The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(56 PM

Home , Bel Canto (opera), Charles Kean, Danielle de Niese, Harlem Duet, John Forbes (physician), Joyce DiDonato

Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(56 PM

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

SPRING/SUMMER 2013 (/previous)

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

CONTENTS

"'Late' has no meaning here": Imagining a Second Chance in Peter Toni Morrison's Desdemona (/710/show) (pdf) (/710/pdf) Erickson

This Tempest's Hers: Metropolitan Opera's The Enchanted Amy Island and the Feminism of Bel Canto Shakespeare Adaptation Scott- (/703/show) (pdf) (/703/pdf) Douglass

Representations of Shakespeare's Humanity and Iconicity: Sarah Incidental Appropriations in Four British Television Broadcasts Olive (/783384/show) (pdf) (/783384/pdf)

A CTRESSES, ARTISTS, AUTHORS: WOMEN S HAKESPEAREANS IN THE NINETEENTH C ENTURY

E DITED BY CHRISTY DESMET AND SUJATA I YENGAR

Christy Introduction (/709/show) (pdf) (/709/pdf) Desmet

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Sarah Bernhardt's Ophelia (/662/show) (pdf) (/662/pdf) Alan Young

"Playing the Men": Ellen Tree, Fanny Kemble, and Theatrical Anne Constructions of Gender (/712/show) (pdf) (/712/pdf) Russell

Judith Joanna Baillie and the Anxiety of Shakespeare's Influence Bailey (/690/show) (pdf) (/690/pdf) Slagle

Shakespeare, King of What? Gender, Nineteenth-Century Tricia Patriotism, and the Case of Poet-lore (/707/show) (pdf) Lootens (/707/pdf)

B OOK REVIEW

Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, by Jeffrey Celestine Kahan (/635/show) (pdf) (/635/pdf) Woo

C ONTRIBUTORS

Contributors (/711/show) (pdf) (/711/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2020

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"'Late' has no meaning here": Imagining a Second (/current) Chance in Toni Morrison's Desdemona

PETER ERICKSON, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY (/previous)

(/archive) ABSTRACT Toni Morrison's Desdemona dramatically displaces Othello as the title character in Shakespeare's play. Morrison's renaming signals her re-vision of Othello by giving Desdemona an afterlife that restores her voice and activates her pursuit of further development beyond Shakespearean limits and without Othello. What enables this change is Desdemona's exploration of newly established and newly emphasized bonds with female characters, notably Emilia and Barbary.

ADAPTATION VERSUS RE-VISION In our Shakespeare-centric culture, we participate in the continuity of a great tradition through which we receive and renew this legacy. Such renewal is valuable as an ongoing historical marker and artistic resource. But a potential danger of this reiteration is the complacency that results when a cultural heritage becomes static because new developments are always interpreted and co-opted, in circular fashion, as an adaptation and extension of Shakespeare's plays, which are viewed as the origin and foundation for all subsequent work. For a culture to keep growing, it also needs change and new directions.

One way to clarify and circumvent this problem is to pursue a dual critical approach that makes a sharp distinction between adaptation and re-vision. The http://borrowers.uga.edu/710/show Page 1 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

present article is part of a cluster of new essays I have written since 2007 on a range of adaptive and revisionary responses to Othello by contemporary writers and visual artists.1 In Adrienne Rich's classic definition of re-vision, "We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us" (Rich 1971, 35). From this perspective, it is possible to envision a departure that moves outside the Shakespearean framework. What is striking about Toni Morrison's engagement with Shakespeare is the extent to which her reinterpretation of Othello is grounded in close reading of Shakespeare's play.2 This baseline allows Morrison to perform the nearly impossible task of acknowledging the power of the old story in the process of creating a re-vision that breaks new ground.

SILENCING/REVIVING DESDEMONA Prior to Desdemona's appearance on stage in Shakespeare's drama, Othello's narration of "the story of my life" (Othello 1.3.128) casts her in the role of listener, as the receiver of his well-told story, albeit an eager, appreciative one "with a greedy ear" (148).3 As soon as she arrives at the meeting of the Senate, however, she demonstrates a linguistic power of persuasion equal to Othello's. As though inspired by hearing Othello, Desdemona leaves behind her domestic life of "house affairs" (146) and quickly finds her own voice in the public arena. First, she addresses her father with confidence and exactitude about her marriage and allegiance to Othello (1.3.179-88). Her assertive stance is crystallized in the verb "challenge" (187), with which she concludes her speech. This forceful tone is amplified, when in her second, even more emphatic speech, she "trumpet[s] to the world" the "downright violence and storm of fortunes" (248-49) driving her love for Othello.

Acting on her own initiative, Desdemona makes a public appeal to Othello's superior, the Duke of Venice. No longer the "greedy ear" herself, she now becomes the speaker who offers her "unfolding" to the Duke's "prosperous ear" (246). Her request to accompany Othello on his assigned mission catches her husband off- guard and implicitly counters his conventional assumption that she would stay behind. Only after rehearsing, and reserving for himself, "the flinty and steel couch of war / My thrice-driven bed of down" (228-29) does Othello observe protocol by attending to the necessary domestic arrangements: "I crave fit disposition for my wife" (234). Faced with Desdemona's unexpected rejection of "a heavy interim" (257) at home, Othello immediately backtracks and falls in line behind his wife's insistence that she will share his martial, as well as marital, "bed."

The wonderfully loud broadcast implied by Desdemona's image of the trumpet is not entirely music to Othello's ears, however. As though inspired by Botticelli's painting Venus and Mars (c. 1483), Othello's vivid anticipation of a "wanton

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dullness" (268) that makes a mockery of military gear almost seems to be asking for it: "Let housewives make a skillet of my helm" (271). When Othello again surveys the prized accoutrements of war, it is to say "farewell" (3.3.353): his "occupation's gone" (362), and "the shrill trump" (356) matches the shrillness of his agony.

Othello's belated support of Desdemona's desire to go to Cyprus exposes him because he feels the need to launch on a linguistically torturous digression on the reliability of his military masculinity and his immunity to male vulnerability to women. Although the intention is to reassure the senators, the effect of spelling out, and dwelling on, the threat posed by the disabling distraction of female sexuality is to confirm the seriousness of this potential danger. The insecurity of his self-defense reactivates the hint of apprehensiveness already expressed in his negatively tinged definition of marriage as "circumscription and confine" (1.2.27). If the long final scene in Venice begins with Othello's display of verbal command, it ends with Desdemona's exercise of verbal authority.

The overall outcome of Othello is the silencing of Desdemona. In the final scene, Shakespeare emphasizes the importance of Desdemona's vocal power by prolonging the dramatization of its loss. Othello's chosen method of smothering targets the symbolic site of vocalization. Against Desdemona's bargaining for ever- shorter amounts of time — "Kill me tomorrow" (5.2.87), "But half an hour" (89), "But while I say one prayer" (91) — Othello is adamant: "It is too late" (92). Despite Othello's insistence that "there is no pause" (90), Shakespeare makes him wait until he is sure that Desdemona is dead — "Not quite dead?" (94). Othello continues to wait — "I think she stirs again. No . . . If she [Emilia] come in, she'll sure speak to my wife" (104-105) — so that he can verify her inability to speak before opening the door to allow Emilia to enter. Even then, Shakespeare upstages Othello — "That? What?" (128) — by reviving Desdemona to speak long enough to establish communication with Emilia: "Out and alas, that was my lady's voice! / . . . O lady, speak again! / Sweet Desdemona, O sweet mistress, speak" (129-31). As though directly from Desdemona, the speaking role passes to Emilia — "I am bound to speak" (191) — until, in parallel with Desdemona, she too is silenced by her husband and dies bearing witness: "So come my soul to bliss as I speak true" (257).

Toni Morrison is closely attuned to the dynamic of female speech and silence in Shakespeare's play. Her drama foils the definitive finality of Othello's tragic ending by creating in Desdemona an afterlife that builds on, and extends, Desdemona's revival by making it permanent rather than temporary. Othello's Shakespearean claim that "It is too late" is overturned: as Desdemona informs him, "'Late' has no meaning here" (10.55; Morrison 2012).4 This point of intervention allows Morrison to restore Desdemona's voice and to reopen the dramatic action.

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With the time constraint removed, she can not only resume speaking but also begin rethinking. Retrospective reflection facilitates a new understanding not possible to achieve under extreme pressure; hence, this special space becomes the basis of Morrison's potential alternative of a second chance.

Figure 1. Peter Sellars, Rokia Traore, Toni Morrison

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Figure 2. Peter Sellars, Rokia Traore, Toni Morrison

In its overall structure, Desdemona consists of two main lines of action. The first is Desdemona's ongoing dialogue with Othello in the postmortem exploration of their relationship, conducted in sections 4, 6, 7, and 10. Running parallel to but apart from the first strand, the second line is the development of female relationships in sections 5, 8, and 9. These two distinct threads are held in a dramatic tension that generates the production's galvanic force and revisionary edge.

The differences between Othello and Desdemona begin with Morrison's reorganization of the Shakespearean characters. A crucial step is the demotion of Iago when Morrison eliminates his onstage presence and limits him to marginal status as a name-only reference. Through this strategic interpretive move, Morrison places the emphasis on Othello and Desdemona as the makers of their own destinies and thus makes them logically the ones in the afterlife who are responsible for coming to terms with their own actions, with no recourse to blaming Iago. In downgrading Iago's importance, Morrison develops further Harry Berger's view that, in conventional readings of Othello, Iago's control and therefore responsibility are greatly exaggerated. Rather, Othello's and Desdemona's problematic contributions in effect do Iago's work for him: "If it all happens with startling rapidity, that's because it has already happened. Poor Iago has to huff and puff to keep up with his victims. It is almost too late to do further harm. The rapidity with which they destroy their relation makes him all but belated and dispensable" (Berger 2013, 137).

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Figure 3. Rokia Traore Seated with Guitar

In creating female characters, Morrison reverses the process. In Shakespeare's play, Desdemona's mother (1.3.185, 4.3.25), Othello's mother (3.4.54), and Barbary (4.3.25) are largely notional figures who never actually appear but exist only as tangential references. Morrison changes the cast by making these women full-fledged characters, thereby expanding and empowering the female community. As already announced in her change of title, Morrison shifts the balance by re-centering the focus on Desdemona. By giving her access to an alternate world of women, Morrison's play gives Desdemona the option, not

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available in Shakespeare, of in-depth woman-to-woman conversations.

Figure 4. Rokia Traore with Chorus, Surrounding Desdemona

OTHELLO'S CONFESSION In his final speech after killing Desdemona, Othello issues to himself, as well as to others, this instruction: "Nothing extenuate" (5.2.351).5 There is, however, a conspicuous gap between this stipulation and the extenuations Othello actually makes as he strives to reshape the narrative structure of his identity in a way that remains ingratiating. Instead of the successive audiences of Brabantio (1.3.127- 32), Desdemona (144-54), and the full senate (76-94) to whom he had told his story in Venice, Othello now has a one-man audience in the person of the state's representative Lodovico, to whose framework Othello's new self-presentation directly responds and adapts. The terms — "Till that the nature of your fault be known / To the Venetian state" (345-46) — set the stage by implying that the nature of Othello's "fault" is not yet determined. This unresolved issue thus warrants further consideration and negotiation, to which Othello might contribute first-hand testimony and thus conceivably influence the verdict.

Perhaps Othello and the state have a mutual interest in protecting their common brand. The concerted Venetian effort to zero in on Iago as the culprit (311-12; 341- 44; 378-79) could give Othello further encouragement to hope for a generous or at least mitigating assessment that would preserve his heroic image. His appeal to the

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Venetian state as the ultimate decision maker is direct: "I have done the state some service, and they know't" (348). As an extenuating gesture, this opening gambit makes its point with such embarrassing boldness that Othello quickly pivots to humble disclaimer: "No more of that" (349). Yet "no more" is as inaccurate as "a word or two" (347), since the end of Othello's long speech will circle back to his exemplary state service by employing his role as the protector when the "state" is "traduced" (363). This memorable final image should have the power to validate the Senate's first impression of his military value and virtue.

Othello's "bloody period" (366) is not the end of the story, however. The final period is the kiss he bestows on the mute Desdemona as he proclaims his right "To die upon a kiss" (369), as though this demonstration might reenact, and thus reclaim and restore, his preferred former image as a lover. In fact, this moment is a grotesque realization of Othello's Liebestod-motivated kiss upon arrival in Cyprus: "May the winds blow till they have wakened death" (2.1.183); "If it were now to die / 'Twere now to be most happy" (186-87). At the end, Desdemona is not alive to utter her previous retort after their mutual kiss: "The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase / Even as our days do grow" (2.1.190-92). The final scene presents Othello's kisses as literally a one-way communication. The last kiss recapitulates in full-circle display the opening kisses for Desdemona asleep: "One more, and that's the last" (5.2.19); these initial kisses foreshadow the last: "So sweet was ne'er so fatal"(5.2.20). Both moments demonstrate acts of self- involvement in which Othello writes his own script. Yet Othello's climactic gesture may nonetheless facilitate the best-face account toward which Lodovico instinctively gravitates because, with a sympathetic tweak, "dying upon a kiss" provides a tolerable closure for Othello's story; tragedy has its own forms of sentimentality.

Lodovico's summary in the final lines of the play — "Myself will straight aboard, and to the state, / This heavy act with heavy heart relate" (5.2.380-81) — sounds potentially aligned with Othello's request that "When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, / Speak of me as I am" (350-51). In the play's last word, Lodovico echoes Othello's "relate," a term that calls attention to the act of telling as a narrative construction that poses choices among various possible styles and contents. If the "heavy heart" with which Lodovico transmits the updated story to the Senate invokes the spirit of Cassio's praise of Othello as "great of heart" (371), then the extenuating, painfully uncritical spin that Othello puts on the relation of his "unlucky deeds" may be modulated for Venetian consumption into an acceptably conventional tragic form, as deserving our pity and support.

One has to agree with Othello's comment toward the very end of Toni Morrison's drama: "We should have had such honest talk, not fantasy, the evening we wed" (10.54). Belatedly, the couple attempts to articulate now what needed to be said

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then. Yet obstacles remain in play, and too often the new conversation veers back to a repetition of the old conversation. The question becomes to what extent "should have" is successfully translated into "honest talk."

The most astonishing new backstory information that Morrison provides for her Othello concerns the sexual activity at the heart of his military exploits. In the transition from section 6 to 7 of Desdemona, the pieces of Othello's story are recorded with the prefatory verb "told" four times until, reaching the fifth item, the verb switches to "confessed" when the subject of "rape" (6.36) is introduced and, in the next section, becomes a graphic account of the prolonged rape of the two elderly women that he and Iago pursue together. The two men's "mutual pleasure" (7.38) in shared sexuality creates an erotic charge that crystallizes Othello's primary allegiance to Iago. In her acerbic retrospect, Desdemona notes her recognition of the powerful force of the "bright, tight camaraderie" in "brotherhood" (7.37): "Romance is always overshadowed by brawn. The language of love is trivial compared to the hidden language of men that lies underneath the secret language they speak in public" (7.37).

By sharing this confession with Desdemona, Othello proposes to make his "exchange of secrecy" (7.38) with Iago the basis of Othello's relationship with Desdemona: "Your gaze, spilling pity and understanding, emboldens me, giving me hope that this, my secret, will be our bond" (6.36). From Othello's point of view, the secret should function as a bond of trust with Desdemona, though at its core this secret negates the marriage. Othello's secret with Desdemona can never equal Othello's prior secret with Iago. Transfer of male power into the center of marriage asks Desdemona to accept her own subordination. This confession continues Othello's pattern of extenuation since, in expecting pity, he declines self- examination and seeks unearned forgiveness, as though the solution is her capacity for understanding, not his.

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Figure 5. Tina Benko as Desdemona

In the second chance afforded by the afterlife, Desdemona explicitly rejects the primacy of male relations to which Othello remains bound: "But real love, the love of an Amazon, is not based on pretty language or the secret sharing between males" (7.37). On the strength of the Amazon image, Desdemona speaks forthrightly and sets limits. To Othello's question "Can you forgive me?" she responds: "No, I cannot" (7.39). This setting aside of the issue of forgiveness begins to suggest how Morrison's revisionary approach to Othello differs from that of Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet. In line with Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem" (Harlem Duet 114), Sears's main character Billie has "exploded" but her recovery is made to hinge on "Forgiveness" (115): "I hate — I love him so — I forgive him now. And now" (116). This halting commitment is not completed, nor is it clear that this direction would completely address the full range of issues that Billie has so painfully raised throughout the play. Billie may risk cutting herself off from the "prophetic fury" contained in her given name Sibyl, which not only comes from Shakespeare's Othello (epigraph, Harlem Duet [19]) but also is passed down from her grandmother through her father (81). The second syllable of her given name echoes her nickname (byl/Bill) and, if we hear Billie as a version of William, suggests a family-derived alternative to Shakespeare. In bypassing forgiveness as the necessary outcome, Morrison keeps the prophetic voice active to the end. This firm limit creates a clear separation between Desdemona and Othello that changes and complicates their relationship in the afterlife and makes the deeper conversation in which they are now engaged so tentative and uncertain. In contrast to the female encounters, Desdemona's meeting with Othello ultimately seems http://borrowers.uga.edu/710/show Page 10 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

unresolved, suspended, and even beside the point.

In Morrison's version, Desdemona's first meeting with Othello is based on a direct link to Barbary: "I saw a glint of brass in his eyes identical to the light in Barbary's eyes" (4.23). "Not yet recovered from Barbary's death" (4.23), Desdemona circumvents, and perhaps prematurely short-circuits, her deep mourning for the loss of Barbary when she quickly turns to Othello to fill the gap. The compressed overlapping of the two events maps Barbary onto Othello, making Othello almost a Barbary substitute. But Morrison's play enables Desdemona to differentiate between these two figures through her respective encounters with them in the afterlife. Ultimately Morrison reverses the Barbary-to-Othello trajectory as Desdemona, with the benefit of the afterlife, moves away from her marriage to Othello toward commitment to a newly fashioned alliance with Barbary.

Figure 6. Rokia Traore at left, Tina Benko at right, with Chorus

DESDEMONA'S STORY The sharp juxtaposition of Morrison's title Desdemona with Shakespeare's Othello is no sooner announced than it is further sharpened by Desdemona's immediate rejection of her name in the opening speech: "My name is Desdemona. The word, Desdemona, means misery . . . I am not the meaning of a name I did not choose" (1.13). In Shakespeare's play, Desdemona was silenced by a physical but bloodless assault directed at her throat and mouth, the source of vocalization. The work of this performance is to redefine her given name and hence the structure and

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meaning of her character.

Figure 7. Rokia Traore with Desdemona

By restoring Desdemona's voice, Morrison gives her the opportunity to tell a different story — "I exist in places where I can speak, at last, words that in earth life were sealed or twisted into the language of obedience" (1.14) — to create a narrative of her identity that focuses on "my interior life" (2.17). In Othello, the deferred declaration of disobedience is associated with Emilia, who with increasing urgency insists on speaking: "'Tis proper I obey him but not now" (5.2.203). Emilia's outspoken defiance of her husband fills the vacuum left by Desdemona's refusal fully to confront Othello. In Morrison's play, Desdemona sets out to question "obedience" (1.14) from the very beginning. Given this agenda, Desdemona embarks on a stunning revision of the Shakespearean precedent.

The principal means by which Desdemona gains access to a new mode of expression is through a sequence of increasingly intense woman-to-woman conversations that Morrison stages. The first of these encounters, which establishes a model for the ones to follow, involves two characters who are mentioned only in passing and make no appearance in Shakespeare's drama. We are thus hearing their voices for the first time. Morrison visualizes a manifestly uncomfortable meeting between Desdemona's and Othello's mothers. In their brief moment, the two women reach a modest accommodation by contemplating the "way of cleansing" (5.27) recommended by Soun, whom we later learn is "a root woman" who "adopted me [Othello] as her son" (6.31). This "cleansing" holds a

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tentative promise of consolation: "We build an altar to the spirits who are waiting to console us" (5.27). What specific form this consolatory gesture might take is left to subsequent encounters in sections 8 and 9 to work out in greater detail. But in section 5, the prospect of female collaboration has been broached.

This moment initiates the theme of transformation. The shift in focus from the graves of Othello and Desdemona to the building of an altar in their memory suggests that the outcome of their story is not fixed but mutable, still in play: a different ending is possible. In addition, this meeting of the mothers symbolically indicates that cultural mixing is not a problem but a positive resource when it enables the flexibility to occupy multiple vantage points and to attain a more far- reaching, broader world view.

The second exchange between Desdemona and Emilia is more sustained and more argumentative, beginning with the air-clearing sarcasm of Emilia's greeting — "Well, well. If it isn't the martyr of Venice" (8.42). Emilia rebuffs Desdemona's assumption that they have a friendship of equals by insisting on her difference as "a servant" (8.43) and as an orphan: "It's not the same. An orphan knows how quickly love can be withdrawn" (8.44). The conversation intimates the self- examination that Desdemona must undergo in order to arrive at a position where she is capable of remaking her sense of herself.

The striking tonal shift in Emilia's concluding image of the lizard that sheds "her dull outer skin" to reveal "her jeweled self" (8.44) signals the hope for a new self- image and self-awareness. The shedding of the old comes from within: "No one helped her; she did it by herself" (8.44). As Emilia puts it in her final metaphoric sentence, "That little lizard changed my life" (8.44). This visionary model belongs not only to Emilia but also implicitly serves as inspiration for Desdemona.

The third encounter, which is also the longest and most elaborate, immediately follows in the next section when Desdemona talks with Barbary, who explicitly identifies herself as "black-skinned" (9.45). The moment is heightened to the level of climactic impact because Barbary, who never actually appears in Shakespeare's play, is granted the power of speech and is elevated to a major onstage role. The part is further enhanced by having it performed by Rokia Traoré, the Malian singer who collaborated with Morrison in creating the production. The African woman missing from Shakespeare at last takes the stage.

Unlike Desdemona, Barbary has been renamed, so that her original African name, Sa'ran, marks her non-Shakespearean reality. The meaning of her alternate name is "joy," which contrasts sharply with the continuation of misery signified by the name Desdemona. Joy opens up the possibility of a shift in a new direction (Kitts 2011, 10). Again, the encounter begins with Barbary/Sa'ran throwing cold water

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on Desdemona's enthusiastic claim of their shared experience — "We shared nothing" — and strongly registering the difference in their status — "I was your slave" (9.45). Sa'ran's assertiveness brings us back, with a new perspective, to Desdemona's reminiscences at the beginning: "My solace in those early days lay with my nurse, Barbary . . . She tended me as though she were my birth mother" (2.18). Sa'ran demonstrates the other, negative, side of this "solace."

In a further twist, however, as the earlier reference to "willow trees" (2.18) prompts, Desdemona's initial account returns us also to the problematic model that Barbary's submission bequeathed to Desdemona: "Yet that same heart, wide as it was, proved vulnerable. When I needed her most, she stumbled under the spell of her lover" (2.18). The preliminary skirmishing over, their shared problem now resurfaces: "And your lover slaughtered you as surely as if he had strangled you. Remember the song you sang every day until you wasted away and embraced death without fight or protest?" (9.46). Although it is unclear whether Barbary's lover is located in Africa or Venice and whether we should imagine him as black or white, the immediacy of Desdemona's account makes it seem as though she witnessed the entire event as having taken place in Venice.

Sa'ran responds by simultaneously repeating and renouncing the willow song that Desdemona had learned from her and had recited prior to her own death at Othello's hands (Othello 4.3.38-55). This is the play's turning point because, at the point of closest conjunction with Shakespeare, Morrison steers clear by having Sa'ran sing a different song that displaces the one inherited from Othello. In Sa'ran's preface, the turn and the rejection are explicit: "No more 'willow.' Afterlife is time and with time there is change. My song is new:" (9.48, original punctuation).

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Figure 8. Rokia Traore with Two Musicians Playing the Ngoni and the Kora

The sequential placement of sections 8 and 9 emphasizes their structural parallel. Both present a contrast between old and new. Both stress the motif of change, whether in Emilia's "That lizard changed my life" (8.44) or Sa'ran's "with time is change" (9.48). At the authorial level, these terms speak to Morrison's metaphorical relationship to Shakespeare. Othello is the old song to Desdemona conceived as the new song that brings change. Morrison's artistic reflexiveness is particularly notable with regard to the old skin that the lizard sloughs off but does not discard: "she did not leave the outer one behind. She dragged it with her" (8.44). The express purpose of Morrison's intervention is to disrupt and change the legacy of Othello, but her project also acknowledges a respect for Shakespeare's work through the image of the retention of the old skin.

Sa'ran's new song, "Someone leans near" (9.49), is written by Toni Morrison, but not new to her, for it appeared as the third poem in her Five Poems, published ten years before, with each poem accompanied by a black silhouette work created by the African American artist Kara Walker (Morrison 2002).6 Since Morrison has altered slightly the original version for use in Desdemona, I pause here to summarize the modifications. For Desdemona, Morrison replaces the second- person "you" address with the first-person "I" to create a more immediate, intimate effect. Word changes are also inserted in two of the poem's sixteen lines. The more dramatic "sudden" is added to "Then on my skin a sudden breath caresses" (Morrison 2002, line 11) and the penultimate line 15, "Once more you know," becomes the far more vivid "What bliss to know." In both cases, the result is more

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emphatic. In particular, "bliss" stands out as a carry-over from the fourth poem, "It Comes Unadorned," where the revelation of the referent of the repeated "It" is deferred to the next-to-last line, which contains the single word "Bliss."

The existence of the earlier version of "Someone leans near" raises the question of whether Morrison was thinking about Othello in the 2002 poem. The question may be unanswerable, but it is worth noting that the phrase "the salt your tears have shed," which appears in both lines 2 and 12 of the original poem, as well as in Desdemona (9.49), corresponds to "Her salt tears" in Shakespeare's willow song: "Her salt tears fell from her and softened the stones" (Othello 4.3.44; Desdemona 9.47). In addition, the entire poem may be associated with a Desdemona who "waits, longing to hear / Words of reason, love or play" but hears none — only "a fury in the words" (Othello 4.2.34); a Desdemona who herself is at a loss for words — "Silence kneads your fear"; and a Desdemona who is immobilized and defenseless, with no way out — "You shore up your heart to run. To stay. / But no sign or design marks the narrow way." Finally, the pivot point of the poem's "Then on your skin a breath caresses" may identify Othello as the "someone who leans near" when he "smells thee on the tree" (Othello, 5.2.15) as he pauses in the act of "plucking her rose" and killing Desdemona.

It is also appropriate to consider Morrison's previous collaboration with Kara Walker, whose style can be seen as a felicitous critical match for the grotesqueness of what Morrison calls the "murderous silence" (8.42) in Shakespeare's Othello. In particular, Walker's illustration for the poem "Someone leans near" shows a huge raptor hovering above the precariously exposed and pinned woman, with "YOU" incised in large letters down the front of her naked torso, by which the bird has staked his claim on the woman's body. If we imagine the raptor as an emblem for Othello and the upside-down woman as Desdemona, Walker offers a brilliantly apt, ironic image for the intertwined fates of the two Shakespearean characters, an image suggestive of the prelude to murder at the opening of the play's final scene.

In the context of Desdemona, "Someone leans near" represents "change" (9.48) by releasing the grip of tragedy. The positive tone of the last two lines suggests that death is not the end but rather symbolizes a new start: "What bliss to know / I will never die again" (9.49). Desdemona joins and ratifies the final note of Sa'ran's song by transforming her first-person singular "I" into the collective "we": "We will never die again" (9.49). This choric refrain conveys a shared resolution in which the two women, and by extension all women, potentially participate. Since "We will never die again" is the final sentence in the entire section, the statement commands attention. By contrast, Desdemona's corresponding "we" formulation in the context of her relationship with Othello at the end of the drama — "We will be judged by how well we love" (10.56) — is far more provisional. Here, with Sa'ran, Desdemona's culmination cannot be gainsaid but stands affirmed.

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WAR AND PEACE The two biggest surprises in Morrison's play are intertwined: Othello's revelation about his "mutual pleasure" in the twin rapes that he and Iago coordinated in section 7 is matched and answered by Desdemona's counter-confession. Her startling renunciation of Othello's military identity is held back until the final section: I am sick of killing as a solution. It solves nothing. Questions nothing, produces nothing, nothing, but more of itself. You thought war was alive, had honor and reason. I tell you it is well beyond all that. My mistake was believing that you hated war as much as I did. You believed I loved Othello the warrior. I did not. (10.54) If Desdemona's eloquent disclosure sounds out of context, this is a vivid sign of the re-vision with which Morrison has decisively altered the context.

Against Othello's profession of war, Desdemona concludes by presenting herself as a proponent of "human peace" (10.56). The contrast and disparity produce a gap that is too wide to be bridged. The hypothetical ideal reunion of Othello and Desdemona in section 10 cannot compete with the combined force of the immediately preceding sections 8 and 9, where the alternative world of female bonds with Emilia and Barbary/Sa'ran replace the male bonding offered in secret by Othello.

As their conversation proceeds, Othello follows the same pattern of critique as in the women's examples. Yet Othello's attempt to criticize Desdemona feels flat and unconvincing: "You never loved me. You fancied the idea of me, the exotic foreigner who kills for the State . . . What excited you was my strange story" (10.50-51). Othello's indulgence in self-pity and his absence of self-awareness are conspicuous. In his courtship of Desdemona, Othello himself played up and exploited an exoticized self-presentation: "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them" (Othello 1.3.166-67). As the crucial second line indicates, Othello is fully complicit in this process. Yet he takes no responsibility for his part in their reciprocal exchange. Rather, pursuing the course of self-extenuation, he tries to place the blame entirely on Desdemona, who rightly speaks out against Othello's predictable, self-serving tack: "You are wrong!" (10.51).

In the new world of Desdemona, Othello's final line consists of four anxious, compressed questions — "And now? Together? Alone? Is it too late?" (10.55) —

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that ring hollow when met with Desdemona's confident rejoinder: "'Late' has no meaning here. Here there is only the possibility of wisdom" (10.55). Implicit in her response is the assertion that they have not yet achieved this "wisdom." The overriding ambiguity of Othello's interrogative juxtaposition of "together" with the word "alone" also registers the distance that separates them. Othello is burdened by working with past assumptions, while Desdemona has moved on. After this point, Othello fades from view and arguably disappears from the text: there are no further speech prefixes designating Othello. Desdemona takes over and acts as though alone for the remainder of the performance. The scope is expansive rather than Othello-focused. Othello's capacity for a new understanding beyond Shakespeare cannot keep up with Desdemona's development, as represented here by Morrison.

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Figure 9. Rokia Traore Singing

With Othello having become at best a bystander, Desdemona speaks about her own vision of "passionate peace": "And if we haven't secured the passionate peace we yearn for, it is because we haven't imagined it" (10.56). The "we" in the subsequent lyrics seems all-encompassing, rather than specific to Othello. The final appeal to a cross-racial "working together" moves in Sa'ran's direction: "Whether we are from the same place or not. / Whether we are from the same culture or not" (10.56). In this context, the twice-repeated line "It would fill me with joy" (10.56) points to Barbary, whose rechristening as Sa'ran animates the invocation of joy.

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In conclusion, I turn to two observations by Toni Morrison with regard to Desdemona. First, Morrison refers to Shakespeare's Othello as an Africanist conception (Morrison 1992; Sellars, Morrison, et al. 2011).7 In a response to Darieck Scott, Morrison applies the term Africanist to Othello (at about 1:34) when she comments on the presentation of his character "not as a complicated human being but as a kind of male Africanist black warrior symbol of something" (Sellars, Morrison, et al. 2011). Opposed to this reductive version, Morrison allows that "there is another Othello that he does not let anyone see except Desdemona. And she recognizes this other person, who may or may not be the classic powerful killing machine that he is understood to be by everyone else." Yet the phrase "may or may not be" preserves an ambiguity. The play raises the issue of whether there is an authorial imprint inherited from Shakespeare that makes Othello's character an impervious structure and limits its depth. The answer remains an open question. Shakespeare's fashioning of Othello "may not" lend itself to refashioning. Perhaps, then, the lesson of this project is that the restricted boundaries of Othello's character are intractable, making it impossible fully to transform and to reinvent the Othello figure as constructed by Shakespeare's play. This may help to explain why Morrison found it more fruitful to explore the possibilities for Barbary as an undefined and thus not yet permanently fixed character.

Second, Morrison downplays the seemingly mandatory themes of forgiveness and redemption by stating her purpose more simply: "The whole thing is about the acquisition of knowledge . . . it's not necessarily even about reconciliation . . . it's finally knowing more" (Sellars, Morrison, et al. 2011, 1:06). For Morrison, understanding need not automatically lead to or guarantee reconciliation. Instead, we should value understanding for its own sake. Desdemona deliberately withholds a happy ending: we should not expect the tragic elevation of Othello, the magical reconstruction of the Othello-Desdemona relationship, or our validation as kind-hearted spectators. Instead, Morrison takes us outside the Shakespearean comfort zone into the stark exploratory world of critical re-vision toward which Adrienne Rich points. The austere, even harsh, approach of Toni Morrison's response to Othello in her Desdemona strikes me as an edifyingly productive stance and a noble cause.

NOTES 1. In chronological order, these include: Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet in "Contextualizing Othello" and "Respeaking Othello in Fred Wilson's Speak of Me as I Am," both in Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art (Erickson 2007a, 111-17 and Erickson 2007b,

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119-50); "Casting for Racial Harmony: Strategies of Redemption in Caleen Sinnette Jennings's Double Play" (Erickson 2009); Phillip Hayes Dean's Paul Robeson in "Black Characters in Search of an Author: Black Plays on Black Performers of Shakespeare" (Erickson 2010); "'Othello's Back': Othello as Mock Tragedy in Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica" (Erickson 2011); "Mining Shakespeare: Fred Wilson's Visual Translations of Othello" (Erickson 2013a), and my commentary on Othello itself, written for a Shakespeare Association of America seminar in 2010 without knowledge of Morrison's Desdemona (Erickson 2013b). 2. In an interview with Elaine Sciolino, Toni Morrison notes the interdependence of Shakespeare's work and her own: Desdemona "would be more fulfilling for the viewer if she or he had read 'Othello'" (Sciolino 2011). 3. Citations of Othello come from The Norton Shakespeare, second edition (Shakespeare 2008). 4. Desdemona (London: Oberon Books, 2012) consists of ten sections or "scenes." Citations refer to the section number, followed by the page. Valuable supplements to the text are the videos of two events at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley in conjunction with the U.S. premiere of Desdemona at Cal Performances. The first is a lecture by Peter Sellars, director of Desdemona (Sellars 2011). The second is an extended discussion among the three collaborators, Peter Sellars, Toni Morrison, Rokia Traoré, with contributions by three faculty members (Abdul JanMohamed, Tamara Roberts, and Darieck Scott) (Sellars, Morrison, et al. 2011). 5. For Othello's final speech, see Berger 2013, 228-29. 6. In an email dated 22 January 2003, Morrison's assistant René Boatman confirmed that Morrison wrote these poems without having seen in advance Kara Walker's accompanying illustrations (Boatman 2003). For Walker's art, see Walker 2007. 7. For a discussion of Africanism in literature, see Morrison 1992.

REFERENCES Berger, Harry. 2013. A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice. New York: Fordham University Press. Boatman, René. 2003. Email message to Peter Erickson. 22 January. Erickson, Peter. 2013a. "Mining Shakespeare: Fred Wilson's Visual Translations of Othello." Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 33 (forthcoming). Erickson, Peter. 2013b. "Race Words in Othello." In Shakespeare and Immigration. Edited by Ruben Espinosa and David Ruiter. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 159-76. Erickson, Peter. 2011. "'Othello's Back': Othello as Mock Tragedy in Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica." JNT 41.3: 362-77.

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Erickson, Peter. 2010. "Black Characters in Search of an Author: Black Plays on Black Performers of Shakespeare." In Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance. Edited by Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson. New York: Palgrave. 223-32. Erickson, Peter. 2009. "Casting for Racial Harmony: Strategies of Redemption in Caleen Sinnette Jennings's Double Play." Shakespeare Bulletin 27.3: 415-23. Erickson, Peter. 2007a. "Contextualizing Othello." In Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art. New York: Palgrave. 103-17. Erickson, Peter. 2007b. "Respeaking Othello in Fred Wilson's Speak of Me as I Am." In Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art. New York: Palgrave. 119-50. Kitts, Lenore. 2011. "Reviving Desdemona." Townsend Newsletter. 9-10. http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/publications/septemberoctober-2011/ (http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/publications/septemberoctober-2011/) [accessed 20 September 2013]. Morrison, Toni. 2012. Desdemona. London: Oberon Books. Morrison, Toni. 2002. Five Poems. Las Vegas: Rainmaker Editions, 2002. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1979. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1971)." In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton. 33-49. Sciolino, Elaine. 2011. "'Desdemona' Talks Back to 'Othello.'" New York Times. 25 October. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/arts/music/toni- morrisons-desdemona-and-peter-sellarss-othello.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/arts/music/toni-morrisons-desdemona-and- peter-sellarss-othello.html) [accessed 20 September 2013]. Sears, Djanet. 1997. Harlem Duet. Toronto: Scirocco Drama. Sellars, Peter. 2011. "Desdemona Takes the Microphone: Toni Morrison and Shakespeare's Hidden Women." 27 October. Available online: http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/media/peter-sellars-director-desdemona/ (http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/media/peter-sellars-director-desdemona/) [accessed 20 September 2013]. Sellars, Peter, and Toni Morrison, Rokia Traoré, Abdul JanMohamed, Tamara Roberts, and Darieck Scott. 2011. "Desdemona: Dialogues Across Histories, Continents, Cultures." 28 October. Available online:

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http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/media/desdemona-dialogues-across-histories- continents-cultures/ (http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/media/desdemona- dialogues-across-histories-continents-cultures/) [accessed 20 September 20 2013]. Shakespeare, William. 2008. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenbatt et al. Second edition. New York: Norton. Walker, Kara. 2007. Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Edited by Philippe Vergne, Sander Gilman, et al. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center.

PERMISSIONS Figures 1-2. Photo Credit: Peter DaSilva/Cal Performances. Figures 3-9. Photo Credit: Pascal Victor/ArtComArt.

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This Tempest's Hers: Metropolitan Opera's The (/current) Enchanted Island and the Feminism of Bel Canto Shakespeare Adaptation (/previous) AMY SCOTT-DOUGLASS, MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY (/about)

ABSTRACT This essay looks at the Metropolitan Opera's The Enchanted Island as a revision of The Tempest that subverts the gender politics of Shakespeare's play. The theory of transgressive adaptation behind this reworking of Shakespeare identifies the music as much as the libretto as the site for potential interpretive freedom, and hinges, in particular, on the voices of divas Joyce DiDonato and Danielle de Niese to articulate their feminist interpretations of their characters and to claim the improvisational liberties that bel canto opera provides to singers in performance.

One does not have to be a scholar grounded in feminist and postcolonial theory to be frustrated by the power abuses in many of Shakespeare's plays; one only has to be an empathetic human being. All of us who study and appreciate Shakespeare have had moments when we are watching a performance or rereading the text of Othello or Merchant of Venice or Taming of the Shrew or The Tempest, and we find ourselves wishing with all our hearts that the play would turn out radically differently. Not just that Othello wouldn't strangle Desdemona or that Antonio wouldn't insist upon Shylock's forced conversion or that Petruchio wouldn't ask Katharina to deliver a speech http://borrowers.uga.edu/703/show Page 1 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

in favor of women's subordination but, rather, that the power abuses would never even get to that point in the story. That somehow, some way, someone would advocate for these strong-willed but socially disempowered characters much, much earlier in the narrative; would descend from the heavens or enter from the wings or rise up from the sea and say, "There are times when the gods can stand no more"; would insist that Prospero stop defaming Sycorax, cease abusing Caliban, and give over threatening Ariel; would maybe even go so far as to insist that Prospero honor his predecessor's claim and return the island to Caliban in his mother's name. In The Metropolitan Opera's The Enchanted Island (2011), this is exactly what happens. In this article, I consider this philosophies of adaptation behind this remarkably feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical reworking of Shakespeare, considering not only the cultural politics at work in Jeremy Sams' newly crafted libretto but also the potential for interpretive agency found by divas Joyce DiDonato and Danielle de Niese in the bel canto devices of improvisation and ornamentation.

Not to be confused with Dryden and Davenant's comedy The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, first staged in 1667, or Shadwell's 1674 operatic treatment of the same adaptation by the same name, the 2011 Enchanted Island is a reworking of the basic plot and main characters from two Shakespeare plays — The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream — into a new libretto, set to music from operas, oratorios and cantatas by Handel, Vivaldi, Ramaeu, and Purcell. The opera opens with Prospero persuading Ariel to raise a tempest on his behalf in order to bring Ferdinand to the island. She agrees to do so, but because Sycorax and Caliban have switched out the crucial magic ingredient, substituting lizard's blood for dragon's blood, Ariel gets the spell wrong, and the tempest that she raises fastens upon the ship containing the couples from A Midsummer Night's Dream rather than Ferdinand's ship. When the subsequent shipwreck leaves the newlywed couples separated and stranded, Ariel casts a spell so that Miranda falls in love with Demetrius, and then Lysander; meanwhile Sycorax casts a spell on Helena so that she falls in love with Caliban. The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream are made to correspond seamlessly, with the opera's Ariel taking on the characteristics of Puck by messing up her spells and mistaking her lovers, and the power struggle between Oberon and Titania for control over human subjects being redirected here as the same type of battle for dominance between Prospero and Sycorax.

In his program note to the production, Sams explains that the idea for his opera started to take shape when he began to imagine Sycorax — a character only alluded to in Shakespeare's play — as the three-dimensional hero of Sams' new story. He writes,

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My thinking was, simply put, that a new take on old music needs a new take on an old story. It's hard (at least for me) to think of stories without thinking of Shakespeare — and it was listening to Purcell that first brought The Tempest to mind. Dryden's version, with music by Purcell, was indeed called The Enchanted Island, a title too good to miss. Dryden, though, had spotted that a desert island is going, by definition, to be slightly devoid of love interest, and love is what fuels the aria-making machine that is Baroque opera. [...] Dryden's addition of a boy-mad sister to Miranda wasn't too inspiring. But his fleshing out of the sorceress Sycorax — Caliban's mother and Ariel's former mistress — was too good not to steal. It wasn't too much of a stretch to imagine her seduced, spurned, and then banished by Prospero to the dark side of the island. He steals her land, her son, her servant, her heart — all useful motives for revenge. (Sams 2011) According to Sams, he went to Shakespeare's plays only for the storylines, not for the songs — an interesting point, considering that, as Daniel Albright points out in Musicking Shakespeare — in a chapter subtitled "The Tempest as Virtual Opera" — "the whole of Tempest is full of music" (10). In fact, in the press packet and other materials The Metropolitan Opera compiled on the adaptation and performance processes, Shakespeare is hardly named at all. Other than this brief reference by Sams, no other mention of Shakespeare is made. Instead, in their program notes and interviews, the director, conductor, and singers of The Enchanted Island repeatedly turn their attention to the music — focusing solely on the composers and the bel canto aesthetic in particular. And even in Sams's case, his note tells us, he approached the process of crafting his new libretto not by reading Shakespeare but by listening to Purcell. This new Shakespeare adaptation called The Enchanted Island, then — which, indeed, is not a "Shakespeare adaptation" to most involved but, rather, a Handel/Vivaldi mash-up or a bel canto pastiche — was achieved not via text but via music — even (this is my point) by the librettist.

Linda Hutcheon has recently argued that opera scholars need to pay more attention to the dramatic text, which, historically, musicians have treated as less important than the score — "the diminutive libretto," as Hutcheon believes the derivational suffixation itself implies (2006, 803). She notes with approval, however, that more opera scholars are beginning to engage with literary theory and textual analysis (804), quoting Haydn specialist Caryl Clark's characterization of musical scores as "scripts for performances" (Clark 2005, 199; quoted in Hutcheon 2006, 807).1 At the same time that I agree that musicologists can only benefit from increased attention to the libretto, I would also argue that Shakespeareans who tend to rely solely on text-based analyses must also cultivate a fuller consideration of scholarship and disciplinary

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practices in the fields of theatre, film, and music studies. Certainly such interdisciplinarity is essential for those of us in Shakespeare adaptation studies. In this article, then, I offer my reading of both the libretto of and, as much as possible, the musical choices in The Enchanted Island, for in this case, it is the performance aesthetic that supplies that feminist interpretation as much as the text does.

I In crafting a "new take" on the "old story" of The Tempest, Sams created a libretto that foregrounds the importance of women's desires and dreams, their power of expression, their glorious moments of transgression, their individuality, and their freedom. We see this from the very opening of the opera, starting with the example of Miranda. Her first entrance finds her telling the audience, "Every morning I awaken to this strange longing. / Every night there is a face that I dream of. / I feel I've been suddenly hurled into a brave new world" (Enchanted Island 2011). Her state of mind does not go unobserved by her worried father. Indeed, Prospero tells Ariel that he is bringing Ferdinand's ship to the island not because he wants to enact revenge upon his usurping brother but because he is worried about controlling Miranda's sexuality. "I see the fire in her eyes / Feel the heat in her blood," Prospero sings. When Prospero gives Ariel a potion to use on Ferdinand and Miranda, he claims that it is necessary since young men these days are no longer chaste. But his subsequent directive to Ariel — "See they both forsake and forget all others they have loved" — suggests that Miranda has already had similar experiences herself. In her scenes and duets with Demetrius and Lysander, Miranda is undoubtedly portrayed as the more assertive in all of her romantic relationships; she is the first to speak, the first to sing, the first to kiss (figure 1).

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Figure 1. Every morning I awaken to this strange longing.

But if this is an opera about female desire and women's dreams, Miranda is really the only woman who is portrayed as being motivated by the stereotypical female desire for all-consuming romance. Helena is an interesting counter-example. On the one hand, she is similar to Titania in that she falls in love with a "monstruous" creature (in this case, Caliban) while under a spell. On the other hand, Helena has a thoughtfulness and depth akin to Hamlet. What Helena desires in this opera is not love but, rather, death — an end to her suffering. "I long to sleep forever / Then all of oblivion will be mine" (Enchanted Island 2011), sings the suicidal Helena upon her first entrance. When she does fall in love with Caliban, she spends her time with him teaching him the names of the flowers, some in Latin, explaining the etymology of the names and pointing out tiny differences between specimens, as though she were a natural philosopher. "[There are] so many multicolored miracles in Nature's treasure trove," she instructs Caliban. Helena's mind is so strong that when Demetrius crosses her path, she overcomes the spell that she is under and "awake[s]" her memories on her own, without anyone else reversing the spell (figure 2).

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Figure 2. Nature's Treasure Trove.

It is no accident that Helena expresses such a deep understanding of the natural world — the title character is, after all, nature itself — the island — which is, throughout the opera, coded as female, and associated in particular with Sycorax. The opera leaves no doubt that Sycorax is the rightful ruler of what she calls her "paradise," her "island divine," and no doubt that Prospero is guilty of having "stole[n]" Ariel from Sycorax and "[en]slaved" Caliban, her "only son" (Enchanted Island 2011). From her very first aria, Sycorax decides that "the hour is coming when we must turn full circle in time" and vows to "match" Prospero "crime for crime." Indeed, the opera puts Sycorax in the position that Shakespeare puts Prospero in at the beginning of the play: nearing old age and seeking retribution for having been usurped in his younger days. "I'll take my vengeance [. . .] for the wrongs from the past," Sycorax promises, "[Prospero] will know how it feels when you are old and all you have known has been taken." Looking like a cross between Grizabella and Fantine, Sycorax reminisces upon her past "strength and splendor": Once at my command eager ghosts would appear And would bow and wait for their orders from me. In my beautiful days there was fire in my eyes. I'd sport a crown of gold and wield a scepter of ice. http://borrowers.uga.edu/703/show Page 6 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

She prepares to "forge wonders" with her "meager magic" that remains. "Still I can conquer / Still I can strike," she decides, and she drinks a potion to renew her "you[th]" and "glory." One component of her plan to wrest power from Prospero is to have Caliban marry and produce an heir, and it is not surprising that she chooses Helena for her would-be daughter-in-law; given the latter's strong mind and inclination toward natural philosophy, Sycorax might well see in Helena a younger version of herself.

But if Sycorax shares Helena's affinity for nature, she also has something in common with Hermia, whose chief complaint is not that a man has stolen from her but, rather, that a man has stolen away from her. From her first appearance onstage, Helena laments having been "left" by Lysander. "You said you'd never abandon me," Hermia sings to her absent husband, "Where are you now?" (Enchanted Island 2011). When Helena enters the scene, the two women commiserate that "[their] husbands do not really want [them]." "O my sister," they sing to each other, "men are fickle, always plotting and deceiving. / First they love you, then they leave you." The trope of the deceptive, inconstant man connects back to Sycorax's own story, for, as we find out early in the opera, Prospero wrested control from her by stealing her heart as a means to steal her island. "Prospero found me, wooed me, maybe even loved me," Sycorax tells us, "First he loved me / Then he left me." Sycorax describes the days in "springtime" when Prospero courted her: First he smiled at me, Then he turned from me, Leaving me dying, Nursing a broken heart. Sycorax describes herself in the same terms as Hermia — "abandoned and forsaken" — and she vows, in reference to Prospero, "He will learn!" Her vengeance, then, stems from a desire to reclaim not just her island but also her identity, having lost herself and given up her power to Prospero when she fell for his lies. And indeed, Sycorax begins to grow younger and more beautiful and to return to "the long forgotten glory of long, long ago" (figure 3). She sings: My strength is coming back to me. I feel it grow unstoppably. A raging sea in side of me, a flood. . . . I feel it deep inside of me, Like thunder underground.

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Figure 3. My strength is coming back to me! / I feel it grow unstoppably!

As powerful as her aria is, one gets the impression that Sycorax's real healing starts to begin, and her real power starts to manifest itself, when she sees that her love spell is useless against true emotions. Her gorgeous, gentle, empathetic response to her son's pain from having been rejected by Helena serves as her own object lesson. "Hearts that love can all be broken," Sycorax tells Caliban, "[N]othing can be done" (Enchanted Island 2011). Sycorax asks Caliban's "forgive[ness]" for not being able to "spar[e]" him from "or prepar[e]" him for the pain of unrequited love and for having used a spell in the first place. As Sycorax sings, Caliban cries himself to sleep. The slave's chain around his neck — put in place by Prospero — has inched up around his mouth so that he cannot breath. Sycorax moves her son's chain so that he can sleep safely. It is a compelling gesture, to say the least. Moments like these suggest that Sycorax's power comes from her humanity: her ability to ask for forgiveness from her child for having tried to use magic to arrange a spouse for him.

Sycorax also succeeds because she has a strong ally in Neptune, god of the sea, who possesses many of the same characteristics as Sycorax. Like Sycorax, Neptune has also experienced natural losses at the hands of mortal men. While Sycorax has lost a body of land, Neptune has lost a body of water. He sings: My ocean, my deep blue heaven, my real apart. When I think of how it's gone forever, My perfect sea, it breaks my heart.

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My perfect sea, my ocean, Once upon a time, how sublime it used to be. My gift from god to mortal. They destroyed the gift I gave. Gone forever, my perfect sea. (Enchanted Island 2011) Like Sycorax, Neptune asserts that he should be "fear[ed]" and "respect[ed]" because he can "in [his] wrath do wonders" — this is the same language used by Sycorax. And like Sycorax, Neptune complains that it is mortal men who have abused his domain. It is no accident that Lysander's first words are "Curse you, Neptune. / I have conquered sea and tempest. / I have tamed the raging sea!" and that Demetrius, similarly, claims that he has "conquered the ocean" as well.

And certainly The Enchanted Island grounds its critique of Prospero in Neptune's arias as well. In the penultimate scene, when Sycorax attempts to "take [her] vengeance" on Prospero "at last" and Prospero responds with the haughty line, "In whose name do you defy my will?" (Enchanted Island 2011). Neptune appears, and answers on Sycorax's behalf. The diatribe he delivers contains virtually every complaint against Prospero that has been articulated by postcolonial, feminist Shakespeare critics: You stand there proud and free, With no vestige of conscience, With no shame for what you've done To this woman and her son. . . . You have stolen the land That was rightfully hers and mine. "There are times when the gods can stand no more," Neptune proclaims, explaining to Prospero that he has come "To shame you / And to name you / As the man that you are" (figure 4).

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Figure 4. There are times when the gods can stand no more.

Even before Neptune's intervention, however, Prospero has been experiencing an awakening and slowly coming to the realization that in meddling with nature, he has only caused problems. The curtain closes on the first act of The Enchanted Island with the "frail" Prospero dissolved into tears, wondering, "What have I wrought here? What have I done? / I have sown discord where there was none" (Enchanted Island 2011) (figures 5 and 6).

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Figure 5. What have I wrought here? / What have I done?

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Figure 6. I forgive you. By the end of the play, when Neptune presses him on having mistreated both Sycorax and the island, Prospero responds with contrition, having learned his lesson. His subsequent aria is directed to Sycorax. "Lady," he tells her, "this island is yours." It was before I came here, and so it remains. And my magic, that is yours too. Who knows how long I will live? One thing remains that only you can give. Forgive me. Pardon the wrongs I have done. Yes, I was heartless. I brought despair and heartache on you and everyone. The aria ends with Prospero on his knees, reaching for Sycorax's hand in supplication. When Neptune asks Sycorax to "proceed with mercy and love," she does. Sycorax sings to Prospero, "I forgive you." As she does so, she extends her hand and caresses his face. And then, remarkably, she leaves. The opera does not insist that they reunite as a couple.

If the libretto were not enough to encourage audiences to see The Enchanted Island as a decidedly feminist retelling of Shakespeare's Tempest, the paratexts that accompany the screen versions of the performance, and especially Deborah Voigt's interviews with the singers, make the opera's intentions — and especially the divas' intentions — quite clear. It is during these interviews with Voigt, for instance, that Joyce DiDonato lays out her reading of Sycorax as "sort of an Everywoman," explaining that Sycorax is like all women who "hit their mid-forties and early fifties" and realize they have "given their life away to their kids, to their jobs" (DiDonato 2012). Like Sycorax, DiDonato explains, all women have "a moment when they say, 'You know what? Enough! I'm going to take my power back!'"

But in addition to functioning to solidify a feminist reading of The Enchanted Island, the interviews also establish a particular philosophy of adaptation. Interestingly, the philosophy of adaptation that emerges in these interviews locates the potential for adaptation not necessarily in the reinterpretation of the story but, rather, in the reinterpretation of the score. In the interview with William Christie, for instance, the renowned conductor identifies the music, rather than the libretto, as the site of malleability, acknowledging that his "orchestra is incredibly adaptive" because they are "doing things that aren't in the score" (Christie 2012). The music, then, the suggestion is, has the potential to function as a space of freedom for performers. It is during the overtures that

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the orchestra is able to be adaptive. And it is during the arias that the singers are able to take liberties — liberties with the notes, and the delivery of the notes, if not the words.

The two interpretive points established during the interviews are interrelated, for the philosophy of adaptation that emerges during the interviews foregrounds women in that it stresses the potential for the singers to take liberties with the arias. The interviews show, in one moment, Plácido Domingo pouting that as Neptune he has few arias in comparison to the women "diva[s],"2 and, in the next moment, Danielle de Niese responding to Deborah Voigt's question about what she's looking forward to in the second half of the opera by talking about how fantastic her songs are and exclaiming, "I'm just waiting for my freedom aria!" (de Niese 2012). It is in this interview that de Niese explains that in her portrayal of Ariel she seizes upon the potential of "Baroque music," which offers the opera star "a real chance to create a character," as opposed to, for instance, Wagner, which allows no such avenue for reinterpretation. Here de Niese is talking about bel canto opera, and virtuosity in particular, which endorsed the frequent use of the device of ornamentation. Understanding the aesthetics and performance practices of bel canto opera is, I would argue, absolutely crucial to understanding the philosophy of adaptation at work behind The Enchanted Island.

II Bel canto opera developed in the seventeenth century, growing out of what Bruce Dickey calls a "revolution in musical style" that valued sprezzatura, or "natural speech rhythms" and that encouraged singers to achieve such sprezzatura by paying "greater attention to the sentiments of the text" and incorporating "a whole range of [. . .] devices" (Dickey 2012, 293), including ornamentation — moments in the performance during which the singer embellished the score by improvising various musical choices — trills, runs, tonal dissonances, changes in pacing or volume. Ornamentation was, in fact, crucial to the singer's performance, since this form of improvisation "represented an essential means of expressing the sentiments of the text[,] displaying grace," and "expressing all the passions of the soul" (294, 301). Baird explains that, following this "seventeenth-century aesthetic," "the finest singers could alter their technique and their sound in order to adapt to the musical or dramatic context," thereby "allow[ing] for a demonstration of harmonic intelligence and expressivity" (2012, 38). The goal was for the bel canto singer to embellish the score as she saw fit, in order to, as Francesco Lamperti put it in the nineteenth century, "convey the emotions of the [character's] soul" (1966, 14). Henry Pleasants explains that "[M]ost, if not all, the devices of bel canto originated in an expressive purpose," including those

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that "lent themselves to the expression of fury, rage, vengeance and resolve, or [. . .] jubilation and satisfaction" (21).

If most of Pleasants's checklist of emotions brings to mind the character of Sycorax, whose fury drives the plot of The Enchanted Island, certainly one of those emotions — the sense of jubilation that comes from achieving one's dream — receives its strongest expression in the character of Ariel, whose "heart's desire," as she puts it, is to realize her "freedom" from Prospero (Enchanted Island 2011). Granted, some could take issue with my choice to refer to The Enchanted Island's Ariel as female; after all, Prospero clearly establishes the character's supposed sex from his first reference to the spirit as "my boy, my beauty." But in this production, there is nothing boyish about the woman playing Ariel — Danielle de Niese — in the least. Curvy, sultry, and costumed as Restoration-breeches-actress-meets-steampunk in this opera, she exudes the kind of female power of a seventeenth-century frondeuse, the likes of Marie de Medici or Mlle de Montpensier. One gets the feeling that Danielle de Niese would come off as an amazon warrior queen no matter what she were wearing (figure 7).

Figure 7. It will be my last masterpiece, and then I will be free.

Additionally, the early scenes with Prospero and Ariel — before Prospero frees her — are staged so that they give off the impression of a male boss harassing his female secretary or a male plantation owner abusing his female slave. Prospero's power over Ariel is very specifically portrayed as the ability to control her body, and the blocking frequently suggests that Prospero is a http://borrowers.uga.edu/703/show Page 14 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

sexual menace to Ariel, forcing her to agree to "earn" her "freedom" by threatening to strangle her if she doesn't bend to his will. In their first scene together, Prospero puts a spell on Ariel with his magic rod. He threatens, "Perhaps I should teach you how to obey me" and takes total control over her body, singing, If you would earn your freedom, Do as I command you. And in your fierce frustration, Do not forget your station. (Enchanted Island 2011) Ariel bows her head and concedes, "Oh generous master, I'll do whatever you may ask." We then see Ariel use her physical charms and physical touch, against her true will, presumably, to calm her master. She holds his hand, leans her face against his body, and promises to bring Prospero "whatever [he] desire[s] from the heavens." She bargains with him, "It will be my last masterpiece, and then I will be free". But the threat of physical violence continues. When Ariel directs the tempest to the "wrong ship," Prospero calls her a "thankless wretch" and threatens to put her "back" in "the holly tree." There is no suggestion that it was Sycorax who enclosed Ariel in the tree originally, as in Shakespeare's play — indeed, the implication is that Prospero imprisoned Ariel once and can do it a second time. When Ariel arranges for Miranda to fall in love with Demetrius instead of Ferdinand, we watch her suffer for it again. Prospero shakes his staff at her, yells "Why did I decide to care for you at all?" and raises the back of his hand, threatening to hit her across the face. Ariel cowers. It is clear that this is an abusive relationship (figure 8).

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Figure 8. Perhaps I should teach you how to obey me.

Ariel's experiences at the end of The Enchanted Island, and the emotion underlying her new state of being, then, are in sharp contrast to the confinement and coercion she has experienced throughout the opera. In her final scene, she appears in an extraordinary beautiful and colorful costume — part peacock, part butterfly — a strong contrast to the belted, bolted, and locked wings that she wore earlier in the opera. "You're free now," Prospero tells her (Enchanted Island 2011). And then she sings. And when she sings, we understand exactly what Danielle de Niese means when she says, "I'm just waiting for my freedom aria." Ariel's voice creates a ripple effect on the sky on the skrim behind her, and as she sings about the joy of "shooting stars," her voice explodes into rushing scales and arpeggios, as if the notes were themselves shooting stars. Behind her, Prospero's cave seems to be in motion, and the cave vibrates, and eventually melts, in sync with Ariel's vocal movements. As performed by de Niese, Ariel's aria is — there is no other way to put this — exactly what freedom sounds like (figure 9).

Figure 9. I'm just waiting for my freedom aria.

If it sounds like freedom, that's because it is. In bel canto terminology, de Niese's riffs are known as "disposizione della voce" — what Baird describes as "light, almost giggling technique" (2012, 38), and they are one of the ornamental devices that the bel canto singer can improvise and adapt as she chooses in the moment of performance itself. Martha Elliott explains that in

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bel canto opera, "the singer ha[s] more license to surge ahead if the text [becomes] excited or impassioned, or to hold the tempo back a bit if the dramatic situation [becomes] sad or tender" (2006, 133). The composer provides notation, Elliott explains, but the singer "often" chooses to "do exactly the opposite of what the notation suggests" (133). This "flexibility" of the bel canto singer "require[s] the accompanist or orchestra to adjust to the soloist" rather than the other way around (133). Indeed, Richard Bonynge admits that when he was conducting the orchestra that accompanied the operatic performances by his wife, renowned dramatic coloratura soprano Joan Sutherland, "he was never sure exactly which embellishments she would use in any given performance" (quoted in Montgomery 2006, 103). Such power has not always set well with composers. Karen S. Gould and Kenneth Keaton reproduce the anecdote that "[w]hen Rossini heard Maria Malibran spinning improvised material around one of his pieces, he is said to have inquired, 'What a lovely aria, my dear. Who was the composer?'" (Gould and Keaton 2000, 144). The authors intend for this story to be evidence that "extended embellishment and improvisations" in bel canto opera "[do] not always result in the finest aesthetic result" (144), but surely, in actuality, this story points to the agency of the diva. Underlying Rossini's reply is his anxiety that during the performance the bel canto singer has the opportunity not just to interpret but also to invent. This is exactly what de Niese means when she says that bel canto gives her the opportunity to "create."3

In addition to encouraging interpretive "freedom" (Stark 1999, 163) and giving the singer license to "make the most" of her vocal "flexibility" (Garcia 1847, 192-93), treatises on bel canto style have always stressed the importance of the singer's imagination and intelligence. In the eighteenth century, Giambattista Mancini claimed that the bel canto singer needed to have "perfect judgment and understanding" and Johann Joachim Quantz stressed that the virtuoso must employ "feeling and judgment" in her performances (Mancini 1774, 53; Quantz 1725, 126), and a century later, Manuel Garcia explained that the bel canto style "permits the singer to display the fertility of his imagination" (1847, 192-93). Music historians have also often stressed the bel canto singer's power. In the nineteenth century, George Hogarth employed the word repeatedly, as in his explanation of the various types of arias to " [give] the singer an opportunity of displaying all his powers of every description" (1851, 2:64). Similarly, Garcia wrote that bel canto requires "the addition of power and emotion" (1847, 198), and eighteenth-century composer Johann F. Christmann emphasized the importance of the singer's "boldness" in performance (1782, 242). Finally — and significantly — bel canto is musically transgressive by definition. From the earliest treatises, the virtuoso singer has been characterized as pushing the limits of what is considered correct and beautiful — as in Giulio Caccini's Le Nuove Musiche (1602), in http://borrowers.uga.edu/703/show Page 17 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

which the author explains that the soloist will be "sometimes transgressing," creating "several dissonances" in order to "move the mind" of her auditors (1602, 44-45).

The attributes of the women characters in The Enchanted Island, then, align precisely with the values that bel canto opera endorses in its singers — freedom, intelligence, power, and transgression. And, as we discover in the interviews that accompany the screen versions, the divas performing in The Enchanted Island demonstrate a keen sense of their own agency in performance, with DiDonato and de Niese in particular seizing upon the interpretive license that bel canto provides. Interestingly, in those same interviews, when asked about their process of creating The Enchanted Island, director Phelim McDermott and librettist Jeremy Sams focus their answers on the adaptation's source material, with McDermott identifying the opera as a "pastiche" of music from Handel and Sams identifying the opera as a "mashing-up of [the] two [Shakespeare] stories" of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream (Sams 2011). DiDonato and de Niese, on the other hand, treat the opera as though it were, as interviewer and fellow diva Voigt terms it, "a brand new work" and "a novel piece."4 Put more bluntly, DiDonato and de Niese treat the The Enchanted Island as though it belongs to them, as though they own it, rather than treating it as an inheritance that first belonged to someone else. In this way, each woman's relationship to the opera mirrors Sycorax's relationship to the island — it is, without question, decidedly hers.

NOTES 1. See, in particular, Tomlinson 1999 and Corse 2000. With regard to feminist approaches to opera, of the few book-length studies that exist, the most frequently cited is Clément 1988. See also McLary 1991, Smart 2000, and Kostenbaum 2001. 2. Voigt uses this phrasing in her interview with Domingo (Voigt 2012b). In the first edition of her interview with Domingo that was shown at intermission as part of the HD live broadcast, Domingo says that he wishes he had more arias. Domingo says, "The Enchanted Island is a work-in-progress, so maybe when we do it again [I'll sing several more arias]." This conversation has been cut from the version of the interview that appears on the DVD. 3. .It is worth considering that music by or attributed to Handel, as most of the music in The Enchanted Island is, might in particular lend itself to a strong sense of adaptorial license at this point in history. Ellen T. Harris analyzes recent Handel scholarship and notes that the composer's legitimacy has come under increased scrutiny in response to the "growing list of Handel's

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borrowings" (Harris 1990, 301). Harris points out that although Shakespeare borrowed from his source material with equal enthusiasm, his reputation as an artistic genius has never been threatened by his plagiarism whereas Handel, on the other hand, has been designated as "merely a 'Great Arranger,' not a composer in the sacred sense of the term" (302). But if it is true that Handel's lack of legitimacy means that, in the minds of musicologists and musicians, "ornamentation and improvisation do no harm" (302), then it allows for increased agency on the part of the musicians. 4. Voigt uses this phrasing in her interview with McDermott (Voigt 2012a).

REFERENCES Albright, Daniel. 2007. Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Baird, Julianne. 2012. "The Bel Canto Singing Style." In A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth-century Music. Edited by Stewart Carter. Revised by Jeffery Kite- Powell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 31-43. Caccini, Giulio. 1602. Le Nuove Musiche. Florence: Marrescotti. Translated by H. Wiley Hitchcock. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1970. Clark, Caryl. 2005. "Haydn in the Theatre: The Operas." In The Cambridge Companion to Haydn. Edited by Caryl Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 176-99. Christie, William. 2012. "Deborah Voigt Interviews: William Christie and Jeremy Sams." "Bonus." DVD 2. The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. Virgin Classics. Christmann, Johann F. 1782. Elementarbuch der Tonkunst. Speyer. Translated by Leonard G. Ratner. Classic Music. New York: Schirmer Books, 1980. 280. Clément, Catherine. 1988. Opera; or, The Undoing of Women. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Corse, Sandra. 2000. Operatic Subjects: The Evolution of Self in Modern Opera. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. De Niese, Danielle. 2012. "Deborah Voigt Interviews: David Daniels and Danielle de Niese." "Bonus." DVD 2. The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. Virgin Classics. Dickey, Bruce. 2012. "Ornamentation in Early Seventeenth-century Italian Music." In A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth-century Music. Edited by Stewart Carter. Revised by Jeffery Kite-Powell. Bloomington: Indiana

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University Press. 293-316. DiDonato, Joyce. 2012. "Deborah Voigt Interviews: Joyce DiDonato and Luca Pisaroni." "Bonus." DVD 2. The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. Virgin Classics. Elliott, Martha. 2006. Singing in Style: A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices. New Haven: Yale University Press. The Enchanted Island. 2011. Directed by Phelim McDermott. Written by Jeremy Sams. Conducted by William Christie. With David Daniels, Joyce DiDonato, Plácido Domingo, Danielle de Niese, and Luca Pisaroni. The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. New York, New York, 31 December 2011-30 January 2012. Originally viewed by author on screen as The Metropolitan Opera: The Enchanted Island Encore. Regal Ballston Common Stadium 12. Arlington, VA. 8 February 2012. Now available on DVD as The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. 2012. Virgin Classics. Garcia, Manuel. 1847. A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing: Part Two. Translated by Donald V. Paschke. reprint 1975; New York: Da Capo Press. Gould, Carol S. and Kenneth Keaton. 2000. "The Essential Role of Improvisation in Musical Performance." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58.2: 143-48. Harris, Ellen T. 1990. "Integrity and Improvisation in the Music of Handel." The Journal of Musicology 8.3: 301-15. Hogarth, George. 1851. Memoirs of the Opera in Italy, France, Germany, and England: A New Edition. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley. 1972; Reprinted New York: Plenum Publishing. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. "Interdisciplinary Opera Studies." PMLA 121.3: 802-10. Kostenbaum, Wayne. 2001. The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. Cambridge, Mass.: De Capo. Lamperti, Francesco. 1916. The Art of Singing. Translated by J.C. Griffith. 1871; New York: G. Schirmer. Mancini, Giambattista. 1774. Regole Armoniche, o Siano Precetti Ragionati per Appredere i Principi della Musica. Vienna. Translated and edited by Edward Foreman. In Practical Reflections on Figured Singing: The Editions of 1774 and 1777 Compared. Champaign, Ill.: Pre Musica Press, 1967. McDermott, Phelim. 2012. "Deborah Voigt Interviews: Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch." "Bonus." DVD 2. The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. Virgin Classics.

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McLary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Montgomery, Alan. 2006. Opera Coaching: Professional Techniques and Considerations. New York: Routledge. Pleasants, Henry. 1966. The Great Singers. New York: Simon and Schuster. Quantz, Johann Joachim. 1725. Versuch Einer Anweisung die Flöte Transversière zu Spielen. Berlin. Translated by Edward R. Reilly. On Playing the Flute. London: Faber, 1966. Sams, Jeremy. 2012. "Deborah Voigt Interviews: William Christie and Jeremy Sams." "Bonus." DVD 2. The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. Virgin Classics. Sams, Jeremy. 2011. "Creating The Enchanted Island." Program Note to The Enchanted Island. The Metropolitan Opera. Available online: http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/enchanted-island-jeremy-sams.aspx (http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/enchanted-island-jeremy-sams.aspx) [accessed 3 August 2012]. Smart, Mary Ann, ed. 2000. Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stark, James. 1999. Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tomlinson, Gary. 1999. Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Voigt, Deborah. 2012a. "Deborah Voigt Interviews: Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch." "Bonus." DVD 2. The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. Virgin Classics. Voigt, Deborah. 2012b. "Deborah Voigt Interviews: Plácido Domingo." "Bonus." DVD 2. The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. Virgin Classics.

ONLINE RESOURCES The Enchanted Island: The Metropolitan Opera HD. YouTube. 9 November 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-0LYy7kE20 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-0LYy7kE20) [accessed 14 October 2013].

PERMISSIONS

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I would like to thank the Metropolitan Opera for providing me with a copy of The Enchanted Island press kit, access to video clips in advance of the release of the DVD, and permission to publish production photos. Figure 1. "Every morning I awaken to this strange longing." Lisette Oropesa as Miranda in The Enchanted Island. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera. Figure 2. "Nature's Treasure Trove." Layla Claire as Helena the natural philosopher and Luca Pisaroni as Caliban in The Enchanted Island. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera. Figure 3. "My strength is coming back to me! / I feel it grow unstoppably!" Joyce DiDonato owning it as Sycorax in The Enchanted Island. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera. Figure 4. "There are times when the gods can stand no more." Placido Domingo as Neptune in The Enchanted Island. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera. Figure 5. "What have I wrought here? / What have I done?" David Daniels as Prospero and Luca Pisaroni as Caliban in The Enchanted Island. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera. Figure 6. "I forgive you." Joyce DiDonato as Sycorax, Placido Domingo as Neptune, and David Daniels as Prospero in The Enchanted Island. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera. Figure 7. "It will be my last masterpiece, and then I will be free." Danielle de Niese as Ariel in The Enchanted Island. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera. Figure 8. "Perhaps I should teach you how to obey me." Danielle de Niese as Ariel and David Daniels as Prospero in The Enchanted Island. Still photos captured by the author from the PBS screening/Metropolitan Opera. Figure 9. "I'm just waiting for my freedom aria." Danielle de Niese (Ariel) in response to Deborah Voigt asking her what she most anticipates in second act of The Enchanted Island. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

ABSTRACT | I | II | NOTES | REFERENCES | ONLINE RESOURCES | TOP

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Representations of Shakespeare's Humanity and Iconicity: (/current) Incidental Appropriations in Four British Television Broadcasts

SARAH OLIVE, UNIVERSITY OF YORK AND THE SHAKESPEARE INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF (/previous) BIRMINGHAM

ABSTRACT Since his lifetime, Shakespeare has been constructed as both an icon and a human, above and beyond most individuals, yet simultaneously one of us. Representations of Shakespeare on television are able to thrive on these seemingly contradictory attributes. Yet Shakespeare is not only credited with humanity and iconicity; he is also figured as bestowing these qualities on others. This article draws the evidence for continuing portrayals of Shakespeare's combined humanity and iconicity in the twenty-first century from four television programs: "The Shakespeare Code" episode of Dr. Who, "The Supersizers Go Elizabethan,""The Quality of Mercy" episode of Lewis, and the series Jamie's Dream School. More broadly, this article extends the work on television appropriations of Shakespeare by authors such as Peter Holland and Douglas Lanier and argues for the adoption of the new term "incidental appropriation" with which to discuss Shakespeare on television beyond adaptations of his plays or documentaries about his life.

The blurb on the back cover of the DVD of Dr. Who, Series 3 is suitably captivating for Whovians and Shakespeareans alike: "The Dr. takes Martha to Elizabethan England, where William Shakespeare is under the control of deadly witch-like creatures," it proclaims. In one sentence, this quotation demonstrates the phenomenon that is the subject of this article: the way in which Shakespeare is appropriated in television programing, often unproblematically, as both a regular human and an outstanding icon: above and beyond most individuals, yet simultaneously one of us.

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Shakespeare's human-ness is alluded to in the blurb's implicit suggestion that the helpless, merely mortal playwright requires the application of Dr. Who's super-human capacities to be freed from his enslavement to this episode's alien adversaries, the Carrionites. Shakespeare's iconicity is simultaneously indicated by his juxtaposition with other heroic British figures, such as Dr. Who and Queen Elizabeth I. Moreover, his iconicity is demonstrated by the fact that his name apparently needs no gloss to be recognizable instantly to the DVD's potential audience. The blurb evidently eschews any construction such as "William Shakespeare, poet and playwright."

This article demonstrates that similar conceptions of Shakespeare's value, as a human and an icon, can be found in other examples from twenty-first century British television, across the gamut of subjects and genres, including science fiction, documentaries (inflected with elements of reality television) such as "The Supersizers Go Elizabethan" and Jamie's Dream School, and murder mysteries such as Lewis. Indeed, I will show that representations of Shakespeare on television are able to thrive on these seemingly contradictory attributes. Furthermore, analysis of these programs demonstrates that they not only credit Shakespeare with humanity and iconicity; they also figure him as bestowing these qualities on others. More broadly, the article argues for the adoption of the term "incidental appropriation" to discuss Shakespeare on television beyond adaptations of his plays or documentaries about his life, which continue to dominate considerations of Shakespeare on television.1 Exceptions to the preponderance of literature on televised play adaptations and biographical material include Cary M. Mazer's article, "Sense/Memory/Sense-memory: Reading Narratives of Shakespearean Rehearsals (2009)," on the televised practice of Shakespearean actors and directors; Laurie Osborne's "Serial Shakespeare" (2012), on the role of Shakespeare in the Canadian mini-series Slings & Arrows; and Mariangela Tempera's essay, "'Only about Kings': Reference to the Second Tetralogy on Film and Television" (2008).

The four programs analyzed here represent a snapshot of Shakespeare on television across a range of broadcasters (BBC, ITV, and C4). Shakespearean quotations, plotlines, and theater practices are all readily appropriated in these broadcasts. In terms of approaching Shakespeare's works, two of the programs (Jamie's Dream School and Lewis) draw on canonical plays, including Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice, and two on more apocryphal works, including the lost play Love's Labor's Won and a poem slandering a Warwickshire nobleman ("The Shakespeare Code" and The Supersizers). These popular culture Shakespeares were not chosen strategically for their acclaim, quality, or the range of genres covered (although, serendipitously, they offer much of the above). These Shakespeares represent my encounters with him outside my own formal education, teaching, and research. They are the Shakespeares that I have come across when switching on the television, browsing links posted by friends on social networking sites, and reading entertainment news. If anything, these are the Shakespeares that I have met while trying to escape studying "Shakespeare." This unstructured, almost auto-ethnographic approach also explains why this article contains only examples from British television: until recently, I have only received four of the UK's five free-to-air channels (no digital or cable channels). Had I set out to conduct a survey of Shakespeare on television internationally, in the twenty-first century, I am aware that I could have chosen from series as diverse as Slings and Arrows (Canada), Deadwood, and Sex and the City (U.S.).

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INCIDENTAL APPROPRIATION: TOWARD A TERMINOLOGY TO DESCRIBE MORE SHAKESPEARES ON SCREEN Shakespeare features as a person, a myth, or a quotation in myriad, often hugely popular, programs: drama, documentary, mockumentary, quiz shows, and satire. His presence on the small screen may not steal the show, but as a figure or a fistful of phrases he is part of the texture of daily life in Britain and beyond. Considering his incidental appropriation highlights the wealth of "previously unrecorded programming appeared on ITV [Independent Television]" and other channels, revealing the way in which the supposedly conjoined relationship of Shakespeare and the BBC has been mythologized through the over-representation in research of broadcast plays (Holderness, 1988, 174).

Incidental appropriation of Shakespeare is experienced, for instance, when, nestled on your couch, you turn on the television to watch your favorite detective or superhero, or to catch a documentary about food or troubled pupils, only to find that the producers have decided to feature students rehearsing Shakespeare; to set thwarted Armageddon in Elizabethan Southwark; to filter their account of early modern diet through Shakespeare's plays and biography; or to depict teenagers disrupting a teacher's efforts with Romeo and Juliet. Julie Sanders has previously used the term "fragmentary allusion," in opposition to "sustained reworking and revision," to describe the phenomenon (2006, 97). The term "fragmentary allusion," however, risks evoking the direct quotation of plays and poems, rather than a wide range of appropriations. Furthermore, the appropriation of Shakespeare in some of these programs is enduring and coherent, rather than fleeting and disunited, while also being largely irrelevant to the overall narrative: a sub-plot to, framing device for or illustration of some other story. Dr. Who, for example, foregrounds the Doctor and his assistant's ability to save the world; Lewis, the crime-solving achievements of a detective inspector and his sergeant; The Supersizers, its presenters' experiences of early modern cuisine; Jamie's Dream School, its host's vision for overcoming youth disengagement with education. Shakespeare gets merely a cameo (or something rather more substantial in "The Shakespeare Code") with which to illustrate these meta-narratives. They are incidental appropriations in the sense that Shakespeare happens in these programs "Occurring . . . in fortuitous or subordinate conjunction with something else of which it forms no essential part" (OED, 1.a). Unlike adaptations of the plays or biopics of Shakespeare's life, these programs do not seek to rework his plays or his life story in any holistic way. There are only brief moments in which the scriptwriting writes back to Shakespeare to better represent oppressed or marginalized groups — for instance, when Shakespeare flirts with Dr. Who or when his offensive labeling of African women is challenged by Martha in "The Shakespeare Code." Additionally, incidental appropriations of Shakespeare frequently occur as part of a competing series of allusions — Shakespeare shares space with Handel, Elizabeth I, and the Sex Pistols, among other icons denoting Britishness in The Supersizers — adding to the sense in which he is at the margins of these productions.

Existing explanations about the function of quotation are useful for suggesting some of the rationale behind incidentally appropriated Shakespeare. It may well be that Shakespeare for these television makers is "a vehicle for accruing capital, power and cultural prestige" or that their incorporations of him into these episodes are "individual acts of 're-vision' that arise from love or rage, or simply a

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desire to play with Shakespeare" (Desmet and Sawyer 1999, 2). It is well acknowledged that quotation and appropriation of Shakespeare may celebrate, entrench, queer, or challenge existing ideas about his life, works, and reception. Annalisa Castaldo has categorized some of these ideas in terms of three common agendas for authors using Shakespeare: first, to test the "cultural literacy" of one's audience; second, to borrow Shakespeare's "cultural authority" for one's own characters and/or work; third, "cultural reconsideration," to "re-think" or talk back to Shakespeare (2007, 408-409; see also Sanders 2006, 46). Pragmatically, Tempera has demonstrated that Shakespeare's works are often chosen by scriptwriters over modern literature since he is out of copyright, saving on time and money spent wrangling with estates (2008, 246). Additionally, she observes that what unites instances of quotation is the program-makers' need for references to be understood, the insistence that they speak universally about human nature, so that particular phrases or memes dominate. Trying to synthesize a single function for incidental appropriations of Shakespeare is difficult because of the range of genres, agendas, and intersections involved. Looking at representations of Shakespeare's humanity and iconicity is a task problematized by the sheer heterogeneity of perspectives (often contradictory) accommodated by use of Shakespeare in any one program. What is perceptible, however, are the ways in which each of these programs constructs multiple visions of Shakespeare's humanity, iconicity, and icon-making powers, constituting a strength in numbers as regards his reputation: it is difficult for any one writer, academic, or program-maker to refute all three of these qualities at any one time.

SHAKESPEARE IN FOUR BRITISH TELEVISION PROGRAMS Before analyzing their representations of Shakespeare's humanity, iconicity, and icon-making powers, I will outline briefly the content of the four broadcasts that interest me here. "The Shakespeare Code" was first broadcast in 2007 on BBC1 (Palmer and Roberts 2007). The Doctor and his assistant, Martha, travel back in time to London in 1599 to investigate the lost Shakespearean work Love's Labor's Won. This leads to their encounters with a shamelessly flirtatious Shakespeare and the discovery of a plot, already in progress, by the witch-like Carrionites to place a code name into the play's closing speeches by bewitching Shakespeare during the writing process. In its focus on this element, the episode appears to be in dialogue with Shakespeare in Love as a source text as much as anything — a phenomenon in adaptation/appropriation that has been noted by Sanders (2006, 62). Dr. Who and Martha learn that when the altered speech is enacted, it will enable the rest of the Carrionite species to invade Earth and supplant the human race. A crisis is averted only by Shakespeare's and Martha's improvised use of what the Doctor terms "powerful words." The audience applauds the battle between Shakespeare and the Carrionites, believing it to be part of the show's "special effects," but the script is lost in the fracas.

While Dr. Who fictionalizes Shakespeare to imagine an answer to a very real academic puzzle, the second program that I will focus on uses expert testimony and historical re-enactment to explore his life and works. In 2008, BBC2 aired an Elizabethan-focused episode of The Supersizers Go . . . series (2007), in which the restaurant critic Giles Coren and the comedienne and broadcaster Sue Perkins inhabit the lives and dining rooms of a "married couple" from different historical periods. The aim of the series is to explore humorously how the diet and daily life of those eras impacts on the bodies of its twenty-first century hosts. Giles and Perkins undergo a medical assessment at the

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beginning and end of each episode to ascertain how the lifestyle of each period has impacted their overall health. For example, this episode includes hosting a feast, visiting the Elizabethan Southbank, taking a barge up the Thames, and doing other activities deemed to represent the life of an Elizabeth merchant family, all of which are illustrated with reference to Shakespeare's biography and plays.

Both "The Shakespeare Code" and The Supersizers Go Elizabethan revisit the figure of Shakespeare in his own historical period as an integral part of their content. The third program, however, deploys the iconicity of his work and the idea of Shakespeare as an icon-maker as a vehicle for a story of theatrical tempers and scholarly ambition. In 2009, ITV1 broadcast an episode of Lewis, the sequel to the Inspector Morse series, titled "The Quality of Mercy," in which a group of vain and bitchy students, hungry for success and recognition, stage a production of The Merchant of Venice, but in the process lose both the actor playing Shylock and a critic. Cryptic notes featuring quotations from Hamlet ("neither a borrower nor a lender be") and A Midsummer Night's Dream ("I will lead them up and down") are discovered with the corpses. Lewis and his aptly-named sergeant, Hathaway, must untangle a web of intrigue involving debt, drugs, sex, plagiarism, a madrigal-singing English professor, and the players themselves to find their Shakespeare-citing killer.

C4's Jamie's Dream School unintentionally offers a rarely foregrounded insight into the ways in which both Shakespeare and Simon Callow — one of his "greatest" interpreters — lack iconicity for some young people. Screened over seven weeks in March and April 2011, Dream School is a pedagogical experiment devised by Jamie Oliver to see whether using celebrity "expert" teachers and giving them both more freedom and greater resources than many schools can afford could re-engage students at risk of dropping out of education or training.2 The school is made up of twenty sixteen to eighteen-year olds with a handful of GCSEs between them (qualifications traditionally marking the end of formal education for those in Britain leaving school at sixteen), and a long list of difficult educational and personal circumstances. I focus on just one strand of the students' schooling, Callow's attempts to teach them Shakespeare.

Scholars have discussed already the Dr. Who episode, which features in the epilogue to Andrew Murphy's Shakespeare for the People and in an article by Peter Holland, which is considered below. I have found no existing discussion of Shakespeare in the Lewis or Supersizers episodes, although Susan Greenhalgh's chapter on television in Shakespeares After Shakespeare explicitly omits discussion of "television adaptations of novels whose authors reference or invoke Shakespeare in title or content," including "the Oxford-based Inspector Morse" series, "partly for reasons of space" (2007, 663). Jamie's Dream School is perhaps still too recent to have received much critical attention. An exception is the essay by Rob Smith, who analyzes the success of Callow's pedagogy from the point-of-view of a professional teacher (2012, 11). Although not featured widely in established print journals, however, these programs do garner comment in more youthful, concise media: tweets, blogs, Facebook groups, discussion threads and exclusively online journals such as Borrowers and Lenders.

SHAKESPEARE THE MAN One aspect of Shakespeare's construction in these programs is as a human being, a phenomenon http://borrowers.uga.edu/783384/show Page 5 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

noted by Peter Holland in his discussion of "The Shakespeare Code." Shakespeare's human qualities, those characteristics that make him "one of us," a "mere mortal" — that emphasize his lived experience — have been circulated in biographical accounts from Shakespeare's lifetime on. Holland draws out "the different senses of 'humanity' used in different versions of Shakespeare in popular and elite culture" (Holland 2012). Yet these senses are also evident in the writing of Shakespeare's near contemporaries. Some praise the exemplary goodness (humaneness) of his nature, extolling the deceased Shakespeare's honor, gentleness, friendliness, wit, and spontaneity (though they had not always written of him so kindly when he was alive). Ben Jonson's "I love the man and honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any," for instance, evokes the binary of a beloved man and worshipped icon that began to emerge almost immediately after Shakespeare's death (cited in Welles 2005). Another tradition of Shakespeare's humanity, which casts him not as an example of humankind at its best, but as a fallible human (stressing his "human-ness"), has also been evident since Shakespeare's day, Greene's description of Shakespeare as "an upstart crow" being among the first of these references (cited in Wells 2005).

Although Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio have criticized the lack of attention given to "the mutability of Shakespeare's image," in comparison to the "mutability of Shakespeare's works" (2006, 197), "Shakespeare the man" has achieved renewed interest from academics. The serious engagement of senior academics with fact and fiction around Shakespeare's life in response to the film Anonymous and the renewed authorship debate is attested to by the significant number and stature of academics involved in the counter-project, Sixty Minutes with Shakespeare (2011), and the free e-book coedited by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson (Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous).

The tradition of lauding Shakespeare as an exemplary human is evident still, even in ostensibly objective, academic attempts at biography. Park Honan, for example, praises Shakespeare's insight into and "sympathy for the human predicament," which is presumed to have extended beyond his writing into his life and being (1998, 408). Apart from its roots in warm eulogies, this view derives from the assumption that to create "so many three-dimensional and fully realized characters, Shakespeare must have been unusually open-minded and sensitive to others" (Castaldo 2007, 410). Stanley Wells's Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life speculates about Shakespeare's nature, with the caveat that these are "personal impressions from the external record": he "cared for his family and for his roots in Stratford but also cared for his career and was willing to make sacrifices in his domestic life in order to pursue it, a man who valued his reputation for integrity and preferred to keep out of trouble" (1994, 20). Unlike the unproblematized conceptions of Shakespeare as an exemplary human above, this depiction of Shakespeare presents us with a more rounded human being — one with streaks of pragmatism or ruthlessness, depending on individual interpretation. More negative assessments of Shakespeare's manly qualities are evident in the work of Katherine Duncan-Jones, who emphasizes the potentially ruthless, greedy, and selfish traits that enabled Shakespeare to succeed professionally and financially (2001, x-xi), and Germaine Greer, who accuses him of infidelity, of neglecting and humiliating his wife, and of being incapable of relating to women generally (2007, 356).

Shakespeare's humanity has also been represented in diverse ways on television in the twenty-first

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century, sometimes differently within the same show. His exemplary humanity has been coupled with his imperfection; his unsurpassed artistry with the assertion of his unimpeachable humanity. Michael Wood, in the documentary series In Search of Shakespeare, similarly invites viewers to strip away their iconic image of Shakespeare to perceive a human being viewers could relate to, would want to know, to dine with, today: You have to think away that image of Shakespeare, the balding, middle-aged man in a ruff, the gentle bard, the icon of English heritage. This is a young blade in his mid-twenties. This is a young man, bold, ambitious in his art. He's funny, streetwise, sexy, and, by all accounts, extremely good company. (In Search of Shakespeare 2004) In "The Shakespeare Code," Dr. Who sums up Shakespeare's unparalleled embodiment of the dual qualities of iconicity and humanity in a single line to Martha: "he's a genius, the genius, the most human human there's ever been" (Palmer and Roberts 2007). The superlatives with which the Doctor extols Shakespeare's humanity are frequently undercut, however, by the actions of the character Shakespeare throughout the episode. He rarely speaks profoundly and beautifully. Instead, he flirts, is rejected, tells jokes, stumbles over words, learns, ages, is balding, and has breath that "doesn't half stink," in Martha's words. These are experiences and attributes, mostly unidealized, that many people would categorize as a part of mundane, human life — things that could happen to anyone, and be empathized with by anyone. Beyond this ordinariness, Shakespeare is shown to be human in terms of his susceptibility to human follies such as vanity. He is shown to be excessively full of his own sense of celebrity, "soaking up the applause and admiration" of his audience at the Globe (Holland 2012). Pearson and Uricchio describe this phenomenon in television presentations of Shakespeare as the "continuity" strategy, a way of constructing Shakespeare that emphasizes the humanity we are assumed to share with him (2006, 200). They can also be interpreted as irreverent realities that potentially puncture the audience's trust in both the Doctor's fine, hyperbolically-worded vignette and in Shakespeare's sacred reputation. Burt has argued that such representations offer "an occasion to demystify Shakespeare's cultural authority" (2000, 206). I argue further that these characteristics (for the show's duration, at least) undercut his cultural authority. In this sense, "The Shakespeare Code" maintains an iconoclastic edge.

In "The Supersizers Go Elizabethan," Shakespeare's human qualities are again represented eclectically, although the program presents this as an exercise in biographical research rather than imagination, through the use of talking heads. Helping the supersizers re-enact a banquet, Stanley Wells paints a picture of Shakespeare as an aspirational proto-capitalist who worked hard to obtain nice things. He comments that by 1597, Shakespeare "had accumulated some wealth, he'd bought new plate, and established a garden in which to grow salads" ("Supersizers Go Elizabethan" 2007). Presumably designed to engage audience empathy for a seemingly remote figure, the construction of Shakespeare's character is perhaps also a reflection of the program-makers' sensitivity to the presumed politics, socio-economic status, and even eco-credentials of BBC2 viewers, a middle-class audience whose members want "programs of depth and substance," "knowledge-building programming," and alternative "comedy, drama, and arts programming" ("Dig Shakespeare" 2011; "Inside the BBC" 2011).

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Elsewhere in the same show, however, Shakespeare is presented as less respectable, more of a "lad," at least in his younger years. Constructing a narrative of Shakespeare as a "man of the people," the historian Nick Onslow relates the apocryphal story about Shakespeare's alleged run in with Lord Lucy over poaching his deer and writing a slanderous poem about the family. Shakespeare thus becomes so "down-to-earth" that he is almost criminalized, cast as an anti-hero — or at the very least, a rebel with a lack of respect for status and authority. The program-makers can in this way be viewed as "antipathetic to a Shakespeare . . . perceived as high-cultural, accessible only to the educated" (Hansen 2010, 152). In this construction of his humanity, Shakespeare is ironically cast in opposition to the iconic qualities with which he is attributed in other parts of the show.

In these two programs, it is also easy to discern the way in which Shakespeare's personality and biography (rather than his works) are figured as bountiful resources for popular culture. The appeal of this uncertainty is something that has been previously identified in mass media representations that are "interested in viewing Shakespeare's life as basically shrouded in mystery" (Burt 2000, 207), a view shared by Burnett and Wray: "his cultural leverage [is] reinforced by his being marketed as a mystery that is still to be deciphered, despite the knowable qualities that the plays appear to epitomize" (2006, 8). The holes in information about and minimal documentation of "Shakespeare the man" allow different permutations and retellings, even within constructions of Shakespeare's humanity.

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seemingly polarized qualities. The interest in Shakespeare, the human, can be seen as a refraction of that concerning Shakespeare the icon. Because he is an icon, there is a hunger to know more about his life, to search for the origins of the extra-ordinary in the ordinary: "Could someone with Shakespeare's education and background have written plays that represent such a wide variety of life?" is a common question in the authorship debate.

SHAKESPEARE THE ICON If valuing Shakespeare's humanity emphasizes the qualities he shares with the rest of the human race, valuing his iconicity emphasizes instead images and stories (both real and imagined) of Shakespeare that, through our reverence and adoration, elevate him above general humankind, figuring him as a god rather than a man. One of the definitions of the word "icon" is a "statue" or "monument," imagery that is invoked in literary criticism of Shakespeare by both those writers who see him as a model author and those who would problematize his idolization. For example, Simon Palfrey writes of Shakespeare's "towering reputation" (2005, xi), while critical references to Shakespeare's "monumentality" litter Terence Hawkes critiques of bardolatry (Hawkes 1973).

Such manifestations of Shakespeare's iconic status are also evident in television. Take The Supersizers: in a show about historical food and diet, the plays are ostensibly used as a record of the gastronomic landscape. Shakespeare's presence, however, is arguably more related to his ability to conjure up an essence of the Elizabethan, to contribute to the texture of the period when combined with references to other iconic elements, such as the monarch and bear-baiting. "The Shakespeare Code" plot, too, starts off predicated on the figure of the iconic and widely-recognizable author. On the surface this seemingly supports Burt's assertion that "the Romantic theory of literary authorship, with Shakespeare as the icon of the Author, is now alive and well in the mass media versions of Shakespeare" (2000, 207). During one scene, he is hero-worshipped by Martha, who calls out at the end of the performance, "Where's Shakespeare? I want to see Shakespeare. Author! Author!" Her idolization of the playwright is further played to by the Doctor, who later tells Martha "when you go home you can tell everyone you've met Shakespeare" (Palmer and Roberts 2007). Shakespeare, this line denotes, needs no introduction; he is universally recognized, a figure held in awe. As the episode develops, however, it cleverly defamiliarizes Shakespeare, forcing the audience to question their knowledge of his life, personality and abilities. It purports to show us the gap between the icon and its original, the icon and the human.

Shakespeare is only one of many icons used frequently in the Inspector Morse/Lewis franchise to denote quintessential Britishness. Others include Oxford University, Jaguar cars, real ale, and rolling countryside. Shakespeare is also used to assist with the characterization of Lewis, his colleagues, and their suspects in terms of their class, education, and creativity, through their ability (or inability) to quote Shakespeare (often ironically), and to recognize when he is being quoted. The way in which Shakespeare features continuously in the series — in titles such as "The Remorseful Day," taken from 2 Henry VI (4.1.1-2) — also reflects the love of word play and intertextual references of Colin Dexter, Morse's creator, continued by the scriptwriters of the new series. "The Quality of Mercy" is also part of a long tradition of films and dramas that "prioritize theatrical shows and stagings of Shakespearean texts . . . Action is oriented towards the climactic event of an opening night; and

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Shakespeare is the dramatist whose works are selected for production, with the result that fragmented quotations from and allusions to the plays abound" (Burnett 2007, 7). This tradition evidently derives the treatment of Shakespeare on television from other media. Castaldo has noted a comparable tendency in detective literature: "A large number of novels, especially young adult novels and murder mysteries, have productions of Shakespeare as a backdrop" (2007, 411). Julie Sanders discusses the centrality of "backstage drama" to musicals such as Kiss Me Kate (2006, 29). The use of Shakespeare in the context of an investigation set in an Oxford college represents part of a movement, from the 1960s onwards, to represent Shakespeare on television as part of "establishment and 'school'" culture" (Longhurst 1988, 63).

Such popular cultural representations are informed by and further reinforce the iconic status of Shakespeare's works, particularly as a more general metonym for theater. Yet "The Quality of Mercy" does much to undermine the myth of Shakespeare as a universally recognizable, universally accessible icon, the assumption on which "The Shakespeare Code" and The Supersizers are predicated. In the episode, Inspector Lewis, a working-class Geordie-boy (in contrast to his university-educated, cultural-capital-stuffed colleagues Morse, Hathaway, Innocent, and Hobson), is shown struggling with the knowledge of canonical literature demanded by a career in this fictionalized Thames Valley police. While his deputy, Hathaway, calmly leafs through a copy of Merchant, noting exits and entrances to establish the time of the Shylock-actor's death, Lewis takes lessons in Shakespearean drama from the forensic pathologist, in the following exchange: Pathologist: I found this note on the body. [Shows to Lewis: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."] Lewis: Shakespeare? Pathologist: Hamlet. Lewis: Wrong play. Pathologist: Well, this is Oxford. Lewis: Don't I bloody know it. ("Quality of Mercy" 2009) Lewis tentatively identifies the quote as generically Shakespearean, but is exasperated at what he sees as the pretentious trickiness of the murderer in choosing a quotation from a work other than the one being rehearsed. The pathologist's comment "Well, this is Oxford" seems intended to remind Lewis that he is dealing with students likely to be familiar with more than one of the plays or who are deft and creative in their use of texts. Lewis's irreverence for such academic posturing is hinted at in his response. Lewis's "ignorance" is perhaps compounded by the fact that the clue that he fails to recognize is a quotation from perhaps the most iconic Shakespeare play (quite literally, if one thinks of the numbers of images associated with Shakespeare featuring Yorick's skull). Initially Lewis's lack of cultural literacy looks set to jeopardize the case. The series being a murder mystery, however, there is a twist: Lewis triumphs in identifying the murderer despite his limited ability to engage with the constituent elements of Shakespeare's iconicity. Ultimately, Lewis's consummately professional knowledge of human nature, his capable interrogation, and investigative skills prove more valuable than familiarity with a high-status playwright. The students, reluctantly and incredulously, acknowledge his abilities, when, while watching him question a fellow cast member, one whispers to another "He's good." The quotations turn out to be red herrings, and Shakespeare is relegated to the periphery of the case, a plaything for literate villains, his iconicity outshone by that of the victorious, http://borrowers.uga.edu/783384/show Page 10 of 19 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

eponymous detective.

SHAKESPEARE THE GIVER OF ICONICITY Unlike "The Shakespeare Code" and The Supersizers, "The Quality of Mercy," as demonstrated above, is not concerned with the historical figure of Shakespeare, either as researched or imagined. Although quotations from Shakespeare plays give the episode its title and some cryptic clues, the staging of a Shakespearean work is a vehicle for the story rather than integral to it: it offers scope for a plot involving theatrical tempers, ambitions, and desires, plagiaristic students, and morally dubious professors of Renaissance studies (as well as a subplot concerning Lewis's measured handling, if not forgiveness, of his wife's killer to which the episode title pertains). It plays on the association of Shakespeare with an older generation of "great English actors," such as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, and with a tradition of "classical performance" (Longhurst 1988, 63, 67). An outstanding feature of the episode is the construction of Shakespeare as an icon-maker. Many people have written about the way in which starring in, directing, and even teaching his plays is career-making. Carol Rutter comments on Shakespeare's prestige-begetting quality that "teaching Shakespeare massively empowers me. He gives me academic 'street cred' and departmental weight to throw around. He gives me national visibility . . . He even gets me through the private entrance into the Royal Palace of St James's" (2009, 224-25). "The Quality of Mercy" takes Shakespeare's capacity to confer iconicity on others to the extreme: the premise of the episode is that these students' participation in an open-air, college production of Merchant will catapult them to fame and fortune in the West End. As one playwright-character puts it, "We're all chancers. We're all looking for the Oxbridge shortcut into show business." The show's ambitious, talented, and only metaphorically cut- throat director refers to Merchant as "her calling card into the business." By directing this play, she hopes that some of Shakespeare's genius will enhance her own reputation. In part, these students' unrestrained ambition builds up a group of characters with a motivation to kill: the show depicts their ruthlessness through their unwillingness to abandon the production despite the death of their lead actor, their lack of tears for their lost co-star, and lines such as "Don't make the mistake of thinking we're here because we want to make a lovely work of art. We're all self-centered. On the make. You could take all the envy and jealousy in this company, feed it into the grid, and light up the whole country." Beyond these elements, there is a symbolic interpretation to be had: that the promise of iconic status, through contact with Shakespeare, has murdered their humanity. Yet the show eventually undercuts such an impression, for the precocious students are ultimately absolved of the murders, leaving them free to seek fame, rather than infamy, from their association with Shakespeare. In terms of his iconicity, Shakespeare has demonstrably provided instrumental rather than intrinsic value for the students, the murderer, and the show's producers.

Jamie's Dream School takes an actor who has benefited from Shakespeare's capacity as an icon- maker — whether through starring in his plays or films about "the man," such as Shakespeare in Love — and shows his inability (not for want of energy, effort, or enthusiasm, it must be said) to impress Shakespeare's iconicity, or his own, on a new generation. The scenes in which Simon Callow teaches Shakespeare to the disadvantaged students contributes to an existing documentary genre in which the experience of studying and/or performing Shakespeare is extended to a socio- economically disadvantaged group. Other works in this genre — all of which feature Romeo and

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Juliet as a key text, and usually as the only key text — include Michael Bogdanov's Shakespeare on the Estate (BBC2 1994), Patterson Joseph's My Shakespeare (C4 2004), and When Romeo Met Juliet (BBC2 2010).

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Callow's classes on Romeo and Juliet involve fraught exertions to deliver the background of the play and to interest students in Shakespeare's biography, historical context, and theatricality more generally by taking them to see his one-man-show, Shakespeare — the Man from Stratford; to teach them Shakespeare's craftsmanship by declaiming passages at them; and to read repeatedly through scenes from Romeo and Juliet involving the warring factions (such as 1.1; such writing is blithely assumed to be relevant to these students, despite the series presenting little evidence of gang violence in their daily lives, past or present). Callow's pedagogic approach, which combines the techniques with which directors might induct professional, experienced actors into rehearsing a show, such as a whole cast read-through (see Smith 2012, 11), with archaic teaching practices such as reading around the class while seated, largely fails to attract, let alone to hold, the students attention — although he fares better when he gets them on their feet and takes them to the Globe for stage fighting classes. He also tries hard initially to forge personalized connections to Shakespeare for the students, asking them for their heroes, who range from Bill Gates to Katie Price, aka Jordan, the glamor model and reality television celebrity, and matching them with Shakespearean protagonists (the heavy editing, sadly, does not reveal his suggested likenesses for Gates and Price). Despite Callow being lauded by Jamie as a "genius drama teacher" and a few students being inspired to explore acting careers, a more skeptical reading of the series suggests that it depicts an

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overwhelming mismatch between Callow's idealizing of his methodology and the reality of it as experienced by his students.

That Callow's students in this series are shown to have little familiarity with Shakespeare is not surprising — for various reasons, they have become disengaged from the National Curriculum, a key piece of legislation in reinforcing and securing Shakespeare's iconic-author status. Indeed, they see no reason to laud Shakespeare, whose use of language, in their eyes, appears poor and perverse, inexpert and imprecise: "Can't he speak English?" spits Angelique. It is not surprising that they are neither aware nor respectful of Callow's own iconicity, his "brilliance," "brilliant mind," "genius," or his status as "one of the world's best actors" — all attributed to him in Oliver's voice-overs. They are too young to remember his appearances in widely and well-received films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (again, flagged by Oliver). Their thoughts are understandably far more consumed by their own lives, families, problems and successes, and hopes and dreams than by critically-acclaimed cultural goods. For instance, several of their icons and enthusiasms have in common wealth and enterprise. Callow himself identifies that their conversation is characterized by a "preponderance of answers about money, success, power." They enjoy and excel in quizzing other celebrity teachers, including Alistair Campbell (Tony Blair's one-time "spin doctor"), Cherie Blair (Queen's Counsel and Blair's wife), and Robert Winston (scientist and broadcaster), about their careers and lifestyles; how they got there; and their earning power. However ill-equipped these students may be for financial success — whether this is their fault or the fault of the education system and the economy — they are preoccupied with the most fundamental skill required by contemporary capitalist society: how to make money in order to support themselves and their families. They vaguely recognize Callow's success in this task: "God, that man's proper posh." They are not willing, however, to take on board his assertion of the widespread assumption that Shakespeare will benefit them in their quest for improved wealth and status because he deals with those issues in his plays. They do not think that Shakespeare can make icons out of them. This is in stark contrast to Greenhalgh and Shaugnessey's finding from an older documentary, Michael Waldman's My Shakespeare (2004), that "There is no sense here of Shakespeare as an icon of privilege, or of exclusionary white culture . . . Shakespeare may be difficult and unfamiliar, but he is nonetheless there for the taking" (2006, 93). Rather than looking to literature for inspiration and education, the Dream School students crave more immediate and tailored advice of the kind given, elsewhere in the program, by the millionaire businessman Alvin Hall. Callow's continued insistence on Shakespeare's relevance to their lives and his inherent value — "Shakespeare is theater, he wrote the most great plays ever" — appears, in the face of their refusal to accept these platitudes, to eradicate any vestiges of respect they have for either "great" man. Setting aside the aura of success that the series wants to generate, but about which even it manifests ambivalence in the final episodes, Jamie's Dream School incidentally presents Shakespeare as "the target of subversion and rebellion" (Longhurst 1988, 63) and offers a rare counter-representation of Shakespeare as a failed icon and failed icon-maker.

SWITCH ON FOR SHAKESPEARE Helen Cooper has argued that Shakespeare played a key role in the cultural transmission of medieval religious, literary, and dramatic traditions into the early modern period and beyond (Cooper 2011). His plays, as part of the popular culture of his time, preserve and rework texts that we have

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otherwise lost (including saints' and certain cycle plays). Along with other educational fora, such as school and academia, television in the twenty-first century plays a vital and continually underestimated role in keeping Shakespeare (man, icon, and works) in circulation. Appropriations of Shakespeare, in these programs, demonstrate the program-makers' awareness of "debates [and] divisions among critics" (Burt 2000, 223) and construct him diversely as a human, an icon, a non- entity, and a maker of others' iconicity. Additionally, Jamie's Dream School counters these depictions or clichés. These appropriations are conventional and radical, serious and satirical, proliferated and debunked, "fragment[ing] Shakespeare at the same time as they try to unite the shards of his cultural memory" (Burnett 2007, 26). Yet, whether Shakespeare's value is upheld, challenged by, or irrelevant to the program as a whole, it is most significant that he has been lighted on rather than any other cultural figure. The incidental appropriation of Shakespeare thus "helps sustain Shakespeare's cultural pre-eminence as much as it reveals fissures within it" (Castaldo 2007, 664) .

The programs in this article largely do not conceive of Shakespeare in ways not already available in academic writing, from biographies to cultural materialist critiques; nevertheless, these incidental appropriations potentially pose "fundamental cultural questions" (such as "Why study Shakespeare?" in Dream School) and "contribut[e] to the much needed politicization of the 'Shakespeare' institution" (class politics in Lewis, sexual politics in The Supersizers, racial politics in "The Shakespeare Code") (Holderness 1985, 200). What television does do, however, is to disseminate widely those extant ways of thinking about Shakespeare's humanity and iconicity, so that they enter the public consciousness on a massive scale. An audience of over 18 million viewers saw these programs on their first broadcast. 6.8 million people watched "The Shakespeare Code" when it first aired (Ware 2010). Lewis and The Supersizers average audiences of 7.7 million and 2.5 million, respectively. Viewing figures for Jamie's Dream School ranged between 1.4 and 2 million from episode to episode ("Latest News" 2010). Additional, unaccounted for numbers are of those viewers who watched repeats, replayed the episodes online, or watched the shows on DVD.

To put this into some perspective, in terms of the sheer volume of exposure to Shakespeare (ignoring differences in the quality, duration, focus, and purpose of exposure as well as recognizing the overlap between figures), around 690,000 British students currently study Shakespeare towards GCSE or A-level qualifications each year. In terms of those experiencing Shakespeare at the theatre, in 2011 the RSC sold 700,000 tickets to performances (Royal Shakespeare Company 2011), the Globe half that (Shakespeare's Globe Annual Review 2011), but these figures include sales to non- Shakespearean works, to visitors from outside Britain, and multiple attendances by individuals. Such statistics support Holderness's contention that "television is a universal medium to a far greater extent than theatre" (1988, 176) and Hawkes's contention that "television constitutes the only really 'national' theater our society is likely to have" (1973, 231). These statements are even more true now, in a society where multiple televisions per household is the norm and both live streaming and playback are readily available online, although, if accessible internationally, such online broadcasts may then constitute "global" rather than "national" theaters. Arguments that increased access to and hours spent using devices connected to and content provided by, or generated for, the internet challenges television's supremacy as the dominant, everyday medium of domestic entertainment ignores the way in which online access facilitates television viewing. A 2011 study found that twenty-seven percent of Britons watch television online every week, a figure higher than in the U.S.

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(Garside 2011). The significance of these very raw statistics, combined with my analysis of incidental appropriation in the four programs above, is that Shakespeare is experienced overwhelmingly by the British population through the medium of television by audiences necessarily intending to watch a program about him or in which he features: a cultural phenomenon that deserves yet more critical attention.

NOTES 1. See, for instance, Aebischer 2004; Bulman and Coursen 1988; Burnett 2007; Burnett and Streete 2011; Burt 2007; Burt 2003; Cartelli and Rowe 2007; Davies and Wells 2004; Greenhalgh 2007; Hatchuel and Guerrin 2008; Henderson 2006; and Holderness 2002). 2. The film is available at: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/jamies-dream-school/4od (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/jamies-dream-school/4od).

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale. 2004. Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bulman, James, and Herb Coursen. 1988. Shakespeare on Television. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Burnett, Mark Thornton. 2007. Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. Hampshire: Palgrave. Burnett, Mark Thornton, and Adrian Streete, eds. 2011. Filming and Performing Renaissance History. London: Palgrave. Burnett, Mark Thornton, and Ramona Wray, eds. 2006. Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Burt, Richard, ed. 2007. Vol. 2 of Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood. Burt, Richard. 2003. "Shakespeare, Glo-cali-zation, Race." In Shakespeare, the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD. Edited by Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose. London: Routledge. 14-36. Burt, Richard. 2000. " Shakespeare in Love and the End of Shakespeare." In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle. Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. London: Macmillan. 203-31. Cartelli, Thomas, and Katherine Rowe. 2007. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Polity. Castaldo, Annalisa. 2007. "Fictions of Shakespeare and Literary Culture." In Vol. 2 of Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Edited by Richard Burt. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood. 408-12.

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Cooper, Helen. 2011. "Shakespeare's Reading." Plenary paper, Cambridge Shakespeare Conference. Cambridge University, Cambridge. 11 September. Davies, Anthony, and Stanley Wells, eds. 2004. Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. 1999. Shakespeare and Appropriation. London: Routledge. "Dig Shakespeare Stratford." 2011. National Treasures Live. BBC1. 24 August. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 2001. Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life. London: Arden Shakespeare. Garside, Juliette. 2011. "UK is Europe's most digitally aware nation, Ofcom study finds." Guardian. 14 December. Greenhalgh, Susan. 2007. "'True to You in My Fashion': Shakespeare on British Broadcast Television." In Vol. 2 of Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Edited by Richard Burt. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood. 651-73. Greenhalgh, Susan, and Robert Shaughnessy. 2006. "Our Shakespeares: British Television and Strains of Multiculturalism." In Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 90-112. Greer, Germaine. 2007. Shakespeare's Wife. London: Bloomsbury. Hansen, Adam. 2010. Shakespeare and Popular Music. London: Continuum. Hatchuel, Sarah, and Natalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds. 2008. Shakespeare on Screen: Television Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Michèle Willems. Cedex: PURH. Hawkes, Terence. 1973. Shakespeare's Talking Animals. London: Edward Arnold. Henderson, Diana E., ed. 2006. A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. Oxford: Blackwell. Holderness, Graham. 2002. Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television. Hatfield, Hertsfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. Holderness, Graham. 1988. "Boxing the Bard." In The Shakespeare Myth. Edited by Graham Holderness. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 173-89. Holderness, Graham. 1985. "Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure." In Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 182-201. Holland, Peter. 2012. "Shakespeare, Humanity Indicators, and the Seven Deadly Sins." Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 7.1 (Spring/Summer 2012). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783091/display (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783091/display) [accessed 18 December 2012]. Honan, Park. 1998. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Honigman, Ernst. 2001. "Shakespeare's Life." In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-12. In Search of Shakespeare. 2004. BBC. 4 February. "Inside the BBC." 2011. BBC. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whatwedo/television (http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whatwedo/television) [accessed 20 December 2011]. Jamie's Dream School. 2011. Channel 4. 2 March-13 April. Available online: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/jamies-dream-school/4o (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/jamies-dream-school/4o)d [accessed 4 October 2013]. Lanier, Douglas. 2002. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. "Latest News." 2010. Broadcast. Available online: http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/ (http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/) [accessed 18 October 2010]. Longhurst, Derek. 1985. "'Base football players': Shakespeare in Contemporary Popular Culture." In The Shakespeare Myth. Edited by Graham Holderness. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 59- 73. Mazer, Cary M. 2009. "Sense/Memory/Sense-memory: Reading Narratives of Shakespearean Rehearsals." Shakespeare Survey 62: 328-48. My Shakespeare. 2004. Channel 4. 27 December. Osborne, Laurie. 2012. "Serial Shakespeare: Intermediate Performance and the Outrageous Fortunes of Slings & Arrows." Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 6.2 (Fall/Winter 2011). Available online: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783090/display (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783090/display) [accessed 26 June 2013]. Palfrey, Simon. 2005. Doing Shakespeare. London: Arden. Palmer, Charlie, dir., and Gareth Roberts, screenplay. 2007. "The Shakespeare Code." Doctor Who: The Complete Third Series. Disc 2 of 6 DVDs. BBC Video. Pearson, Roberta E., and William Uricchio. 2006. "Brushing up Shakespeare: Relevance and Televisual Form in Great Britons and In Search of Shakespeare." In A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. Edited by Diana E. Henderson. Oxford: Blackwell. 197-215. Playing Shakespeare. 1979-84. Channel 4. 9 December. "The Quality of Mercy." 2009. Lewis. ITV1. 29 March. Rogers, Simon. 2010. "A-level results 2010: the complete exam breakdown by subject, school, and sex." Guardian. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/aug/19/a-levels- results-analysis-subject-school (http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/aug/19/a-levels- results-analysis-subject-school) [accessed 20 September 2011].

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Rothwell, Kenneth. 2004. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Royal Shakespeare Company. 2011. "Key Facts and Figures." Royal Shakespeare Company. Available online: http://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/our-work/facts-and-figures.aspx (http://www.rsc.org.uk/about- us/our-work/facts-and-figures.aspx) [accessed 14 August 2011]. Rutter, Carol. 2009. "Playing Hercules, or Laboring in My Vocation." Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On. Edited by G. B. Shand. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Sedghi, Ami, and Lisa Evans. 2011. "GCSE results 2011: Exam breakdown by subject, school and gender." Guardian. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/aug/25/gcse- results-2011-exam-breakdown (http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/aug/25/gcse- results-2011-exam-breakdown) [accessed 20 September 2011]. "Shakespeare's Globe Annual Review." 2011. Shakespeare's Globe. Available online: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/about-us/todays-globe/annual-review (http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/about-us/todays-globe/annual-review) [accessed 15 August 2012]. Shakespeare on the Estate. 1994. BBC2. "Sixty Minutes with Shakespeare." 2011. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Available online: http://60minutes.bloggingshakespeare.com/ (http://60minutes.bloggingshakespeare.com/) [accessed 17 November 2011]. Slings and Arrows. 2006. Movie Network. 3 November 2003-28 August 2006. Smith, Rob. 2012. "Art Imitating Life: A Professional Insight into Representations of Ways with Shakespeare." Teaching Shakespeare 1: 11. "The Supersizers Go Elizabethan." 2007. The Supersizers Go. . . BBC2. 17 June. Tempera, Mariangela. 2008. "'Only about Kings': Reference to the Second Tetralogy on Film and Television." In Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad. Edited by Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne- Guerrin. Cedex: PURH. Terris, Olwen. 2009. "Shakespeare and Television Advertising." In Shakespeare on Film, Television, and Radio: The Researcher's Guide. Edited by Olwen Terris, Eve Oesterlen, and Luke McKernan. London: British Universities Film and Video Council. 40-50. Terris, Olwen. 2008. "Shakespeare and British Television." Shakespeare Survey 61: 199-212. Ware, Peter. 2010. "Fact File: The Shakespeare Code." Dr. Who. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/episodes/2007/facts/fact_302.shtml (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/episodes/2007/facts/fact_302.shtml) [accessed 7 April 2010]. Wells, Stanley. 2005. Oxford Dictionary of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Wells, Stanley. 1994. Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Wells, Stanley, and Paul Edmondson, eds. 2011. Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Available online: http://bloggingshakespeare.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/Shakespeare_Bites_Back_Book.pdf (http://bloggingshakespeare.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/Shakespeare_Bites_Back_Book.pdf) [accessed 18 December 2012]. When Romeo Met Juliet. 2010. BBC2. 23 June.

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Introduction

(/current) CHRISTY DESMET, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES (/previous)

(/about) ABSTRACT This Introduction analyzes the rise of twentieth-century Shakespeare (/archive) as a reaction against not only Romantic versions of Shakespeare, the usual target of academic analysis after T. S. Eliot, but also feminine, and often feminist, approaches to Shakespeare produced by women actors, artists, and authors in the nineteenth century. These women, in turn, engage not just with the nationalist figure of King Shakespeare, as epitomized by Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, but also with one another in networks that are sometimes personal, sometimes dispersed.

Perhaps the most influential document in twentieth-century Shakespeare studies was L. C. Knights's How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933). A scathing attack on nineteenth-century character criticism and particularly A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1905), Knights's essay declared the Shakespearean play to be not a "little world of persons," as Bradley had claimed, but a poem, whose words and patterns of words must be read attentively if readers are to enjoy a "total complex emotional response" (1933, 11). Knights complains that Bradley treats Shakespeare's plays as if they were second-rate novels. But few readers remember that Knights's first and most vitriolic volley was against retired actress Ellen Terry. After a long career on the theater, between 1911 and 1921 Terry had developed a slate of lecture-performances on Shakespearean topics that she http://borrowers.uga.edu/709/show Page 1 of 4 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(57 PM

delivered throughout Great Britain, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Best known and loved among the lectures were those on Shakespeare's heroines. In 1932, after Terry's death and one year before the appearance of How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? Christopher St. John published Terry's Four Lectures on Shakespeare (1932a).

In his landmark essay, Knights takes the same tone toward Terry that Dr. Johnson took generally toward women authors: "Ellen Terry does not, of course, represent critical Authority; the point is not that she could write as she did, but that the book was popular" (1933, 4). Knights exhibits an obvious degree of antifeminism, but he also claims for (white English) men, for academics, and for solitary readers the right to literary criticism as a profession. To this end, he objects to Terry not as a theatrical icon, but as a lecturer-critic who performs a woman-centered Shakespearean criticism.

The women discussed in this essay cluster "perform" in multiple artistic arenas, and they are aware of their place in an emerging network that links women through Shakespeare. (For an important discussion of the connection between female performance and friendship, see Ehnenn 1997). Joanna Baillie, as Judith Bailey Slagle discusses in her essay, reacted against an audience who insisted on identifying her with Shakespeare by writing her own plays rather than be absorbed into the ideological complex that is Shakespeare. Baillie was also friends with Sarah Siddons, the iconic Shakespearean actress of the late eighteenth century, who played the role of Jane de Montfort in Baillie's play of that name and became a major figure in the intellectual lives of later women Shakesepareans. Ellen Tree — who in 1832 played Romeo, with Siddons's niece Fanny Kemble cast as Juliet — was involved, as Anne Russell demonstrates, in an artistic genealogy that includes Kemble, Kemble's sometime friend and critical compatriot Anna Jameson, and the later actress-critic Helen Faucit, to whom Fanny's father Charles Kemble bequeathed Fanny's Shakespeare volumes.

Jameson is an important and often unacknowledged agent in the network of women Shakespeareans in nineteenth-century. As Russell notes, in their early life Jameson sought to influence Fanny's theatrical opinions about Shakespeare, and Kemble's late volume of criticism, Notes on Some of Shakespeare's Plays (1882) clearly is descended from Jameson's influential Characteristics of Women (first edition 1832; see Jameson 1890). Ellen Terry also owned and annotated work by

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previous women critics, and Christopher St. John thinks that she drew on them particularly for her opinions about Shakespeare's women characters (Terry 1932b). The Ellen Terry Museum at Smallhythe in Kent possesses Terry's copy of Jameson's Characteristics of Women, complete with the actress's annotations. On both sides of the Atlantic, women Shakespeareans also engaged more overtly with national and gender politics. As Tricia Lootens discusses, Porter and Clarke's journal Poet-lore "performed" through its Shakespearean criticism political debates on topics ranging from Carlyle's nationalistic King Shakespeare to the New Woman. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt comes to epitomize feminine performativity through her immersion, in a variety of artistic media, in the experience of death through the figure of Shakespeare's Ophelia.

Thomas Carlyle asks, "Will you give-up your Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English?" The answer is well known: "Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare does not go, he lasts for ever with us; we cannot give-up our Shakespeare!" (Carlyle 1969, 113). The women authors, actresses, and artists discussed in this essay cluster address this same question, but their answers challenge and complicate Carlyle's image of the English Shakespeare in multiple ways, and so enrich our understanding of the plays, Shakespeare's female characters, and the women themselves who "performed" Shakespeare in different critical and artistic spaces.

REFERENCES Bradley, A. C. 1905. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. Second edition. London: Macmillan. Carlyle, Thomas. 1969. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. New York: AMS Press. Ehnenn, Jill. 1997. "'An Attractive Dramatic Exhibition'?: Female Friendship, Shakespeare's Women, and Female Performativity in 19th- Century Britain." Women's Studies 26: 315-41. Jameson, Anna. [1890]. Characteristics of Women. 2d edition. The Young Lady's Library. London: George Routledge and Sons.

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Kemble, Frances Anne. 1882. Notes upon Some of Shakespeare's Plays. London: Richard Bentley and Son. Knights, L. C. 1933. How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism. Cambridge: The Minority Press. Terry, Ellen. 1932a. Four Lectures on Shakespeare. Edited with an Introduction by Christopher St. John. London: Martin Hopkinson, Ltd. Terry, Ellen. 1932b. Ellen Terry's Memoirs, with a Preface, Notes, and Additional Biographical Chapters by Edith Craig and Christopher St. John. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

ABSTRACT | REFERENCES | TOP

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Sarah Bernhardt's Ophelia

(/current) ALAN R. YOUNG, ACADIA UNIVERSITY

(/archive) ABSTRACT This essay argues that both Sarah Bernhardt's 1880 sculpture of the drowned Ophelia and her later, on-stage appearance in 1886 as the dead Ophelia contributed significantly to the nineteenth-century obsession with death and sexuality. The cult of Ophelia was central to this obsession, and in both her sculpture and stage appearance, Bernhardt added subversive aspects that hinted at the nature of the female subject and the afterlife of Ophelia that would continue to play a significant role in visual culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In 1880, Sarah Bernhardt, whose acting career had already made her something of a superstar, completed a sculpture of the death of Ophelia. Then, six years later in a Paris theater, she fulfilled a long-held ambition of acting the part of Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. These two examples of her extraordinary creativity each made significant contributions to the afterlife of Ophelia and in particular to the cultural icon of the dead or dying Ophelia that is so familiar today. In art, though theater and film may be strongly influenced by art works depicting Ophelia, that afterlife can be virtually independent of Shakespeare, the lifeless or near lifeless body of Ophelia serving as a site of erotic desire and idealized feminine beauty (Rutter 1998, 301-13; Fraser 2000, 245-50, 253-55; Young 2000, 262-67; Romanska 2005b, 496-97). http://borrowers.uga.edu/662/show Page 1 of 42 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

A number of recent publications and art exhibitions have traced aspects of the ongoing fascination with the Ophelia phenomenon, a fascination that began in the eighteenth century and continues to capture the creative imagination of artists today. During the last few years, the constant reinvention of Shakespeare has extended the long-standing appropriation of the death of Ophelia deep into popular culture. As a result, depictions of Ophelia's last moments are ubiquitous within the twenty-first century world of electronic social-networking sites, video- and photo- sharing sites, wikis, blogs, vlogs, and folksonomies, often collectively referred to as Web 2.0. (Young 2009; Iyengar and Desmet 2012). What follows here will endeavor to show how Bernhardt's celebrity status almost certainly ensured that her two representations of Ophelia made significant contributions to the ongoing reinvention of the construct of Ophelia in both art and stage performance. I begin with Bernhardt's sculpture, but to place the work in as full a context as possible, I offer first a brief account of her work in this medium prior to the completion of Ophelia in 1880, together with some relevant contextual material concerning her seemingly obsessive fascination with death.

SARAH BERNHARDT AS SCULPTOR Bernhardt's interest in sculpture appears to date from about 1869. Following the advice of the sculptor Roland Mathieu-Meusnier (another early influence was Jules Franceschi), who recognized her talent in modeling and urged her to continue, Bernhardt became so caught up in the creation of sculptures that she was tempted to give up her stage career. In 1873, unhappy about her work at the Comédie Française and physically unwell, she decided to take a studio and devote herself to sculpture. As she explains in her memoirs: "As I was not able to use my intelligence and my energy in creating rôles at the theater, as I wished, I gave myself up to another art, and began working at sculpture with frantic enthusiasm" (figure 1). "I soon made great progress, [. . .]. I was indifferent now to the theater" (Bernhardt 1907b, 262; Tooley 1899, 96).

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Figure 1. Bernhardt Working on her Sculpture of Medea Although she was in the early 1870s "discouraged and disgusted with the theater" (Bernhardt 1907b, 268), she never completely gave up acting, and within a few years, acting became once again the center of her creative existence in spite of the doubts she had experienced. Even so, as her acting career blossomed, she continued sculpting and (less successfully) painting. For her, these two creative outlets outside the theatre were to remain important throughout the rest of her life.1

Never one to be intimidated by a challenge, in both 1874 and 1875 she submitted sculptures to the annual Salon de Paris,2 the most prestigious of European art events during the first nine decades of the nineteenth century (Paturot 1874, 67, 69, 76; Viadot 1883, 16; Tooley 1899, 96). Thereafter, she regularly exhibited both sculptures and paintings at the Salon until 1886.3 In 1875, she studied sculpture with the renowned sculptor-painter Gustave Doré and was subsequently 4 http://borrowers.uga.edu/662/show Page 3 of 42 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

commissioned to provide a sculpture for the façade of the Opéra de Monte Carlo.4 In 1876, Bernhardt submitted to the Salon a large and ambitious project, Après la Tempête (After the Storm), inspired by a tragic story she had heard while recovering in Britanny from the psychological and physical aftermath of the death of her half-sister Régina. In her memoirs, Bernhardt describes her struggle to finish this large pieta-like sculpture, depicting an old Breton woman with the body of her drowned grandson across her lap. Her work resulted in an "Honorable Mention" at the Salon, and her plaster version of the sculpture was then followed by versions in marble and bronze (figure 2).5

Figure 2. Apres le Tempete

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As a means of publicizing her evolving commitment to the plastic arts and to challenge the stereotypical view that sculpture was a male art, Bernhardt in about 1875 had the Paris photographer Melandri create photographs of her working in her studio on a sculpture (see figure 1), with others depicting her as a painter (figure 3).

Figure 3. Sarah Bernhardt Painting It should be noted, however, that her paintings were not as warmly praised as her sculptures, although they were regularly exhibited. The photographs show her wearing a white satin pant suit designed by the well-known couturier Charles Frederick Worth. Bernhardt also wore a white tulle scarf and white pumps with

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butterfly bows (noeuds de papillon). As Carol Ockman has pointed out, Bernhardt's outfit "feminized the then controversial masculine garb originally adopted by Rosa Bonheur, George Sand, and other female artists and writers" (Ockman 2005, 43). The photographs elicited a great deal of comment and clearly had the desired effect of drawing attention to Bernhardt's newly chosen métier. According to one authority, some fifty or so of her sculptures have been traced, although the whereabouts of only about half that number is known (Abdy 1997, 250-51).

An important source of information about Bernhardt's sculptures is to be found among the reviews, catalogues, and descriptions relating to the exhibitions of her art works that she organized to correspond with her acting tours abroad. Her primary goals were always twofold: to enhance her own celebrity status and to boost her income through sales. Her first such exhibition occurred when she appeared with the Comédie Française in London in 1879. The exhibition at the William Russell Galleries on Piccadilly included five of Bernhardt's busts, a version of her Après la Tempête (the Times reviewer noted the "palpable echo of the famous 'Pietà' of Michael Angelo"), a small head of an infant Bellona, the statuette of a crouching jester, and a bronze bas-relief based on a design by Georges Clairin that depicted Bernhardt as a Muse-like figure crowning with laurel wreaths the busts of Shakespeare and Moliere.6 The exhibition provoked considerable interest, and on 16 June Tom Taylor, the art critic for The Times, wrote a detailed and generally positive review that was reprinted two weeks later in the New York Times. Among those who attended the London exhibition were the Prince and Princess of Wales, Sir Frederick Leighton (President of the Royal Academy), and William Gladstone.7 In London, according to one source, she sold the majority of the works on display — ten pictures and six pieces of sculpture, including a bronze casting of Après la Tempête that went for four hundred pounds (Aston 1989, 133).

Back in Paris, Bernhardt was interviewed in January 1880 in her elaborately decorated dressing room at the Comédie Française. Towards the close of the interview, she made what appears to have been her first recorded allusion to her Ophelia sculpture. The interview originally appeared in Boulevard and was subsequently reprinted on 30 January 1880 in Brief: The Weekly News. As the interview was closing, the unnamed author explains, "I could not leave the loge without asking Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt what she was preparing for the next Salon. She replied that she was working in the studio of Stevens, and that she intended to exhibit 'Ophélia Morte,' as well as a painting, 'Les Fiançailles de la Mort,' a young girl en toilette blanche, with orange-flowers, prepared to go to the altar, and to the figure of Death which lurks behind it" (Anonymous 1880c, 114).8 Contrary to what she had told her English interviewer, however, Bernhardt did not that year submit her Ophelia to the Salon, although she did exhibit the painting she had http://borrowers.uga.edu/662/show Page 6 of 42 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

mentioned in her interview, along with a sculpted bronze portrait of herself as a Sphinx. Possibly she did not have time to finish her Ophelia, or possibly she ran into difficulties working with marble. Though not referring specifically to Bernhardt's Ophelia, an early biographer, without citing any supporting evidence, remarked in 1896 that "In sculpture, Sarah felt herself from the first ill at ease. The cold exasperated her, for marble is glacial. How to warm it, and give it life and movement!" (Wisner 1901, n.p.). At this time also her life was in considerable turmoil, since she had quit the Comédie Française in April and subsequently had been forced by a court ruling to pay a large sum (100,000 francs) in redress for having broken her contract.

There is also the fact that Bernhardt made another visit to London, and then in August of 1880 visited Copenhagen to perform at the Theatre Royal (Bernhardt 1907b, 351-62). There does not appear to have been an accompanying exhibition of her works at either venue, but the visit to Denmark, which she describes in some detail in her memoirs, seems to have furthered her growing interest in Hamlet and in particular the figure of Ophelia. While in Copenhagen, she asked to be taken to Elsinore so that she could see the various sites associated with Hamlet. The King of Denmark, who had attended her opening performance of Adrienne Lecouvreur with the Queen, the Princess of Wales, the Queen of the Hellènes, and other dignitaries, responded with great warmth to Bernhardt's request by offering her the use of his steamboat. The manager of the Theatre Royal organized a magnificent lunch, and Bernhardt's entire company, along with "the principal nobilities of Denmark," then made the short journey to see Hamlet's supposed grave, Ophelia's Spring, Marienlyst Palace, and Kronbourg Castle. Bernhardt, however, was disappointed and recorded in her memoirs that reality did not come up to expectation and she regretted making the excursion: "The so-called Tomb of Hamlet is represented by a small column, ugly and mournful looking; there is little verdure and the desolate sadness of deceit without beauty." Even so, she was obviously gratified when "They gave me a little water from the Spring of Ophelia to drink and the Baron de Fallesen broke the glass without allowing anyone else to drink from the spring" (Bernhardt 1907b, 359).9

Having formed her own company, Bernhardt left Europe on 15 October for an extensive first tour of North America, taking with her the now finished Ophelia sculpture, along with five other sculptures and fifteen of her paintings. Her physically grueling tour would last until May 1881. In at least six of the larger cities she visited (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee), she arranged for exhibitions of her art works (Marks 2003, 38, 44, 72, 95, 101, 104, 113, 146, 176-77; Colombier 1881, 52, 74-78). The exhibition in New York began with a private showing to invited guests on 8 November at the Union League Club Theatre (Anonymous 1880a; Collins 2008, 27). In Boston, Bernhardt followed the same timetable for her exhibition at the http://borrowers.uga.edu/662/show Page 7 of 42 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

Studio Building on Tremont Street. There was a private viewing on Thursday 9 December, followed by a public viewing from Friday the next day.

As was the case in London, the works on display at her exhibitions were for sale, and almost all, in spite of some very virulent complaints about Bernhardt's supposed financial greed, were purchased for delivery following the end of the tour (Marks 2003, 40, 51, 72). However, her Ophelia was not for sale. On public display for the first time, the sculpture was the object of some positive, though largely very generalized praise from American art critics (Marks 2003, 72, 95, 101). As a consequence, Bernhardt understandably held fast to her decision to take this particular new sculpture back to France for entry in the 1881 Salon. It duly appeared there that Spring (Forbes-Robertson 1881, 427; Mason 1881, 74) and was again reviewed (figure 4).

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Figure 4. Sarah Bernhardt, Death of Ophelia One critic who saw it there was John Forbes-Robertson. Writing for the London Magazine of Art, he had this to say: Sarah Bernhardt, who has been delighting London audiences lately by her marvellous personations, and who excels in other arts than that of acting, confines herself this year to sculpture. Her 'Ophelia' is what the French call a bas-relief, but the Italians, we should imagine, an alto-rilievo. Only the head and bust are shown, as she is supposed to be floating on the water just before sinking. One breast is bare, and on the other has fallen from her dishevelled hair a string of flowers. Her head is turned over her right shoulder, her eyes are placidly closed, and the expression of her face is tender and sweet exceedingly. (Forbes-Robertson 1881, 427)

Before looking more closely at Bernhardt's Ophelia and before discussing her on stage performance as Ophelia, it will be helpful to have some familiarity with both her deep-rooted lifelong obsession with the subject of death and with her awareness of Ophelia's death as a subject that had long been of particular fascination to artists in France and elsewhere. Only within the context of these two matters can her two contributions to the phenomenon of Ophelia's afterlife be fully appreciated.

SARAH BERNHARDT AND DEATH: A PERSONAL OBSESSION Bernhardt's obsession with death has often been commented upon. It appears to have had its roots in her teenage years. Suffering from repeated illness, extreme thinness, a persistent cough, and a tendency to spit up blood, she and her doctors expected her to die at an early age (Bernhardt 1907b, 262, 266). While quite young, she persuaded her mother to purchase a coffin for her. Never one to pass up an opportunity to excite sensational publicity, she later had the photographer Melandri record her as though dead in her coffin (figure 5).

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Figure 5. Bernhardt in her Coffin Dressed in white and bedecked with flowers, her appearance in the photograph is inevitably suggestive both of nineteenth-century depictions of dead women in general and of Ophelia in particular. On a plinth beside the coffin and as though mourning Bernhardt's death, the photographer (or Bernhardt) placed Bernhardt's marble bust (now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) of her artist lover, Louise Abbéma, who appears to be looking down at Bernhardt's "corpse." This juxtaposition of the two women, it has been suggested, creates a complex thematic interplay relating to death and immortality, the status of women and women artists, and what we now see as a pervasive nineteenth-century cult of invalidism, eroticism, and the dead female, topics often linked to the madness and death of Ophelia (Ockman 2005,

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51-52; Showalter 1985, 77-94; Dijkstra 1986; Bronfen 1992; Peterson 1998, 1-24; Kiefer 2001, 11-39; Young 2002, 279-345; Romanska 2005a, 35-53; Romanska 2005b, 485-513; and Wildschut and Krien 2009).

On the eve of her departure for her first tour of America, Bernhardt was interviewed by the correspondent for the New York Herald, an interview subsequently printed in the Sacramento Daily Record-Union. Among other things, she was asked why she had had her photograph taken while she was in her now famous coffin. To this, she responded "with a pouting, coquettish smile," and the retort: "After my death I shall be ugly, shall I not?" Her interviewer, joining in her game, replied decisively with "I think not." Bernhardt then answered her question, though with how much veracity we shall never know, by saying, "Well, I know they would take my photographs after my death, and they would pain my friends. I thought it better, therefore, to have them taken while I was still living and my face was pleasing to them — that is all!" (Anonymous 1880b, 7). Whatever her true motives, Bernhardt kept her coffin with her for the rest of her life, and when she died in 1923, her body was, according to one biographer, dressed in white satin and placed in her coffin (Silverthorne 2004, 117). Ironically and in spite of the availability of her coffin photographs, Bernhardt allowed herself to be filmed on her deathbed in 1923 in Paris. Too sick to leave her bed towards the end of making the movie La Voyante (The Clairvoyant), she had the cameras brought into her bedroom. In spite of her heroic efforts, however, she collapsed and died before the movie was complete, and another actor dressed in Bernhardt's costume finished the final scenes, though with her back to the camera (Menefee 2004, 39).10

Bernhardt constantly thought about death in part because of her half-sister Régina. As has often been noted, and as she recounts in her autobiography, Bernhardt was profoundly affected, both physically and psychologically, by the death of Régina, with whom she had been very close. During her sister's final days, Bernhardt had her coffin moved into her sister's room so that she could sleep in it and remain beside her sister each night: "After the death of my sister I fell seriously ill. I had tended her day and night, and this, in addition to the grief I was suffering, made me anaemic" (Bernhardt 1907b, 270). Tragically, Bernhardt would later lose her other half-sister (Jeanne), who died from an addiction to drugs in 1884. But there were other signs of Bernhardt's obsession with death. Following her somewhat inauspicious acting debut in 1862, she took poison and for five days hovered between life and death. When questioned upon her recovery, she replied (whether truthfully or not we do not know) that she had poisoned herself because she "wanted to see what death was like" (Gottlieb 2010, Ch. 6).

Related to this desire, perhaps, were visits to the École Pratique d'Anatomie in Paris (School of Anatomy). There, she studied corpses and dissections. At some point, she also acquired a skeleton that she playfully named Lazarus (Collins 2008,

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19). Along with many of her contemporaries, she also visited the Paris morgue to see the bodies on display (Silverthorne 2004, 36), and late in life, still maintaining her morbid fascination with death, she appears to have arranged to perform for a group of prisoners on death row.11 Possibly, too, like many other Europeans, she was affected by the extraordinary popular craze related to the so-called "L'Inconnue de la Seine" (the Unknown Woman of the Seine), a beautiful young unidentified woman drowned in the Seine, whose death mask was produced in innumerable copies that became popular souvenirs as well as serving as an inspiration for artists and writers in various countries for decades to come (Phillips 1982, 321-27; Alvarez 1985, 156; Bronfen 1992, 206-67; Romanska 2005a, 37-38; Pinet 2002, 175-90; Chrisafis 2007; Perni 2012, 195). However, because the exact date of the drowning death of L'Inconnue is unknown, one cannot be certain whether it preceded Bernhardt's Ophelia.12

One can be more certain about at least two other artifacts related to Bernhardt's obsession with death. The first, one of Bernhardt's most prized possessions (she included a photograph of it in her memoirs), was a human skull (figure 6), now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, that had been presented to her by Victor Hugo sometime after her acclaimed performance in his Hernani in 1877 (image from Bernhardt 1907b, opp. 248; see also Ockman and Silver 2005, 13).

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Figure 6. Skull Presented to Bernhardt by Victor Hugo It was inscribed with verses on the theme of death that he had composed in her honor: Squelette, qu'as tu fait de l'àme? Lampe, qu'as tu fait de la flame? Cage déserte, qu'as tu fait? De ton bel oiseau qui chantait? Volcan, qu'as tu fait de la lave? Qu'as tu fait de ton maître, esclave?13 The second memento mori that she kept by her was something that alluded to the means of her suicide in Victorien Sardou's Cléopâtre. This five-act derivative of Shakespeare's drama Antony and Cleopatra received its premier on 24 October

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1890. Bernhardt's memento was a magnificent bracelet, now owned by the Sakai City Government, Japan, in the form of a snake, designed for her by Alphonse Mucha and Georges Fouquet (Ockman and Silver 2005, 13).

SARAH BERNHARDT AND DEATH: HER OTHER ART WORKS AND STAGE PERFORMANCES In addition to acquiring artifacts, Sarah Bernhardt also found outlets for her obsession with death both in the works of art she created and in her dramatic roles on stage. Mentioned already was Bernhardt's pietà-like sculpture Après la Tempête. To this, one might add her 1877 bronze sculpture of Le Fou et la Mort (The Fool and Death), depicting the jester Triboulet holding the skull of his daughter in Hugo's Le roi s'amuse. Equally morbid, perhaps, was her painting La Jeune Fille et la Mort (Young Girl and Death), which she presented at the Paris Salon in 1880. As has already been noted above, it depicts a young girl on the eve of marriage, with the figure of death beckoning her, a version of the popular "Death and the Maiden" topos.

On stage, Bernhardt's death scenes became legendary. Early in her career in 1868, for example, she played Cordelia in a French translation of King Lear at the Odéon, her limp body (one assumes) carried on stage by her grieving father in the final scene. Of her death scene in Zaïre early in her career, she left an extraordinary account: I was determined to faint, determined to vomit blood, determined to die . . . I gave myself entirely up to it. I had sobbed, I had loved, I had suffered, and I had been stabbed by the poignard of Orosmano, uttering a true cry of suffering, for I had felt the steel penetrate my breast; then falling, panting, dying on the Oriental divan, I had meant to die in reality, and dared scarcely move my arms, convinced as I was that I was in my death agony. (Bernhardt 1907b, 266) During the 1880 New York Herald interview cited earlier, the journalist asked her, "How do you feel after a scene like that, for instance, of the death of Adrienne Lecouvreur? Do you easily recover from the painful illusion, madame?" To this, in a revealing statement about her acting method, Bernhardt replied, The illusion? Ah! With me it is reality at the time. I am always ill after that death scene, and generally have to be assisted from the stage. In playing I lose my identity utterly, and for the time being I am no longer Sara — I am only the hapless woman I represent. My tears are not simulated — they are real, burning, hot tears that scald my cheeks! When the interviewer asked how she could keep her health while giving "such successive shocks to her entire nervous system," Bernhardt answered, "I do not

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keep it. I'm consumptive (poitrinaire). I spit blood, and, being of a very nervous temperament, the slightest thing irritates me" (Anonymous 1880b, 7).

Following her debut as Marguérite in La Dame aux Camélias in 1880, her death scene in this play (later recorded on film in Camille 1911) became a popular favorite (see Sarah Bernhardt in Camille, DVD containing restored version by David W. Menefee), but there were other works with death scenes throughout her acting career, including Phèdre, Hernani, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fédora, Victorien Sardou's La Tosca, in which the title character jumped to her death from the battlements, and Sardou's Cléopatra, in which death is self-administered with the aid of an asp (the subject of Bernhardt's bracelet), and in 1899 Shakespeare's Hamlet, in which Bernhardt played the title character and later recorded her death scene on film (Le duel d'Hamlet) in 1900 (see Sarah Bernhardt in Camille, DVD also containing restored version of Le Duel d'Hamlet by David W. Menefee).14 She recorded yet another death scene in the movie Daniel in 1921 (see Sarah Bernhardt, Mothers of France / Mères Françaises, DVD also containing restored version of The Death Scene from Daniel by David W. Menefee). At the same time, no doubt, she found Hamlet's meditations on death particularly suited to her own temperament (figure 7).

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Figure 7. Bernhardt as Hamlet Holding Yorick's Skull As one commentator, attempting to make sense of Bernhardt's obsession with death, recently suggested, Paradoxically, [Bernhardt's] success at dying released her from expectations that she would die young. As a classical tragedienne, Bernhardt must have had an uncanny relationship to death. Her living depended on it. As she expired onstage, she would often end by coughing up blood or falling into a dead faint. By the early 1880s, her talent for dying was so remarked on that a final death agony was practically mandatory. Rhapsodic critics insisted that she never died the same way twice. For the next forty years, she died nightly, and sometimes two times a day . . . (Ockman and Silver 2005, 55)

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SARAH BERNHARDT AND DEATH: ART WORKS BY OTHERS In addition to Bernhardt's legendary obsession with death, there is yet another possible inspiration for her decision to sculpt the death of Ophelia. By the time she created her Ophelia, the subject of Ophelia's death had been taken up by a number of painters and book illustrators. Four works in particular may have been familiar to Bernhardt. We know that Bernhardt met John Everett Millais while in England in 1879, but there is no record of what they talked about (Bernhardt 1907b, 313). Millais's depiction of the drowning Ophelia had caused a sensation at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1852 (figure 8).

Figure 8. John Everett Millais, Ophelia Shortly after its creation, the painting passed into private hands. Although the painting was exhibited occasionally prior to 1880, Bernhardt was never in the same locale, and when it was exhibited in Paris in 1855, she was probably too young to have seen it. However, although she probably never saw Millais's iconic painting, she may have seen one or other of the two engravings of it that were produced in 1864 and 1866 respectively, the first by Alfred Smith, and the second, a mezzotint, by J. Stephenson.

A particularly striking feature of Millais's painting, important because it was one that would be matched in Bernhardt's sculpture, was the artist's placing of Ophelia on her back in the water. To Victorian sensibilities, such a pose was suggestive of the fallen woman and evocative of unmentionable erotic potential, both matters already explored a year or so earlier in George Frederick Watts's painting Found http://borrowers.uga.edu/662/show Page 17 of 42 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

Drowned (1848-50) now in the Watts Gallery (Rhodes 2008, 94). Bernhardt's coffin photograph and the angle of the camera employed to take it must have evoked the same kind of uneasy response among nineteenth-century viewers. Significant in this context is Georges Clairin's portrait of Bernhardt that caused such a stir at the 1876 Salon (figure 9).

Figure 9. George Clairin, Sarah Bernhardt For this, Bernhardt posed, semi-reclined on a sofa, her eyes directed at the viewer in what for the nineteenth century could have been interpreted as an immodest or even lascivious invitation. Two of her biographers describe the portrait as follows: "She is dressed in a clinging white satin robe d'interieur . . . There is no hint of the great lady in her undulant attitude or her inscrutable smile. Indeed, no lady of the faubourg would have allowed herself to be pictured in such intimate attire or in so inviting a position" (Gold and Fizdale 1991, 134).

More promising, however, as possible direct inspiration for Bernhardt's sculpture are four French works that she probably did see. The first is an 1844 oil painting by Eugène Delacroix (figure 10), one of several of his works depicting Ophelia's death.15 Predating Millais's work, it is a dramatic rendering of Ophelia's fall into http://borrowers.uga.edu/662/show Page 18 of 42 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

the stream.

Figure 10. Eugene Delacroix, Death of Ophelia Her breasts are uncovered, and her left arm is raised still clutching the branch of a tree. The work was exhibited in Paris in 1864 and again in 1878 when Bernhardt, given her keen interest in the arts, may have seen it. Delacroix seems to have aimed at depicting the horrific moment when Ophelia's body entered the water. As such his painting, like his other versions of the same subject, is far removed from the tranquility of Millais's depiction. Ophelia has a terrified look on her face, and her clothes are being stripped from her body by the motion of her fall.

A second work is James Bertrand's Mort d'Ophélie (Death of Ophelia), which appears almost deliberately to echo Millais's much earlier painting (figure 11).

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Figure 11. James Bertrand, Mort d'Ophelie Exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1872 with a second Ophelia painting entitled Folie d'Ophélie, Mort d'Ophélie depicts a supine Ophelia, semi-submerged in water, her feet to the left, her head to the right (the reverse of Millais). Bertrand's Ophelia has flowers in her hair, and she holds a garland in her hands which rests upon the base of her throat. Gone is the déshabillé and dramatic struggle of Delacroix's various Ophelias. Like Millais's Ophelia, Bertrand's wears a dress that completely covers her; however, in a notable departure from the Millais picture, Bertrand's Ophelia wears a dark-colored dress. This makes for a much more somber composition but also allows for the viewer's gaze to concentrate upon the beauty of the highlighted face and hands of Ophelia. It seems very likely that Bernhardt, who was in Paris in 1872, would have seen Bertrand's depiction of this serene Ophelia with the idealized face merging with the water.

Two years later at the Salon in 1874, the little known painter Nöel Saunier exhibited a canvas that appears almost to reverse Bertrand's composition by depicting Ophelia in a luminous white dress. She is on her back, too, and though apparently dead, she is upon the bank of the stream rather than submerged in the water in the background. The white of her dress and the serenity of her face contrast sharply with the dark tones of the natural environment that surrounds her (Paturot 1874, 244; Lafond 2012, 180-81). Saunier's work and its presentation of Ophelia as in a state of blissful repose as she unconsciously offers her body to the viewer's gaze is certainly suggestive, though not necessarily an obvious direct influence upon Bernhardt's sculpture. Not only is its tranquil mood so very different from the horrific dramatic moment captured by Delacroix, but its emphasis is upon the representation of youthful female beauty.

More significant for my purposes here was an Ophelia work that was shown two years later than that of Saunier at the same Paris Salon in which Bernhardt

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presented her acclaimed Après la Tempête. The work in question was a bronze bas- relief of Ophelia's death by the well-established sculptor Auguste Préault (figure 12).

Figure 12. Auguste Preault, Ophelie This remarkable work, now in the Musée d'Orsay (Paris), was a re-working of a plaster version that he had originally created in 1842 and exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1850-51 (Mower 1981, 298-99). It depicts a full-length Ophelia merging with water. She is draped in a sheet that covers all but her arms, shoulders, and one leg. Paradoxically, the drapery (like that in Delacroix's various treatments) serves to emphasize the sinuous and erotic contours of her body. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is partly open, and her head is tilted to her left. The official Museum website describes the sculpture as follows: "Ophelia is shown drifting lifeless on the water. With closed eyes and parted mouth, she escapes the stiffness of death. The waves intermingle with the folds of the wet sheet wound around the girl, emphasizing the curve of her limbs."16 At the Salon the year after Préault exhibited his early plaster version of his sculpture, Léopold Burthe in 1852 exhibited a painting of Ophelia (now in the Musées de Poitiers) employing a somewhat similar pose. Though still grasping a branch above her head, Burthe's Ophelia in semi- submerged in the water (Lafond 2012, 177-78). Her clinging dress, like that of Préault's Ophelia serves to emphasize the sensuous lines of her body. One breast is exposed as will be so with Bernhardt's Ophelia, although there is no evidence that Bernhardt ever saw Burthe's painting. Bernhardt had a particularly strong presence at this same Salon since, besides her own works, also on display were portraits of her by her close friends Clairin and Louise Abbéma. Indeed, Lucy H. Hooper in her report "From Abroad" (dated Paris, 26 May, 1876) told readers in the United States that Bernhardt was the heroine of that year's exhibition on account of her Après la Tempête, the two portraits of her, and her statuette as La Fille de Roland (Hooper 1876, 765). It is inconceivable that Bernhardt did not see Préault's

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sculpture and that it did not in some way influence her execution of the same subject a few years later.

SARAH BERNHARDT'S SCULPTURE OF THE DEATH OF OPHELIA Bernhardt's Ophelia, first exhibited during her American tour in 1881-82 and then at the 1882 Paris Salon, is a marble bas relief, 70.5 x 60 cms., that depicts the flower-bedecked head and upper torso of Ophelia. She is supine, her right shoulder and breast are exposed, and she is seemingly merging with the water around her. Her eyes are closed and her head is turned to her right. It has been suggested that the sculpture is a self-portrait (Binion 1993, 8). Although I would be very hesitant to endorse this theory, there is one feature that does seem to be derived from Bernhardt's own physique, namely Ophelia's somewhat long neck. By incorporating this feature into her sculpture, Bernhardt is able to create a version of the sinuous, serpentine movement of her body that she frequently employed in her death scenes and that is occasionally found in portraits of her, a prime example being Clairin's 1879 painted portrait of her in the role of the Queen in Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas (figure 13).

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Figure 13. Georges Clairin, Bernhardt in Ruy Blas Now in the Bibliothèque de la Comédie Française (Paris), this shows Bernhardt walking away from the viewer but looking back over her right shoulder as though inviting the viewer to follow her. Her entire body forms a spiral that is emphasized by the swirling twist of her dress and its train. It has been claimed that the serpent- woman motif was in the nineteenth century "not just an attribute of the femme fatale of the Fin de siècle; it is an aesthetic ideal that pervaded all aspects of the culture," the photograph of Bernhardt in her coffin and her Ophelia sculpture being representative examples (Westerweel 1995, 266-67).

Bernhardt's sculpture was created close in time to Madeleine Lemaire's painting

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Ophélie, well-known from prints, although the original work cannot be located (figure 14).

Figure 14. Madeleine Lemaire, Ophelie Painted sometime in the 1880s, Lemaire's work shows Ophelia, in a tottering pose, standing beside the stream. Her breasts are bared and, as one critic has noted, Lemaire made Ophelia "leer with the glowering light of the vampire in her eyes, thus emphasizing the sexual origin of her madness — an aspect further accentuated by the very indecorous fashion in which her dress has slipped off her shoulders to reveal her breasts" (Dijkstra 1986, 44). Seth Lerer, in a more recent attempt to

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capture in words the disturbing effect of Lemaire's painting, talks colloquially about Ophelia's creepy eroticism" and likens her pose to "a kind of crazy Liberté — her breasts bare, her hair disheveled, her flowers falling out of her hands" (Lerer 2012, 18). She is a subversive figure, completely contrary to the norm presented by male artists (Cousseau 2001, 105-22), who generally chose to present Ophelia fully clothed (a painting by Léopold Burthe mentioned earlier in note 15, however, appears to have been a rare exception, as were the various depictions of Ophelia's death by Delacroix).

Although its eroticism is more contained than that portrayed by Lemaire, Bernhardt's sculpture of Ophelia is equally subversive in its departure from the norm. Rather than the disturbed and disturbing facial leer of Lemaire's Ophelia, Bernhardt's figure offers a romanticized image of unclothed female beauty in a state of ecstasy. While retaining the partial nudity of Delacroix's work, Bernhardt's representation instead makes no attempt to mirror the impact of Ophelia's dramatic fall into the water, what Judith Wechsler has described as a "body in torment" (Wechsler 2002, 213). This permits the state of ecstasy depicted in Bernhardt's Ophelia to be read as expressive of the erotically charged moment that a beautiful woman in a state of apparent serenity passes from life to death. It is this moment in time that Bernhardt's sculpture so tellingly captures. Her sculpture consequently makes a major contribution to a version of Ophelia that points directly towards the ongoing fascination with Ophelia among modern artists, but also towards the countless re-workings of images of the dead or dying Ophelia now so commonly to be found on internet video- and photo-sharing sites. Such web images, as I have discussed elsewhere (Young 2009), sustain the mythic relationship between water and femininity, and the intimate relationship between madness and femininity so often commented upon by feminist scholars. Many of the images also permit us, as do many earlier art works, to gaze at the vulnerability of Ophelia's youth and beauty, an often erotic process that in extreme cases invites comparison with the invitational pornographic images of young women now so ubiquitous elsewhere in the darker corners of the world wide web.

In the summer of 1881, Bernhardt gave her Ophelia to the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in gratitude for the warmth and hospitality she had received when she first performed there in August 1880 (she subsequently made two further visits). The sculpture was received by the theater in June 1881 and was then put on display in the grand public foyer when this impressive room was inaugurated to celebrate the King's birthday on 8 April 1883. J. V. Dahlerup, one of the original 1874 building's architects, was responsible for both the foyer and the manner in which the sculpture was displayed. Today, Bernhardt's sculpture is still on view in its original location, and within its black and red velvet frame, it occupies a commanding position above the center fireplace (figure 15).17

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Figure 15. Foyer, Royal Theatre, Copenhagen

Subsequent to the Ophelia that Bernhardt exhibited at the 1881 Salon, she appears to have created at least two more versions. One she exhibited in Chicago in the Women's Room at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 (Davenport 1893, 640; Elliot 1894, 273; see figure 16).

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Figure 16. Sarah Bernhardt, Death of Ophelia Another was the subject of the photograph that Bernhardt included in her memoirs in 1907 (Bernhardt 1907a, opp. 328). A comparison of this photograph with photographs of the works exhibited in the 1881 Salon and the 1893 Chicago exhibition reveals differences in many small details. In 1885 at an auction in Vienna, "Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt's marble high relief, 'Ophelia,' which was in her exhibition in this country, brought 2,710 florins from an admirer of the actress" (Anonymous 1885, 189). The admiring purchaser is not named and the current whereabouts of the work is not known. It is just possible that this work, for which I have been unable to find a photograph, may have been that exhibited in Chicago, or it may have been yet a further version of what for Bernhardt was clearly a very

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successful sculptural subject. To my knowledge, no one has to date noticed that Bernhardt did more than one Ophelia. A third version can be seen in the photograph that Bernhardt chose to include in her 1907 memoirs (figure 17).

Figure 17. Sarah Bernhardt, Death of Ophelia

For the sculptor, the creation of such a work poses a considerable challenge. Not only must the finished work depict both the beauty and serenity of Ophelia, but the medium of marble must be made to yield the illusion of fluidity as the water moves around Ophelia and absorbs her body into its own element. That Bernhardt triumphed over these obstacles is a sign of her remarkable talent as a sculptor. Had she forsaken the stage completely and dedicated herself full time to sculpture, she might well have become as familiar a name as a sculptress as she is now as an actress.

SARAH BERNHARDT'S STAGE PERFORMANCE AS OPHELIA Six years after completing her first version of her sculpture of Ophelia's death, Bernhardt in 1886 appeared at the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre in Hamlet, not as the protagonist but as Ophelia, a role that she had apparently long wanted to do. Remarkably, as she explained in an interview in Paris, she had never seen anyone else in the part: "My Ophelia is my own conception. I have often wished to see a good Ophelia, Madame Terry, for instance, but lacked time and opportunity" (Anonymous 1886b, 1). In general, this production, with a specially commissioned new translation by Lucien Cressonois and Charles Samson, was not a success,

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principally because the actor playing Hamlet (Philippe Garnier) was by all accounts quite unsuited to the role. Bernhardt's performance as Ophelia was generally, though by no means universally praised, particularly for her mad scenes and her chanting of her Valentine ballad (Roux 1886, 312; Anonymous 1886a, 274-75; Knight 1886, 195-97; Morlot 1886, 366-68; Anonymous 1886b, 1; Anonymous 1886c, 347; Anonymous 1886d, 9; Anonymous 1886e, 8). However, her audiences remained disappointed, and the production was soon abandoned (Huret 1899, 106; Verneuil 1942, 184-85; Aston 1989, 233). Plans to take the production to London were also dropped.

Several critics, however, noted an unexpected innovation introduced into the production by Bernhardt. In the graveyard scene, contrary to normal practice, Bernhardt had herself, as the dead Ophelia, brought on stage on a bier, thereby offering her audience yet another view of her as a corpse (Phelps 1890, 150-51; Sprague 1944, 173).18 Joseph Knight had a very mixed response to this. Following her departure from the mad scene and following what was normally the last that would have been seen of her, Bernhardt, contrary to normal stage practice, reappeared in person on stage. As Knight explained, "She is once more seen with her face rigid as marble, and her body, covered with flowers, carried on a bier to the churchyard" (Knight 1886, 197). He then goes on to suggest the advantage to Bernhardt that derived from this: "Its advantages are that it supplies a scene picturesque in itself, and that it introduces Ophelia in the last act, to the interest of which — at least, from the standpoint of the actress — it may be held to add." However, in the view of Knight, this startling departure from the customary use of a closed and untenanted coffin was "accompanied by drawbacks far more than compensatory." In the performance that Knight saw, there appears to have been no onstage grave: Neither Laertes nor Hamlet can, according to stage directions, jump into the grave beside the corpse, or claim to "be buried with her quick." The short, fierce struggle of the two men begins across the corpse over which, at its outset, Laertes is bending . . . the mere irreverence of such a proceeding is in itself its condemnation. (Knight 1886, 197)

In having herself brought on stage in this way, Bernhardt was making an indirect allusion to Ophelia's song in act 4, scene 5, with its apparent reference to her father's funeral: "They bore him barefaced on the bier" (Hamlet, 4.5.163).19 At the same time her stage entry as a corpse gave literal rendering to the 1604 quarto text stage direction that calls for a "corse," rather than the "coffin" named in the 1603 quarto and the 1623 folio texts. But principally, she thereby created yet one more opportunity to display herself as dead. Such a dramatic theatrical coup did not go unnoticed in theatrical circles. Within a year, Bernhardt's acting as the body of Ophelia was taken further when in late 1887, the Booth-Barrett production had the

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corpse brought in on a bier somewhat earlier in the play, during act 4, scene 7, while Gertrude is recounting the manner of Ophelia's death. The Booth 1890 promptbook has "4 guards . . . bring on bier carry down C & turn it setting it crosswise" (Shattuck 1969, 259). When the curtain fell at the end of the scene (act 4, scene 7), Laertes "throws himself on Ophelia's body" (Sprague 1944, 173). Mary Isabella Stone described another Booth production in which the drowned Ophelia was "Borne in upon a litter, her garlands hanging about her, her face slightly disfigured" (Stone 1990, 117). The practice then spread further, and it was not uncommon in late nineteenth-century productions to have Ophelia's newly- drowned body brought on stage, carried on a bier, and "damply plastered in her gown, or caught in a net covered in weeds and slime, her hair wetly streaming" (Rosenberg 1992, 822).

Early on, the innovative stage business introduced by Bernhardt provoked harsh criticism.When the British actor-manager F. R. (Frank) Benson followed Bernhardt a few years later and used his real Ophelia in the funeral scene, The Athenaeum (15 March, 1890) reacted harshly: "the depositing of the real Ophelia, in the presence of the audience, in the grave into which her brother jumps, we resent as little short of an offence" (Sprague 1944, 173; Young 2000, 262-63). Such criticism aside, the stage business introduced by Bernhardt, continued into the early years of the twentieth century. A photograph exists of Ernest Carpenter's 1909 production of Hamlet in London that shows the recently-drowned Ophelia (Hutin Britton) in act 4 with the grief-stricken Laertes leaning over her body, and in about 1916 the same stage business was still alive, according to one eyewitness, John Gielgud (Young 2000, 266).

The kind of negative criticism directed at Benson did not, however, do anything to deter Bernhardt from exploiting the apparent shock achieved by bringing back onstage the actress who had played Ophelia in act 4. In her famed 1899 production, in which she now played Hamlet, Bernhardt had her Ophelia (Marthe Mellot) carried in shoulder-high on a bier during the graveyard scene. She also employed "an elaborate procession of maids and monks, with flowers and music" quite contrary to the supposed "maimed rites" (5.1.202) referred to in Shakespeare's text (Hansen 1899, 470; Norris 1899, 22; Taranow 1996, 170). Though this use of stage spectacle, uncalled for in the text, was not an innovation (Henry Irving had done the same thing), in this instance it helped to highlight and prolong the exposure of Ophelia's body. A drawing by Alphonse Mucha (now in the Collection Rondel, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris), published in 1899 by Le Figaro (Supplément Illustré, 20 May-6 June, 1899) and in Revue Encyclopédique (Paris: Libraire Larousse, 1899), 491, records some of the details of this feature of Bernhardt's production (Taranow 1996, 230) (figure 18).

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Figure 18. Alphonse Mucha, Ophelia's Funeral It does not show the figures of Hamlet, Horatio, and the Gravedigger, concentrating instead upon the funeral procession. To the left, a robed figure holds up a large crucifix at the beginning of the procession. Other elaborately-robed clergy follow. Then comes Ophelia's bier, carried by hooded monks. Upon the bier is Ophelia's body, and there are flowers at her feet, a bouquet on either side of her, a small bouquet in her hands, and a large, circular floral arrangement at her head. Three young women follow the bier and strew flowers. Mucha, a close acquaintance of Bernhardt,20 clearly understood her purpose at this moment in the production, turning a spotlight, as it were, upon the corpse rather than upon Hamlet's response to the approaching procession.

IN CONCLUSION Sarah Bernhardt occupied a unique position with regard to the nineteenth-century obsessive fascination with the erotic presentation of morbid sexuality that was central to the cult of Ophelia. Her contribution to this cult was twofold. First, with her sculpture she was able to make a particularly telling, widely viewed, and what I have described as "subversive" contribution as manifested within the visual arts. Second, as an actress, she made a significant and influential theatrical contribution when she had herself brought on stage as Ophelia's corpse in 1886 and had Marthe Mellot do the same thing in 1899. Such "representations of the dead Ophelia that originated in nineteenth-century theatrical and visual discourses initiated," as a number of critics have observed, "the modern necrosexual aesthetic, which came to constitute the 'essence' of the feminine subject and which continues to dominate twentieth-century visual culture" (Romanska 2005a, 47). As I have attempted to show, no better nineteenth-century examples of this aesthetic can be found than those created by the actress and sculptress, Sarah Bernhardt.

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NOTES 1. Bernhardt's creative life extended into more areas than I have so far mentioned. She was the author of a book for children, two novels, three plays, short stories, theater criticism, essays, a monograph on L'Art du Théâtre (The Art of Theater), and, as already mentioned, a volume of memoirs. Toward the end of her life, she acted in a number of films and was a pioneer in exploring the new medium of film. 2. Bernhardt's early works included a plaster medallion of La Gouvernante de Madame Gérard, another of Madame Gérard, and another entitled Edouard II. There were also portrait busts of Mlle Emmy de —; and a young American, Miss Multon. Bernhardt's entry for the 1874 Salon was a portrait bust of a young woman (Paturot 1874, 67, 69, 76; Viadot 1883, 16), and for the 1875 Salon she submitted a bust of her sister Régina, who had recently died. 3. In 1878, for example, she exhibited portrait busts of Emile de Girardin and W. Busnach; in 1879 portrait busts of Mlle Hocquiguy and Louise Abbéma; in 1880 a self-portrait as a Sphinx-like inkwell; and in 1881 a portrait bust of M. Coquelin. Examples of sculptures from the later period of her life include a bronze entitled Algue in 1900; a bronze Gentleman in 1920; and a bronze head of her son Maurice Bernhardt in 1920. Relatively recently, these works were all offered at auction at various dates. See http://artprice.com (http://artprice.com) [accessed 7 July 2012]. 4. The building was designed by the architect Charles Garnier, and inaugurated by Bernhardt in 1879. Bernhardt's work was entitled Le Chant, a winged figure representing music. There was a matching sculpture by Doré entitled La Danse (Zuber 2005, 170). 5. The original plaster is untraced, and so is one of the two small marble versions. One of these appeared in the sale of her collection in 1923, possibly the same work that can now be seen in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (the gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay). A bronze version was put up for auction at Sotheby's, New York, on 26 May 1994 (lot 47). 6. This bas-relief was offered at auction on 23 April 1997 by the company of Dronot Richelieu (Paris). 7. A painting by René Lelong, now in the Dahesh Museum of Art in Greenwich (Connecticut), depicts Gladstone conversing with Bernhardt in front of her Après la Tempête http://www.daheshmuseum.org/portfolio/1166/gallery/paintings/ (http://www.daheshmuseum.org/portfolio/1166/gallery/paintings/)). 8. Alfred Stevens, a Belgian-born painter, was both a close friend and the initial mentor of Bernhardt's early work as a painter. From 1849 until his death in 1906, he worked in Paris. The studio referred to here is presumably that of Stevens in Paris. Stevens was renowned for his paintings of women, and he was responsible for a number of portraits of Bernhardt, including one depicting her as Marie Madeleine, cradling a skull (now in the Museum Voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent), and another in which she is the model for a woman in a bath, Le Bain (The Bath) http://borrowers.uga.edu/662/show Page 32 of 42 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

(now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris). 9. For pictures and skeptical discussions of Hamlet's grave and Ophelia's Spring, see Bronk 1899, 195-202; and Riis 1901, 388-98). 10. In addition, the photographer Paul Nadar was able to take a post mortem photograph of her in her bed (http://morthouse.com/post/15724113902/this- portrait-is-actually-by-paul-nadar-still (http://morthouse.com/post/15724113902/this-portrait-is-actually-by-paul-nadar- still)). 11. See the cover of the Paris Magazine Femina (November 1913): http://www.bridgemanartondemand.com/image/739598/french-school-sarah- bernhardt-in-a-play-staged-for-death-row-prisoners-at-a-french-prison-front- cover-of-femina-magazine-paris-november-1913 (http://www.bridgemanartondemand.com/image/739598/french-school-sarah- bernhardt-in-a-play-staged-for-death-row-prisoners-at-a-french-prison-front- cover-of-femina-magazine-paris-november-1913). 12. Romanska, making the same error that I had made in 2002 and believing that Bernhardt's Ophelia dates from 1890, juxtaposed photographic illustrations and argued that "Bernhardt stylized her bas-relief of Ophelia as L'Inconnue" (Romanska 2005a, 37; and Young 2002, 119). Concerning L'Inconnue, Sacherverell Sitwell once argued for a date in the late 1870s or early 1880s (Sitwell 1945, 315-17). Other commentators suggest a somewhat later date. See, for example, Anja Zeidler's web essay (Zeidler 2013). 13. "Skeleton, what hast thou done with thy soul? / Lamp, what hast thou done with thy flame? / Empty cage, what hast thou done with thy beautiful bird that used to sing? / Volcano, what hast thou done with thy lava? / What hast thou done with thy master, slave?" (Author's translation). 14. Bernhardt's performance in the dueling scene and Hamlet's subsequent death have been preserved in a 1900 film, available on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp_v_dP8s-8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp_v_dP8s-8). Cf. Bernhardt's death scene in the film Daniel (1921). 15. The 1844 painting is now in the Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur. Delacroix's other versions of the same subject consist of a virtual monochrome painting of 1838 now in the Pinakothek, Munich; a lithograph of 1843; and a painting of 1853 now in the Louvre (Johnson 1981, nos. 264, 282, 313). An examination of the provenance and history of these works suggests (though not conclusively) that Bernhardt was most likely to have seen the 1844 painting. For a discussion of some examples of other nineteenth-century representations of dead women, see Young 2002, 337. 16. See the image at http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in- focus/search/commentaire/commentaire_id/ophelie-369.html? no_cache=1&cHash=9678851fa5 (http://www.musee-

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orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in- focus/search/commentaire/commentaire_id/ophelie-369.html? no_cache=1&cHash=9678851fa5). 17. I am indebted to Niels Peder Jörgensen (Forskningsbibliotekar, mag.art., Det Kongelige Teaters Arkiv Bibliotek) for sending me photographs of the theater foyer and of Bernhardt's Ophelia. 18. It should be noted in passing, however, that twenty years earlier, The Athenaeum had had no such qualms when reviewing the reading of Hamlet in St. George's Hall by an English clergyman, J. C. M. Bellows, the father of the actor Kyrle Bellew. The reading was accompanied by a background miming of scenes from the play. Of Ophelia's funeral, the reviewer said: "In the burial of Ophelia, Mr. Bellew has introduced some improvements. The modern coffin is done away with, and Ophelia is borne to the grave upon an open bier, such as was used in Anglo-Saxon periods" (Anonymous 1870, 237). Bernhardt's innovation within a full theater performance was thus not quite the unprecedented novelty that it might have first seemed. 19. All citations from Hamlet are to the The Norton Shakespeare (1997). 20. Mucha worked closely with Bernhardt during much of her theatrical career. He was responsible for the still frequently reproduced series of posters depicting her in her principal roles. At the base of the 1899 poster depicting Bernhardt as Hamlet, Mucha included an image of Ophelia on her back

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Anonymous. 1885. "Art Notes." The American (Philadelphia), 10 no. 259 (26 July): 189. Anonymous. 1886a. Les Annales du Théâtre et de la Musique (6 March): 274-75. Anonymous. 1886b. "Bernhardt. Shakespeare and the Theatrical Favorite of Paris." The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Wednesday, 12 May. 1. Anonymous. 1886c. "A French Hamlet." The Nation. A Weekly Journal Devoted to Politics, Literature, Science, & Art 43. 8 October. 347-48. Anonymous. 1886d. "A French Ophelia. Sarah Bernhardt's First Appearance in 'Hamlet.'" New York Herald. Sunday, 28 February. 9. Anonymous. 1886e. "Letter from Paris to Edmund Yates." The Theatre (New York), 1.1 (20 March): 8. ArtPrice. 2012. Available online: http://artprice.com (http://artprice.com) [accessed 5 July, 2012]. Aston, Elaine. 1989. Sarah Bernhardt: A French Actress on the English Stage. Oxford: Berg. Bernhardt, Sarah. 1880. Sarah Bernhardt Souvenir, Including the Authorized Catalogue of Her Paintings and Sculpture, with Facsimiles of Etchings by Herself, an Original Frontispiece Contributed by Clairin [etc.]. New York. Bernhardt, Sarah. 1907a. Ma Double Vie: Mémoires de Sarah Bernhardt. Paris: Charpentier and Fasquelle. Bernhardt, Sarah. 1907b. Memories of My Life, Being My Personal, Professional, and Social Recollections as Woman and Artist. New York: D. Appleton. A translation of Bernhardt 1907a. Binion, Rudolph. 1993. Love Beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts. New York and London: New York University Press. Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham. 1892. Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama. A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook. Edited by Marion Harland. 4 vols. New York: Selmar Hess. Bronfen, Elizabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge. Bronk, Mitchell. 1899. "Holger Danske, Hamlet, and the Castle of Elsinor." The International, An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Travel and Literature (7 July to December): 195-202. Cave, Edward [see Sylvanus Urban].

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Chrisafis, Angelique. 2007. "Ophelia of the Seine." The Guardian. Friday, 30 November. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/01/france.art (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/01/france.art) [accessed 11 August 2013]. Collins, Catherine R. 2008. "Sarah Bernhardt the Visual Artist." M.A. Thesis. The College of Fine Arts, Ohio University (June). Colombier, Marie. 1881. Le Voyage de Sarah Bernhardt en Amérique. Paris: Maurice Dreyfous. Cousseau, Anne. 2001. "Ophélie: Histoire d'un mythe fin de siècle." Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 101.1 (January-February): 81-104, 105-22. Davenport, Henry. 1893. The World's Fair As Seen in One Hundred Days. Philadelphia: National Publishing Co. Dijkstra, Bram. 1986. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elliott, Maud Howe. 1894. Art and Handicraft. World's Columbian Exposition. Chicago, 1893. Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally. Forbes-Robertson, John. 1881. "The Salon of 1881." The Magazine of Art. Vol. 4. London, Paris, New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. 425-30. Fraser, R. Scott. 2000. "On Ophelia." In Shakespeare and the Visual Arts. Edited by Holger Klein and James L. Harner. Lewiston: Mellon. 238-59. Geffroy, Gustave, 1899. "Revue Dramatique." Revue Encyclopédique. Paris: Larousse. 487-92. Gold, Arthur, and Robert Fizdale. 1991. The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt. New York: Knopf. Gottlieb, Robert. 2010. Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Hansen, John. 1899. "Sara Bernhardt as Hamlet." National Magazine (August): 470. Hooper, Lucy H. 1876. "From Abroad." Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science, and Art 15 (1 January to 24 June): 765. Huret, Jules. 1899. Sarah Bernhardt. London: Chapman and Hall. Iyengar, Sujata, and Christy Desmet. 2012. "Rebooting Ophelia: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Appropriation." In The Afterlife of Ophelia. Edited by Kaara Peterson and Deanne Williams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 59-78.

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Johnson, Lee. 1981. The Paintings of Eugene Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue. 4 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kiefer, Carol Solomon. "The Myth and Madness of Ophelia." In The Myth and Madness of Ophelia. Amherst, Mass.: Mead Art Museum. 11-39. Knight, Joseph. 1886. "'Hamlet' at the Porte-Saint-Martin." The Theatre. A Monthly Review of the Drama, Music, and the Fine Arts. Edited by Clement Scott. New Series, 7 (January to June): 193-99. Lafond, Delphine Gervais de. 2012. "Ophélie in Nineteenth-Century French Painting." In The Afterlife of Ophelia. Edited by Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 169-91. Lerer, Seth. 2012. "'I've got a feeling for Ophelia': Childhood and Performance." In The Afterlife of Ophelia. Edited by Kaara Peterson and Deanne Williams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 11-28. Marks, Patricia. 2003. Sarah Bernhardt's First American Tour, 1880-1881. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. Mason, R. H. 1881. The Paris Salon, 1881. Paris: E. Bernard, and London: Edward Stanford. Menefee, David W. 2004. The First Female Stars: Women of the Silent Era. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers. Morlot, Émile. 1866. "Critique Dramatique." Revue d'Art Dramatique 1 (January- March): 366-76. Mower, David. 1981. "Antoine Augustine Préault (1809-1879)." Art Bulletin 63.2 (June): 298-99. Musée d'Orsay (Paris). Available online at: http://www.musee- orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in- focus/search/commentaire/commentaire_id/ophelie-369.html? no_cache=1&cHash=9678851fa5 (http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works- in-focus/search/commentaire/commentaire_id/ophelie-369.html? no_cache=1&cHash=9678851fa5) [accessed 17 August 2013]. Norris, Zöe Anderson. 1899. "Sarah Bernhardt in Hamlet." The Criterion 21.494 (8 July): 22. Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. 1997. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton. Ockman, Carol, and Kenneth E. Silver, eds. 2005. Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama. New Haven and London: Yale University Press and The Jewish Museum.

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Ockman, Carol. 2005. "Was She Magnificent? Sarah Bernhardt's Reach." In Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama. Edited by Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver. New Haven and London: Yale University Press and The Jewish Museum. 23-73. Paturot, Nestor. 1874. Le Salon de 1874. Paris: Bureaux du Journal le National. Perni, Remedios. 2012. "At the Margins: Ophelia in Modern and Contemporary Photography." In The Afterlife of Ophelia. Edited by Kaara Peterson and Deanne Williams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 193-211. Peterson, Kaara. 1998. "Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition." Mosaic 31.3: 1-24. Peterson, Kaara, and Deanne Williams, eds. 2012. The Afterlife of Ophelia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Phelps, Henry Pitt. 1890. Hamlet from the Actors' Standpoint: Its Representations and a Comparison of Their Performances. New York: Edgar S. Werner. Phillips, David. 1982. "In Search of an Unknown Woman: L'Inconnue de la Seine." Neophilologus 66.3 (July): 321-27. Pinet, Hélène. 2002. "L'eau, la femme, la mort. Le mythe de L'Inconnue de la Seine." In Le Dernier Portrait. Exposition présentée au Musée d'Orsay du 5 mars au 26 mai 2002. Paris: Musée d'Orsay. 175-90. Rhodes, Kimberly. 2008. Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate. Riis, Jacob A. 1901. "Hamlet's Castle." The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 61 (November 1900 to April 1901): 388-98. Romanska, Magda. 2005a. "NecrOphelia: Death, Femininity and the Making of Modern Aesthetics." Performance Research 10.3: 35-53. Romanska, Magda. 2005b. "Ontology and Eroticism: Two Bodies of Ophelia." Women's Studies 34.6: 485-513. Rosenberg, Marvin. 1992. The Masks of Hamlet. Newark: Delaware University Press. Roux, Hughes Le. 1886. La Revue Bleu (6 March): 312. Rutter, Carol Chillington. 1998. "Snatched Bodies: Ophelia in the Grave." Shakespeare Quarterly 49.3 (Autumn): 299-319. Scolnicov, Hanna. 2000. "Intertextuality and Realism in Three Versions of Hamlet: The Willow Speech and the Aesthetics of Cinema." In Shakespeare and the Visual Arts. Edited by Holger Klein and James L. Harner. Lewiston: Mellon. 227-37.

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Shattuck, Charles H. 1969. The Hamlet of Edwin Booth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1985. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism." In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London: Methuen. 77-94. Silverthorne, Elizabeth. 2004. Women in the Arts: Sarah Bernhardt. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers. Sitwell, Sacherverell. 1945. "L'Inconnue de la Seine." In Lilliput: The Pocket Magazine for Everyone 16.4: 315-17. Sprague, Arthur Colby. 1944. Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Business in His Plays (1660-1905). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Stone, Mary Isabella. 1990. Edwin Booth's Performances: The Mary Isabella Stone Commentaries. Edited by Daniel J. Watermeier. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Taranow, Gerda. 1996. The Bernhardt Hamlet: Culture and Context. New York: Peter Lang. Taylor, Tom. 1879. "Sara Bernhardt's Art Works. The Famous Actress as a Sculptor and Painter." The Times (London). 16 June. Reprinted in the New York Times. 29 June. Tooley, Sarah. 1899. "How Madame Bernhardt Took to Sculpture." The American Monthly Review of Reviews 19 (January to June): 96. Urban, Sylvanus [pseudonym for Edward Cave]. 1866. "Table Talk." Gentleman's Magazine 260 (January-June): 414-15. Verneuil, Louis. 1942. The Fabulous Life of Sarah Bernhardt. London: Harper. Viardot, Louis 1883. The Masterpieces of French Art Illustrated: Being a Biographical History of Art in France, From the Earliest Period To And Including the Salon of 1882. Edited by William A. Armstrong. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Gebbie. Wechsler, Judith. 2002. "Performing Ophelia: The Iconography of Madness." Theatre Survey 43.2 (November): 201-21. Westerweel, Baart. 1995. "Rider Haggard's Heart of Darkness." In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. 255-70. Wildschut, Flos, and Krien Clevis (eds.). 2009. Ophelia: Sehnsucht, Melancholia, and Desire for Death. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij de Buitenkant.

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Wisner, Arthur. 1896. Sarah Bernhard, Artist and Woman. With Numerous Autograph Pages Especially Written by Sarah Bernhardt. New York: A. Blanck. [Published under pseudonym A. L. Renner.] Young, Alan R. 2000. " Hamlet and Nineteenth-Century Photography." In Shakespeare and the Visual Arts. Edited by Holger Klein and James L. Harner. Lewiston: Mellon. 260-307. Young, Alan R. 2002. Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Young, Alan R. 2009. "The Death of Shakespeare's Ophelia, Popular Culture, and Web 2.0." Online essay: http://www.opheliapopularculture.com/ (http://www.opheliapopularculture.com/) [accessed 17 August 2013]. Zeidler, Anja. 2013. "Influence and Authenticity of L'Inconnue de la Seine." Undated web essay. Available online: http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/inconnue/index.shtml (http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/inconnue/index.shtml) [accessed 22 August 2013]. Zuber, Suzanne Schwartz. 2005. "Chronology of Sarah Bernhardt's Life." In Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama. Edited by Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver. New Haven and London: Yale University Press and The Jewish Museum. 167-79.

PERMISSIONS Figure 1. Sarah Bernhardt Working on her Sculpture of Medea. (Photograph by Melandri, c. 1875). Photograph in Bernhardt, Memories 1907, opp. page 288. Figure 2. Sarah Bernhardt, Après la Tempête, 1876. Bronze. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby's, Inc. © 1994. Figure 3. Sarah Bernhardt Painting. (Photograph by Melandri, c. 1875). Photograph in Bernhardt, Memories 1907, opp. page 280. Figure 4. Sarah Bernhardt, Death of Ophelia, 1880. (Marble bas-relief. Royal Theatre, Copenhagen). Photograph courtesy of Royal Theatre, Copenhagen. Figure 5. Sarah Bernhardt in her Coffin. (Photograph by Melandri, ca. 1880). Photograph in Bernhardt, Memories 1907, opp. page 270. Figure 6. Skull presented to Sarah Bernhardt by Victor Hugo following her successful performance in Hernani, ca. 1877. Photograph in Bernhardt, Memories 1907, opp. page 248.

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Figure 7. One of a number of photographs of Bernhardt as Hamlet holding Yorick's skull. (Photograph by James Lafayette, 1899). Courtesy of Library of Congress (LC- USZC4-6529). Figure 8. John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-2. Oil on canvas. Tate Gallery, London. Photograph Wikipedia Commons, PD-Art. Figure 9. Georges Clairin, Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, 1876. Oil on canvas. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Photograph © Petit Palais/Roger-Viollet/The Image Works. Figure 10. Eugène Delacroix, Death of Ophelia, 1844. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Collection Oskar Reinhart (Am Römerholz), Winterthur. Figure 11. James Bertrand, Mort d'Ophélie, 1872. Oil on canvas. Current location unknown. Photograph courtesy of Whitford Fine Art, London. Figure 12. Auguste Préault, Ophélie, 1876. Bronze bas-relief after a plaster original of 1842. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Figure 13. Georges Clairin, Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt as the Queen in Ruy Blas, 1879. Oil on canvas. Bibliothèque de la Comédie Française, Paris. By permission of Erich Lessing Kunst- und Kulturearchiv, Vienna. Figure 14. Madeleine Lemaire, Ophélie, c. 1880s. Photogravure of now lost painting. Brewer, Character Sketches 1892, Vol.3, after 126. Figure 15. Foyer, Royal Theatre, Copenhagen. Completed 1883. Bernhardt's Ophelia was placed above the central fireplace. Photograph courtesy of Royal Theatre, Copenhagen. Figure 16. Sarah Bernhardt, Death of Ophelia, c. 1893. Marble bas-relief. Exhibited in Chicago in 1893. Present location unknown. Photograph from Elliot 1894, 273. Figure 17. Sarah Bernhardt, Death of Ophelia, date unknown. Marble bas-relief. Photograph from Bernhardt, Memories 1907, opp. page 258. Figure 18. Alphonse Mucha, Sketch depicting Ophelia's funeral, 1899. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection Rondel, Paris. Reproduced in Revue Encyclopédique (Paris: Libraire Larousse, 1899), p. 491.

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"Playing the Men": Ellen Tree, Fanny (/current) Kemble, and Theatrical Constructions of Gender (/previous) ANNE RUSSELL, WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY (/about)

ABSTRACT Ellen Tree, the first English performer to regularly play tragic male roles, initiated a nineteenth-century Anglo-American convention in which many women performers played a limited number of tragic male roles, primarily Romeo and Hamlet. Nineteenth-century women's performances of tragic male characters point to multiple tensions and fissures in the understanding and representation of gender in theater. Tree's negotiation of these tensions and her decisions about how, and in what contexts, to play tragic male roles indicate her awareness of the ways in which shifting social perspectives on gender might be accommodated in her stage representations. She followed her enthusiastic and romantic Romeo with Thomas Noon Talfourd's Ion, whose dignified and "classical" character offered a kind of idealized and unsexualized masculinity that was not too deceptively "realistic." Thirty years after she had first performed Romeo with Fanny Kemble as Juliet, Tree attended several of Kemble's public readings of Shakespeare, in which Kemble read all the roles. Tree expressed a combination of admiration and disquiet at the way Kemble "read the men best." Tree's mixed emotions about

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Kemble's reading register not only her recognition of changing social mores, but also unresolved tensions and ironies in Tree's own theatrical practices. Audience responses to Kemble's readings show astonishment at her intensity and emotionality, particularly her strikingly convincing readings of male characters. These strong audience reactions to Kemble's readings of Shakespeare's plays suggest that the expressions of emotionality possible in public reading could be perceived as more dangerously exciting than stylized and conventional stage performances of the period. Kemble had often criticized acting as overly emotional, and considered stage performance to be less respectable and less intellectual than reading plays aloud without costumes or stage action. Yet Tree, who had performed regularly onstage for over forty years, was shocked by the emotion and lack of restraint in Fanny Kemble's reading. The contradictions and ironies in responses to the stage performances and readings of Tree and Kemble indicate they were both judged for exceeding social expectations of womanly restraint, even as they felt, expressed, and responded to strong emotion in both reading and performance.

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Eleanora ('Ellen') Kean (née Tree) as Ion in 'Ion'

In 1832, Ellen Tree played Romeo in a single performance at Covent Garden Theatre, with Fanny Kemble as Juliet. Four years later, also at Covent Garden, Tree performed Ion, the tragic hero of Thomas Noon Talfourd's new play of the same name, in a short run. Tree was the first English woman to play tragic male roles repeatedly, and influenced a number of later performers, initiating a nineteenth-century Anglo- American convention in which many women performers played a limited number of tragic male roles.1 Tree's decision to play Romeo and Ion can be seen as an effort to expand her range as a performer and to explore, in a tentative way, dramatic representations of masculinity on http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 3 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

the nineteenth-century stage. Tree played Romeo only once in England, and at least twice during her tour of the United States from 1836 to 1839. Tree had a greater professional investment in the role of Ion, however, which she played repeatedly, both in England and in the United States, until at least the late1840s.

Nineteenth-century women's performances of tragic male characters direct our attention to tensions and fissures in the era's understanding and representation of gender in theater. Tree's negotiation of these tensions and her decisions about how, and in what contexts, to play tragic male roles indicate that throughout her career, she was aware of the ways in which shifting social perspectives on gender might be accommodated in her stage representations. In youth she demonstrated an interest in experimental and daring performances. Her enthusiastic and romantic Romeo was followed by Ion, whose dignified and "classical" character offered a kind of idealized masculinity that was not too deceptively "realistic." Later in her career, she became known for representations of Shakespeare's cross-dressing characters, Viola and Rosalind, that emphasized those characters' taste, refinement, and essential "womanliness." In her performances of male characters and cross-dressed female characters, Tree constructed an idealized and stylized representation of "masculinity" that also incorporated elements of "womanliness" — such as delicacy, modesty, and restraint — that were important to nineteenth-century culture.

In her later years, however, Tree expressed mixed emotions about the appropriate ways of representing masculinity and womanliness dramatically. Thirty years after she had first performed Romeo with Fanny Kemble, Tree attended several of Kemble's public readings of Shakespeare, in which Kemble read all the roles. In a letter to her husband written over several days in April 1863, Tree expressed a combination of admiration and disquiet at the way Kemble "read the men best." Of Kemble's Falstaff, Tree says, "it is too gross — it was to me painful — yet clever" (quoted in Carson 1945, "Introduction," 38). Tree's mixed emotions about Kemble's reading not only register her recognition of changing and often contradictory social mores, but also point to unresolved tensions and ironies in Tree's own theatrical practices throughout her career. These tensions are also indicated in Tree's entry in the nineteenth-century Dictionary of National Biography, which emphasizes that she "was essentially womanly in her art" (DNB 1892, 30.266). The DNB entry mentions her one English performance of Romeo in passing without reference to her many performances of Ion, erasing from an otherwise exhaustive list a role http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 4 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

Tree had played much more often than Romeo. Retrospectively at least, even the noble Ion might have become a problematic character, difficult to assimilate with the "essentially womanly . . . art" that the writer believes defined Tree's career. This critic's investment in Tree's "womanliness" superseded the more complex arc of her dramatic representations, but may also have registered a change in mores, as indicated by Tree's discomfort with Fanny Kemble's convincing readings of male characters. That Tree's influential early performances of Ion were passed over in the retrospective account of her career suggests that not only Tree, but also her society, had changed. Fanny Kemble herself had expressed anxiety about the propriety of theatrical acting, which was traditionally considered less respectable and less intellectual than reading plays without costumes or stage action and representation. Yet Fanny Kemble's readings of Shakespeare's plays induced strong emotional reactions, in Tree as well as in other audience members, suggesting that the expressions of emotionality possible in reading aloud could be perceived as even more dangerously exciting than reactions to stylized and conventional stage performances.

ELLEN TREE Ellen Tree (1805-1880) was a successful and innovative professional performer who began acting about 1823. Little is known of her early life. The nineteenth-century Dictionary of National Biography entry on Tree says that she had three sisters who also performed, two of whom retired from the stage after marriage to men outside the theater. Another sister was Mrs. Quin, "a dancer of Drury Lane" (DNB 1892, 30.265). Ellen Tree's early career seems to have followed a typical trajectory for the period. She started in small roles and toured provincial theaters, where she learned and performed lead characters in the standard repertory. She began acting regularly in London theaters about 1826. She is described as a "debutant" in the Opera Glass of 2 October, 1826 and is named on a Drury Lane playbill of 18 October, 1826.2 By the 1830s, as a performer, Ellen Tree was independent and exploratory. In addition to creating Romeo and Ion as characters that women performers might play, she took a wide range of other roles, both from the standard repertory and from new plays. She toured the United States independently for almost three years, from September 1836 until 1839, returning to England with the then very substantial sum of twelve thousand pounds (Carson 1945, 6).

In 1842, Tree married the actor Charles Kean, the son of Edmund Kean, and together they formed a powerful alliance, acting together until

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shortly before his death. After marriage, Ellen Tree billed herself as Mrs. Charles Kean. (For consistency, I will refer throughout to her as Tree.) In some ways, Tree suppressed her independent identity, at least for public representation, yet she continued to attract admiring audiences and reviews (often better than her husband's). For most of the next twenty years, the pair led a series of acting companies, and many of Tree's surviving letters show that it was she who often organized business affairs of all kinds.3 In the 1850s, at the Princess's Theatre, the Kean company organized numerous successful and influential revivals of Shakespeare. Richard Schoch's study of Shakespeare's historical plays as produced by the company emphasizes Kean's role in doing archival and historical research, as did the playbills at the time (Schoch 1998). Ellen Terry, whose first role in 1856 was Mamillius in the Princess's production of The Winter's Tale, was systematically instructed in acting by Tree and described her as "a joint ruler, not a queen-consort" of the company (Terry 1908, 13-14). In the 1860s, the Keans took a company of actors on a long tour through Australia, followed by a return visit to the United States and parts of Canada. Kean died in 1868, and Tree seems to have stopped performing then.

TREE, KEMBLE, JAMESON, FAUCIT In the early, exploratory period of her career, Ellen Tree was associated, directly and indirectly, with several women interested in the performance and interpretation of Shakespeare's women characters. Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble (1809-1893) and Helen Faucit (1814- 1898) both played many Shakespearean roles, as well as writing about them retrospectively. Fanny Kemble's Records of a Girlhood (1879) is a lively memoir that includes anecdotes of performing; her Notes Upon Some of Shakespere's Plays (1882) is a more serious work. Helen Faucit's On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters (1885) describes and justifies her performance practices. In the 1830s Kemble, Tree, and Faucit were linked in a number of ways, not least by their belief that representing Shakespeare's women characters was important and serious work. But both Tree and Kemble went beyond Shakespeare's female characters to explore male roles — Tree on stage, and Kemble in her later readings.

Fanny Kemble's parents were Charles Kemble, an actor who was for many years proprietor of Covent Garden Theatre, and Maria van Camp, a singer and dancer. Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble, both tragic actors, were her father's siblings. Fanny Kemble wrote extensively about her experiences when she first started performing in her teens, as

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well as about the theatrical, familial, and social contexts in which she performed. In 1829, Kemble was urged to begin to perform to help repair the losses her father had accumulated in managing Covent Garden. She was immediately a spectacular success in her debut as Juliet, which became her signature role. Her journals and memoirs record the theatrical, familial, and social contexts in which she performed, as well as the intensity of her emotional engagement in her roles. Kemble's brilliant stage career in England lasted only a few years. In 1832, she left with her father for an American tour in order to earn more money to repay her father's debts. She was an immediate success in the United States and "left an indelible mark on American theatre audiences and on American society" (Dudden 1994, 27). In 1834, she married Pierce Butler and left the stage. They were incompatible in many ways, not least in their attitude toward Butler's slave plantations, which Kemble loathed and criticized in print (Kemble 1863). After their highly publicized divorce in 1849, Kemble lost custody of her two daughters. She reverted to her family name, and after returning briefly to the stage, began to present readings of Shakespeare plays, seated at a table with a large book and taking all of the roles herself (Furnas 1982, 322-39; David 2007, 229-36).

In her youth, Kemble knew and corresponded with Anna Jameson (1794-1860), an artist and critic whose Characteristics of Women (1832), also known as Shakespeare's Heroines, included detailed essays analyzing some of Shakespeare's female characters. Clara Thomas argues that Jameson based much of her thinking about Shakespeare's women characters on some of the opinions of Kemble's aunt, Sarah Siddons (Thomas 1967, 64-68). Kemble's friendship and correspondence with Jameson also included discussions of Shakespeare's characters, in which Jameson attempted, as Christy Desmet (2004) argues, to influence rhetorically Kemble's on-stage portrayals of Shakespeare's women.

Jameson's writing and the performances of Fanny Kemble and Ellen Tree may well have influenced Helen Faucit's On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters, which emphasizes her early independent reading of Shakespeare, away from the influence of theater performances. Faucit's retrospective interpretations of the Shakespearean characters that she played are at pains to negotiate tensions between the "womanliness" expected of the characters on the stage and the autonomy Faucit found in the characters of the text. As Carol Carlisle's biography demonstrates, however, Faucit was not as self-taught as her own account suggests. She does not disclose that her http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 7 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

maternal grandparents owned a theater or that both of her parents were actors. Her parents separated when she was young, and her mother, Harriet Faucit, lived with Faucit's "step-father," the renowned comedian William Farren (Carlisle 2000, 11). Farren's brother Percy tutored Helen Faucit in acting, and William Farren arranged some early engagements (Carlisle 2000, 22). By 1836, Charles Kemble was also a "mentor," who gave Faucit some of Fanny Kemble's promptbooks, inscribed "To you alone do these Parts, which were once Fanny Kemble's, of right belong; for from you alone can we expect the most efficient representation of them" (Carlisle 2000, 49).

Kemble and Tree performed with one another in Romeo and Juliet in 1832; earlier that year, Tree had also played Francoise de Foix in Fanny Kemble's tragedy Francis the First when it was staged at Covent Garden. Faucit and Tree also performed together in a company led by William Macready. Carlisle suggests that the younger Faucit, who started acting in 1836, saw Tree then and later as a "rival" with whom she was in competition for leading roles (Carlisle 2000, 45-50, 73, 85). Carlisle describes Kemble as another, victorious rival over Faucit during Kemble's brief return to the English stage in 1847-48 (168). Such an awareness of rivalry would be especially acute if Faucit was actually using Kemble's promptbooks as models for her own performances. Yet even though these performers were in competition for roles and fame, their writings and performances offered congruent interpretations and representations of Shakespeare's women characters. Tree's and Kemble's representations of masculine characters in performances (in the case of Tree) and readings (in the case of Kemble) explored stereotypes of masculinity in ways that attracted, but also unsettled, audiences and critics. Audience comments on Kemble emphasized not only her skill in female characters but also her exceptionally convincing readings of male characters. Taken together, Tree's and Kemble's innovative perspectives opened up a space for the representation of idealized, yet emotional, representations of both "femininity" and "masculinity" that were fluid and exploratory, offering a means to obliquely suggest broad and tolerant definitions of masculinity and femininity. Overall, the work of this loose network of female performers and critics strongly affected how Shakespeare's characters, both male and female, were conceptualized and performed in the nineteenth century.

ELLEN TREE AS ROMEO Ellen Tree was widely recognized as an innovative and skilled

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performer. Unlike Kemble and Faucit, she did not write for publication about her conception of Shakespeare's characters' motives, expectations, or interiority. Tree's many letters rarely give a sustained analysis or interpretation of the characters she played. Instead, she focuses more on the theatrical effects of a character or scene. In her discussions of acting technique, in her awareness of audience response, and in her negotiation of her own roles, it is clear that Tree had a distinct idea of how she wanted to play roles and that she took a great deal of control over her own self-representation.

Tree's most significant artistic innovation was her decision to play tragic male roles on the stage. Early in her career, Sarah Siddons, Fanny Kemble's aunt, had played Hamlet on a few occasions in provincial theaters, but she did not repeat these performances in London (Parsons 1909, 31; Manvell 1970, 321). 4 After the 1832 performance with Fanny Kemble, Tree did not play Romeo or any other male role until August 1836, when she performed Ion, the hero of Talfourd's new play at the Haymarket in London. She began a three-year tour of the United States in September 1836, where she was praised for many different roles, including Ion, which she performed many times, on this tour and again in the 1840s. Tree's precedent influenced numerous women who played Romeo, Ion, and other male characters, in England and the United States, particularly the American performer Charlotte Cushman, who made Romeo, Ion, and Hamlet staples of her repertoire from the late 1830s through the 1840s.5 Tree's performances of Romeo and Ion, and of cross-dressed characters such as Rosalind and Viola, contributed to an interpretation of and discourse about Shakespeare's characters that emphasized the fluidity and performativity of gender, while also recognizing social constraints that limited the range of experimentation for both male and female performers. Her decisions about when and where to play Romeo and Ion indicate some of the ways in which societal expectations about gender constructed nineteenth century performances of characters by Shakespeare and by contemporary playwrights. Reviews of Tree's Romeo and her own retrospective comments about the implications of playing Romeo indicate some of the potential pitfalls for cross-dressed performances.

The Covent Garden playbill for 4 June, 1832 — a performance for Tree's benefit — lists a varied program. The main performance was Romeo and Juliet, with Tree as Romeo, Fanny Kemble as Juliet, and Fanny Kemble's father, Charles Kemble, as Mercutio. Benefits, special performances whose profits went to a particular actor, often feature innovative casting and a group of star performers supporting the person http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 9 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

whose benefit was being held. In addition to the play, there were several musical performances, as well as an "afterpiece" of Comus, in which Tree was the Lady. The contrast between the chaste Lady and impetuous Romeo would have left the audience with an impression of Tree's versatility — and also, perhaps, of her chastity.

Tree's Romeo made a positive impression on some spectators. The Tatler's review of 5-6 June, 1832 says that Tree "makes a very handsome Romeo," adding that the writer "liked best the most impassioned parts" (Tatler 1832, 5-6 June, 223). An anonymous letter in the Tatler of 7-8 June praises Tree for having everything but "the masculine bearing of a man — all it wanted; her tenderness was as true as heaven and Shakspeare!" (Tatler 1832, 7-8 June, 231). The letter ends, "Miss Tree, in her conception and acting of Romeo, was a giant among pigmies! — A precious consolation! — but thank heaven, we have her as a woman" (232). Less approvingly, an anonymous newspaper review, on the back of the playbill of the performance in the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, criticizes the performance as an "impropriety," yet somewhat confusingly adds that "Romeo is a dreadfully soft youth and therefore can only (we should hope for the honour of manhood) be represented by a woman." Nevertheless, "Miss E. Tree acted the character better than we ever saw it represented."6 The reviewer's doubts about Romeo's "softness" suggest one reason why the role might have been considered appropriate for Tree.

Fanny Kemble wrote later that Tree was the only Romeo she had played with "who looked the part" (Kemble 1879, 200). Kemble's Romeos were usually considerably older than she was, and on her U.S. tour, her father sometimes played Romeo. Catherine R. Burroughs points to many references in Kemble's diaries and memoirs expressing distaste for acting, arguing that "this unusual situation of playing her father's lover onstage . . . could have contributed to Fanny's association of acting with inappropriate, even scandalous, behaviour" (Burroughs 1999, 140). Although Kemble does not specifically link her anxiety to her performances with her father, she does admit to misgivings about the very nature of stage performance as manifested in Tree's unusual role: "The acting of Romeo, or any other man's part by a woman (in spite of Mrs. Siddons' Hamlet), is, in my judgment, contrary to every artistic and perhaps natural propriety, but I cannot deny that the stature . . . and the beautiful face, of which the fine features were too marked in their classical regularity to look feeble or even effeminate, of my fine female lover made her physically an appropriate representation of Romeo." Tree also "fenced very well." Kemble refused, however, to http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 10 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

allow Tree to perform the traditional stage business of carrying Juliet's corpse "to the foot-lights" (Kemble 1879, 200).

In the contemporary reviews and in Kemble's retrospective comments, there is tension and equivocation — admiration for Tree's performance, but also doubt as to whether she ought to have done it at all. Such mixed opinions seem relevant to Tree's reluctance to play Romeo again for Covent Garden. In a letter to "Mr. Moore" of Covent Garden, dated September 1832, Tree refused a request to perform Romeo again the next season, asking him to pass on her comments to Mr. Laporte, the manager of the theater: "I assure you no earthly consideration will induce me to open in that character . . . to open the the [sic] theatre with it only for the sake of my acting Romeo would expose me deservedly to censure and do me more harm than you with all your kindness could possibly undo." Later in the letter, Tree emphasizes, "I never can — I never will repeat the character of Romeo . . . If you intend me to do any good in the higher walk of the Drama it would be ruin for me to open in a male character" (Tree n.d., emphasis in original). Tree's letter points to the complex and sometimes contradictory demands of stage conventions, management power, the performer's control over what characters to play, and the female actor's particular concern with her offstage reputation. The context of a benefit probably was significant in Tree's initial decision to play Romeo, because a single performance for a benefit could be indulged as an experiment. Critical responses like those of the reviewers quoted above, however, might have indicated to Tree that there was less public tolerance than she had anticipated. Tree's argument that it would be "ruin for me to open in a male character" suggests extreme anxiety about her own social and professional status if she were to play Romeo again.

Tree's letter also argues that "Juliet should be any character or none," pointing to the primacy of Juliet in nineteenth-century theater productions. Romeo was an imperfect, unsatisfactory hero, while Juliet was idealized. Reviews of Romeo and Juliet with young stars such as Fanny Kemble or Helen Faucit as Juliet tend to focus on the character, and performer, of Juliet, with relatively little discussion of Romeo. In many reviews other characters and the actors who play them are mentioned only in passing, if at all. Juliet's centrality to nineteenth- century readings of the play is clearly evident in the analyses of her character by Anna Jameson and Helen Faucit. Both Jameson and Faucit imagine the character's life before the play begins, inventing events and motives unknown to the reader or playgoer. Jameson's aim is to defend Juliet from any criticism of her impulsiveness and eroticism, while http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 11 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

Faucit imagines Juliet's early life partly in order to play her, in an early practice of the actor's preparation later theorized by Stanislavski. Faucit's and Jameson's works of character criticism intersected with theatrical practices to depict an idealized, yet emotional, Juliet, as the character was played by Fanny Kemble.

In playing Romeo to Fanny Kemble's Juliet, Tree had moved the focus of the performance slightly from the familiar, and adored, figure of Juliet (and Kemble) to the more problematic character of Romeo, and to the transgressive performer, Ellen Tree. Her wish "to do . . . good in the higher walk of the Drama" suggests that Tree now recognized a demand for a moral function in the performance of idealized roles that would be undercut if she were to open as Romeo. Tree's refusal seems to have been accepted by the management of Covent Garden, where she performed a variety of conventional leading women's roles that year. But although Tree did not perform Romeo again in London, there are at least two records indicating that she played Romeo in the U.S. A review in the Mississippi Free Trader, in March 1839, says that Tree's Romeo "was performed better than any other lady could do, and in some scenes we had forgot that one of the other sex was acting Romeo" (quoted in Carson 1945, 6). A review of a performance in Vicksburg, Mississippi was more critical, and suggests why Tree might have refused to play Romeo again in London: "Neither the play nor the performance suited our taste. Miss Tree ought to eschew the pantaloons" (quoted in Orange 1983, 165). No comprehensive list of Tree's performances in the U.S. is known, and her itinerary can only be determined from brief references in letters, occasional newspaper reviews, and scattered allusions by her contemporaries. Hence, it is not impossible that Tree might have played Romeo in other cities in the three years she spent touring throughout the U.S. Tree never played Romeo again in London, but perhaps she felt more freedom to experiment on the road.

TREE, TALFOURD, AND ION In 1836, Tree took another male role, Ion, the hero of Thomas Noon Talfourd's tragedy set in ancient Greece. Ion, which would become a standard role for Tree, was much less problematic for performance by a woman in the nineteenth century than was Romeo. Unlike the impulsive Romeo, whose suicide is a marvel of bad timing, Ion is politically aware, emotional yet sensitive, in love yet chaste, and commits suicide as a noble, self-sacrificing, political act. Tree played Ion in London in 1836, many times in the United States, and again after she returned to London in 1839.

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Talfourd (1795-1854), the author of Ion, was a judge and an MP between 1835 and 1841, who was remembered primarily for introducing several early unsuccessful copyright bills. He contributed to a number of London literary magazines; among his acquaintance were Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Robert Browning, and the actor William Macready. Talfourd wrote Ion over several years in the early 1830s, and first printed it for his friends. The title page of the first edition reads "For private circulation. Not published" (Talfourd [1835a]). Talfourd's "Preface" emphasizes that the blank-verse play, which had many declamatory speeches, was not written for performance. The "Preface" to the second, "private" edition notes that Talfourd had made some revisions (Talfourd 1835b). By the next year, Talfourd had published the play, and Macready had organized a production. The first 1836 edition omits the personal "Preface," but includes a "Notice" dedicating the play to the memory of his schoolteacher and includes additional stage directions. The "Fourth Edition" of 1837 adds to the title page a statement that this version of the play was "First acted at Covent Garden Theatre 26th May 1836" Talfourd (1837). (I quote from this edition as the "acting" edition.) Encouraged by the reception of the performance and publication of Ion, Talfourd went on to write two less successful plays, The Athenian Captive and Glencoe.

Ion, A Tragedy in Five Acts is set in Argos, in ancient Greece. Talfourd's 1835 "Preface" notes that he was inspired by Euripides's Ion for the initial situation (Talfourd [1835a], vii). But as the plot summary below demonstrates, Talfourd also drew on elements from other Greek tragedies, as well as on Greek political models. In Ion, the gods and the sympathetic characters criticize monarchy as a "tyranny" linked to disease. At the end, monarchy is to be replaced by an unspecified form of self-government. Although the critique of monarchy is set in the far past, Talfourd wrote the play in the reign of William IV, during the volatile years of struggle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords over the Reform bills. Talfourd's sympathies are not only with Reform, but apparently with republicanism. The revisions in the 1836 edition, for instance, emphasize that Ion's resistance to monarchy is the will of the gods. This political aspect of Ion may help to explain the play's particular popularity in the United States, though it also had considerable success in England.

As the play opens, Argos is in the grip of disease. Numerous characters discuss their disdain for the king, Adrastus, a "tyrant" who "holds his crimson revels" in his palace (Talfourd 1837, 13), while the people of the city suffer. Ion, a foundling who had been adopted by the high priest http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 13 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

Medon, is now a respected young man entrusted with the care of the temple. Ion remonstrates with the king, who grants him an hour of life before being executed. In that time, Adrastus tells Ion that when he was a young man falsely accused of killing his younger brother, his wife and child had been killed by his father's servants. After telling his story, Adrastus sends away the executioner, and Ion asks Adrastus to "Let thy awakened heart" ask "the pleasure of the gods / And whatso'er the sacrifice, perform it" (39).

Ion returns to the temple just as a messenger comes from the oracle with a message: "Argos ne'er shall find release / Till her monarch's race shall cease" (Talfourd 1837, 53). After emerging from a trance in which statues speak to him, Ion knows that his duty is to assassinate the king. His foster sister Clemanthe, now his beloved, remonstrates, fearing that killing will alter his character. Ion meets with a like-minded group, who draw lots to determine who will kill the king, and Ion's lot is drawn. At no point is the assassination represented as morally problematic in itself; instead, Ion calls himself "a sad instrument in Jove's great hand" (81).

Just after Ion leaves for the palace with a knife, a messenger brings a deathbed confession by one of the servants sent to kill Adrastus' wife and child, revealing that the child had not been killed. Medon realizes from the circumstances that the foundling, Ion, is really the son of Adrastus. Clemanthe tells Medon that Ion is about to unwittingly kill his father. Medon rushes to prevent Ion from becoming a "parricide" (Talfourd 1837, 78), arriving just as Ion is about to stab Adrastus. At Medon's news, Ion cries "Father!" (84) and faints. When Ion and Adrastus withdraw for an offstage reunion, Ctesiphon, another plotter, kills Adrastus, leaving Ion as the heir to the throne. On determining that the people are still dying Ion agrees to be confirmed as king. The following day, he appoints wise advisors, exiles the standing army, and asks that should he die without children, the people will "swear to me / That ye will seek hereafter in yourselves / The means of sovereign rule" (Talfourd 1837, 116). Ion stabs himself, and as he dies in Clemanthe's arms, hears that "the pestilence abates" (119). His last words are "The offering is accepted — all is well" (120).

Talfourd's friend, Macready, created the role of Ion in the production that opened on 26 May 1836, for the actor's benefit. Macready's diaries show that he took considerable trouble over the staging of the play, and the stage directions in the 1836 acting edition presumably reflect his decisions. Ellen Tree created the small role of Clemanthe in the benefit

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performance, but had another engagement afterwards, and Helen Faucit played Clemanthe for the rest of the run (Carlisle 2000, 45). Macready's praise for Tree's talents — in his diary entry of 9 April, 1836 — and his thanks for her willingness to take part in his benefit nevertheless were qualified only a few weeks later (Macready 1912, 1:291). His diary of 14 June 1836 records his response to the news that Tree would be playing Ion in another production: I was displeased . . . In strict justice I do think that having arranged the play (which Talfourd would not have done successfully) and put it upon the stage, it is scarcely fair, before the attraction is decided as past, to turn over my labours to any other persons . . . I cannot think it is possible that the experiment can succeed. (1:328) Macready's irritation about being quickly replaced in the role he had created may have influenced his 8 August, 1836 characterization of Tree's performance as Ion in August as "a very pretty effort . . . and a very creditable woman's effort, but it is no more like a young man than a coat and waistcoat are" (1:340). On 27 August 1836, when he was again preparing to play Ion, Macready outlines his critical responses in more detail: Rehearsed Ion, which I no longer feel pleasure in performing. I feel, I fancy, rather dégouté with Talfourd's "delight" at seeing Miss Tree's appearance in the part; if it is the author's feeling that it is the nasty sort of epicene animal which a woman so dressed up renders it, I am very loth to appear in it. (1:340) Macready's disgust with Tree's performance of a male role, and with Talfourd's "delight," did not prevent him from writing to her on 22 September, 1836 to offer to play Adrastus to her Ion for her "farewell Benefit": "I was glad I had done it, as a kind thing to her" (1:342).

In contrast to Macready's mixed feelings, some reviews of Tree were quite enthusiastic. A review in The Athenaeum of 6 August 1836 praises her "graceful and spirited performance . . . the carriage she assumes is more like a man than that of any other female we ever remember to have seen on the stage; and the ever presence of real, with the total absence of mock modesty, make the illusion complete." The reviewer's impression was undercut, however, in the last act, "where the great length of the imperial robes caused by a close adherence to classical costume, gives them too much the appearance of petticoats" (Athenaeum 1836). In this and other reviews, there is no disapproval of a woman who plays a character as youthful and unerotic as Ion, as there had been when Tree played the emotional Romeo. Fanny Kemble, for http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 15 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

example, observes that Tree's Ion, "which in its ideal classical purity is almost without sex, was less open to objection than the fighting young Veronese" (Kemble 1879, 200). The responses also point to significant breaks in Tree's representation of masculinity. It is not only the character's "purity . . . without sex" that makes Ion a character appropriate for a woman to perform. In addition, Tree's gestures and her costume disrupt the performance of masculinity, reminding viewers of her "modesty."

Talfourd praised Tree's performance in a new preface to the "Fourth Edition," dated 14 November 1837. After giving generous praise to Macready's first Covent Garden production as an "effort of art" that inspired "others to attempt the part" (Talfourd 1837, xvii), he offers thanks to the performers of the second production, and most of all, to the original representative of the heroine, who now illustrated the hero, and who has made the story of his sufferings and his virtue familiar to Transatlantic ears. Who is there does not feel proud of the just appreciation by the great American people, of one who is not only the exquisite representation of a range of delightful characters, but of all that is most graceful and refined in English womanhood, — or fail to cherish a wish for her fame and happiness, as if she were a personal friend or relation of his own? (xx) Talfourd's comments make it clear that he approved of Tree's performance of the "sufferings" and "virtue" of Ion; like the reviewers above, he also stresses the refinement and grace of Tree's "English womanhood."

Talfourd had good reason to be grateful to Tree, who did him the service of making his play widely known, particularly in the U.S. (Reilly 1979-81, 28-29). Ion became a regular part in her repertoire for more than ten years. In the successful three-year U.S. tour that Tree began in the autumn of 1836, she played Ion frequently in large and small cities — for example, in Philadelphia on 6 December, 1836 and at the Park Theatre in New York in February. Tree returned to the U.S. to tour with her husband Charles Kean from 1845-47. Records and letters held by their manager Sol Smith, of Ludlow and Smith, indicate that Tree played Ion in 1846 during engagements in Mobile, St. Louis, and New Orleans (quoted in Carson 1945, 11) and very likely elsewhere on the extended tour. Ion was so important in Tree's repertoire that, as a playbill at the Theatre Museum indicates, she chose to play Ion for her "2nd appearance since her return from America" at the Haymarket on 5 http://borrowers.uga.edu/712/show Page 16 of 24 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

September, 1839.

The familiarity, as well as the social acceptance, of Tree's Ion is illustrated in the memoirs of the pioneering feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton in a discussion of the campaign for dress reform led by Amelia Bloomer in the late 1840s. After describing vividly the "jeers and laughter" experienced by the women who wore "the Bloomer costume," Stanton adds: "After giving up the experiment, we found that the costume in which Diana the Huntress is represented, and that worn on the stage by Ellen Tree in the play of 'Ion,' would have been more artistic and convenient" (Stanton 1898, 203-204). Engravings of Tree's Ion show that she wore a costume very similar to the one she wore as Viola — a light-colored, belted, knee-length tunic with pale tights. On the stage, Tree was free to wear clothing that Stanton believes would, on the street, be seen as "artistic" and only mildly transgressive. Stanton saw in the costuming conventions adopted by Tree for the virtuous Ion a possible way to ameliorate at least some of the socially-mandated restrictions of women's clothing while still maintaining social expectations for restrained and womanly behavior. Her perspective on Tree's costume for Ion also suggests how unmasculine, and how unthreatening to the social norm, was Tree's Ion.

TREE AS ROSALIND AND VIOLA Tree's experiences playing Romeo and Ion seem to have sensitized her to some of the issues important to reviewers and audiences in the representation of masculinity on stage, and these insights affected her approach to performing Shakespeare's cross-dressing characters Rosalind and Viola, both of whom she played as very "womanly" even when the characters were in disguise. A Monthly Repository review of October 1836 describes Tree's Viola as "modest, finished, beautiful" (Monthly Repository 1836, 629). A review of 7 September 1839 in The Athenaeum praises her "feminine sweetness and gentleness of manner," but complains that Tree plays Viola "with only too timid and constrained delicacy; deporting herself rather as a modest young page, who admired Olivia, than with the saucy airs and raillery of a secret rival in the Duke's affections" (Athenaeum 1839, 686). By 18 November 1848, a reviewer in the Athenaeum says that the womanly Viola is now "traditional . . . Of all modern actresses, Mrs. Kean is the only one who presents it in its sweetness and its depth . . . Viola, with Mrs. Kean, puts not off the woman with her attire, but becomes yet more womanly" (Athenaeum 1848, 1154).

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Although not as famous as her Viola, Tree's Rosalind was also associated with femininity and "womanliness." In 1851, the Keans presented As You Like It at the Princess's Theatre. The Athenaeum review of 8 February 1851 calls her Rosalind "original" because its "buoyancy, vivacity, and sweetness can hardly be excelled" (Athenaeum 1851, 171). (The same reviewer contrasts Tree's Rosalind with Charles Kean's Jaques, which was "marked by correct recitation and noble bearing.") This "revival" used the traditional acting text of the play, which included the cuckoo song from Love's Labor's Lost(Shattuck 1962, [vi]), although for a command performance at Windsor Castle, Tree offered to cut both the cuckoo song and the epilogue, "as she fears that which is usually addressed to a public audience may appear offensive at court" (quoted in Shattuck 1962, [v]). Here, Tree structured her approach to the text with awareness of particular expectations from her courtly audience.

PERFORMING MEN AND READING MEN Tree's emphasis on representing cross-dressed women characters in terms of their "womanliness" points to her acute awareness, and perhaps her partial internalization, of increasingly restrictive social mores. It is surprising that in 1863, Tree, a woman who had been performing a male character on the stage since her youth, felt acutely that Fanny Kemble's mere reading of male characters was troubling. Carson quotes at length from a very detailed account of Kemble's reading of As You Like It that Tree wrote to her husband on 6 and 7 April 1863. She praises Kemble's Orlando, Adam, Duke, and Audrey ("certainly an imitation of Mrs. Keeley") and says that Kemble read "portions of Jaques exceedingly well" (quoted in Carson 1945, 38). She also observes: There is something grating to me in a woman reading all the men, and straining her voice at times into a manly tone — but she read the men best . . . I do not think it possible for a woman to read comic male characters in Shakespeare and avoid a tinge of vulgarity and coarseness . . . but she cut out grossness very neatly. (quoted in Carson 1945, 38) On 8 April, Tree attended Kemble's reading of The Merry Wives of Windsor and found it a wonderful exhibition. It is monstrous clever, but shocking I think to see a woman, (a gentlewoman) so coarsely unsex herself — and I feel this the more / when I hear the melodious tenor of her natural

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voice in "sweet Anne Page" . . . . The room was not more than half full and not many Ladies . . . Her Falstaff I think is good I think for any one (reading) — wonderful for a woman — but it made me almost angry that she did it so well. It is too gross — it was to me painful — but very clever . . . I've wondered (after hearing her in Falstaff) where the sweet womanly tones came from . . . To me her doing Falstaff was as bad as a woman going on for a Clown in a Pantomime — It is such a coarse unsexing. (quoted in Carson 1945, 38-39, emphasis in original) Interestingly, these letters do not refer to or reflect on Tree's own history of stage performances of male characters, when critical responses to her own early performances of Romeo and Ion alternated between fascination and disgust. Tree's dismay at Kemble's success in reading comic male characters suggests that genre and plot have some effect on her response. Tree oscillates between admiration for Kemble's vocal and interpretive ability in the performance of As You Like It and reluctant disapproval of Kemble's success at reading "the men best." Tree's especially severe disapproval of Kemble's convincing reading of Falstaff functions not only as a critique of Falstaff as a character, but also of Kemble's ability to "unsex herself" to inhabit the role so convincingly. By contrast, after the mid 1830s, no critic ever suggests that Tree had "unsexed herself" in her delicate and restrained performances of Ion and Romeo.

There are multiple ironies in the judgments that Tree and Kemble make of one another's representation and reading of male roles. Kemble admires Tree's appearance, bearing, and fencing as Romeo, but refuses to let her perform Romeo's traditional "masculine" stage business of carrying Juliet. Tree is impressed, but also shocked, by Kemble's effect as a reader — especially by Kemble's success in reading Falstaff and other transgressive male characters. Kemble's affectionate account of Tree's performance of Romeo, written sixteen years after the readings that shocked Tree, makes a point of emphasizing Kemble's own mixed feelings about the propriety of women playing men's roles when she says, "The acting of Romeo, or any other man's part by a woman (in spite of Mrs. Siddons' Hamlet), is, in my judgment, contrary to every artistic and perhaps natural propriety" (Kemble 1879, 200). Burroughs argues that, for Fanny Kemble, "reading represented respectability and constraint," in contrast to the emotionality of acting (Burroughs 1999, 137-38). The audience responses to Kemble's readings, however, show astonishment at the intensity and emotionality she could express through reading, particularly the strikingly convincing readings of male

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characters. While Kemble herself had often criticized acting as overly emotional, Tree, who had performed regularly onstage for over forty years, was shocked by the lack of restraint in Fanny Kemble's reading. As Tree's restrained performances of Romeo and Ion had brought her both criticism and praise, so too Kemble's intense and emotional reading of the whole range of Shakespeare's characters evoked both wonder and disapproval. The contradictions and ironies in responses to the performances of Tree and Kemble suggest how much they were both judged in light of social expectations of womanly restraint, even as they felt, expressed, and responded to strong emotion in both reading and performance.

NOTES 1. I gratefully acknowledge the research support of the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. For helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper, I would like to thank members of the Shakespeare Association of America seminar in Nineteenth-Century Shakespeares, especially leaders Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. After Tree, a considerable number of women in England and the United States played a limited range of male parts — Romeo, Hamlet, the Fool in King Lear, and a few roles from the nineteenth-century tragic and melodramatic repertoire, particularly Ion. The American Charlotte Cushman, who frequently played Romeo and Ion during her career, was certainly influenced by Tree's example. Sarah Bernhardt, who played Hamlet in French, drew from a continental theatrical tradition, but her appearances in England and North America were preceded by Tree, Cushman, and other lesser- known performers. It is difficult to document Tree's performances with precision because records and letters are fragmentary and scattered. 2. This playbill, like those subsequently referenced in this essay, is held in the Theatre Museum Library, Covent Garden. 3. Some of Tree's letters are included in Letters of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean Relating to their American Tours (Tree 1845) and Emigrant in Motley: The Journey of Charles and Ellen Kean in Quest of a Theatrical Fortune in Australia and America, as told in their hitherto unpublished letters (Tree [1954]). John Ripley surveys and quotes from unpublished letters from the American portion of the tour held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Other unpublished letters by Tree are held by the British Library and the Folger Shakespeare

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Library. 4. A few other women are reported to have performed male roles after Siddons and before Tree, but these performances are difficult to document. 5. For discussions of Cushman's Romeo, see Elisabeth M. Puknat (1951), Joseph Leach (1970), and Anne Russell (1993). 6. This review is on the same playbill for 4 June 1832.

REFERENCES The Athenaeum. 1836. London. 6 August, 1839, 7 September, 686; 1848, 18 November, 1154; 1851, 8 February, 171. Burroughs, Catherine B. 1999. "'Be Good!' Acting, Reader's Theater, and Oratory in Frances Anne Kemble's Writing." In Romanticism and Women Poets. Edited by Harriett Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Carlisle, Carol Jones. 2000. Helen Faucit: Fire and Ice on the Victorian Stage. London: Society for Theatre Research. Carson, William G. B. 1945. Introduction to Letters of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean Relating to their American Tours. Language and Literature, No. 15. Saint Louis: Washington University. Cole, John William. 1859. The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, F.S.A. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley. David, Deirdre. 2007. Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Desmet, Christy. 2004. "Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Criticism as Feminine Performance Space." Unpublished Conference Paper. British Women Writers' Conference, Athens, GA. Dudden, Faye E. 1994. Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press. Faucit, Helena, Lady Martin. 1885. On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters. 1904; Edinburgh: Blackwood. Furnas, J. C. 1982. Fanny Kemble: Leading Lady of the Nineteenth- Century Stage. New York: Dial. Jameson, Anna. 1833. Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. 2nd edition. 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley.

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Jenkins, Rebecca. 2005. Fanny Kemble: A Reluctant Celebrity. London, Simon and Schuster. Kemble, Frances Ann. 1879. Records of a Girlhood. New York: Holt. Kemble, Frances Ann. 1863. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839. London: Longman, Green et al; New York: Harper. Leach, Joseph. 1970. Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Macready, William Charles. 1912. The Diaries of William Charles Macready. Edited by William Toynbee. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Manvell, Roger. 1970. Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Artist. London: Heineman. The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature. 1832. London. 2 October. 629. Mullenix, Elizabeth Reitz. 1999. "'So Unfemininely Masculine': Discourse, True/False Womanhood, and the American Career of Fanny Kemble." Theatre Survey 40.2 (November): 27-42. Orange, Linwood E. 1983. "Shakespeare in Mississippi, 1814-1980." In Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Parsons, Mrs. Clement. 1909. The Incomparable Siddons. London: Methuen. Puknat, Elisabeth M. 1951. "Romeo was a Lady: Charlotte Cushman's London Triumph." Theatre Annual 9: 129-39. Reilly, Joy. 1979-81. "Miss Ellen Tree (1805-1880): An Actress Overlooked or the Noble Art of Suffering." Theatre Studies 26-27: 21- 34. Ripley, John. 2007. "'We are Not in Little England Now:' Charles and Ellen Kean in Civil-War America." Theatre Notebook 61.2: 77-106. Russell, Anne. 1993. "Gender, Passion, and Performance: Nineteenth- Century Women Romeos." Essays in Theatre / Études théâtrales 11.2: 153-66.

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Schoch, Richard W. 1998. Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shattuck, Charles H. 1962. Mr. Macready Produces "As You Like It"; A Prompt-book Study. Urbana Illinois: Beta Phi Mu. Promptbook facsimile paginated; commentary unpaginated. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. 1898. Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897. New York: European Publishing Company. [Talfourd, Thomas Noon.] [1835a.] Ion: A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: Printed by J. Valpy. For Private Circulation. Not Published. [Talfourd, Thomas Noon.] [1835b.] Ion: A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: Printed by J. Valpy. For Private Circulation. Not Published. [Talfourd, Thomas Noon.] 1836a. Ion: A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: Moxon. [Talfourd, Thomas Noon.] 1836b. Ion: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Second edition. London: Moxon. [Talfourd, Thomas Noon.] 1837. Ion: A Tragedy in Five Acts. 4th edition. London: Moxon. The Tatler: A Daily Journal of Literature and the Stage. 1832. London. 5-6 June; 7-8 June. Terry, Ellen. 1908. The Story of My Life. New York: Doubleday. Thomas, Clara. 1967. Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tree, Ellen (Kean). 1945. Letters of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean Relating to their American Tours. Edited by William G. B. Carson. Language and Literature, No. 15. Saint Louis: Washington University. Tree, Ellen (Kean). [1954]. Emigrant in Motley: The Journey of Charles and Ellen Kean in Quest of a Theatrical Fortune in Australia and America, as told in their hitherto unpublished letters. Edited by J. M. D. Hardwick. Rockliff. Tree, Ellen (Kean). n.d. Unpublished letter, British Library MS Add. 27925 ff. 142-43.

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Joanna Baillie and the Anxiety of (/current) Shakespeare's Influence

JUDITH BAILEY SLAGLE, EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY (/previous)

(/archive)

ABSTRACT Joanna Baillie, a drama critic as well as a dramatist, began during the last decade of the eighteenth century to develop her own theory of tragedy and comedy, based on human emotions, the elemental instincts that prompted Shakespeare's characters to action over two hundred years before. Baillie could not escape Shakespeare's early influence; even if she had tried, critics and colleagues regularly reminded her of her debt. While Baillie admitted her poetical debt to Ossian and to Robert Burns, her Romantic "naturalness" was indeed fresh and original. Her dramatic writing, however, followed many of the themes of Shakespeare — love, hate, revenge, jealousy, ambition — and she defended and defined her focus on such passions in her "Introductory Discourse" to A Series of Plays, whereas Shakespeare was tacit about his scheme if, in fact, he had one.

"Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? . . . twisting, and untwisting the same rope?" — Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

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INTRODUCTION

Joanna Baillie

"The most important playwright in nineteenth-century Scotland," writes Adrienne Scullion in A History of Scottish Women's Writing, "is Joanna Baillie" (1997, 160). A poet, playwright, and theatre theorist, Baillie (1762-1851) was the child of enlightenment parents, the niece of the famous Hunter physicians, the sister of Dr. Matthew Baillie — one of George III's physicians — and a close friend of Sir Walter Scott and other Romantic writers. With little formal schooling, she taught herself the fundamentals of drama by reading indiscriminately, acting out parts, http://borrowers.uga.edu/690/show Page 2 of 28 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

and attending plays. And for her early dramatic experience, she thanked Shakespeare. Like other Romantic women writers, Baillie sought to balance what she had inherited from the past with a fresh perspective and a personal artistic identity. The result of such unification was clearly an artistic anomaly — a woman writer whom Scott deemed in Marmion our "own Shakespeare" (Scott 1995, 69).

In the Preface to Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception, Lucy Newlyn defines what she calls the complicated series of intersecting concerns for English Romantic writers, which include: the equivocal relationship between a writer and his or her audience during the age of criticism; the ways in which writers construct an authentic identity for themselves from the materials of the past, when the past's authority is under question; and the need to accommodate authorial rights alongside interpretative freedoms, at a time when the emerging power of the subject is politically and philosophically desirable, but contentious. (Newlyn 2000, vii) Further, Newlyn argues, while Harold Bloom's focus on authority, tradition, and canon formation have "celebrated" the "anxiety of influence," he lays "emphasis on one side of the polarity, writer-reader, and works in a single temporal direction," subsequently "ignoring the duality of the writing-reading subject, who looks both before and after" (Newlyn 2000, vii). An additional emphasis on the writing-reading subject also leads to implications regarding the "anxiety of reception" and the "divided self," the condition that R. D. Laing defined as an individual's personality "profoundly modified even to the point of threatened loss of . . . identity" (quoted in Newlyn 2000, viii). For purposes of this discussion, I am most interested in employing three parameters that Newlyn outlines in order to interpret (1) how Baillie responded to the critical audience who insisted on aligning her with Shakespeare, (2) how she "re-places" Shakespeare with her dramas and (3) how, in the face of the "rise of the reader" in early nineteenth- century Britain, she constructed her own identity from Shakespeare's plays and from other materials of the past. As Newlyn suggests, male Romantic writers were less burdened with the past than they were "preoccupied with the combined threats of modernity and futurity." Newlyn's concern is "with authorial anxiety as it manifested itself in the Romantic era, and specifically with the threatened status of poetry as it dealt with the challenges posed by the rise of the reader." She offers "a new reading of Romanticism by reversing the temporal direction of Bloom's model of influence and applying it to a particular nexus of personal circumstances and historical condition" (x). http://borrowers.uga.edu/690/show Page 3 of 28 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

Romantic women writers were far less concerned about threats of futurity, but Baillie did address concerns about the quality of past and present playwrights in her 1798 "Introductory Discourse" to A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind, each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy: [I]n presenting to us those views of great characters, and of the human mind in difficult and trying situations, which peculiarly belong to Tragedy, the far greater proportion, even of those who may be considered as respectable dramatic poets, have very much failed. (Baillie 1851, 8)1

What Baillie hoped to accomplish was a more realistic, characteristic drama than that promoted by Shakespeare and earlier dramatists and by her peer Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his Drury Lane company. What she did accomplish, I argue, was the development of strong women characters — justifiably wary of relationships with men — and of psychologically motivated characters, often obsessive and violent. Certainly, something she accomplished as well was a wish stated in her "Introductory Discourse": "It was the saying of a sagacious Scotchman," writes Baillie, "'Let who will make the laws of a nation, if I have the writing of its ballads'" (Baillie 1851, 14). While she never realized the level of dramatic representation that Shakespeare enjoyed and enjoys, Baillie's poems and song lyrics, particularly her work with music collector George Thomson, proved a considerable legacy for her native Scotland. Along with contemporaries such as Burns, Scott, and others, Baillie today represents Romantic Scotland as "King Shakespeare" represents England.

BAILLIE'S EARLY AND MATURE EXPERIENCE WITH SHAKESPEARE In an 1838 memoir written for her nephew William Baillie, Joanna Baillie, then nearing her eighties, traced her initial interest in drama. She was living at Long Calderwood in Scotland at the time and was probably a teenager when she was acting out scenes from Shakespeare for her family and friends: Our two maid servants were summoned from the kitchen and they with my Mother & Sister made the audience. First when we began, they all laughed without restraint at our strange appearance but, as I proceeded in my part, they became grave and ended by sheding [sic] tears, and this was a great triumph for me. Every one praised me but my Mother who, very wisely did not like to give me any kind of encouragement. At another time too I acted Hamlet in the

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Ghost scene with great commendation. (Slagle 2002, 53) But Baillie's interest in drama had peaked even earlier, and she related that after her father's election to the Divinity Chair in Glasgow in 1775, a gentleman of the town often stayed at the house of her friend Miss Graham and owned a copy of Bell's Theatre, with engravings of Shakespearean actors and actresses in stage costumes.2 This work, along with her own inclination to act out in play, furthered her interest in tragedy and comedy. Even as an adult living in London, Baillie regularly documented in letters her presence at theatrical performances, often to see adaptations of Shakespeare's plays or to witness the debut of actor friends such as George and Sarah Bartley or Fanny Kemble.3 In a September 1816 letter to Sir Walter Scott, for example, Baillie recounted a performance of Hamlet that she had just seen in Paris: Night before last we went to see Talma act Hamlet. I was much disappointed. His expression of feeling appeared to me exaggerated & harsh, and tho' the action of his arms is often very good yet he is upon the whole neither dignified nor graceful. He is not Hamlet Prince of Denmarc [sic] to my fancy but a good Bourgeois of Paris thro'out. I ought not however to judge so severely from one character only, and my imperfect knowledge of the french language — or I should rather say my not being accustomed to hear it spoken prevents me from being sensible of many excellencies in speaking his part which others might be sensible of . . . I suppose you know this French Play of Hamlet. It is an old Play I find & quite after the French School. There has been so much pains taken to make poor Hamlet well-bred that the whole character & spirit is extracted from it. That Goth Shakespear[e] has no notion how a Prince & a Lover ought to speak. (Slagle 1999, 361-62)4 This telling critique from a spectator and Romantic playwright implies that the Romantics were not necessarily anti-theatrical, but were moving toward a concept of dramatic experience as an intellectual and emotional engagement. And this modern audience was interested in the psychological responses of characters — just what Baillie was offering in her plays on passions — with added emphasis on women's position in society.

As Baillie's letters often describe performances she attended, most of them point to the theatrical Shakespeare, always fluid, rather than to the literary Shakespeare. On the other hand, she also attended private readings of Shakespeare by acting friends such as Sarah Siddons and George Bartley.5 "How many passages of s[h]akespear," Baillie wrote

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her friend Margaret Holford in 1824, "we admire because we know the whole interest of the Play from which they are taken which we should otherwise read with comparative indifference" (Slagle 1999, 707). That she was critical of both text and performance is revealed in such commentary.

Baillie, a drama critic as well as a dramatist, during the last decade of the eighteenth century began to develop her own theory of tragedy and comedy based on human emotions, elemental instincts that had prompted Shakespeare's characters to action over two hundred years before — and she could not escape his early influence on her. Even if she had tried, critics and colleagues regularly reminded her of her debt. While she admitted her poetical debt to Ossian and to Robert Burns, her Romantic "naturalness" was indeed fresh and original. Her dramatic writing, however, followed many of the themes of Shakespeare — love, hate, revenge, jealousy, ambition — but she defended and defined her focus on such passions in her "Introductory Discourse" to A Series of Plays, whereas Shakespeare was tacit about his scheme if, in fact, he had one. An explanation like Baillie's, after all, was not unusual for a Romantic writer embarking on a new venue, especially a woman writer: From that strong sympathy which most creatures, but the human above all, feel for others of their kind, nothing has become so much an object of man's curiosity as man himself . . . Every person who is not deficient in intellect, is more or less occupied in tracing among the individuals he converses with, the varieties of understanding and temper which constitute the characters of men . . . If man is an object of so much attention to man, engaged in the ordinary occurrences of life, how much more does he excite his curiosity and interest when placed in extraordinary situations of difficulty and distress? . . . It is not merely under the violent agitations of passion, that man so rouses and interests us; even the smallest indications of an unquiet mind . . . will set our attention as anxiously upon the watch, as the first distant flashes of a gathering storm. (Baillie 1851, 1-3, 5) This desire, as Baillie says, "to know what men are in the closet as well as in the field" is the same fascination that Shakespeare counted on for an audience watching Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello agonize over and lose control of their passions.

Unfortunately, the term "closet dramatist" has often been misused in relation to Baillie; while she focuses on passions that men might display in their "closet," that is, in private, she clearly intended her plays for the http://borrowers.uga.edu/690/show Page 6 of 28 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

stage and repeatedly noted her disappointment at seldom being represented there. Her characters are motivated by passions and/or by their own psychoses. Privy to the medical scholarship of her famous uncle John Hunter (and the work of his older brother William Hunter, whom she never met), Baillie was also familiar with the medical studies of her brother Dr. Matthew Baillie; and her plays, argues Alan Richardson, rely "on the new neurophysiology summarized four years earlier by her brother in the Gulstonian lectures" (Richardson 2001, 77). Baillie, then, succeeded in combining Shakespeare's genius with the psychological and neurological studies of her day to create volatile characters often destroyed by their own unhealthy minds — not only by their external circumstances.

Nevertheless, if Baillie repeated the themes of Shakespeare, they were themes unoriginal to him as well, for even he had been accused of copying from romances, earlier tragedies, and historical chronicles. Baillie's critics, however, suggested that she should strive to become even more like the earlier playwrights. While the act of borrowing from previous literary works prevailed from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, explains Laura Rosenthal, "dramatic writing [still] raises particular ambiguities of intertextuality and originality": "As a commercial genre, theater had since the Renaissance been under some pressure to offer something that the audience had not seen the previous week; still, retelling familiar stories had also been customary and rarely understood as plagiarism" (Rosenthal 1996, 7). Baillie, who had grown up reading early dramas, could not escape the "retelling" of familiar stories enhanced by her own philosophical bent. Renaissance influence was probable, but in an original and systematic way, she strove to analyze the human passions in her own way — with Shakespeare as signifier in the Romantic theater and literature. Intrigued by human behavior when she was a young woman, Baillie explained her curiosity to friend and writer Mary Berry in an 1831 memoir: Traits of human nature whether in Books or in real life have always had most power in arresting my attention & keeping place in my recollection. This has often made me a watcher of children at play or under any excitement, and a frequenter in early life of the habitations of labouring & country people which happily for me I had many opportunities of doing. I might forget the dialogue in which it was displayed and could not therefore make a truthful anecdote of it, but the trait itself remained perhaps for ever. (quoted in Slagle 2002, 71) Thus was the stage set for her dramatic emphasis, and Baillie's focus on http://borrowers.uga.edu/690/show Page 7 of 28 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

the passions was outlined and represented in her very specific agenda.

BAILLIE'S CRITICAL RECEPTION In the early nineteenth century, two critical giants had emerged to review the magnitude of published material being introduced to the reading public: The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. If Baillie did not feel justifiably threatened by the critics early on, she certainly did after the emergence of her third volume of A Series of Plays (1812). Shortly before Scottish reviewer Francis Jeffrey attacked Baillie's third volume, he had noted in 1811, after the success of her Family Legend, that "Southey, and Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Miss Baillie have all of them copied the manner of our old poets; and, along with this indication of good taste, have given great proofs of original genius" (quoted in Greig 1948, 194).6 But his review of volume three was brutal, and Baillie never forgot it. In February 1812 the Edinburgh Review printed his remarks: It is now, we think, something more than nine years since we first ventured to express our opinion of Miss Baillie's earlier productions; and to raise our warning voice against those narrow and peculiar views of dramatic excellence, by which, it appeared to us, that she had imprudently increased the difficulties of a very difficult undertaking. Notwithstanding this admonition, Miss Baillie has gone on (as we expected) in her own way; and has become (as we expected) both less popular, and less deserving of popularity, in every successive publication . . . Miss Baillie, we think, has set the example of plays as poor in incident and character, and as sluggish in their pace, as any that languish on the Continental stage, without their grandeur, their elegance, or their interest; and, at the same time, as low and as irregular in their diction as our own early tragedies, — and certainly without their spirit, grace, or animation. (Jeffrey 1811-12, 265-66) While Jeffrey's "as we expected" condemned Baillie for what he clearly considered her "unfeminine" independence, his criticism that her plays were "poor in incident and character" was not unlike the criticism he leveled toward other successful playwrights of the time. He moved on to give Baillie some praise but focused on non-threatening traits such as her pleasing lyrical verse and her intelligent morality. Baillie would thereafter refer to herself as a "burnt child" for ever having revealed her authorship at the beginning of her career: [Miss Head] would fain have kept her name & sex unknown, if her

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friends would have allowed it, and they were not very wise friends who thwarted her on this point. I speak feelingly on this subject like a burnt child. John any-body would have stood higher with the critics than Joanna Baillie. I too was unwisely thwarted on this point. (Slagle 1999, 438-39) In contrast to Jeffrey's estimation of Baillie, however, Lord Byron, who could not have been more opposite from Baillie in disposition, saw her as a dynamic playwright and was both intrigued and intimidated by her ability to portray what he considered "masculine" passions, passions that Shakespeare perfected and that other male writers imitated.7 In 1815 Byron reflected the prejudice of his culture in two letters, speculating that "Women (saving Joanna Baillie) cannot write tragedy. They haven't the experience of life for it" (Marchand 1982, 4:290). And in 1817 he concluded, "When Voltaire was asked why no woman has ever written even a tolerable tragedy, 'Ah (said the Patriarch) the composition of a tragedy requires testicles.' If this be true, Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does — I suppose she borrows them" (Marchand 1982, 5:203). Clearly, the critical conflict over Baillie was steeped in issues of gender — she was simply addressing issues too masculine for a nineteenth-century woman — the dark recesses of the mind, the passions only revealed in one's "closet." But while often subtly echoing Shakespeare's themes, Baillie's plays are also distinctive in their focus on women acting in and reacting to a patriarchal culture — a culture that forced them to live with the results of war, marriage, legal systems, and so on, developed by men. Baillie's subjects were far too "unfeminine" for the early nineteenth-century critics, but what many failed to understand was that showing the mental decline of her characters was meant to be cautionary rather than sensational.

"In women's writing, across the full discursive range in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries," explains Newlyn, "it is difficult to distinguish between a genuine 'anxiety of reception' and a culturally induced rhetoric of self-deprecation" (Newlyn 2000, 224). Like many early women writers, Baillie is an ironic figure of modesty and anonymity. Even though her first two books appeared anonymously, she still apologized for her "attempt" at drama in the "Introductory Discourse" to volume one of A Series of Plays: It is natural for a writer, who is about to submit his works to the Public, to feel a strong inclination, by some Preliminary Address, to conciliate the favour of his reader, and dispose him, if possible, to peruse them with a favourable eye. (Baillie 1851, 1)

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Likewise, she apologized for the "influences" from which she allegedly suffered and, unjustly, for her lack of form: situated where I have no library to consult; my reading through the whole of my life has been of a loose, scattered, unmethodical kind, with no determined direction, and I have not been blessed by nature with the advantages of a retentive or accurate memory. (Baillie 1851, 17) Ironically, these are the very imagined "failings" which made her poetry and drama fresh and exciting. In spite of her early apologies, Baillie did secure critical acclaim for her work, but she also suffered from some severe external criticism. Unfortunately, she seems to have internalized that criticism later on and to have become anxious about her work's reception; and this anxiety surely struggled with her ambition. In addition, Baillie was concerned about the proliferation of new material being introduced to the public, believing that her own work would suffer from readers' "overexposure" to new texts and their resultant inability to assess genuine literary merit. While novels were becoming the preferred genre for many readers in the nineteenth century, an increase in readership may have actually served to promote writers like Baillie, writers who could imitate a national treasure like Shakespeare.

ECHOES OF SHAKESPEARE Whereas several of the dramas contained in Baillie's three-volume A Series of Plays represent similar passions revealed in Shakespeare's plays, four plays in particular epitomize Shakespeare's themes and sometimes even his characters. Volume 1 of A Series of Plays closes with Baillie's most enduring drama, De Monfort: A Tragedy, set in "a town in Germany" (Baillie 1851, 76). The five-act structure and blank verse are similar to Shakespeare's, but the gothic setting makes this play much more contemporary. 8

This play about hatred and revenge was just suited to the impassioned acting styles of Kemble and Siddons and, along with Baillie's Family Legend, was the most performed of her plays.9 Sarah Siddons even asked Baillie to write her more parts like Jane De Monfort's, evidence that she tired of constantly being cast in the same Shakespearean roles. Although, according to Baillie's letters, De Monfort was altered by John Kemble for performance, it was still a gothic masterpiece. From the opening act, a mystery enfolds De Monfort, raising questions about why he has left his sister Jane, why his personality has changed, and why he is dark and melancholy. He is a haunted hero, pre-Byronic with his

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tortured soul.

De Monfort learns of his wife's death at the beginning of the play, and in Hamlet-like fashion laments that "There are [those serpents] who . . . sting the soul — Ay, till its healthful frame is chang'd to secret, fest'ring, sore desease, / So deadly is the wound" (Baillie 1851, 79). His soul has become Hamlet's "unweeded garden," in which "things rank and gross in nature" fester, though the cause is more mysterious than it is for Hamlet (1.2.135-36).10 De Monfort's sister Jane urges him to confide in her, but he fears that she will despise him if he does, for his hatred for Rezenvelt is obsessive. Rezenvelt, like Claudius, has gained "wealth and new-got titles" that he does not deserve (Baillie 1851, 86). De Monfort's hatred eventually clouds his reason when he sees — but misinterprets — Rezenvelt holding the hand of his sister Jane De Monfort, later compounded by a false rumor that Rezenvelt is Jane's lover: Hell's direst torment seize the infernal villain! Detested of my soul! I will have vengeance! I'll crush thy swelling pride — I'll still thy vaunting — I'll do a deed of blood! (Baillie 1851, 94) These words, as well as many others in Baillie's play, echo Hamlet's. In act 4, for example, Hamlet attempts to boost his courage in much the same way as De Monfort: "O, from this time forth / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" (Hamlet 4.4.55-56). Baillie's Gothic play contains "Radcliffean" elements as well and an over-romanticized implication that the protagonist dies of grief after he finally murders Rezenvelt,11 but the protagonist's smoldering hatred and inability to act also mirrors Hamlet's psychological stagnation — and Claudius' inability to pray. In addition, the tragic ending with Freberg's Fortinbras-like speech echoes Hamlet's closing scene: Unhappy men! Ye, both in nature rich, With talents and with virtues were endued. Ye should have lov'd, yet deadly rancour came, And in the prime of manhood of your days Ye sleep in horrid death. O Direful hate! (Baillie 1851, 102) Fortinbras expresses grief for the prince in a similar way: "For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have prov'd most royal" (Hamlet 5.2.341-42).

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Catherine Burroughs point out that even though the play is titled De Monfort the title should not "compel readers to focus solely on the way in which the dramaturgy moves the male sibling of the De Monfort family through the culture of the play"; for Jane De Monfort "also wrests from De Monfort's murder of Rezenvelt an interpretation that maintains the illusion of his heroic stature" and continues to distinguish him from more common criminals. Additionally, most critics agree that Jane is the "epitome of perfect womanhood by the standards of late- eighteenth-century middle-class London society, the character . . . written to be performed in the world of the play with a carefully controlled gesture and speech" (Burroughs 1997, 119). Contrarily, Deirdre Gilbert analyzes Jane De Monfort as extremely manipulative, a Lady Macbeth in her ability to control the dramatic action but far more sinister than Lady Macbeth in her motives for doing so (Gilbert 2002, 79-80). However we interpret Jane De Monfort, in fashioning a Hamlet- like revenge play, Baillie reassigns "control" and rationality to a woman — a woman unlike Hamlet's Ophelia or Gertrude.

Following volume one in 1802, volume two of A Series of Plays contained four dramas: The Election, Ethwald (parts 1 and 2), and The Second Marriage. The most Shakespearean of these, Ethwald: A Tragedy, In Five Acts, Part First and Part Second is set in "England, in the kingdom of Mercia, and the time near the end of the Heptarchy" (Baillie 1851, 134).12 Here Baillie focuses on ambition, a passion, she argues, far less transient than others and requiring exposure in more than one situation: Ambition alone acquires strength from gratification, and after having gained one object, still sees another rise before it to which it as eagerly pushes on; and the dominion which it usurps over the mind is capable of enduring from youth to extreme age. To give a full view, therefore, of this passion, it was necessary to show the subject of it in many different situations, and passing through a considerable course of events. (Baillie 1851, 105) Baillie's Ethwald opens on a scene in a Saxon castle where young Ethwald languishes, wishing to make a name for himself and lamenting his low birth. Taking his fate into his own hands, Ethwald disappears from home and joins a group of soldiers fighting for King Oswal of Mercia. He is instrumental in winning the battle, and the King rewards him with an earldom. This initial taste of fame excites his ambition, and he finds his current status as heroic warrior still lacking: The noble ethling greatly honours me

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With precious tokens; nay, the very soldiers Do rear their pointed weapons as I pass; As though it were to say, "there goes the man That we would cheerly follow." Unto what end these fair beginnings point I know not — but of this I am assured, There is a course of honour lies before me, Be it with dangers, toil, or pain beset, Which I will boldly tread. (Baillie 1851, 143) All this before Ethwald has heard the mystics' prophecies — Macbeth questions his fate in a similar way just after his encounter with the witches: This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? (Macbeth 1.3.129-32) Hungering for more recognition as well, Ethwald asks the deceitful Alwy to help him incite another battle, distraught at the notion of peace: What, peace! Peace, sayst thou, with these glorious arms, In conquest red, occasion bright'ning round us, And smiling victory, with beck'ning hand Pointing to future fields of nobler strife, With richer honours crown'd? What, on the face Of such fair prospects draw the veil of peace! (Baillie 1851, 143-44) Ethwald even wishes the captured British prince will escape so that they can continue the war. But Alwy's immediate plan is to start a different conflict, rumoring to the ruthless thane Woggarwolfe that his Wessex foes have taken Boruth. The ploy succeeds, and in the ensuing battle scene Edward, heir to the Saxon throne, retreats as Ethwald rises to save his army. Only the noble thane Ethelbert seems to understand that the war-torn landscape is the result of Ethwald's ambition, although Ethwald denies his accusations: I am a man aspiring to be great, But loathing cruelty: who wears a sword That will protect and not destroy the feeble. (Baillie 1851, 150) But, of course, everyone suffers from war; and in this play Baillie delineates the horrors of war, not the honor of it. By act 4, just before he

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consults the Druidesses for a look into the future, Ethwald again laments his un-royal birth, and we understand that fame as a warrior is just the beginning of his obsession for power: I see my path: But what is that to me? My steps are chain'd. Amongst the mighty great, and earth's high lords, There is no place for me! (Baillie 1851, 152) As he consults the Druid mystics, he envisions a specter wearing a crown, which provides the impetus he needs to manipulate the future and advance from soldier to king. In the process of "aspiring to be great," Ethwald's passions prove "hostile to public good," as he leaves particularly the women characters unable to survive in his patriarchal wasteland (Baillie 1851, 150, 162). Ethwald, Alwy, and conspirators eventually storm the castle, where King Oswal faces them bravely. Ethwald has given Alwy orders to assassinate the king but retreats himself to another room, returning to see the dead king and feigning surprise: "What sight is this? / Ah! Ye have gone too far. Who did this deed?" (Baillie 1851, 159). With the king dead and his heir Edward imprisoned, Ethwald, like Macbeth, takes the throne and then marries the king's proud daughter, Elburga.

Deirdre Gilbert explains that in Ethwald Baillie, in a cross-coupling of characters, "releases two Shakespearean heroines, Ophelia and Lady Macbeth, breathing new life into them through the transfiguration of Bertha and Elburga" (Gilbert 2002, 177).13 Bertha, Ethwald's childhood friend and prospective wife, eventually goes mad and, Ophelia-like, wanders around singing songs. Elburga, argues Deirdre Gilbert, shares her husband's ambition, but Ethwald, "unlike Macbeth, shuts his queen out from 'things of moment'" (Gilbert 2003, 154). Further, as Nina Auerbach explains, Anna Jameson — in Shakespeare's Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Political, and Historical (1832) — like Baillie, "allows these heroines to 'exist perennially,' giving them a 'larger life than their plays allow'" (Auerbach 1982, 211). Ethwald, Part First, closes as the protagonist questions his motives for conquest, which provides him an opportunity to redeem himself or to follow the path of Macbeth.

Ethwald: A Tragedy, In Five Acts, Part Second opens with an unrepentant King Ethwald, however, and ultimately proves that a leader's ambition and thirst for glory in battle destroys his citizens, just as Macbeth's ambition destroys himself and those around him. Catherine Burroughs explains that Part Second culminates in "a lengthy http://borrowers.uga.edu/690/show Page 14 of 28 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

scene that forecasts Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, as women, babies, the sick, and the elderly flee the horrors of a war created by Ethwald's rage for glory" (Burroughs 1997, 130-31), depicting a battle field strewn with the slain. In act one Ethelbert casts his eyes to heaven and exclaims: Ah, Mercia, Mercia! On red fields of carnage Bleed thy remaining sons, and carrion birds Tear the cold limbs that should have turn'd thy soil. (Baillie 1851, 173) Recurrent images of blood also recall Macbeth. And a report from a scout in act two reveals war's affect on women and children: The armies, at this moment, are engaged In bloody battle. On my way I met a crowd of helpless women, from their homes Who fly with terror, each upon her back Bearing some helpless babe or valued piece Of Household good snatch'd up in haste. (Baillie 1851, 174) So much for Ethwald's promise not to "destroy the feeble" — and Baillie's point is that everyone suffers in war. Of course, Shakespeare was aware of this also, as Macduff says to Malcolm: Each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds As if it felt with Scotland. . . . (Macbeth 4.3.4-7) Like Macbeth, Ethwald loses his life in act five to a noble thane. Unlike Macbeth, however, Baillie's play is ultimately about more than ambition; in the end it is a play "about female solidarity — albeit tenuous — and survival" (Gilbert 2002, 154), a gender twist central to Baillie's plays.

Concerned that the large cast of Ethwald, Part Second might not be able to sustain the "expression of strong passion" (quoted in Burroughs 1997, 112), Baillie altered the play in 1815 and wrote to Scott in October: I have been busy of late putting my house — that is to say my chest of papers in order, not expecting to die the sooner for having done so, but being better prepared (in this respect at least) for that event if it should please God to bring it suddenly upon me. I have altered Rayner so as to make it an acting play if any manager of any

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Theatre should hereafter wish to produce it; and I have done or think I have done the same good turn for the 2d part of Ethwald. Oh how I wish you were my next door neighbour that I might run in to you with my papers in my hand! (Slagle 1999, 341) In December of that same year, she reiterated her revisions to Scott and made clear that she wanted Ethwald to be an "acting play" and was willing to alter this play about ambition accordingly, a reflection of her own ambition.

Long after the emergence of volume 3 of A Series of Plays in 1812, Baillie ventured on another multi-volume work, entitled simply Dramas. Though Baillie felt by now that she had exhausted her audience's curiosity in the passions, this 1836 three-volume collection contained two plays still relating to her earlier focus, both with similarities to Shakespeare's Othello. Volume 1 of Dramas opens with Romiero: A Tragedy, In Five Acts that focuses on jealousy. The setting is Romiero's castle on the shore of the Mediterranean, and the time is the fourteenth century. When Zorada, Romiero's wife, finds her father Don Sebastian shipwrecked on their shore, she hides him and plans his escape, for he is a political fugitive whom Romiero has sworn to return to the king of Castile. Like Othello, Romiero is a jealous husband, but his suspicions need no fueling from an Iago; he is sufficiently paranoid on his own. When he finds Zorada missing from their bedchamber, he at once suspects her of an intrigue with young Maurice, who is actually in love with Zorada's friend Beatrice. While Zorada is distressed but passive in the face of Romiero's verbal attacks, Beatrice, on the other hand, actively defends her sex: Bea. Are you not well, my lord? Rom. No damsel; well was banish'd from the world, When woman came to it. Bea. Fy! say not so. For if deprived of women, what were men? Like leafless elms stripp'd of the clasping vine; Like unrigg'd barks, of sail and pennant bare; Like unstring'd viols, which yield no melody. Banish us all, and lay my life upon it, You will right quickly send for us again. (Baillie 1851, 331- 32) Emilia has a similar conversation with Othello in act four, yet she is far less aggressive than Beatrice: Oth. You have seen nothing then? http://borrowers.uga.edu/690/show Page 16 of 28 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

. . . . Emil. I durst, my lord, to wager she is honest; Lay down my soul at stake. If you think other, Remove your thought; it doth abuse your bosom. (Othello 4.2.1, 4.2.13-15) Here Baillie moves away from Shakespeare: her heroine is aggressive in defending a woman friend, while Shakespeare's heroine is passive. Like Othello, though, Romiero is intolerant and controlling, and Baillie suggests that he has married too young a wife for his insecurity. His possessive, unhealthy love for Zorada is accentuated by Maurice's healthy love for Beatrice. Zorada is only trying to save her father, but in one of several volatile scenes, Romiero rants at her: Thou'st played me false; thou art a worthless woman; So base, so sunk, that those whose appellation Brings blushes to the cheeks of honest women Compared to thee are pure. — Off! do not speak! (Baillie 1851, 331) Othello focuses on the visage of his accused as well: Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin, Ay, here look grim as hell! (4.2.64-66) While Othello's jealous rage leads to his deliberate murder of Desdemona, Romiero accidentally murders his wife in an attempt to stab her father; and Baillie emphasizes the dangers of women's subjugation to their husbands, especially irrational ones. Further, according to Betsy Bolton, Baillie, along with contemporaries such as Mary Robinson, "echoes Shakespeare's Shylock in denouncing customs that forbid women to defend themselves" or to manipulate the social order (Bolton 2001, 117). As a result, although Romiero is tragic, he fails to elicit the reader's sympathy, a fact of which Baillie was well aware. From modern audiences, Othello often evokes the same contempt.

Shortly after the appearance of Dramas, Baillie felt it necessary to defend her flawed hero in an essay entitled "On the Character of Romiero" for Fraser's Magazine (vol. 14). She recommended the essay to her friend Margaret Holford Hodson and to Harvard divinity professor Dr. Andrews Norton in November of 1836, stating that those who disliked and condemned the character of her jealous man ought to read her defense of him, an excerpt of which follows:

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I am not presumptuous enough to suppose that I can altogether vindicate Romiero; but in simply laying before the reader my own intentions in delineating this character, something very near a vindication may, perhaps, be found. I have endeavoured to represent him as a man fastidiously delicate in everything connected with the affections of the heart. This is shown by his former concealed attachment to a Lady which was only discovered after her death — by his being so distressed at the idea of Zorada's love having passed from him to another, that he at first thinks the further personal criminality scarcely worth considering — by his not enduring when that criminality is from circumstances made to appear probable or presumptive, even in his aggravated agony, to have her name coupled with any gross epithet. This, it appears to me, is a jealousy dealing particularly with the affections of the heart, not being afraid or suspicious of more ignoble wrongs; and therefore jealousy that (as its frailty indeed) might belong to a noble nature. (Slagle 1999, 719) Ultimately, however, Baillie was not so successful in drawing sympathy for what she deemed Romiero's "noble nature," flawed like Shakespeare's original but not guilty of premeditated murder. She was still lamenting the critics' misinterpretation when she wrote to Mrs. Norton in January 1837: I lately had inserted in Fraser's Magazine, — a short defense of the Character of Romiero from the censure cast upon it by my very friendly critic in the Quarterly Review. . . . I should not thought it worth while to have noticed it publicly at all, but I found the high Shakespearean Critics of the Literary Coteries had adopted the same notions, calling Romiero a self-instigated Othello (out of rule of course) and the story a broken backed plot. (Slagle 1999, 939- 40) The Quarterly critic believed that because Romiero was instigated to jealousy by his own observations and his suspicious nature, and not by an outside agency, he did not deserve sympathy. A more observant critic, however, might have noted how Baillie was attempting to distinguish her character from Shakespeare's.

Completing volume 1 of Dramas is Baillie's final play on passions, again an Othello-like tragedy entitled Henriquez: A Tragedy, In Five Acts. This tragedy on remorse is set in the thirteenth-century town of Zamora. Henriquez is one of the plays that Victorian critic Fred Rowton estimated in The Female Poets of Great Britain as well designed for the

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stage and that he argued "clearly shows that with performers sedulously bent on carrying out the author's design, and willing to sacrifice momentary applause for ultimate appreciation, Mrs. Baillie's Plays would be as forcible in action as they are striking on perusal" (quoted in Burroughs 1997, 200). This play about remorse is just as clearly about jealousy, for the protagonist Henriquez murders his friend Don Juan de Torva because he believes his wife Leonora is in a love relationship with Juan. Basing his rash suspicions on a private letter from Leonora, which he has no business reading in the first place, Henriquez never even questions his wife; instead, he believes the worst of her and seeks out Juan to murder him outside the castle. Baillie's discovery scene comes in act two, when readers learn that Don Juan has been on his way to beg for the hand of Mencia, Leonora's sister, and Leonora has innocently gone to meet Juan to let him through the gates in order to plead his case. Henriquez does not immediately admit to the murder, and young Antonio, who is also in love with Mencia, is imprisoned as the only suspect. When it is clear that his friend Don Juan has left all his property to Henriquez, the general cannot bear his guilt and remorse, and in the end he saves Antonio through his confession.

Like Othello's Desdemona, Leonora is never given a chance in this tragedy to plead her innocence. In fact, her husband, like Shakespeare's Othello and Browning's later inarticulate Duke of Ferrara, will not, or cannot, communicate his insecurity — he can only make unkind insinuations at the king's gathering: Leo. Doubt not we shall be gay; but we expect Some merry masquers here to join our revels; They should have come ere now. Hen. Wait ye for such? Are they not come Already? Leo. How so, my lord? Hen. The world is full of them: Who knows the honest unclothed worth of those That by your side may stand, drink from your cup, Or in your bosom lie? We are all masquers. (Baillie 1851, 367) As Othello reacts to Iago, Henriquez reacts to insinuations made by his young servant Blas, searches his wife's private quarters, kills his best friend, and subsequently alienates his wife. While his later remorse is convincing, it does not seem to come until the reading of Juan's will, after which is revealed the "dark mysteries of human nature" (Baillie 1851, 375) which occupy his mind. Oddly, Henriquez does not spend the night before his execution with his wife Leonora; so even though he http://borrowers.uga.edu/690/show Page 19 of 28 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

may be exonerated as a person, he is never exonerated from his role as an uncommunicative, possessive, and cruel husband. Like Shakespeare's protagonist, Baillie's elicits tragedy through jealousy and failed communication.

Baillie had written at least the first two acts of Henriquez as early as 1812, for she promised Scott in April that she would send him a copy of her tragedy, "The story of which I have scetched [sic] out in the form of an anecdote taken from an old chronicle" (Slagle 1999, 301). After reading the draft, Scott asked Baillie how she presumed to prevent the audience from anticipating the conclusion and suggested that she read the notes to Robert Southey's Cid. Clearly, she struggled with creating Henriquez's character without "telegraphing" his eventual actions, as suggested in her letter to Scott in November of 1812: It never was my intention to declare the purpose of the Hero till the very end of the Play, but now I shall be particularly careful that it shall not be at all understood or divined till the very last. My greatest difficulty will be in making him, circumstanced as he is and shunning all confidence or communication with any body, sufficiently discover the dreadful picture of his own mind without loading the play with soliloquy which could be a great fault. I must try to get over it the best way I can. I wish I were better acquainted with the manners of Spain in those days. (Slagle 1999, 313) By 1815, artist Sir Thomas Lawrence was also reading her draft, and she valued his opinion of it as an "acting play" in particular. When the play finally appeared in Dramas in 1836, Baillie happily notified her friend Margaret Holford Hodson on March 19 that Henriquez was being performed that very evening at Drury Lane. According to the author, actors George and Sarah Bartley had been reading scenes from the play aloud at social gatherings. This play ended Baillie's calculated focus on the human passions and diminished her echoes of Shakespeare, for several possible reasons. First, after praising her first two volumes of A Series of Plays, critic Frances Jeffrey had been brutal in his estimation of her third volume in the Edinburgh Review of February 1812, calling these plays "poor in incident and character" (Jeffrey 1811-12, 265). Second, in these later years of her life, having lost her brother Matthew and her trusted friend Scott, Baillie was turning her thoughts to more philosophical and religious works and moving away from psychological and feminist revisions of Shakespeare.

A PERSONAL IDENTITY

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The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries introduced a large reading public, although, according to Newlyn, not necessarily an educated one; this resulted, for many authors, in an "anxiety of reception" (Newlyn 2000, 29). Baillie clearly felt enough anxiety to publish her first volume entitled Poems (1790) and her first volume of A Series of Plays (1798) anonymously. And, of course, constantly being compared to Shakespeare couldn't have inspired confidence. In a Critical Review article of September 1798, as a critic praised her first anonymous volume of A Series of Plays, he also insisted that the writer study the versification of Shakespeare and others from the Renaissance so that "He may soon versify with their facility," for "he has already avoided the faults of our modern theatrical authors" (Anonymous 1798, my emphasis). Following the emergence of volume 2 of A Series of Plays in 1802, now bearing the author's name, yet another critic persisted in linking Baillie to Shakespeare: Miss Baillie's dramatic powers are of the highest order. With the miserable stage-writers of the day, it would be insult to compare her; nor is it much commendation to rank her above Young, and Rowe, and Southerne . . . She has a near approach to Shak[e]speare. (Anonymous 1803, 200-12) Further, in 1808, Scott's dedicatory opening to the third canto of Marmion began with a tribute to Baillie, whose readers "Awakening at the inspired strain, / Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again," clinching the comparison (Scott 1995, 69).14 From Scott this was high praise, because, writes Wilmon Brewer, "where Scott thought of the merits of drama, he thought always of Shakespeare . . . To Shakespeare's inspiration he attributed what was best in most of his favorite English dramatists from Ben Jonson to Joanna Baillie" (Brewer 1974, 197).15 Baillie, clearly Scott's favorite contemporary dramatist, manifested for him, argues Brewer, the potential to renew "the unequalled tragic poetry of Shakespeare" (Brewer 1974, 167).

Likewise, in her Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Laetitia Barbauld devoted ten lines to her friend Joanna Baillie and only a couplet to Shakespeare: Then, loved Joanna, to admiring eyes Thy storied groups in scenic pomp shall rise; Their high soul'd strains and Shakespear's noble rage Shall with alternate passion shake the stage. Some youthful Basil from thy moral lay With stricter hand his fond desires shall sway;

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Some Ethwald, as the fleeting shadows pass, Start at his likeness in the mystic glass; The tragic Muse resume her just controul, With pity and with terror purge the soul, While wide o'er transatlantic realms thy name Shall live in light, and gather all its fame. (Barbauld 2001, 65) Baillie's friend William Sotheby also christened Baillie "Sister of Shakespeare!" in his poem "To Joanna Baillie" (Burroughs 1997, 2000). According to Lucy Newlyn, Baillie clearly risked an imbalance of praise — in listing Britain's achievements in the arts, Barbauld ranks Shakespeare and Baillie as the great dramatists, upholding the ideology of empire and a continuation of perfection (Newlyn 2000, 25, 165). The comparison continued, and even as late as 1836, after the emergence of Baillie's Dramas, her friend Lady Byron noted that the playwright showed concern that one of several articles in the Edinburgh Review had compared her to Elizabethan writers and noted her "inferiority" to them (Slagle 2002, 252). A critic for Blackwood's January 1836 issue, on the other hand, vowed that "on laying down Volume First [Dramas], which we read through . . . we felt that Scott was justified in linking her name with that of Shakespeare" (Slagle 1999, 655n). Repeatedly compared to a dramatic giant like Shakespeare, Baillie was almost certain to fail with readers and critics eventually. However, what most of them failed to see was how she was changing Shakespeare's plays, giving the power of choice and reason to women characters and combining action with psychological introspection.

BAILLIE'S ROMANTIC LEGACY Ultimately, in the face of endless comparisons to Shakespeare, occasional venomous criticism, and copious literary competition, Joanna Baillie managed to construct her own Romantic feminine theory and identity — shaped partly from materials of the past — in the face of this "rise of the reader" in early nineteenth-century Britain. In defense against the critics, and in an attempt at a posthumous reputation, during her last years Baillie began to construct what she called her "monster book." Nearing the end of her life, she labored zealously to compile one last collection of her complete works, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, published in 1851 shortly before her death. Edited mostly for her sister Agnes and heirs, niece Elizabeth Margaret Baillie Milligan (1794-1876) and nephew William Hunter Baillie (1797-1894), it was also one final move to leave her mark as a woman writer. In her last contract with Longman dated 13 April 1850, the publisher agreed

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that "Messrs. Longman and Co. shall publish at their own expense and risk The works of Joanna Baillie in one volume" (Slagle 2002, 284). Her publisher was hardly afraid of failure at this point in his long years of dealing with Baillie. After the 1851 first edition, The Dramatic and Poetical Works appeared in two subsequent editions from Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, one later in 1851 and another in 1853. Baillie died on 23 February 1851 at eighty-eight, surrounded by her family.

Joanna Baillie left a great legacy in songs, poems, plays, and letters; but by the early twentieth century, biographers such as Donald Carswell had dismissed her as an "old-maidish" scribbler, a fate similar to that of many other early women writers. "In Baillie's case," argues Catherine Burroughs, "this neglect is all the more striking given that her contemporaries readily acknowledged her significance as both a playwright and theater theorist": Mary Berry, to whom a copy of Baillie's first volume of plays was sent in 1798, summarized the tone of the early responses to Baillie's work by saying, "everybody talks in raptures (I always thought they deserved) of the tragedies and of the introduction as of a new and admirable piece of criticism." (quoted in Burroughs 1997, 98) Fortunately, interest in Baillie's dramas began to reemerge in the 1980s. Between that time and the present, Burroughs' Closet Stages has addressed Baillie's theater theory, dozens of insightful articles have emerged, a collection of essays has been devoted to her, and her letters and a biography have been published.

Joanna Baillie, admittedly a child of Shakespeare's artistic lineage, was ultimately successful in supplementing what she learned about language and form from the Renaissance playwrights with her own very original dramatic critical theory and feminist understanding of the human passions. Reinventing Shakespeare in many of her plays, Baillie breathes new life into formulaic characters, especially women characters, often dismissing cultural myths and reassigning control. After more than a century's neglect, she has once again found a voice.

NOTES 1. Citations for Baillie's plays and criticism come from The Dramatic and

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Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie (1851). 2. Bell's Edition of Shakespeare's Plays, As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London (1774) prefaced each play with a picture of actors in full costume. 3. George Bartley (1782?-1858) acquired early stage experience in Cheltenham in 1800 as Orlando in As You Like It. He debuted in London in 1802 and in 1809-11 managed the Glasgow theatre, also acting with increasing reputation. His second wife, Sarah Smith, a successful tragic actress, appeared in 1814 as Ophelia at Drury Lane while George played Falstaff. The loss of his son at Oxford led to his retirement after a 50-year career (DNB 1:1255-56). In 1818 the Bartleys made a successful trip to America and were instrumental in getting Baillie's plays performed there. 4. François Joseph Talma (1763-1826) was a French tragic actor educated in England. A friend of Napoleon, he made his debut in Paris in 1787 in Voltaire's Brutus and first introduced on the French stage the custom of wearing costumes of the period represented in the play. 5. Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), actress and eldest child of Sarah and Roger Kemble, was a young beauty and lady's maid to Mrs. Greatheed, where she often recited Shakespeare before aristocratic company. She married actor William Siddons in 1773. Hearing of her talent shortly thereafter, Garrick sent one of his men to see her in The Fair Penitent and hired her at £5/week for Drury Lane, where she became the foremost tragic actress. Siddons played the role of Jane in Baillie's De Monfort in 1800 (DNB 8:195-202; many biographies are available). 6. There were literally dozens of reviews on Baillie's publications; while I cite or quote from only a few in this essay, there could be a separate study on them alone. 7. See William Brewer's "Joanna Baillie and Lord Byron" (1995) for a more complete study on Byron and Baillie. 8. De Monfort: A Tragedy was first performed in 1800 at Drury Lane and at least 28 other times in various places during Baillie's lifetime. Later performances of this and The Family Legend are addressed in Joanna Baillie: A Literary Life (Slagle 2002). 9. John Philip Kemble (1757-1823), one of England's most famous actors, began playing parts in his father's company in childhood. His sister, Sarah Kemble Siddons, recommended him to the Chamberlain's company as Theodosius in Lee's tragedy in 1776, with dozens of parts to follow. Kemble wrote prologues for institutions in York and Leeds, where he appeared for the first time in Hamlet; he is said to have written out the part over forty times. He managed the Edinburgh Theater briefly in 1781, and first appeared at Drury Lane as Hamlet in 1783; on 29

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April 1800, he played De Monfort in Baillie's play (DNB 10:1260-66). 10. All Shakespeare quotations come from The Norton Shakespeare (1997). 11. However, Aloma Noble argues that because "over 135 Gothic plays, of which ten are by Joanna Baillie, were written and produced in England between 1768 and 1810" the success of De Monfort was almost certain (see Noble 1983, 131). 12. See Baillie's account of her inspiration for Ethwald in Chapter 1 of Joanna Baillie: A Literary Life (Slagle 2002). 13. Gilbert also explains that while Baillie does repeat some of the moral ambiguity found in the character of Macbeth in Ethwald, her hero is a far less conflicted "butcher." Her portrayal of Queen Elburga, counterpart to Lady Macbeth, loses almost all semblance to Shakespeare's heroine, particularly when we consider John Kemble's and Sarah Siddons's interpretation of the couple. Donohue emphasizes that the performance Baillie and her contemporaries would have known " [elicited] a great amount of sympathy from the audience despite the overt evil of the characters' actions." (2003, 137) 14. This inscription also appears on a monument erected in Baillie's honor by James Donald in the 1890s at St. Bride's Church, Bothwell, Scotland. 15. Two dramatic poems that Scott submitted for Baillie's edition of A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors in 1823, Halidon Hill and Macduff's Cross, recall Shakespeare's characters and events of history.

REFERENCES Anonymous. 1803. "A Series of Plays, etc." The Critical Review; or Annals of Literature 37: 200-12. Anonymous. 1798. "A Series of Plays, etc." The Critical Review; or Annals of Literature 24: 13-22. Auerbach, Nina. 1982. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Baillie, Joanna. 1851. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.

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Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. 2001. "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem." In Women's Writing 1778-1838: An Anthology. Edited by Fiona Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell's Edition of Shakespeare's Plays, As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London. 1774. London: John Bell. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London: Oxford University Press. Bolton, Betsy. 2001. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brewer, William. "Joanna Baillie and Lord Byron." Keats-Shelley Journal 44 (1995): 165-81. Brewer, Wilmon. 1974. Shakespeare's Influence on Sir Walter Scott. 1925; reprint, Boston: Cornhill. Burroughs, Catherine B. 1997. Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cox, Jeffrey N. 1992. Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825. Athens: Ohio University Press. Gilbert, Deirdre. 2003. "Joanna Baillie, Passionate Anatomist: From Masquerade to Myth in Her Early Drama." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Denver. Gough, Monica, ed. 1990. Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Young Actress. New York: Columbia University Press. Greig, James A. 1948. Francis Jeffrey of The Edinburgh Review. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Jeffrey, Francis. 1811-12. "A Series of Plays, etc., Vol. 3." The Edinburgh Review 19: 261-90. Marchand, Leslie A., ed. 1982. Byron's Letters and Journals. 5 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Newlyn, Lucy. 2000. Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Noble, Aloma E. 1983. "Joanna Baillie as a Dramatic Artist." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa.

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Richardson, Alan. 2001. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenthal, Laura J. 1996. Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Scott, Sir Walter. 1995. Introduction to Canto Three. Marmion. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. Scullion, Adrienne. 1997. "Some Women of the Nineteenth-century Scottish Theatre: Joanna Baillie, Frances Wright and Helen MacGregor." In A History of Scottish Women's Writing. Edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. New York and London: W. W. Norton Slagle, Judith Bailey. 2002. Joanna Baillie: A Literary Life. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Slagle, Judith Bailey, ed. 1999. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. 2 vols. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Sterne, Laurence. 1980. Tristram Shandy. Edited by Howard Anderson. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Wordsworth, Jonathan, ed. 1994. Introduction to Poems, 1790. Oxford and New York: Woodstock.

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Shakespeare, King of What? Gender, (/current) Nineteenth-Century Patriotism, and the Case of Poet-lore (/previous) TRICIA LOOTENS, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA (/about)

ABSTRACT This essay contextualizes Thomas Carlyle's "King Shakespeare" in the context of women's nineteenth-century patriotism and the journal Poet- lore, which was co-founded by Charlotte Porter, the editor of Shakespeariana. Lootens uncovers the ways in which a "cosmopolitan, feminist" Shakespeare emerges in the nineteenth century through female editorships and women's reading circles, often in opposition to the imperialistic, English Shakespeare championed by Carlyle. American women's reading circles explicitly connected female education with active citizenship, idealizing the Shakespearean heroine as a "New Woman" as they did so. Poet-Lore's 1896 section on new readings of The Taming of the Shrew is exemplary in this regard, attempting to recuperate Katharina's final speech as an expression of ethical and personal reform. The essay concludes by observing that although Poet- Lore's racial politics can oppose white American civic womanhood to "foreign, ignorant voters controlled by demagogues," it nonetheless engages Porter's own assertion that a cosmopolitan or multicultural influence was not only desirable but also necessary for the full development of American civilization.

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Figure 1. Cover Page of Poet Lore 7 (1895)

INTRODUCTION In 1860, in the Preface to her notorious Poems before Congress, Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggested that if the passionate political poetry of that volume "should appear to English readers too pungently rendered to admit of a patriotic respect to the English sense of things," this was because such readers misunderstood patriotism. "What I have written," she

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asserted, "has simply been written because I love truth and justice quand même, — more than Plato and Plato's country, more than Dante and Dante's country, more even than Shakespeare and Shakespeare's country." For "if patriotism be a virtue indeed, it cannot mean an exclusive devotion to our country's interests, — for that is only another form of devotion to personal interests, family interests, or provincial interests, all of which, if not driven past themselves, are vulgar and immoral objects" (Browning 1900, 3:314-16; 314, 315).1 Even today, these are fighting words.2 From a woman who had only recently been termed England's Queen of Song, however, such language was — and was clearly meant to be — particularly shocking. For as E.B.B. insists upon an adamantly cosmopolitan patriotism, defending women's writing of poetry concerned with affairs of state as well as personal or domestic interests, she does even more than openly criticize "Shakespeare's country";3 she seems to suggest that "truth and justice" might, and perhaps even do, go against Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, however, "seems" turns out to be the operative term: this was, after all, the woman who had once asked a friend whether she wouldn't "climb your ladder ten times" just "to catch the color" of Shakespeare's "garters" (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 15 July 1841, in Browning 1983, 1:234-37; 234). As E.B.B. proceeds to envision an ideal future, Shakespeare, or rather Shakespeare's specific form of glory, is at once recuperated and extended. "I dream of the day," she continues, "when an English statesman shall arise with a heart too large for England." Only then, she predicts, "shall the nation be glorious, and her praise, instead of exploding from within, from loud civic mouths, come to her from without, as all worthy praise must, from the alliances she has fostered and the population she has saved" (315-16). Implicitly returning Shakespeare's country to the spirit of "Shakespeare," Barrett Browning thus shapes her diplomat-hero to look revealingly like a mid-century poet-hero. That is, like King Shakespeare himself, the statesman of whom she dreams will embody quintessential British glory precisely by being too great to be contained by Britain.

If Barrett Browning's credo ends with the evocation of imaginary praise for Shakespeare's country, however, some sense of aftershock remains. Once raised, after all, the possibility that one might, at some point, have to choose between Shakespeare and "truth and justice" cannot be so easily laid. And indeed, if there is a ghost haunting Europe's cosmopolitan Shakespeare, poetic justice surely plays out in this specter's emergence in Poems before Congress: that is, within a volume dedicated at once to a patriotism too large for single countries and to the passionate defense of Italian nationalist struggles.

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As that great early celebration of "King Shakespeare," Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History famously demonstrates, nineteenth-century celebrations of Shakespeare take form through the uneasy, shifting interplays of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and imperialism, the implications of whose literal terms may change almost from moment to moment. "Will you give-up your Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English; never have had any Indian Empire or never have had any Shakspeare?" Carlyle asks — only to answer, "Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare does not go, he lasts for ever with us; we cannot give-up our Shakespeare!" (Carlyle 1969, 113). Who are "we?" one might ask this text in turn. By 1840, when Carlyle first gave his lectures on hero-worship, King Shakespeare's subjects were clearly international. After all, as Richard Foulkes notes, "Shakespeare in the age of Empire" inspired a burgeoning "global" performance "network," as "actors of many different native tongues" made names for themselves, not merely in English or in bilingual performances, but even, in some cases, in their native tongue (Foulkes 2002, 4).4 And indeed, in crowning King Shakespeare, Carlyle, like his 1827 correspondent Goethe, clearly celebrates the incipient literary triumph of "what is universal in humanity"(7). Nonetheless, when Carlyle says "we," he also means the British. "We" possess an Indian empire, after all; and that is only the beginning: "In America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes," Carlyle predicts, "there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe." To unify that "Saxondom," it will take "an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament, or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone!" And hence, of course, Carlyle's famous figurative crowning of the Bard: "This King Shakspeare," Carlyle continues, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying- signs?" (114).

Only an early nineteenth-century writer could have hoped to enlist imperial "Saxondom" under the gentlest of all rallying signs.5 As heirs to what Eric Hobsbawm and others have characterized as late nineteenth- century patriotism's shift to the right, we may be tempted to read Carlyle's Saxon "King Shakespeare" as a figure for imperialist ethnic nationalism; and if so, we are right (Hobsbawm 1987, 143). Jingo Shakespeare is real. Still, as I hope to show here, much like other early nineteenth-century celebrations of world citizenship, the dream of King Shakespeare as a gentle rallying-sign was both complex and resilient; it could serve at once as cover and as counter to the overtly imperial Bard. Enlisted though he might be in service of "Anglo-Saxon" imperial supremacy, Carlyle's King Shakespeare remained closely aligned with other less frightening, if still http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 4 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

somewhat disquieting, patriotic Bards. As late as 1888, in The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets, for example, British poet Gerald Massey could still contrast "our" Elizabethan "Prince of Peace" not only to mortal monarchs, but to Christ, explicitly awarding highest glories to Shakespeare's nonviolent "Throne" in "the heart of all" (untitled poem, in Hughes, ed. 1904, 209). An Englishman whose throne of the heart was too large for England, a "race" model whose power belonged not to one nation, but to the human race, Shakespeare could thus help define British patriotism in terms of transcendence. What such transcendence meant, however, tended to remain up for grabs. Was it, for example, the transcendence of "Saxondom" as the racial royalty of humanity? Or that of British constitutional monarchy as an evolutionary (inter)national ideal toward which all "less developed" nations should (perhaps futilely) strive? Or was it, rather, a liberal, Enlightenment transcendence, whereby Shakespeare, as the speaking soul of one among many great "races" — as a national voice rising in harmonious unison with other such voices — issued a Mazzinian rallying cry for cosmopolitanism? All of these possibilities were alive at the century's end; and our understanding of each stands to gain from recent investigations into cosmopolitanism, both as a "plural, particular" ideal and as one whose tense, intimate, and various relations to nationalism may be grasped, if at all, only in highly specific contexts.6

SHAKESPEARE AND FEMINIST PATRIOTISM Here, I want to explore one such context: that is, Shakespeare's powerful, disputed role in the complex process of conceiving feminine patriotism and "race" patriotism in the United States at the end of the century, as played out within a constellation of texts devoted to civic "Shakespeare study." In Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England, her study of the "late Victorian popular" and pedagogical "obsession" with The Merchant of Venice, Linda Rozmovits explores how fin-de-siècle British Bardolatry, having "put all" its moral "eggs in Shakespeare's basket," confronts the simultaneous challenges both of a feminist or proto-feminist "cult of Portia" and of the ways in which Henry Irving's more complex, sympathetic portrayal of Shylock reverberated through a culture increasingly shaped by Jewish public power (Rozmovits 1998, 3, 57, 69; see 62-79). Often, Rozmovits suggests, conflicts over "race," religion, or ethnicity in the Merchant seem to be displaced — or perhaps, better said, dissembled and occluded — by questions of gender politics.7 In one sense, her point may well hold in the very different context of Shakespeare studies in the United States: certainly, to consider questions of nationalism, ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism in the late

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nineteenth-century U.S. is inevitably to address questions of gender. In another sense, however, in an American context, relations between "race" studies and guides to womanhood may be at once closer and more open. Consider, for example, the following passage from an 1897 Shakespeariana article on "Shakespeare as a Text-book," in which Charles F. Johnson speaks against teaching from expurgated editions: [I]f there were young women in the class the case might be different . . . but that any sane man can be hurt by the Shakespearian frankness is . . . preposterous. . . . As a moral teacher Shakespeare is based on sound ethical principles, and interprets chastity, honor, motherhood, loverhood, friendship, as our race has always interpreted them in its healthy developments. We are not Arabs nor Hungarians nor Frenchmen, and the moral standards of alien races should not be held up before our young men. If that is done, moral growth may be distorted. It is not so much that we are better, as that we are other. Shakespeare is closely akin to us, and, as the creator of Imogen and Miranda, is one of our moral teachers. (Johnson 1897, 496-97) Safe for sane men, if not for young women and the unbalanced masculines, Shakespeare teaches a separate and surely, ultimately, unequal "American" "race" morality; and he does so, specifically, as creator of Imogen and Miranda. Lest this seem idiosyncratic, one need only turn to two essays by that much-published educator William Taylor Thom, "The Introduction of Shakespeare into the Schools" (1883-84a) and "Shakespeare Study for American Women" (1883-84b). Eccentric only in its explicitness, the cognitive dissonance of these essays clearly prefigures canon debates to come. If the "American people" is to remain "true to its origin and worthy of its heritage from the race of Shakespeare," Thom argues, the nation's youth must study the Bard. For such reading will awaken "ancestral instinct and passion for general and individual freedom" which is "the greatest contribution of the Teuton to modern civilization" (1883-84a, 11; emphasis in original). Interestingly, in girls, that instinct manages to be fully compatible with the life-goal of attempting to please men by imitating fictional heroines. "If . . . the women of our race would know and be what the men of our race love as their ideals," Thom urges, "let them study Shakespeare and be what he makes his women" (1883-84b, 101). To be Shakespearean is to be sacred, is to be Teutonic: "True to his race, with whom love of true womanhood is a sort of religion," Thom's Shakespeare "supplements" even "the Good Book itself" by revealing "the Teutonic mind in contrast with the Hebrew mind." "To the Jew," Thom explains, "woman was an inferior; to the Teuton, she is a friend and consort" (1883-84a, 101).8

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That all this may seem in some sense painfully predictable should render it no less painful. What follows, however, may come as a slight surprise. "The Italian, the Welshman, the Pole, the Frenchman, the Irishman, the Hun, the German, the Anglo-Saxon, and the omnipresent Jew are with us and of us," Thom asserts. "They represent the various branches of the great, conquering, civilizing Aryan family of peoples. Their stock is Sklavonic, Keltic, Latin, Teutonic, with all that those names imply of deed and thought in ages past. The union of these races should give the good qualities of all in the resulting predominant type." Suddenly, the association of "Teutonic" or "Aryan" ideals with racial purity might seem to fall away, making room for some new version of Carlyle's King, albeit a more republican leader, stripped of material Saxon genealogy and moved from the British empire to the U.S. Echoing Carlyle, Thom asserts that "all these branches of humanity" must be "made to conform to a standard flexible enough — human enough — to permit and produce unity amid variety. Such an agency we have in the infinite humanity of our greatest poet, 'Nature's darling.'" Thus, Shakespeare emerges as the controlling monarch of the Teutonizing, Christianizing melting pot: "Think of the future of a nation with such elements as ours," reads the closing peroration, "conformed to the sturdy Anglo-Saxon type, nurtured in the morals of the New Testament, and bred upon the free human spirit of Shakespeare!" (1883-84b, 102).

If "Teutonic" and "Aryan" do not mean quite what we might expect here, they nonetheless clearly mean something.9 And in fact, as a footnote makes clear, full access to such "breeding" through Shakespeare's "free human spirit" is to be explicitly limited to Euro-Americans. Granted: African Americans, too, must learn the "terse, nervous speech of King James's Bible and Shakespeare" if they are to "become and remain good American citizens"; but they are to do so in "hope" of learning "to solve the knotty problem of their relations toward the masterful, superior white race, of whom one of them said recently, with a ludicrously pathetic wisdom of mistake: 'Taint no use talkin'; dem Angry-Saxons is boun'ter rule anyway'" (Thom 1883-84b, 98).10 For some Americans, it would seem, the point of Shakespeare study was to ensure training in civic silence.

FROM SHAKESPEARIANA TO POET-LORE Thom's essays appeared in 1883 and 1884 in Shakespeariana, a journal published by the Shakespeare Society of New York. There is some irony in that venue. For Shakespeariana's editor at the time was a woman named Charlotte Porter;11 and after Porter left Shakespeariana, she was to

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co-found Poet-lore, a journal whose editorial policies were often to provide powerful critical resistance to positions such as Thom's. Dismissively characterized by one twentieth-century critic as having "served, at first," as a mere "newsletter for Browning and Shakespeare Societies in the U.S.A." (Peterson 1969, 89), Poet-lore did indeed devote a great deal of space to detailed reports of Shakespeare study, both within and beyond the classroom; and it generally did so in a spirit of strong commitment to what its historian Melvin H. Bernstein has termed "the Browning-Shakespeare touchstone" (Bernstein 1966, 18). Consider, for example, the journal's cover art for 1895 (figure 1). At top, draped from the strings of what is surely a lyre, stretches a banner. One side, in quaintly archaic printing, reads "Shake-Speare"; the other, "Browning." Need one say more? Perhaps — and not merely because the banner in question runs under a line that reads: "Devoted to the Appreciation of the Poets and to Comparative Literature." For Shakespeare's and Browning's names hardly stand alone here. From Hafiz to Hitomaro, to Puskin, Heine, "Sophokles," Hroswitha, Caedmon, Corneille, Catullus, Cervantes, Gorki, Tagore, Turgenieff, Homer, and Bhavabhuti — such "lore" scarcely seems to fit a mere newsletter. However idiosyncratic or comically chauvinist the details of Poet-lore's celebratory wreath may be — how did Bayard Taylor slip in between Chaucer, Milton, and Ariosto, for example? — the range of writers thus honored remains striking. Apparently, the "Browning-Shakespeare touchstone," "adventurously" applied, allowed for many sorts of literary appreciation (Bernstein 1966, 18). And in fact, the journal, which was early in its defense of Whitman and praise of Blake, celebrated an American poetry created not only by, say, Emerson or Whitman, but also by the likes of Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Emily Dickinson. Through Poet-lore, a wide American audience apparently received its first exposure to writers such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Gorki, Tagore, Schnitzler, and Maeterlink (McHenry 1980, 73).

Shakespeare, then, stood in varied company here. Still, he retained pride of place. Indeed, Shakespeare studies stood at the origin of Poet-lore: for it was through Shakespeariana that co-editors Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke first met. The two women's critical and scholarly collaboration, which formed part of a lovership sealed by the exchange of rings, began when Clarke submitted to an article on Shakespeare and music for Porter's approval; it ended only with Clarke's death in 1926.12 Pioneers in women's formal education — Clarke studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Porter at Wells College and the Sorbonne — Porter and Clarke were also deeply devoted to a grassroots study-circle culture within which women's literary self-education meant education for active 13 http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 8 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

citizenship.13 Indeed, to turn, in particular, to the study-guide sections of the early years of Poet-lore is to see how the mid-century activist feminism of Seneca Falls or Britain's Langham Place group survived and thrived within the sorts of reading circles in which so many women's suffrage supporters seem to have found cultural homes (Scheil 2012). It is also to be reminded of connections that trace even further back, to those precise interminglings of conceptions of "national literatures," feminine patriotism, and cosmopolitan Shakespeare reading which shaped the writings of Germaine de Staël and her admirer Anna Jameson. For even as love of Shakespeare first introduced these two influential New Women to one another, so Porter and Clarke sought to effect ties between King Shakespeare and certain highly particular versions of that other great, ambiguously cosmopolitan fin-de-siècle figure, the New Woman. In fact, as Bernstein puts it, "to read" this particular "monthly magazine, twenty- five cents per copy, which, according to its cover page was 'devoted to Shakespeare, Browning, and the comparative study of literature,' was to collaborate toward the creation of a new world of emergent women, positivism, beneficent Social Darwinism, a vague liberalism, and an understanding of the supranational art of literature" (Bernstein 1966, 14).

Drawn through the likes of Poet-lore, then, the lines between Jameson and the ground-breaking feminist Shakespearean criticism of the latter years of the twentieth century may be shorter than we often tend to think. Certainly the true woman — including the Shakespearean women — often appeared here as a New Woman. "Shakespeare!" wrote Alice Groff in 1898, for example, glorifying "the prophet and herald of the 'new woman' of every stage of social development, even to the fin de siècle type of our own day.""Shakespeare," she continues, "with a divine disregard of all social ideals, has given us the human woman, not only in her actuality, but in her possibility, and in such variety that he seems to have run the whole gamut of human variability, — with the exception of one type. He has given us not one single specimen of the domestic, home- sphere-bound woman" (Groff 1898, 248-49; emphasis in original). Continuing earlier traditions of politicized (and essentialized) readings of "Shakespeare's heroines" which had begun in the 1830s with Jameson, Poet-lore writers often sought, to quote Vida D. Scudder in 1890, to reconcile the feminine "ideal of the sixteenth century and that of the nineteenth" — the alleged Shakespearean reverence for women as "things ensky'd and sainted" with Browning's idealized Victorian visions of female "suffering human souls" (Scudder 1889, 465, 461). "Can you worship a fellow-worker as you worship a saint?" asks Scudder. Yes, the answer comes — as long as that fellow worker's "essential womanhood" expresses itself through her abstract, public passion for "universal http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 9 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

righteousness" (462-63). Just as one might be most English by being more than English, it seems, one might be most womanly by being more than "womanly."

Reconciling Shakespearean heroines with "emergent women" could take quite varied forms. In the essay quoted above, for example, Scudder falls back on familiar ground. If one attempts to look "back along the ages" for "women with characters so varied and clear, with souls as deeply true" as those of Browning's heroines, she writes, one wanders "through a waste of arid satire, of light persiflage" — until, "through the vista of centuries, gracious forms appear; the forms of Portia, of Virgilia. The smiles of Rosalind and Beatrice flash upon us, the saintliness of Isabel shines radiant and pure" (Scudder 1889, 453). This is invocation, not analysis. Blithely disregarding differences not only among Shakespeare's female characters, but also among such heroines' previous nineteenth-century critics, Scudder claims to follow Jameson, Ruskin, and Dowden in glorifying Shakespeare's women as both "absolutely good" and as possessed of a complete and "crystal-clear" simplicity as fixed and flawless as that of jewels (455-56).14 On one level, such heroines stand no chance against Browning's "eager, complex figures, capable of growth, liable to fall"; on another, these same modern heroines represent merely a "correction and expansion of the old ideal" (461, 465). For the "essential sanctity of the woman" remains intact: "in the world," as once only in private, women must still "uplift and soothe, as in the days of Shakespeare" (462, 465).

ALCESTIS' SILENCE Scudder's mythologizing heroine-study stands in instructive relation to Charlotte Porter's 1891 "Old and New Ideals of Womanhood: The Iphigenia and Alkestis Stories" (1891).15 Here, the focus lies on literary accounts of the "sacrifice of woman by man for his own and the public good." More specifically, Porter attempts to trace the historical development of those "notions of social duty and decorum" which "exact" sacrifice; of conceptions of sacrifice's "real value" and relations to "the unknown powers"; and of the level of "consciousness, willingness, or weighing of the whole deed on the part of the victim" (Porter, Charlotte 1891, 269). At issue, explicitly, is the assumption of the "sacrificers" that while "the man's interest lies united with that of the public, the woman's lies "necessarily apart and altogether separable from it" (270). From Aeschylus through Sophocles to Euripides, and then to Goethe, Porter traces shifting accounts of Agamemnon's doomed, sacrificial slaughter of his child Iphigenia, in pursuit of the Trojan War. Aeschylus, Porter writes,

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opens the way for an account capable of stressing three points: the "wrong" done Iphigenia's mother Clytemnestra and her child through Iphigenia's sacrifice "in the name of the public good"; the power of "the fight of the human will against destiny"; and "the leading of the gods to understanding under the law of sore experience." Whereas Sophocles underplays these moments, she suggests, Euripides explores them, developing a new "conception of the claims of womanhood as being part of the social body" (273, 274). Indeed, Euripides exalts Iphigenia's transformation into a patriotic heroine who stands forth to die for Greece; and though this newly heroic account eventually falters, Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris succeeds where Euripides failed, dramatizing its heroine's higher "moral insight and action" through her conscious defense of personal integrity and self- respect (275).16

From here, Porter goes on to trace a similar line of development, beginning with Euripides's Alcestis. Chaucer, she writes, was "an heir of all the intervening time, in that he takes the stand-point of the woman" in his own Alcestis figure, Hypermnestra. Still, his "child-like" tone, which renders him "in a way, younger than all the Greeks," nonetheless fails to achieve accord with "the temper of Euripides' subtle treatment of the Alkestis story" (Porter, Charlotte 1891, 276-77). That honor goes instead to "Shakespeare's portrayal of the calm fortitude of Hermione" (277). For like Euripides' Alcestis, who offers to die in place of her (ambiguously portrayed) husband Admetus, Shakespeare's Hermione proves herself "serenely capable of the perfect fearless service of love" (278).17 Possessed of "the utter calm of wise sight" — not to mention married to "lords" who resemble one another in their dubious "exercise or use of what they conceive to be their due," Alcestis and Hermione "are much alike." And so, too, Porter notes, are their fates: both "die," leaving behind penitent husbands who are nonetheless tempted toward second marriages; both appear, miraculously returned to life, to claim the honor they have earned. (Shakespeare's Paulina, Porter notes, "can work wonders as well as Herakles" [279].) Not surprisingly, this line of development ends with the "last version of the Alkestis story," which "Browning puts in the mouth of his 'lyric girl' Balaustion" (278).

The result of all these readings is indeed a form of "poet lore," at once created and found. "These ideals all tally well with each other," Porter's article concludes: "The Iphigenia of Goethe differs from the highest reach of the Iphigenia of Euripides in counting as true service of love and only worthy the doing that which does her higher independent self no wrong. The clearest illustration in Shakespeare and in Browning of the old Alkestis story sets the limit of the good of self-sacrifice this side of self 18 http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 11 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

respect . . ." (Porter, Charlotte 1891, 280).18 Dramatically different from the Scudder piece in its literary and political ambitions, Porter's article, too, thus turns Shakespeare study to the celebration of women's expanding public duties. Here, too, moreover, "the development of the ideal woman implies . . . a more highly evolved ideal of love." For Porter, however, what matters is less the survival of eternal femininity than the critical understanding of loving femininity's right relations to civic duty. "Development in the ideal of womanhood," we learn, "lies parallel with the development of the ideal of patriotic service." Both expect reciprocity; both require a certain level of clear-sighted detachment: "the chief end of the sacrifice of the heroine or the self-forgetting labor of the patriot" is not "to secure the special temporary good of the loved one, or of the state, but to lead the way to the good of good" (280).

RECUPERATING THE SHREW To be sure, here as in the rest of this discussion, I am attempting to trace a drift — or, with luck, a discourse — rather than a homogenous, programmatic stance. Not every analysis of female Shakespearean characters in Poet-lore supported New Womanhood; not every reading that praised those characters cast them as civic models. Still, even in articles with quite different concerns, the impulse to conceive Shakespeare in cosmopolitan, feminist terms often continues to make itself felt. Consider, for example, the journal's 1896 three-part section entitled "New Views of Shakespeare's Shrew." Arthur S. Way's "Kate the Curst as an Elizabethan 'New Woman,'" which opens the section, initially casts Katharine, much like a Jameson heroine, as a sympathetic figure "who might under other conditions have become the brilliant leader of a salon, like Mme. de Staël, or a power in stirring times, like Madame Roland, a girl of swift perceptions and ready wit, a red-hot Beatrice" (Way 1896, 171).19 Very quickly, however, Way's Katharine takes on a different guise: that of an Elizabethan counterpart to the excessively independent women of Way's own time. The "New Woman," he suggests, was "a feature of the close" of the sixteenth as well as the nineteenth century; and since "citizen and courtier alike might be inclined to fear that the New Woman was becoming too self-assertive," they "might thus have welcomed" The Taming of the Shrew as "an object-lesson on the wisest, kindest, and most effectual way of curbing her" (172). Certainly, Way seems to do so — as well as to take the word "curb" fairly literally. For though he disavows the use of "coarse brutality" or "cold-blooded grinding tyranny" as un-English, he insists that Katharine must be reclaimed, as "a beautiful wild creature may be tamed for man's service" (172, 171). Saved "from herself," in part through the deployment of

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"suffering, . . . cold, hunger, and sleeplessness" to counteract her "too redundant vitality," Way's Katharine does come to relish obedience, even in "the dreaded yet inevitable scene in which she will have to show herself submissive": for she "regards" her performance here "as a piece of concerted acting . . . in which she is to take her cue" from Petruchio, so that they can "amicably play into each other's hands" (171, 178, 180). After all, she receives her reward for submitting to Petruchio: that is, the power to domineer over other women. Like a "mutinous rabble" transformed into "a disciplined army" — or, perhaps, a wild stray transformed into a well-trained herd dog — Katharine has become "stronger" through disciplined obedience (181). Driving "the rebel brides like sheep before her," she proves her "imperious" strength by enacting her master's will (180). Tellingly, she points out first that disobedience is "'bad form,'" then that it is "unreasonable and ungrateful," and finally that it is "futile." Eventually, led forth by Petruchio "not as a captive at his chariot-wheels, but as a fellow victor," she can savor "the sweetness of triumph in submission" (181).

From his initial evocation of a thwarted Staël or Mme. Roland, Way thus shapes a fairy tale of joyous, sexy submission. Indeed, Way ends his account, "They lived happily ever after" (1896, 181). Such a reading's attractions for a journal like Poet-lore seem clear: for even if certain aspects of Way's account seem designed to preclude later feminist readings, other aspects surely prefigure them. The section's second essay, by W. J. Rolfe, goes further, devoting similar passion and far greater precision to its reading of the play's sexual politics. A Shakespeare editor who had already published his own edition of The Taming of the Shrew, Rolfe is no teller of fairy tales: he adamantly locates his own reading within specific contexts of scholarship and performance (Rolfe 1896, 184). At stake here is an argument concerning Shakespeare's treatment of his presumed source materials, and more specifically, his elevation of Katharine and Petruchio's characters to what Rolfe terms "a higher plane of humanity" (184). Indeed, to Rolfe's mind, the very word "taming" requires scare quotes (185, 188, 190). Explicitly rejecting suggestions that Petruchio tames his wife "as he would break a vicious horse," Rolfe presents instead the successful "homeopathic treatment" of a willing patient — indeed, of a "true woman" (185). Petruchio's "purpose throughout," Rolfe asserts, "is to show Katherine [sic] an exaggerated reflex of herself, and to make her feel how unreasonable and unworthy such a character is; but he does it in a thoroughly good-natured way." When Katharine ceases to resist, then, it is because she has been "compelled to say to herself, 'This is what I am coming to, if I go on as I have begun: let me endeavor to reform myself first, and then my husband, http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 13 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

for we are a couple of wretched fools'" (188; emphasis in original). Shakespeare's "'taming' process, all through," in short, "is marked by a certain refinement, in spite of its outward" — and inherited — "coarseness" (184, 188). The play must thus be acted with great "delicacy and discretion"; otherwise, it ceases to be fully Shakespearean, devolving instead into something akin to that original "rude and vulgar farce" which the Bard took such "pains to elevate and refine" (188).20 And this necessity extends, of course, to the final scene. For by this point, having already learned to meet Petruchio's most absurd demands with "merry irony," Katharine has been "bright enough to suspect that some trial of . . . conjugal obedience is going on" and to enter "into it with a spirit of hearty enjoyment" inspired by recognition of Petruchio's "devoted service" rather than any submission to "the supposed superiority of sex" (190-91, emphasis in original). In her speech to the wives, properly understood, "there is little that should offend our modern taste": for if the husband is "represented as sovereign, he is also servant." As to Katharine's move to lay her hand under her husband's foot — well, Rolfe suggests, that part was surely added by someone other than Shakespeare (191).

Less optimistically, though no less suggestively, the final "new shrew" reading, Ella Crowell's "Shakespeare's Katharine and Ibsen's Nora" (1896) returns to storytelling mode. Here, however, the subject is difference, whether between heroines or periods; and the model for reading Shakespeare seems to come closer to, say, the novels of George Eliot than to fairy tales. In her historically "premature" "restless thirsting for liberty and her blind, indefinite conception of a wrong done her by society," Crowell's Katharine risks "deeper unhappiness, and perhaps insanity" (Crowell 1896, 193). When her "spirit is broken and she finally surrenders, she forms for herself a code of ethics and turns her conquered strength to the pursuance of duty." Here, the struggle of the play is primarily internal: Katharine's "surrender is not so much a sudden yielding to Petruchio's firm purpose, impetuous audacity, and strong will, as it is the climax of exhaustion which her fiery spirit has brought upon itself" (194). Only "after recognizing the hopelessness of her struggle," does she give in; and thus, rebellion as well as submission teaches "her deep, earnest, passionate nature" to comprehend "all that is best in the life which the spirit of the times has prescribed for women" (193). Katharine, Crowell makes clear, is a stronger, more admirable character than Nora; but thanks to the advance of civilization, "higher education," and "the diminution of war, and physical perils," as well as to "the growing prestige of intellectual over physical attributes," Nora can and must strike out to develop "her deeper nature" as Katharine dare not (193, 195). Were Shakespeare's "shrew" a nineteenth-century woman, her "married life" http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 14 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

with Petruchio might garner condemnation as "superficial in its quiet happiness." As it is, through willing submission to historical limitations, catalyzed by a "change . . . rudely thrust upon her," Katharine achieves a married life that is "deep, true, and real" (193, 194, 193).

CONCLUSION While those critics who published in Poet-lore might not agree about either New Womanhood or the claims of artistic cosmopolitanism, they tended to conceive of Shakespeare studies in terms of both international literary relations and the contemporary politics of gender. Indeed, from the perspective of Shakespeare studies, such emphasis may partly explain the insistence with which Poet-lore aligns Shakespeare with Robert Browning. As we have seen, such pairing was far from absolute: in practice, Shakespeare's female characters might easily be paralleled to those of Euripides, Goethe, or Ibsen. Still, Browning claims top banner- status; and he does so, I suspect, for at least two reasons. In the first place, what Robert Sawyer terms the "Shakespeareanization" of Robert Browning was a two-way process: that is, even as Browning gained literary authority through his association with the Bard, so, too, the Shakespeare of fin-de-siècle readers like Porter and Clarke might take on certain political meanings — including a more intimate relationship to American literature — through his association with Browning (Sawyer 2003, 84-113). Thus, for example, Poet-lore seems concerned at points to demonstrate the difference between speaking for the "English," as a "race," and speaking as a successor to the Bard.21 When, for instance, George W. Alger's 1896 "Tennyson as Poet of the English People" anoints Britain's Poet Laureate as the first genuine "Poet of the English Race," Alger does more than praise Tennyson's "essentially" English conservatism and respect for law; his representation of the "slow, deep feeling of his race"; and his capacity to remain "uniformly sane, even in his deepest passion" (Alger 1896, 329, 327, 328).22 He also ensures that Tennyson's new title as "greatest national poet" precludes its possessor from standing as a true heir to Shakespeare. There is little use in turning to Shakespeare, Alger argues, if one seeks to understand "the spirit of the English people": for "Shakespeare's men and women are too much 'citizens of the world' to be of aid in studying England merely." Not surprisingly, another poet shares this backhanded compliment: "Browning," too, proves to be an unsuitable guide to the "English race" "because he was too busy telling the world what all men and women thought and felt, to pay much attention to what the English people were or did" (329).

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To the extent that Shakespeare is an "English race" man, then, he might find an heir in Tennyson; to the extent that he belongs to the world, his heir must be Browning (and, perhaps, Browning's own heir, Ibsen). If the honor thus accorded the former Poet Laureate of England seems slight, it may grow more attractive in comparison to Poet-lore's treatment of that celebrated, if unofficial, "Poet Laureate of Empire," Rudyard Kipling. After an invidious comparison of Kipling's "Song of the English" to "one of Shakespeare's loudest strains of patriotism" in King John, for example,23 a review of Kipling's Seven Seas volume notes that the "material dominion" Kipling praises is "as nothing compared with the subtler expansion of the influences of the English or any other racial genius, keeping no bounds of colonies or dependencies, nor to be marked and owned like a branded sheep. Beside such Imperial Dispersion, Imperial Dominion is a puny temporality" (P. [Charlotte Porter] 1897, 292). Thus implicitly posed in opposition to Carlyle's King Shakespeare, Tennyson's most popular patriotic successor appears as anything but a credit to his "race." Rather, he is that worst of late-century creatures, an "atavism"; and he is so, in great part, by right of his fixation on "mere racial unity" (293). "Kipling's much-talked-of-virility," the review predicts, "is of the sort to become superannuated. The pith and marrow of his song is the grandiloquent, but gross, 'Pride of Race' — the Enthusiasm, as he phrases it, in his 'Song of the English,' for the 'Blood that is slower to bless than to ban" (292). Given Kipling's "inmost core of aristocratic conservatism and Anglomania," he is no fit "heir of the great English bards," even in a limited sense (294).

Worth noting here is the emphasis on Kipling's virility, which extends to a contrast between the "flabby" virility "of muscle," on which Kipling seems to rely, and that genuine "virility of spirit" which seems to belong to a Shakespearean empire of influence (P. [Charlotte Porter] 1897, 292). For much as proclaimed affiliation with Browning could help ratify Shakespeare's status within a heroic tradition of literary cosmopolitanism, so, too, could Shakespeare's identification with Browning — or perhaps better said, with "the Brownings" — act as a useful fulcrum upon which Poet-lore's connections among Shakespeare, cosmopolitanism, and civic feminism might be made to turn. I say "the Brownings" in part because that reverence with which so many Poet-lore writers approached Browning seems to have sprung in part from awareness of the poet's famously happy marriage. Within Britain, Sawyer notes, competitive Browning societies seem to have drawn on this marriage in glorifying their Victorian bard for unimpeachably heterosexual masculinity (Sawyer 2003, 113). In the context of Poet-lore, praise for Browning's romantic life seem to have carried a different valence. Browning and Barrett http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 16 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

Browning's working, companionate romantic partnership could serve, after all, as biographical confirmation of the poet's literary support of what Bernstein terms "emergent women" (1966, 14) — where "emergent" refers not merely to female activity within what we often call the public sphere, but also to that form of cosmopolitan patriotism upon which Barrett Browning calls in imagining the statesman with a "heart too large for England." To anyone familiar with the careers of Poet-lore's editors (or, perhaps, any very careful reader of footnotes), this will, of course, come as no surprise. For though Barrett Browning's name may be tucked into a bottom corner of the 1895 Poet-lore cover, that name looms large in Porter and Clarke's current claims to fame. Few scholars, surely, have reason to consult their editions of Shakespeare and Browning; but until the completion of an ambitious recent textual project, to seek a scholarly edition of the complete poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning will still be to rely upon the work of Porter and Clarke. There are good reasons, then, for hearing strong resonances between the introduction to Poems before Congress, with which I opened, and Poet-lore's "Shakespeareanizing" of civic feminist cosmopolitanism. For partly through Porter and Clarke's editorship, the promise to "love truth and justice" more than "Shakespeare and Shakespeare's country" became, paradoxically, proof of loyalty to the true — because truly cosmopolitan — Shakespeare himself.

This is not to suggest, of course, that Poet-lore could or did lay to rest the specter that E.B.B.'s preface raises. "Truth" and "justice" are far from the only values to which cosmopolitanism — including a cosmopolitan Shakespeare — may be devoted, after all. From a current vantage point, for example, Poet-lore's definitions of what Porter terms the "good of good" often seem less than persuasive. The same Shakespeare who serves as what one 1898 article terms a "herald of the new woman," for example, also expresses "race ideals"; and here as elsewhere, for example, the New Woman's supporters proved perfectly capable of elevating (implicitly white, "native") female prospective voters over "foreign, ignorant voters controlled by bosses and demagogues" (Michael 1897, 227). Nor are the journal's discussions of, say, Othello particularly uplifting. Just as, in a British context, glorifications of a Shakespeare who transcended Englishness and military Empire proved vulnerable to service as evidence of British moral supremacy, and thus, ultimately, as justification for imperialist military interventions, so, too, could American visions of transcendent national literary power. For American admirers of Shakespeare, even the drive to claim literature as something more than what one writer termed a "paltry, hostile trophy of mere national greatness" could never entirely escape the desire to inhabit (and police) some "grand and spacious Saxon Cathedral of English Literature" http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 17 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

(Schelling 1889, 213). Still, within the irretrievably problematic late- century discourses of literature and "race," Poet-lore often succeeded in countering what Porter once termed "racial 'imperialism,'" invoking instead an argument that "no one race can attain unto quite as rich a development if self-debarred from the counter-influences reacting upon it from other developing races" (Porter, Charlotte 1901, 440, 443). Poet-lore thus stands as a significant index to the conflicted process whereby Shakespearean criticism not only negotiated the patriotic demands of shifting gender politics and of cosmopolitan responses to ethnic nationalisms, but also explored the promising, deeply problematic intersections between the two.

If debates over these issues have not yet disappeared, neither has Poet- lore. According to its Website, having outlasted not only the heyday of Shakespeare and Browning societies, but also that of the literary historiography that gently mocked its early ambitions,24 Porter and Clarke's journal remains the oldest continuously published poetry magazine in the United States.25

NOTES 1. Many thanks to Monica Smith for her assistance in researching early volumes of Poet-lore. 2. See, for example, Robbins and Cheah, eds., 1998, and Robbins 1999. 3. Indeed, as Maura O'Connor powerfully demonstrates, Barrett Browning joins an entire generation of ambitious middle-class women for whom criticism of British foreign policy with respect to Italy played a powerful role in the development of British national identity. See O'Connor 1998, 92, 93-115. 4. See also Kujawinska-Courtney and Mercer, eds., 2003. As Foulkes underscores, such internationalism involved its own conflicts: see, for example, in British terms, Moody 2003. 5. For a discussion of how late-century Saxon racialism helped shape popular conceptions of those other great, quintessentially British heroes, Robin Hood and Arthur, see Barczewski 2000, 127-61. Barczewski argues that early nineteenth-century writers tended to focus on "British" superiority as an effect of the amalgamation of "races," including Normans, Saxons, and Celts. Late-century writers, she asserts, celebrated instead "English," "Anglo-Saxon" racial purity (161). 6. Robbins, "Introduction, 1," in Robbins and Cheah, eds., 1998, 2. See also Pheng Cheah, "Introduction, 2," in Robbins and Cheah, eds., 1998, 21-32,

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especially 21-30. 7. "The single most striking feature of many of the essays, articles, and schoolbooks" that focus on Portia, Rozmovits notes, "is the extent to which they construe The Merchant of Venice to be a play primarily about Portia, her wealth, her marriage, and her day in court," with "a subplot about a Jewish moneylender hovering in the background" (1998, 5-6). On Portia and British gender politics, see Hankey 1994. 8. See also the lengthy footnote insisting that "the Jewess Mary" became the supreme feminine ideal only when outfitted with Teutonic, Christian virtues (Thom 1883-84b,101). 9. For an invaluable contextualization of such positions, in terms of British/American cultural relations, "American ethnogenesis and the cult of Anglo-Saxonism," see Sturgess 2004, 106-18. Never an entirely comfortable construction, the "Teutonic" Shakespeare was, of course, to become even more problematic over time. See, for example, Habicht 2001; and Hinojosa 2003. 10. On the more general construction of an aggressively white "Anglo- Saxon" and/or "Anglo-American" identity, see, for example, the 1861 New York Herald article which asserts that the U.S. population "is the Anglo-Saxon race, absorbing the Celtic and all other nationalities except the African, and assimilating them into itself. There is one language, the English, that which the immortal Shakespeare wrote" (quoted in Sturgess 2004, 113, 120 n. 58; see also 115-16); for African-American and American Indian resistance to such ideas, see 154-58. On the force of exclusionary attempts at the homogenizing Shakespearian education of immigrants, even within reformist institutions such as settlement houses, see Babb 1998. 11. On the larger context of Porter's work, see Thompson and Roberts, "Mary Cowden Clarke" (2003), 170-89, 185, 189, n. 24; "Clarke, Helen Archibald (1860-1926) and Porter, Charlotte Endymion (1857-1942)," in McHenry 1980, 73-74. See also Thompson and Roberts, eds., Women Reading Shakespeare (1997), 160-62. 12. The article appeared in Shakespeariana in 1888. See "Clarke, Helen Archibald (1860-1926) and Porter, Charlotte Endymion (Helen Charlotte Porter; 1857-1942)," in Hogan and Hudson, eds. 1998, 137. 13. See, for example, how a brief "Book Inklings" column opens with a review of Mary R. Silsby's Tributes to Shakespeare and ends by noting a manual created by the "president of the 'Boston Political Class.'" Harriette R. Shattuck's Woman's Manual of Parliamentary Law. With Practical Illustrations especially adapted to Woman's Organizations garners strong praise as a "little arsenal of organization" ("Book Inklings" 1892, 528-31). On the limits of formal education for women,

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see, for example, "Notes and News" 1890, 666-68. 14. In practice, these critics agree neither with one another nor with Scudder. See Lootens 1996, 45-115, especially 77-115; and Hankey 1994. 15. Comparisons between classical and Shakespearian plays were popular: see, for example, Sheldon, "The Antigone of Sophocles and Shakespeare's Isabel" (1892). 16. In Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, Porter writes, Iphigenia's "sudden flower of voluntary sacrifice" fails to bear fruit: here, rather than display a heroism worthy of her earlier transformation, Iphigenia seeks to evade danger by exploiting her position as priestess (Porter, Charlotte 1891, 275). Goethe's Iphigenia, in contrast, "dares at all odds the open fight with fate" (276). 17. In Euripides, Apollo has brokered a bargain with the Under-Gods to save Admetus if someone will volunteer to die in his stead. After Admetus' friends and parents refuse to do so, his wife Alcestis steps forward; and as the play opens, Death is arriving to claim her. She dies; and when the remorseful Admetus blames his father, Pheres angrily reproaches his son with shameless cowardice. The play ends more or less happily: Admetus' friend Heracles attacks Death, wresting Alcestis from his grip; and returns her, veiled, forcing Admetus to accept her (in violation of his own mourning) before revealing her identity. As the play ends, Alcestis remains silent, awaiting divine purification. 18. See also P.A.C. [Porter and Clarke?], "A Study of Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale.' Considered in Connection with Greene's 'Pandosto' and the 'Alkestis' of Euripides" (1892), which lists Alcestis stories by William Morris, Emma Lazarus, Browning, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as several Poet-lore articles on the Alcestis figure (P.A.C. 1892, 518). One "Proposition for Debate" reads as follows: "Development in literature of the ideal of womanhood is away from self- sacrifice and toward self-development" (518). Another suggests that Shakespeare's "way of telling 'The Winter's Tale' indicates the passing away of aristocratic and the formation of democratic ideals, and the dawning change in the status both of woman and of commoner" (521, emphasis in original). 19. For British contexts for the "new shrew," see Carlson 1998; and Mangan 2003. 20. Rolfe can be quite explicit in his performance suggestions. Even the delivery of a single word, he stresses, can help "elucidate and illuminate" a work that he argues is most often "degraded, obscured, and caricatured" on stage (Rolfe 1896, 190). 21. As Sturgess (2004) discusses in some detail, this is part of a longstanding process.

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22. To be fair, such praise is not quite absolute: a "foreigner," for example, might "meet with some things in 'Maud' . . . which would lead him astray" as to the English character (Alger 1896, 329). On late-century British attempts at furthering Tennyson's alignment with Shakespeare, see Decker 2003. 23. P. [Charlotte Porter] 1897, "Kipling's 'Seven Seas' an Atavism." The Shakespearean lines in question are, "This England never did, nor never shall, / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror" (P. 1897, 291; quoting King John, in Shakespeare 1997, 5.7.111-12). 24. Besides Peterson 1969, see Greer 1952, which terms the journal merely "a convenient clearing house for whatever was going on in the Browning world" (170). To be fair, in contrast to Greer, who writes that Poet-lore "invariably represented" the societies' "adulatory attitude" toward Browning (Greer 1952, 182), Peterson notes the journal's "shrewd" editorial suggestion that perhaps the British Browning Society would have been longer-lived, had it been more successful at moving beyond reverence into critical analysis (Peterson 1969, 113). 25. This information can be found at the Poet-lore site, http://www.writer.org/poetlore/ (http://www.writer.org/poetlore/) [cited 10 October 2013].

REFERENCES Alger, George W. 1896. "Tennyson as Poet of the English People." Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 8: 325-29. Babb, Valerie. 1998. Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. New York: New York University Press. Barczewski, Stephanie L. 2000. Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood. New York: Oxford University Press. Bernstein, Melvin H. 1966. "The Early Years of Poet Lore, 1889-1929." Poet Lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 61 (Spring): 9-32. "Book Inklings." 1892. Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 4: 528-31. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. 1900. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Edited by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke. 6 vols. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. 1983. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836-1854. Edited by Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan. 3 vols. Waco, Texas: Armstrong http://borrowers.uga.edu/707/show Page 21 of 25 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(58 PM

Browning Library. Carlson, Susan. 1998. "The Suffrage Shrew: The Shakespeare Festival, 'A Man's Play,' and New Women." In Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century. Edited by Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 85-102. Carlyle, Thomas. 1969. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. New York: AMS Press. Crowell, Ella. 1896. "Shakespeare's Katharine and Ibsen's Nora." Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 8: 192-97. Decker, Christopher. 2003. "Shakespeare and the Death of Tennyson." In Victorian Shakespeare, Volume Two. Edited by Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 131-49. Foulkes, Richard. 2002. Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Greer, Louise. 1952. Browning and America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Groff, Alice. 1898. "The Evolution of the Character of Woman in English Literature." Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 10: 242-50. Habicht, Werner. 2001. "Shakespeare Celebrations in Time of War." Shakespeare Quarterly 52: 441-55. Hankey, Julie. 1994. "Victorian Portias: Shakespeare's Borderline Heroine." Shakespeare Quarterly 45: 426-48. Hinojosa, Lynne Walhout. 2003. "Shakespeare and (Anti-German) Nationalism in the Writing of English Literary History, 1880-1923." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 46: 227-49. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1987. The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. New York: Vintage. Hogan, Steve, and Lee Hudson, eds. 1998. Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia. New York: Henry Holt. Hughes, Cecil Eldred, ed. 1904. The Praise of Shakespeare: An English Anthology. London: Methuen. Johnson, Charles F. 1897. "Shakespeare as a Text-book." Shakespeariana 4: 487-99. Kujawkinska-Courtney, Krystyna. 2003. "Ira Aldridge, European Tragedian." In The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Krystyna Kujawkinska-Courtney and John M. Mercer. Lewiston, N.Y.:

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Edwin Mellen. 117-38. Kujawkinska-Courtney, Krystyna, and John M. Mercer, eds. 2003. The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen. Lootens, Tricia. 1996. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Mangan, Michael. 2003. "Breaking Butterflies and Taming Shrews: Hysteria, Acting Styles, and Gender Politics in Late Victorian Shakespeare Production." In The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Krystyna Kujawkinska-Courtney and John M. Mercer. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen. 139-57. McHenry, Robert, ed. 1980. Liberty's Women. Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam. Michael, Helen Abbott. 1897. "Woman and Freedom in Whitman." Poet- lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 9: 216-37. Moody, Jane. 2003. "Shakespeare and the Immigrants: Nationhood, Psychology, and Xenophobia on the Nineteenth-century Stage." In Victorian Shakespeare, Volume One. Edited by Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 99-118. "Notes and News." 1890. Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 2: 666- 68. O'Connor, Maura. 1998. The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination. New York: St. Martin's. P. [Charlotte Porter]. 1897. "Kipling's 'Seven Seas' and Atavism." Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 9: 291-95. P.A.C. [Porter and Clarke?]. 1892. "A Study of Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale.' Considered in Connection with Greene's 'Pandosto' and the 'Alkestis' of Euripides." Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 4: 516-21. Peterson, William S. 1969. Interrogating the Oracle: A History of the London Browning Society. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Porter, Charlotte. 1901. "A 'Literary History of America.'" Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 13: 439-48. Porter, Charlotte. 1891. "Old and New Ideals of Womanhood: The Iphigenia and Alkestis Stories." Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 3: 269- 80.

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Robbins, Bruce. 1999. "Root, Root, Root: Martha Nussbaum Meets the Home Team." In Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York University Press. 147-68. Robbins, Bruce, and Pheng Cheah, eds. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1-20. Rolfe, W. J. 1896. "The Taming of the Shrew." Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 8: 182-92. Rozmovits, Linda. 1998. Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sawyer, Robert. 2003. Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Scheil, Katherine West. 2012. She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Schelling, Felix E. 1889. "A Word on English Literature in America." Poet- lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 1: 210-13. Scudder, Vida D. 1889. "Womanhood in Modern Poetry." Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 1: 449-65. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. Sheldon, W. L. 1892. The Antigone of Sophocles and Shakespeare's Isabel. Poet-lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 4: 609-12. Sturgess, Kim C. 2004. Shakespeare and the American Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Thom, William Taylor. 1883-84a. "The Introduction of Shakespeare into the Schools." Shakespeariana 1: 10-11. Thom, William Taylor. 1883-84b. "Shakespeare Study for American Women." Shakespeariana 1: 97-102. Thompson, Ann, and Sasha Roberts. 2003. "Mary Cowden Clarke: Marriage, Gender and the Victorian Woman Critic of Shakespeare." In Victorian Shakespeare, Volume Two. Edited by Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 170-89.

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Thompson, Ann, and Sasha Roberts. 1997. Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900: An Anthology of Criticism. New York: Manchester University Press. Way, Arthur S. 1896. "Kate the Curst as an Elizabethan 'New Woman.'" Poet- lore: A Quarterly of World Literature 8: 169-81.

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REFERENCES (/current) Kahan, Jeffrey. Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture. Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh University Press, 2010.

(/previous)Jeffrey Kahan clearly has a penchant for analyzing quirkiness within theater and performance history. A scholar of British Romanticism as well as of Shakespeare, Kahan has authored monographs on Edmund (/about) Kean, the enfant terrible of Shakespeare acting history (2006), and on William Henry Ireland, the notorious Shakespeare forger (1998). He (/archive) has edited Ireland's poetry (2004a) and a multi-volume set of Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies, and Forgeries, 1710-1820 (Kahan 2004b).

In Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, Kahan presents the first book-length analysis of a colorful character named William Henry West Betty, whom one might dub the "Shirley Temple" of the British Romantic era. Master Betty, as he was known, was all the rage, taking Scotland, Ireland, and eventually London by storm as a theatrical wunderkind. A "tween" in contemporary parlance, Betty was marketed as the "Young Roscius," a deliberate reference to David Garrick. He made headlines for successfully playing many Shakespearean parts, including Hamlet, Macbeth, and other roles surprising for a child actor.

Kahan's excellent study goes well beyond mere biography and presents a cohesive, accessible analysis of the Betty phenomenon from a cultural studies vantage point. Kahan argues that "Bettymania" reflected political attitudes as well as the rise of consumerism and of a celebrity culture that is quite recognizable in today's terms: a culture of wild fan behavior and sophisticated Public Relations. The back cover blurb highlights one of Kahan's most brilliant points: that "the disintegration of Betty's popularity was not a sign of celebrity culture's failure but of its appropriate function. One idol must be replaced with another." http://borrowers.uga.edu/635/show Page 1 of 7 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3/4/20, 4(59 PM

Kahan's analysis joins the growing body of Romanticist scholarship on celebrity, such as Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody's Theatre and Celebrity in Britain: 1660-2000 (2005), Ghislaine McDayter's Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (2009), and Tom Mole's Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (2007). Mole has also edited a collection, Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850 (2009). Richard Dyer's seminal work, Stars (1979), inaugurated much of the current fruitful work on stars, fandom, and celebrity. Kahan's analysis furthers the work that Julie Carlson has begun in her article on Master Betty (Carlson 1996).

In Bettymania, Kahan provides an important contribution to Shakespeare scholarship, as well as to Romanticist discourse, theatre history, and cultural studies. His work on Master Betty differs from classic actor studies such as Kalman Burnim's David Garrick: Director (1961), which presents meticulous archival research and simple biographical narrative, with little overarching argument. Kahan's approach is more akin to that of scholars who have analyzed Shakespeare's afterlife and continuing cultural meaning, such as Barbara Hodgdon (1998), Péter Dávidházi (1998), Graham Holderness (2002), Richard Burt (2002), and myself (Woo 2008). Kahan's work strikes me as most reminiscent of Marc Baer's book-length analysis of the Old Price Riots in the early 1800s (Baer 1992); like Baer, Kahan trains his focus upon a relatively short and outrageous theatrical phenomenon, and analyzes its significance with verve and insight.

The wit and humor that Kahan displays throughout his study attest to his enjoyment of his subject matter, and make his book a pleasurable and accessible read. Copiously researched, Bettymania shows Kahan's flair for nosing out amusing anecdotes, which he shares with relish, as well as for making incisive commentary. For instance, his chapter on "Kemble's Revenge," which relates how the haughty and resentful John Philip Kemble cleverly and subtly retaliated against the upstart Betty, is rife with lively tales that support Kahan's convincing and compassionate analysis of the adult actors' psyches.

Kahan begins his study by observing the techniques that Garrick employed to promote himself, arguing that his self-marketing efforts, successful as they were, paled in comparison to the "businesslike media machine" that Betty ran, "which sought public endorsements, paid critics for positive notices, issued daily health bulletins, leaked private correspondence for press release, repackaged the boy actor for regional markets, and profited directly from official or souvenir

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merchandise" (2010, 17). Besides this very contemporary-sounding Public Relations apparatus, Betty's stardom owes a debt to Wordsworthian notions of childhood and innocence, as Kahan points out (2010, 24-25).

The first chapter of Bettymania considers why Master Betty was branded differently in Scotland, Ireland, and then England. His narrative is highly spirited and entertaining. Drawing analogies to "Garrick Fever," when a young sprightly Garrick heralded the professional demise of his predecessor, James Quin, Kahan argues that Bettymania was a "decidedly nostalgic and thus conservative enterprise" (2010, 59). He characterizes the fad as reliant upon a "Romantic adherence of innocence and ignorance" which resulted in "a kind of pretzel logic, twisted and half-baked" (59). His parsing of the convoluted and overdetermined meanings superimposed upon the star serves to illumine various strands of the era's sociocultural discourse (again resembling Baer's 1992 analysis of Kemble and the Old Price Riots). Additionally, Kahan's detailed discussion of actors' contracts and salaries, the workings of benefit performances, and the spate of child performers that arose in Betty's wake is immensely useful: careful and clear in presentation.

Kahan's positioning of Betty as an influential and hitherto unrecognized figure within the development of Romantic discourse, and of Shakespeare's impact within that discuourse, is his most provocative assertion. Analyzing the gendered resonances of the sensibility ascribed to Betty, Kahan argues that Betty's Hamlet was deeply admired because of the contrast between his and Kemble's approach to the Dane, Kemble being famed for his stoic, dignified, and sublime characterizations. Betty occasionally used his youth to excellent effect, playing Hamlet with a feminine delicacy and tenderness that an older man perhaps could not have carried off, and highlighting his filial relationship with Gertrude.

Kahan makes note as well of moments when Betty's choices as an actor made a virtue of necessity: unable to intimidate the full-grown woman playing Ophelia to his Hamlet, Betty chose to showcase Hamlet's delicacy and sensitivity (2010, 109). Kahan argues that Betty's Hamlet probably influenced subsequent Hamlet actors, including Sarah Bernhardt. Here, Kahan's point is thought-provoking but rather underdeveloped: it would be worthwhile indeed to speculate further upon the interaction between Betty's Shakespearean interpretations and the Romantic obsession with Shakespeare, and with Hamlet in

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particular. Even the figures who abhorred Betty, including Coleridge, Kemble, and Siddons, may owe some portion of their views on Shakespeare to their negative reaction against the Betty craze.

Kahan does miss several opportunities to draw fruitful connections with other discussions within Romantic scholarship, such as the proliferation of studies on Sarah Siddons and the maternal sensitivity she was known for evincing. A discussion of sensibility on stage, in relation to the evolving understanding of "Romanticism," would productively tie his study with the several fields he already engages with: Romanticism, theater history, and Shakespeare studies. Moreover, he might have positioned his monograph in relation to other studies that argue for more serious critical attention to be accorded to actors, such as the Players of Shakespeare series released by Cambridge University Press in the 1990s, and more recently, Jonathan Holmes's study of the Royal Shakespeare Company (2004) and Tony Howard's Women as Hamlet (2007).

By the same token, Kahan's discussion of Betty's perceived transvestitism, the obsession of some of his fans with his biological gender and physical body, and the related phenomenon of the Chevalier d'Eon's cross-dressing is quite brief. Kahan reads Betty as "liberated to traverse the boundaries of class and clothing" (2010, 115) without contextualizing his interpretation within the copious scholarship on cross-dressing.

Throughout, Kahan presents his reader with nuanced and thoughtful analyses of the Betty fad, delineating the myriad reasons for Master Betty's meteoric rise to fame as well as his downfall, and using Bettymania as a case study for a greater understanding of today's celebrity obsession. The voyeurism, mystification, and idealization that were projected onto the child star resemble what today's superstars encounter, not to mention the fickle and transitory loyalty of their once-adoring public.

Overall, Kahan's study would have benefited from more references to other critical strands, such as discussions of Garrick, since Betty was billed as a new Garrick, and the two were mystified in similar fashion. Kahan's use of actor memoirs also led me to think that his points would have been strengthened with more theorizing of the nature of these memoirs, such as has been done by several scholars studying eighteenth-century actresses. Nonetheless, Kahan's Bettymania is a marvelous and memorable analysis of a phenomenon not likely to be

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taken too seriously until now. He closes with a potentially powerful rumination on the interplay between social civility and celebrity, eloquently concluding, "Though Bettymania only lasted a season or two, modern celebrity culture, nourished by the evanescent thoughts and dreams of millions, has proven to be the center that continues to hold" (Kahan 2010, 156).

The continued appearance of studies related to celebrity attest to the timeliness of Kahan's book, and to its place within a dynamic scholarly conversation on celebrity culture and theatrical "marketing."

REFERENCES Baer, Marc. 1992. Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnim, Kalman. 1961. David Garrick: Director. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Burt, Richard, ed. 2002. Shakespeare after Mass Media. New York: Palgrave. Carlson, Julie A. 1996. "Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer Stage of Youth in English Romanticism." South Atlantic Quarterly 95.3: 575- 602. Dávidházi, Péter. 1998. The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective. New York: St. Martin's. Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars. London: British Film Institute. Hodgdon, Barbara. 1998. The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Holderness, Graham. 2002. Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth. Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. Holmes, Jonathan. 2004. Merely Players? Actors' Accounts of Performing Shakespeare. New York: Routledge. Howard, Tony. 2007. Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kahan, Jeffrey. 2010. Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press. Kahan, Jeffrey. 2006. The Cult of Kean. London: Ashgate. Kahan, Jeffrey. 1998. Reforging Shakespeare: The Story of a Theatrical Scandal. Bethlehem: Lehigh Univerity Press. Kahan, Jeffrey, ed. 2004a. The Poetry Of W. H. Ireland (1801-1815): Including the Poet's Imitations, Satires, Romantic Verses, and Commentaries on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Others. Studies in British Literature. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen. Kahan, Jeffrey. 2004b. Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies and Forgeries, 1710-1820. 3 vols. New York: Routledge. Luckhurst, Mary and Jane Moody, eds. 2005. Theatre and Celebrity in Britain: 1660-2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McDayter, Ghislaine. 2009. Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture. Albany: SUNY Press. Mole, Tom. 2007. Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. New York: Palgrave. Mole, Tom, ed. 2009. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woo, Celestine. 2008. Romantic Actors and Bardolatry: Performing Shakespeare from Garrick to Kean. Studies in Shakespeare. New York: Peter Lang.

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Contributors

(/current)

Peter Erickson is a member of the graduate faculty in theater and a (/previous)faculty affiliate in African American studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art (2007), (/about) Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (1991), and Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (1985), and co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Othello (2005), Early Modern (/archive) Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (2000), and Shakespeare's "Rough Magic" (1985).

Tricia Lootens, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is the author of Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (University Press of Virginia, 1996). Lootens, who coedited the Longman's Cultural Edition of Rudyard Kipling's Kim with Paula M. Krebs, specializes primarily in Victorian poetry.

Sarah Olive is a Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York and a Visiting Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Shakespeare Valued: Policy, Pedagogy, and Popular Culture in Education, 1989-2009 (Bristol: Intellect). She is also the editor of the British Shakespeare Association cross-sector magazine for educators, Teaching Shakespeare. Her research interests cohere around the function of Shakespeare in modern popular culture, particularly television, and education.

Anne Russell is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her publications include several essays on the performance

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history of Shakespeare, including women's performances of Hamlet and Romeo. Her research also focuses on poetry and drama by early modern women, and she has published on Mary Sidney's The Tragedie of Antonie, Katherine Philips's Pompey, and Aphra Behn's poetry. She is co-editor, with Viviana Comensoli, of Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (University of Illinois Press). Her edition of Behn's play The Rover is published by Broadview Press.

Amy Scott-Douglass is Assistant Professor of English at Marymount University, specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama in performance and literature by early modern women. Her scholarship appears in Shakespeare the Movie Part II (2003), Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections (Ashgate, 2006), "The Public's Open to Us All": Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), Weyward Macbeth: Non- Traditional Casting and the African-American Experience (Palgrave, 2009), The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (2011), and the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia (forthcoming). She is the author of Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars (Continuum, 2007) and the "Theater" section of Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture (Greenwood, 2006).

Judith Bailey Slagle is Professor of English Literature and Language Department Chair at East Tennessee State University, with areas of specialization in Restoration and Eighteenth-century Literature, British Romanticists, and Textual Editing. Her 2002 book, Joanna Baillie: A Literary Life (2002) was the first biographical study of this Scottish writer.

Celestine Woo has been an English Professor for twenty years, most recently as an Associate Professor at SUNY Empire State. She writes on Shakespeare and film, nineteenth-century Shakespearean actresses, among many topics. She is the author of Romantic Actors and Bardolatry: Performing Shakespeare from Garrick to Kean (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

Alan R. Young is Professor Emeritus at Acadia University. He has written extensively on Shakespeare, emblem literature, the English Renaissance, and the literature of Atlantic Canada. In a number of recent articles, and in his Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900 (2002) and Punch and Shakespeare in the Victorian Era (2007), he has documented aspects of the nineteenth-century reception and

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appropriation of Shakespeare. He has had a long-standing interest in visual representations of Ophelia and recently created a website concerned with "The Death of Shakespeare's Ophelia, Popular Culture, and Web 2.0."

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