producto cultural que se ofrecía modificado al público." 33. Immediately following La fierecilla domada, Carmen Sevilla starred in Don Juan (1956) — a film by John Berry, who had previously directed Veronica Lake, Lillian Gish, Joan Fontaine in the 1940s — and, in 1961, she played Mary Magdalene in Nicholas Ray's King of Kings. For John Berry's 1940s films, see Miss Susie Slagle's (1946) and From This Day Forward (1946). In her other Shakespearean role, Carmen Sevilla would play Octavia in Charlton Heston's Antony and Cleopatra, shot in Spain in 1971. 34. For an account of the political overtones in Claudio Guerin's filmed theater production of Hamlet in 1970, see Tronch-Pérez (2010).

REFERENCES Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Aragüez Rubio, Carlos. 2005. "Intelectuales y cine en el segundo franquismo: de las Conversaciones de Salamanca al nuevo cine español." Historia del presente 5: 121-35. Bandín Fuertes, E. 2007. Traducción, recepción y censura de teatro clásico inglés. Estudio descriptivo-comparativo del Corpus TRACEtci (1939-1985). Ph.D. dissertation, León: Universidad de León. Bean, John. 1980. "Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew." In The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift, Gayle Green, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 65-78. Burmann, Conchita, and Sigfrido Burmann. 2006. Sigfrido Burmann: la gira americana de Un Teatro de Arte (1926-1929). Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas. Caparros Lera, José María. 1983. El cine español bajo el régimen de Franco. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Dougherty, Dru, and María Francisca Vilches de Frutos. 1992. El teatro en España: entre la tradición y la vanguardia, 1918-1939. Madrid: Fundación Federico García Lorca/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, http://borrowers.uga.edu/782772/show Page 35 of 38 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(20 PM

CSIC. Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Methuen. Fernández Cuenca, Carlos. 1972. La Guerra de España y el Cine. Madrid: Editorial nacional. La fierecilla domada. 1956. Dir. Antonio Román. Producciones Benito Perojo/Vascos Films. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1992. "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V." In New Historicism and Renaissance Drama. Edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton. London: Longman. 83-108. Henderson, Diana. 2003. "A Shrew for the Times, Revisited." In Shakespeare, the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD. Edited by Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose. New York: Routledge. 120-39. Henderson, Diana. 1997. "A Shrew for the Times." In Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. Edited by Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. New York: Routledge. 148-68. Heredero, Carlos F. 1993. Las huellas del tiempo: cine español, 1951-1961. Madrid: Filmoteca Española. Hodgdon, Barbara. 1998. "Katherina Bound; or, Play(k)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life." In Shakespeare on Film: Contemporary Critical Essays. Edited by Robert Shaughnessy. New York: St. Martin's Press. Holderness, Graham. 1989. The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Howard, Jean E. 1986. "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies." English Literary Renaissance 16.1: 13-42. Merino Álvarez, Raquel. 2001. "Traducción, adaptación y censura de productos dramáticos." In La traducción en los medios audiovisuales. Edited by F. Chaume y Rosa Agost. Castelló: Universitat Jaume I. 231-38. Montrose, Louis. 1986. "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History." English Literary Renaissance 16.1: 5-12. Moreno Sáez, Francisco. 1999. "Educación y Cultura en el franquismo." In El franquismo: visiones y balances. Edited by Roque Moreno Fonseret and Francisco Sevillano Calero. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante.

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Mulvey, Laura. 2000. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In Film and Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller. 1975; Oxford: Blackwell. 483-94. Newman, Karen. 1986. "Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew." English Literary Renaissance 16.1: 86-100. Nicolás Marín, María Encarna. 1991. "El franquismo." In Historia de España, Vol. 12: El régimen de Franco y la transición a la democracia (de 1939 a hoy). Barcelona: Planeta. Nicolás Meseguer, Manuel. 2008. Las relaciones cinematográficas hispano- alemanas durante la guerra civil española y los inicios del franquismo (1936-1945). Ph.D. Thesis. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. Pérez Gómez, Ángel A., and José L. Martínez Montalbán. Cine Español 1951/1978: Diccionario de Directores. 1978; Bilbao: Mensajero. Rabadán, Rosa, ed. 2000. Traducción y censura (inglés-español), 1939-1985: estudio preliminar. León: Universidad de León. Ríos Carratalá, Juan A. 2003. Dramaturgos en el cine español (1936-1975). Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Ruiz Carnicer, M. A., and Jordi García Gracia. 2001. La España de Franco (1939-1975): Cultura y vida cotidiana. Madrid: Síntesis. Sánchez López, Rosario. 1990. Mujer española, una sombra del destino en lo universal: trayectoria histórica de Sección Femenina de Falange (1934- 1977). Murcia: Universidad, Secretariado de publicaciones. Taibo, Paco Ignacio. 2002. Un cine para un imperio: Películas en la España de Franco. Madrid: Oberon. Thompson, Ann, ed. 2003. The Taming of the Shrew. New Cambridge Shakespeare. 1984; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tronch-Pérez, Jesús. 2010. "'Dangerous and rebel prince': A Television Adaptation of Hamlet in Late Francoist Spain." Shakespeare Survey 63: 301-15. Vizcaíno Casas, Fernando. 1976. Historia y anécdota del cine español. Madrid: Adra. Werner, Carmen. 1942. Convivencia Social. Madrid: Delegación Nacional de Sección Femenina de F. E. T. y de las J. O. N. S. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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ONLINE RESOURCES TRACE (Censored Translations Database). http://www.ehu.es/trace/description.html (http://www.ehu.es/trace/description.html).

ABSTRACT | THE PEOPLE BEHIND LA FIERECILLA DOMADA | FILMING THE TAMING OF THE SHREW IN FRANCO'S DICTATORSHIP | (A) INITIAL (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS | (B) AN EXTRA WEDDING SCENE AND CATALINA'S DECENCY | (C) A KISS TO PROVE A WOMAN | (D) TAMING PROCESSES: THE RIVER AND CAVE SCENES | VISUAL PLEASURE, INTERPELLATION, AND IDEOLOGY IN LA FIERECILLA DOMADA | CODA | FILMOGRAPHY | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Found: (/current) Five Seconds of Laurence Olivier's Film of Hamlet (/previous) MICHAEL P. JENSEN, INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR (/about)

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES (/archive)

ABSTRACT There is an often-repeated legend that Laurence Olivier and co- screenwriter Alan Dent left Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of their 1948 film version of Hamlet. While this is true for most intents and purposes, in fact two unnamed characters with no lines take their place in one scene of the film, a fact that has not been previously noticed. This note establishes why so many have claimed that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are absent from the film, presents evidence that either they, or nameless substitutes for them, do appear in the persons of these two characters, and suggests that the claim that the characters were cut needs to be qualified.

One of the most pervasive myths in Shakespeare films is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not appear in Laurence Olivier's 1948 film version of Hamlet.1 After all, Olivier himself said twice that they do not. The first time was when he wrote, "[We] have taken out altogether Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" (Olivier 1948, 11-12). He said it again when discussing cuts to the play almost forty years later: "Of course we missed . . . some of our favorite characters, like

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who enrich the four-and-a-half hour pattern of the play which I was changing to the tighter pattern of a two- and-a-half hour film" (Olivier 1986, 292). The first of these quotations was printed in a book created to publicize the film. There were two other publications created for the same purpose, and both substantiate Olivier's statement. A souvenir program sold to moviegoers in the U.S. describes some of the trims made for the film, saying, in part, that "Olivier's cuts in his film production are more radical than is usual. Important characters such as Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern were eliminated" ("Putting Hamlet on Celluloid," 2-3).The strongest statement occurs in a third publication, an edition of the play that indicates the cuts made for the film, supplemented by three essays by people involved in the production and thiry-eight photographs and production illustrations. One essay, about the excisions to Shakespeare's text, is by Alan Dent who, in consultation with Olivier, cut the play down to size. Dent first notes several minor characters that were cut, then adds that other characters lost "include, more sensationally, Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern," and finally, asks and answers his own rhetorical question, "Why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? They went at the very outset because there just had to be one whacking great cut . . . if the film were not to run to the impracticable length of three hours or more. The cut was not done unhesitantly. No Hamlet who ever existed would willingly choose to deprive himself of the magnificent opportunities for mockery that these two false friends give him." Most of a page is devoted to explaining this elective surgery (Dent 1948).2

Given that these insiders state so forcefully that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were cut in the script stage, one can hardly blame Shakespeare film scholars and others for believing it. No less than Bernice W. Kliman, one of the founders of Shakespeare film studies, writes that "Olivier's omission of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reduces the constraints on Hamlet's behavior" (Kliman 1988, 29). Performance critics also believe that these characters were excised. Michael Cohen writes, "Olivier cut the parts of Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern completely" (Cohen, 6). Olivier biographies and studies of his work repeat the claim. Donald Spoto, for instance, writes that Olivier omits several characters, "among them Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" (Spoto 1992, 207). I examined forty-seven Shakespeare film books. The fifteen that address these cuts agree that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not in the film. I examined fourteen editions of Hamlet and books about the play with sections on Hamlet films. The six that address these cuts agree that http://borrowers.uga.edu/782724/show Page 2 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(21 PM

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not in the film. I examined fifteen biographies of Olivier and books about his work. The six that discuss these cuts agree that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not in the film. No book examined says otherwise. H. R. Coursen sums it up when he observes that "Probably the most famous example of editing" "is the Olivier film . . . and its deletion of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" (Coursen 2002, 143).

Despite this scholarly consensus, however, it seems that Olivier did not remove Rosencrantz and Guildenstern altogether from his film of Hamlet. In what corresponds to 4.3.59-60 of the play, two characters fill their place. The King holds out a document and says, "Away, for everything is seal'd and done / That else leans on th' affair. Pray you make haste." At that, his courtiers file out and two men step in from off camera, entering the left of the frame (figure 1). Claudius hands them the document (figure 2), and they turn to exit the right side of the frame. Their screen time is five seconds, and they have no lines. They simply take the letter and go. Those who know the play realize that the document is the death order, instructing the King of England to execute Hamlet upon his arrival. While the document is not described in 4.3, Hamlet explains it and two other off-stage plot points to Horatio in 5.2.12-62, saying that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carried papers from Claudius instructing that Hamlet be executed. Hamlet discovers this document and forges a replacement ordering the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.3

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Figure 1. The two courtiers enter the frame.

Figure 2. Claudius hands them the document.

Are these characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Comments by Olivier and Dent, who made the film, and others less close to the production use language that indicates the complete absence of Hamlet's false friends, and certainly these two actors speak none of Rosencrantz's or Guildenstern's lines, Claudius does not confuse their names, they do not spy on Hamlet, nor do they refuse to play a recorder or try to get to the heart of Hamlet's mystery. In the most significant sense, they are not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Another approach, however, is to say that in the film, Claudius gives to "two courtiers" the document that in the play, he gives to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Olivier could have had Claudius give the document to one courtier, or three. Nothing except that original presence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern demands that they be two. If the courtiers are not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, then they stand-in for them, silently filling their space in this scene. We can call these characters pretty much anything: Stan and Ollie, Hope and Crosby, or simply "two courtiers," but by making them two Olivier seems to give a nod to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by having these two do what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do at this moment in the story.

This is not a great and significant discovery. It probably will not

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overturn interpretations of the film or open new ways of understanding it. We might, though, amend our language a little when writing about the film. It is probably not correct to continue saying that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are cut from the film. We should acknowledge instead that their place is for five seconds filled by these two courtiers.

NOTES 1. My thanks to Douglas Lanier for helping me solve the problem of including screen captures from a DVD and for his encouraging comments about a late draft of this note. Thanks also to Bernice W. Kliman for helpful comments on the same draft. Quotations and citations from the play are taken from the Arden 2 Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins. 2. The pages of this book are not numbered. The quotations are taken from the fourth and fifth pages of Dent's essay. 3. Claudius gives the document to them at one 1:41:19-22, or just under a minute before the end of Chapter 20 on the Criterion Collection, region one DVD.

REFERENCES Cohen, Michael. 1989. Hamlet in My Mind's Eye. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Coursen, H. R. 2002. Shakespeare in Space: Recent Shakespeare Production on Screen. New York and Oxford: Peter Lang. Dent, Alan. 1948. "Text-Editing Shakespeare with Particular reference to Hamlet." In Hamlet: The Film and the Play. Edited by Alan Dent. London: World Film Publications. Hamlet. 2000. Dir. Laurence Olivier. 1948; Two Cities Films; DVD: Criterion. Kliman, Bernice W. 1988. Hamlet: Film, Television, and Audio Performance. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Olivier, Laurence. 1986. On Acting. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Olivier, Laurence. 1948. "An Essay in Hamlet." In The Film Hamlet: A Record of its Production. Edited by Brenda Cross. London: Saturn Press. "Putting Hamlet on Celluloid." 1948. In Laurence Olivier Presents Hamlet. New York: Al Greenstone. Shakespeare, William. 1982. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. Arden 2. London and New York: Methuen. Spoto, Donald. 1992. Laurence Olivier: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins.

ABSTRACT | NOTES | REFERENCES | TOP

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KATIE L. N. GRUBBS, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

(/current) REFERENCES

Hateley, Erica. Shakespeare in Children's Literature: Gender and (/previous)Cultural Capital. New York: Routledge, 2009. xiii + 218 pp. ISBN 978- 0-415-96492-0 (Cloth).

(/about) In the Spring/Summer 2006 edition on the theme of "Shakespeare for Children," Borrowers and Lenders published an article entitled "Of Tails and Tempests: Feminine Sexuality and Shakespearean Children's Texts," (/archive) by Erica Hateley, in which the author examined what she termed the "mermaid-Miranda" figure in literature for children. She closely examined both Disney's 1989 film The Little Mermaid and Penni Russon's adaptation of The Tempest, the young adult novel Undine (2004), arguing that while these texts "seem to perform a progressive appropriation [. . .] they actually combine the most conservative aspects of both The Tempest and mermaid stories to produce authoritative (and dangerously persuasive) ideals of passive feminine sexuality that confine girls within patriarchally-dictated familial positions" (Hateley 2006, 1). In Shakespeare and Children's Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital (2009), Hateley expands these ideas to examine not just Undine, but many other appropriations of Shakespeare for young people, while still maintaining her focus on gender issues within such texts.

In the Introduction, Hateley lays out the critical framework of her text by focusing on both Michel Foucault's concept of the "author function" with regard to Shakespeare's "discursive authority" and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's work on cultural capital, "particularly as it applies to 'Shakespeare' as both embodiment and marker of its attainment" (Hateley 2009, 10, 11). She introduces the subject of how "the discourse of 'Shakespeare' is put to work in literature for young readers to legitimate gendered difference," arguing that "children's authors deploy Shakespeare, not just as cultural authority, but as cultural authority on

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gender" (2009, 12, 14, emphasis in original). In other words, Hateley argues that authors of Shakespeare appropriations for children prescribe traditional gender roles for implied readers, using the cultural capital of the Bard to add weight to those prescriptions.

In Chapter 1, "Romantic Roots: Constructing the Child as Reader, and Shakespeare as Author," Hateley examines three prominent nineteenth- century adaptations/appropriations of Shakespeare for children: Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare (1807), Mary Cowden Clarke's Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1850-1851), and Edith Nesbit's The Children's Shakespeare (1897). A treatment of all three of these foundational texts in the genre of Shakespeare for children in one chapter might initially seem overwhelming for a reader. Hateley prevents this, however, by giving a thorough background for each text, but then focusing closely only on each text's treatment of Macbeth. The chapter argues that these texts established patterns of appropriating Shakespeare for children that have lasted throughout the twentieth century, and "thus diachronically contextualize contemporary Shakespearean children's literature and the cultural forces reflected and reproduced by it" (2009, 21-22). This statement also explains why the chapter on nineteenth- century texts is important to Hateley's argument in the rest of the book, which deals almost exclusively with contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare for young readers.

The title of Chapter 2, "Author(is)ing the Child: Shakespeare as Character," is self-explanatory. In it, Hateley examines recent texts for young readers that incorporate William Shakespeare as a character, arguing that though "[f]or academics [. . .] 'Shakespeare' is a signifier or a discourse [. . .] whose personal history and experience are fundamentally irrelevant to the Shakespeare play," within popular culture, "Shakespeare is first and foremost the man whose plays reflect his personality and experience" (2009, 49, emphasis in original). This section includes close readings of Gary Blackwood's The Shakespeare Stealer (1998), Shakespeare's Scribe (2000), and Shakespeare's Spy (2003); Grace Tiffany's My Father Had A Daughter: Judith Shakespeare's Tale (2003); and Peter W. Hassinger's Shakespeare's Daughter (2004), all historical- fiction novels for young readers. Hateley's close readings provide numerous textual examples to support her claim that even though these texts present male and female protagonists and were written by male and female authors, within all of them "masculine readers are encouraged to recognise and ultimately appropriate the cultural authority of Shakespeare," while "feminine readers are encouraged simultaneously to recognise both the cultural value of Shakespeare and his work, and the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782726/show Page 2 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(21 PM

extent to which their own natural distance from it is authorised by that value" (2009, 81). Though this chapter is comprehensive and useful within the area of novels that include Shakespeare as a character, it can feel removed from the other chapters, which deal exclusively with appropriations of plays.

In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, Hateley settles into the meat of her argument, presenting close readings of appropriations for young readers of three chosen plays: Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest. The author does an excellent job of explaining the plots of the stories and giving background where necessary: though I was not familiar with many of the children's texts she examined, I never had any trouble following her close readings or her argument. Chapter 3, "'Be These Juggling Fiends No More Believed': Macbeth, Gender, and Subversion," argues that Macbeth's gendered taxonomy of subversion and containment is transferred into contemporary children's texts as gendered models of reading: feminine subjects are allowed a limited sense of cultural subversion, aligned with passive reading praxes; masculine subjects are offered a self-reflexive model of reading that enables long-term cultural power. (2009, 83-84) Hateley supports this argument by examining such texts as Neil Arksey's MacB (1999), which is basically Macbeth on the soccer field, and Welwyn Winton Katz's Come Like Shadows (1993), in which protagonists Lucas and Kinny experience an actual connection with one of the witches of Macbeth via a magic mirror. She also does close readings of many other novels in this chapter, exploring specific ways in which feminine subjects are given a culturally subversive, though still passive, reading model, while masculine subjects are given a self-reflexive model. For example, in Arksey's MacB, female readers encounter a powerful and culturally subversive female figure in MacB's ruthless mother (the Lady Macbeth figure), but in the end MacB rejects her influence and blames her as the cause of all his wrongdoing. In Katz's novel, while both female (Kincardine or "Kinny") and male (Lucas) main characters are presented, throughout the novel Lucas is portrayed as a more acute observer and a confident person, while Kinny continually doubts herself, even wondering at times if she is crazy. Hateley aptly comments that "the conclusion of the novel makes clear that if the protagonist has been Kincardine, the hero is Lucas" (2009, 111, emphasis in original). She demonstrates that the male characters in these texts are presented as characters that male readers can identify with in a positive way, while the culturally subversive female characters are presented as evil, unstable, or http://borrowers.uga.edu/782726/show Page 3 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(21 PM

simply less capable.

Chapter 4, "Puck vs. Hermia: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Gender, and Sexuality," asserts that "[s]pecific sub-plots of Dream are explicitly gendered" (Hateley 2009, 117). One such sub-plot involves what the author terms "Puck Syndrome," which is a narrative that places implied male readers "not only into a position of limited autonomy that is circumscribed by Oberon (the Shakespearean father), but also implicitly prefigures future authority for such readers when they become adults" (2009, 118). Appropriations that display this "Puck Syndrome" include Susan Cooper's King of Shadows (1999), Mary Pope Osborne's Stage Fright on a Summer's Night (2002; part of the Magic Treehouse series), and Sophie Masson's Cold Iron (1998). However, Hateley also explores appropriations that deal with other gendered subplots. John Updike's Bottom's Dream (1969) and Ursula Dubosarsky's How to Be a Great Detective (2004) both feature the "rustics" (the Dubosarsky text focuses on the Pyramus and Thisbe narrative), and stories for teenage feminine implied readers focus more on the "romance" plot dealing with Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius: examples include Meacham's A Mid- Semester Night's Dream (2004), Marilyn Singer's The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth (1983), and Charlotte Calder's Cupid Painted Blind (2002). After examining all of these texts, Hateley concludes that "Puck may operate as a carnivalesque figure of limited autonomy for pre-adolescent masculine readers, but when children's literature appropriates A Midsummer Night's Dream for adolescent feminine readers, no space is made for autonomous development" and that in these texts "[y]oung men are directed towards a life of the mind, young women towards a life of the body" (2009, 145, 146).

Hateley's final chapter of close reading, Chapter 5, "'This Island's Mine': The Tempest, Gender, and Authority/Autonomy," connects to her discussion of The Tempest and Russon's Undine that appeared in her 2006 Borrowers and Lenders article, but greatly expands both the range of texts treated and the point being made. She states that appropriations of the The Tempest for older child readers usually center on the "child figures" Miranda and Caliban, rather than on Prospero, "offering [these child figures] as figures of identification for the implied reader" (2009, 147). Hateley's choice to view Caliban as a child figure in the play is intriguing and can perhaps be attributed to her views on the "arguably analogous cultural position of children and subjects of colonisation" (2009, 148). In addition to Undine, she also examines Sophie Masson's The Tempestuous Voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare (2003), Dennis Covington's Lizard (1991), Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time http://borrowers.uga.edu/782726/show Page 4 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(21 PM

(1962), and other novels. She concludes that novels like Lizard and Tad Williams' Caliban's Hour offer "the juvenile masculine subject [. . .] a model of cultural authority which is simultaneously predicated on the sexual subordination of the feminine (intratextual) and cultural authority (extratextual)" (2009, 164), and that novels that imply a feminine reader also comply with this model. While she concedes that "Russon comes closer than L'Engle or Oneal to offering the implied feminine reader a position of autonomy," she nevertheless states that Undine is not "an unequivocally feminist appropriation" because of its "maintenance of unregulated feminine sexuality as dangerous" (2009, 186).

That final statement reflects the main point of Hateley's Conclusion, that no Shakespeare appropriation for young readers that she has so far seen succeeds in escaping the following trap: "[r]ather than offering an imaginative space where categories of subjectivity [. . .] might be contested, appropriations of Shakespeare naturalise normative values, and even make the implied reader complicit in their production" (2009, 187). The author admits that even she is not quite sure what this text would look like, though she posits that it might need to shift away from focusing on specifically gendered characters in favor of a more "ambiguously gendered" character like Ariel (2009, 186). Hateley "looks forward to a text which combines feminine autonomy with the cultural capital of Shakespeare" but in the end concludes that shifting the discursive norms of Shakespeare for children [. . .] must be enacted in at least two ways: the first being the willingness to admit the pluralities inherent in the Shakespearean text into appropriations of the plays; the second being the re-construction of children as critical readers rather than gendered readers. (2009, 186, 188-89, emphasis in original) This book would be of great interest to both Shakespeare scholars studying appropriations of his work for children and scholars of children's literature in general; scholars interested in gender theory and construction of selfhood will also find it helpful. Hateley's close readings are thorough, as mentioned earlier, and her notes provide valuable additional information. Perhaps the only drawback to this text is that the title is in some ways a misnomer: though the book is called Shakespeare in Children's Literature (perhaps because Hateley's text is part of a Routledge series entitled Children's Literature and Culture, edited by Jack Zipes), it deals mainly with young adult novels, and the Young Adult genre often presents very different subject matter from picture books or novels for readers under ten. Therefore, scholars interested in those areas of literature for young readers might not find as much useful http://borrowers.uga.edu/782726/show Page 5 of 6 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(21 PM

analysis in this book. Nevertheless, this focus on young adult novels means that scholars interested in appropriations of Shakespeare for young adults or gender roles as presented in young adult novels will find this text invaluable.

REFERENCES Hateley, Erica. 2009. Shakespeare in Children's Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital. New York: Routledge. Hateley, Erica. 2006. "Of Tails and Tempests: Feminine Sexuality and Shakespearean Children's Texts." Borrowers and Lenders 2.1. http://www.borrowers.uga.edu (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu) [cited 16 July 2011].

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REFERENCES (/current) Prince, Kathryn. Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. vii-180 pp. ISBN 10: 0-415-96243-9 (Cloth). (/previous) E-Books. Kindles. iPads, and Nooks. The recent proliferation of innovative information delivery systems seems to be solely a (/about) contemporary issue. But lest we forget, a similar explosion of information formats, specifically inexpensive journals for an emerging (/archive) readership, also occurred in nineteenth-century England. While the Victorian reception history of Shakespeare has been examined by multiple critics, the role of the periodical press in shaping Shakespeare in the period has largely been ignored. Kathryn Prince's recent book helps to remedy that neglect, and she correctly asserts that many who have written on nineteenth-century Shakespeare tend to use periodicals only as ancillary works that help to support larger arguments about the role of the Bard in shaping Victorian texts and contexts. Moreover, Prince's work comes at a time when we are reconsidering more marginalized voices, and her book proves to be extremely useful as a supplement, if not an alternative, to the grand narratives many critics have proposed.

After surveying recent critical trends in her "Introduction," Prince posits that many earlier studies offer a narrative-driven, albeit fragmentary structure, "illuminating the period by flashes of lightning" in a way that is similar to Coleridge's description of Edmund Kean's acting; most of those accounts, Prince continues, also move toward a Darwinian "inevitable conclusion in the present" of Shakespeare's exalted status (1). She counters, in response, that British periodicals of the nineteenth century "reveal the richness and diversity of Victorian Shakespeare reception in a way that encourages comparative, rather than narrative, analysis" (2). Instead of relying on articles as

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"corroborative or corrective examples," she suggests that a wider survey of periodicals will reveal a variety of Shakespeares, fiercely contested and hardly monolithic. Of course, other narratives have also proposed that Shakespeare can be employed for contradictory claims, but Prince's focus on reception "from the ground up" may be unique in these explorations. Her first three chapters are neatly divided into sections on periodicals aimed at working-men, children, and women; the last two chapters consider important theatrical concerns: the so- called "theater crisis" at mid-century, and, in the last chapter, the debate over a national theater.

The newly-literate working class is the focus of Prince's first chapter, "Making Shakespeare Readers in the Early Working Class Press." Carefully comparing radical and conservative periodicals, Prince highlights the distinction between journals such as the Penny Magazine, edited by the prolific Charles Knight, and others, such as the radical The National, a Library for the People. The former tended to focus on, in Prince's words, "enculturation" by educating workers on a "variety of culturally-significant topics," including Shakespeare, while simultaneously "diverting them from less wholesome pastimes" (22, 23); the latter employed Shakespeare as "compatriot, a man who had," like its idealized readership, "risen from obscure beginnings" but who "never abandoned his solidarity with the people of his own class" (29). Prince concludes that by "finding innovative uses for Shakespeare's life and works, these periodicals expanded Shakespeare's status as the national poet to include political values that challenged class hierarchy" (36).

Unlike the working-class magazines, the journals for children examined in Chapter 2, "Shakespeare for Manly Boys and Marriageable Girls," had to aim for "a broader audience that included parents and educators, the gatekeepers to children's reading experiences" (37). Prince proposes that many of these periodicals, such as the Girl's Own Paper, borrowed their style and tone from the ubiquitous Tales from Shakespear (1807) by Charles and Mary Lamb, a book "presumably handed down from one generation to the next along with outgrown toys and clothing" (39). Interestingly, but predictably, the gender of the children's audience bifurcated the Shakespearean angle. In other words, while the magazines for boys focused on biography, the ones for girls had a "moralising tendency" (40), in hopes of cultivating a whole crop of Angels in the House. In addition, although Victorian boys "were taught to admire Shakespeare as an embodiment of English manliness," girls were "encouraged to http://borrowers.uga.edu/782684/show Page 2 of 4 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(22 PM

emulate Shakespeare's heroines," particularly after the enormous success of books by Anna Jameson in 1832 and Mary Cowden Clark at mid-century (54). In sum, "children's publishers borrowed the sensationalism and fun that gave Shakespeare an added appeal to young readers," while the sterile Shakespeare of the Lambs and others "contributed a moral focus" (60).

In Chapter 3, "Character Criticism and its Discontents in Periodicals for Women," Prince sets out to challenge the notion that the only type of Shakespearean criticism written by women in this period focused on characters because women would be particularly adept at this activity "by virtue of their more emotional and sensitive natures" (63). While Prince admits that a number of women mined this mode of discussion, even those who did vary in their approaches. For instance, whereas Helen Faucit employed an "intimate [and] highly personal" tone, Fanny Kemble "adopted a more overtly scholarly approach" (64). But despite these differences, it is important to remember that both women published early versions of their later book-length works in periodicals — Faucit in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and Kemble in Macmillan's Magazine. Later in the chapter, Prince also shows the wide range of women's magazines, from Victoria, which had a "varied but always considered approach to Shakespeare," to Ladies Treasury, which, "more often than not, attempted to make Shakespeare as familiar, and as fashionable, as the latest dress pattern" (70, 79).

In Chapters 4 and 5, Prince widens her focus to consider the Theatres Regulation Act and the Great Exhibition, and, in the last chapter, the push for a national theater in England. Both of these events, as she points out, "were driven by many of the same objectives" vis-à-vis Shakespeare as the periodicals, including "accessability, education, and enculturation" (124). Many periodicals, such as The Era and the Theatrical Journal, lobbied for such legislation, starting a push that would actually take close to one 100 years, from 1848 to Parliament's vote to finance a national theater in 1849. Like many that Prince traces in the earlier chapters, this debate focuses on notions of "social improvement" for the working classes as well as Shakespeare's role in underpinning Victorian ideology both at home, and later, in the empire at large. Using such models as the Comédie Française, a sometimes strained alliance, including, but not limited to Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, and Harley Granville-Barker pronounced in the periodicals that a national theater would be "considered an intervention" to protect English citizens "from the intellectual poverty of an unregulated stage" (136). Of course, it was not until 1963 that the http://borrowers.uga.edu/782684/show Page 3 of 4 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(22 PM

vision would be realized, but as Prince concludes, this century-long struggle to allow "labourers as well as lords" to attend Shakespeare performances could not have been possible without Victorian periodicals to lay the groundwork for this important debate (149). In sum, Prince's book provides a valuable addition to the work on Shakespeare in the Victorian era. By focusing on the ways in which emerging technologies provide information to emerging audiences, her work is as interesting as it is au courant.

REFERENCES Prince, Kathryn. 2008. Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals. New York and London: Routledge.

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M. G. AUNE, CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

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David Bevington. Shakespeare and Biography. Oxford Shakespeare (/previous)Topics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 179 pp. ISBN 978-0- 19-958648-6 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-19-958647-9 (paper).

(/about) Over the past fifteen years, Oxford University Press has published twenty titles in their Shakespeare Topics series — brief overviews of selected subjects such as Marxism, genre, race and colonialism, and the sonnets (/archive) written by notable figures in their fields. The audience is primarily undergraduates, but the books also provide ideas, overviews, and bibliographies useful for more advanced students. David Bevington was asked to write the most recent entry, Shakespeare and Biography. As the jacket copy quickly informs us, it is not a biography of Shakespeare, but an account of the work of biographers since Nicholas Rowe and the challenges they have faced.1 With the remarkable productivity of Shakespearean biographers (nearly one biography produced annually since 1995) and changes in the theoretical climate since Samuel Schoenbaum's revision of Shakespeare's Lives (1991), the book is timely and welcome. It addresses the jacket copy's goals and more, coming close to exceeding its remit.

Bevington begins his introductory chapter, "The Biographical Problem," by acknowledging that, contrary to popular belief, we know much more about William Shakespeare than we do about his contemporaries. Paradoxically, this knowledge has not resulted in the writing of satisfactory biographies because Shakespeare's ability in his plays "to present opposing sides with rare insight" has "erect[ed] a barrier between the work of art and the artist who created it [which] affords little opportunity or desire for the artist to speak on his own behalf" (4-5). In other words, we have information about Shakespeare's life, but his works do not help us to augment or to contextualize it. This is vexing because

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we want desperately to know what Shakespeare was like: "What were his beliefs, his ideals, his hopes, his fears? Was he happily married? . . . What did he look like? Did he retire to Stratford?" (2). These questions and others like them provide Bevington with an approach to his project. He poses them at the beginnings of his chapters and then traces how a variety of biographers have provided answers. The first chapter also introduces and summarizes important twentieth-century biographers and identifies those on whom Bevington will draw most heavily: Peter Ackroyd, Jonathan Bate, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Stephen Greenblatt, Germaine Greer, Park Honan, and René Weis.

"The Art of Biography," Chapter 2, is the most conventional. It sketches biographical writing about Shakespeare from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, touching on the most familiar of the sources and traditions that have accumulated around his life. The expected names appear here: Robert Greene, Francis Meres, John Aubrey, Edmond Malone, and Rowe. The chapter is expository, but with occasional caveats such as: "we must be wary of a gathering movement to idealize Shakespeare in the decades, and then centuries, after his death" (28). The next three chapters focus on "topics that have fascinated biographers and readers ever since the early days of Shakespeare biography": sex, religion, and politics (30).

By sex, Bevington means gender and identity, marriage, and sexual orientation. The chapter begins with a discussion of gender and love in the plays and refers to interpretations suggested by biographers. Though the comedies offer rich examples of gender conflicts, little substantial biographical information can be taken from them. In what becomes a kind of refrain in the book, Bevington explains that Shakespeare so persistently provides multiple points of view on any given issue that it is impossible to ascertain what his own views may be. Various biographers' explanations are given for the questions about Shakespeare's married life: why so comparatively few children? Why the second best bed? Did he have a venereal disease? The sonnets and their connection to Shakespeare's sexual orientation, a topic that "has caused considerable distress" occupy the most space (43). Early biographers went to great lengths to draw autobiographical information from the poems, but at the same time affirm Shakespeare's heterosexuality. Modern biographers are much more circumspect. Bevington is of this mind, noting that the plays and poems provide examples of hetero-, bi-, and homosexual longing and that because early modern poetic language did not possess the same gendered boundaries as modern English, it is often difficult to interpret.

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Just as we cannot know Shakespeare's true feelings about his wife, we also cannot know if his politics were liberal, conservative, or centrist, Bevington contends in Chapter 4. As the performance histories of the history and Roman plays in particular have demonstrated, Shakespeare's works are available to a great range of interpretations. What is most important, Bevington reminds us, is that the plays were and are extremely popular. As a result, Shakespeare's politics are most likely conservative, ensuring the broadest, most positive reception.

Though it has always been a point of contention, Shakespeare's religion has become most controversial in recent years. In Chapter 5, Bevington establishes the various positions and partisans carefully, including substantially more factual evidence than in previous chapters. He again does not support one theory over another, only agreeing with Jeffrey Knapp that audiences did seem to see the theater as a kind of religious experience and that Shakespeare recognized this in his playwriting. The chapter ends with an account of Judaism in Shakespeare's culture and plays, though oddly no mention of Islam.

Departing from the thematic organizational principle, Chapters 6 and 7 are based on Edward Dowden's quadripartite organization of Shakespeare's biography.2 According to Dowden, Shakespeare began in a developmental mode (ca. 1589-1594), then experienced a phase of great success (1594-1599), a third stage characterized by Hamlet and an exploration of tragedy, and a final phase that appears optimistic and contented. In these two chapters, which borrow Dowden's labels, "Out of the Depths" and "On the Heights," Bevington looks at the great tragedies, Twelfth Night, and the later, generically slippery plays. The final chapter, "L'envoi," returns to what we do not know about Shakespeare's life. It segues smoothly into an account of Shakespeare's education and then to a brief description of the anti-Strafordian position, its supporters, and its most effective opponents. As with all his sources, Bevington is careful and generous in his summaries. At the same time, he has no doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems attributed to him.

Throughout the book, Bevington treats his sources with respect and equanimity. The brevity of the book requires a narrow focus, and his favorites are drawn from the last fifteen years. Greenblatt and Duncan- Jones are cited most often, followed by Weis, Bate, and Honan. There does seem to be a slight bias toward those who have written the most speculative (Greenblatt), unorthodox (Duncan-Jones), or outrageous (Weis) statements, but Bevington does not use these moments to judge.

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Greenblatt's speculations are sometimes excessive, but always strongly supported. Duncan-Jones provides an unlikable Shakespeare, but in a thoroughly documented historical context. Bevington reports some of Weis's curious conjectures (that Shakespeare never intended Coriolanus to be performed), but avoids others (that Shakespeare had a limp; cf. Sonnets 37, 66, 89, and 90).

Though the book jacket claims that Shakespeare and Biography is not a biography of Shakespeare, it inevitably must be. By contextualizing the work of biographers, Bevington has to provide biographical information about Shakespeare.3 Rather than distract from the book's focus, the biographical element makes the book all the more valuable, especially to the general reader. So, too, does its tendency to provide extended readings of the plays and poems as they pertain to points in Shakespeare's life. Bevington is careful to avoid suggesting that we might read the plays as sources of unmediated information about Shakespeare's life and character. At the same time, he finds it impossible to resist suggesting connections. After observing that Hamlet was not written until several years after Shakespeare's son Hamnet died, Bevington goes on to note that 1 and 2 Henry IV contain the death and mourning of a son, Hotspur. In particular, Kate's attack on Northumberland for arriving at Shrewsbury too late to help his son "bears a suggestive resemblance to the way Shakespeare could have felt if he had been unable to reach in time the bedside of his dying son" (102).

In many ways, Shakespeare and Biography follows the example of Dowden rather than Schoenbaum. The book is committed to providing its readers with an account of not only what has been said about Shakespeare's life, but also how Shakespeare's life and works can be seen as inevitably intertwined. The study of Shakespeare is presented as populist and holistic. Readers can learn much about the man by reading the plays and poems and vice versa, in a kind of feedback loop. Some readers may chafe at this approach, seeking one that strives to separate the two.4 The vast majority of readers, however, will find much useful material here.

NOTES 1. In this brief interview, Bevington provides some context for his project: "David Bevington on Shakespeare and Biography," Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 22 June 2010, http://vimeo.com/12767835

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(http://vimeo.com/12767835). 2. Edward Dowden's Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) and its condensed follow-up, Shakspere (1877) were enormously influential biographical and critical studies of Shakespeare and his work. Strongly guided by Romantic and Darwinian epistemologies, Dowden wrote eloquently about Shakespeare's life and art such that in the relationship between his life and his writings, "[t]he oeuvre is an autobiographical poem, and the autobiography holds more importance than the poem" (Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives [1991], 356). 3. Though Bevington has not written a full biography, he did contribute a brief sketch of Shakespeare's life to David Scott Kastan's A Companion to Shakespeare, which though distinct, shares a similar approach to Shakespeare and Biography; see "Shakespeare the Man," in David Scott Kastan, ed. A Companion to Shakespeare, 9-21. Bevington's Shakespeare: Seven Ages of Man (2005) is also not technically a biography, but it does provide substantial information about Shakespeare's life and his plays, keyed to Jaques's speech from As You Like It. 4. Several recent articles might be of interest here. The 2005 installment of Shakespeare Survey, "Writing About Shakespeare," contains several essays on Shakespearean biography, the most thorough being Lois Potter's "Having Our Will: Imagination in Recent Shakespeare Biographies" (1-8) and James Shapiro's "Toward a New Biography of Shakespeare" (9-14). See also Stanley Wells, "Current Issues in Shakespeare Biography" (2005). A special number of Critical Survey, "Shakespeare and the Personal Story" was edited by Graham Holderness and Katherine Scheil and consists of papers from the 2008 International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford ( Critical Survey 21.3 [Winter 2009]).

REFERENCES Bevington, David. 2010. Shakespeare and Biography. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bevington, David. 2010. "Shakespeare and Biography." Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 22 June 2010. http://vimeo.com/12767835 [cited 20 June 2011]. Bevington, David. 2005. Shakespeare: Seven Ages of Man. Second edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Bevington, David. 1999. "Shakespeare the Man." In A Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Blackwell. 9-21. Dowden, Edward. 1877. Shakspere. London: Macmillan. Dowden, Edward. 1875. Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. London: Henry King. Holderness, Graham, and Katherine Scheil, eds. 2009. Shakespeare and the Personal Story. Critical Survey 21.3 (Winter). Potter, Lois. 2005. "Having Our Will: Imagination in Recent Shakespeare Biographies." Shakespeare Survey. Edited by Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-8. Schoenbaum, Samuel. 1991. Shakespeare's Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shapiro, James. 2005. "Toward a New Biography of Shakespeare." Shakespeare Survey. Edited by Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9-14. Wells, Stanley. 2005. "Current Issues in Shakespeare Biography." In In the Footsteps of William Shakespeare. Edited by Christa Jansohn. Münster, LIT. 5-21.

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(/current) M. G. Aune is Associate Professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania; his research interests include early modern travel writing and Shakespeare in performance and on film. His reviews and articles have appeared in Early Modern Literary Studies, Renaissance (/previous) Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, Borrowers and Lenders, and Shakespeare. (/about) Juan F. Cerdá — M. A. University of Birmingham (Shakespeare Institute), Ph.D. University of Murcia (Spain) — has been working in (/archive) the research project "Shakespeare in Spain within the framework of his European reception" since 2006 and is currently teaching at the University of Murcia. Selected publications include "Spaces of Patronage: The Enchanted Island and Prospero's Books," Folio 15 (2008); "'Betwixt our nation and the aspiring French': Spanish Patriotism(s) through Shakespeare's Critical Reception (1764-1834)," Linguaculture 2 (2010); "Shakespeare in García Lorca's Early Poems," Atlantis 34.1 (2011). His research interests include Shakespeare appropriations on stage/screen and Shakespeare's Spanish reception. Currently, he is working on the publication of the monograph Shakespeare and the Renovation of Spanish Theatrical Culture, 1900- 1936.

Susan Allen Ford is Professor of English and Writing Center Coordinator at Delta State University. She is Editor of Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal and Persuasions On-Line, has published essays on Jane Austen and her contemporaries, detective fiction, the Gothic, and in Shakespearean Gothic (edited by Christy Desmet and Anne Williams) on the Gothic dimensions of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.

Katie L. N. Grubbs is a doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia, where she teaches First-year Composition and Shakespeare. Her research interests include performance of death on the Renaissance http://borrowers.uga.edu/782697/show Page 1 of 3 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/26/20, 4(23 PM

stage, adaptations of Shakespeare for children, and the Renaissance elegy. She is currently working on her dissertation, which will examine the Renaissance and early American infant elegy, focusing on issues of identity and construction of selfhood in poems by Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Katherine Philips, Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others. Katie has been an active member of UGA's Early Modern Union of Scholars since its inception and enjoyed serving her fellow graduate students last year as President of the English Graduate Organization.

Michael P. Jensen is an independent scholar with roughly 300 publications, seventy-five of which are about Shakespeare and the writers of his era. These have been published in The Ben Jonson Journal, Shakespeare Bulletin, and other journals and in popular publications such as Filmfax, and have been heard on KJAZ-FM. He is a contributing editor to Shakespeare Newsletter, where he created the "Talking Books" column. His article, "Macbeth Meets Alley Oop, and William Shakespeare Meets V. T. Hamlin and Tom Stoppard" appeared in Borrowers and Lenders 2.1 (2006).

Robert Sawyer is Professor of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University. Author of Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), he is also co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (Routledge, 1999) and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2001). He recently completed a monograph about Charles Kean for the Lives of Shakespearian Actors series (Pickering & Chatto, 2010).

Elizabeth Williamson teaches at Evergreen State College. She is the author of The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Ashgate, 2009) and co-editor (with Jane Hwang Degenhardt) of Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2011). Her articles on religiously charged stage properties have appeared in English Literary Renaissance and Studies in English Literature, as well as the edited collection Shakespeare and Religious Change. More broadly, her research and teaching deal with the intersection of theater and popular culture in a variety of historical time periods.

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