virtual issue: william shakespeare - Berghahn Journals

VIRTUAL ISSUE: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Berghahn is pleased to offer access to a collection of articles on the topic of Shakespeare from the journal Critical Survey. _________________________________________ I. Shakeshafte Rowan Williams VOLUME 25, ISSUE 3

II. Shakespeare's Church and the Pilgrim Fathers: Commemorating Plymouth Rock in Stratford Clara Calvo VOLUME 24, ISSUE 2

III. Shakespeare Remembered Graham Holderness VOLUME 22, ISSUE 2

IV. Physical Trauma and (Adapt)ability in Titus Andronicus Caroline Lamb VOLUME 22, ISSUE 1

V. Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition Margaret Litvin VOLUME 19, ISSUE 3

VI. Early Modern Subjects, Shakespearean Performances, and (Post) Modern Spectators Barbara Hodgdon VOLUME 9, ISSUE 3

Shakeshafte Rowan Williams

Preface In August 1581, Alexander Hoghton, of Lea and Hoghton Tower in Lancashire, died, after making a will in which he left bequests to a number of members of his household – a large one, as befitted one of the wealthiest men in the region, occupying an ample and spectacularly situated mansion not far from Preston. Among the beneficiaries are Fulk Gillom (who can be traced with some likelihood as belonging to a Chester family connected with the productions of the guild plays in the city) and William Shakeshafte. In addition to receiving legacies, these two are also recommended to a neighbour, Sir Thomas Hesketh, for patronage and/or employment; the context clearly suggests that they are involved with providing entertainments for the household. Nothing more can be learned for sure about Shakeshafte. But since Hoghton’s will was first published in the nineteenth century, the similarity of the name to that of a better-known sixteenth-century figure has generated a wealth of speculation. A local tradition was unearthed that Shakespeare had worked with a Catholic family in Lancashire, and John Aubrey’s report that Shakespeare had in his youth been ‘a schoolmaster in the country’ was prayed in aid. The possible Catholic connections and sympathies of Shakespeare at various points of his life gave the thesis added plausibility for some; and Lord Strange, later Earl of Derby and an early patron of Shakespeare, had close links with Lancashire and its gentry families. More significantly, it emerged that John Cottam, schoolmaster in Stratford from 1579 to 1582, came from a family living near Hoghton Tower.

Critical Survey doi: 10.3167/cs.2013.250304

Volume 25, Number 3, 2013: 43–87 ISSN 0011–1570 (Print), ISSN 1752–2293 (Online)

44

Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 3

Cottam and the Hoghtons were loyal to the ‘old religion’; and when the Jesuit, Edmund Campion, toured the north of England in 1580–1, he stayed with different members of the Hoghton family, among other Catholic gentry households. Converted to Catholicism after a brilliant Oxford career, Campion had moved abroad to study for the priesthood, joined the Jesuits and made a stellar reputation in Europe, spending time at the court of the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II in Prague. He returned to England in 1580 – along with Thomas Cottam, brother of the Stratford schoolmaster, also a Jesuit priest. At this period, Catholic missioners from abroad were regarded by Elizabeth I’s government as automatically treasonous, given that the Pope in 1569 had sanctioned the removal by force or assassination of the Queen. Their reputation was much the same as that of Al Qaeda in the present context, though very few indeed actually supported violence or rebellion. Both Cottam and Campion were executed in 1581 by the usual barbaric method of partial hanging followed by disembowelling. Campion was made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1970. So there is a strong likelihood that Campion was either at Hoghton Tower or at Alexander Hoghton’s other residence at Lea during some period in 1580–1. Whoever William Shakeshafte really was must have been there at the same time. Scholars differ very sharply about the likelihood of the identification of Shakeshafte with the young man from Stratford; several leading Shakespearean experts such as Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Bate believe that the Lancashire connection is wholly discredited; but others still consider it a possibility, given the slender but strong chain of connections with what can be securely known of Shakespeare. Short of decisive new documentary evidence, it is unlikely that the question will ever be settled. But that at least allows for a ‘fantasia’ (borrowing Thornton Wilder’s term for his historical novel, The Ides of March) on the events of these years – particularly on what a Campion and a Shakespeare might have had to say to each other: the intelligence of the martyr and the intelligence of the poet. And that is what this play attempts.

Shakeshafte

45

Practically all the names are taken from Hoghton’s will or other documents from the same period and area. Hoghton’s exiled older brother was actually called Thomas, like the younger half-brother who inherited his estate; since this half-brother appears here, I have renamed the older brother William to avoid confusion. Similarly, I have rechristened Roger, Margaret Crichlow’s husband, as Walter to distinguish him from Roger Livesey. There is a codicil to Hoghton’s will revoking, without explanation, the legacy to Margaret. ‘Hastings’ was one of several assumed names used by Campion in his travels. It is worth remembering that this is a period in which accent has nothing to do with class. Gentry and servants sound much the same, and they will all sound rather different from a southerner like Will or an internationally mobile intellectual like Hastings/Campion. * Characters The Family ALEXANDER HOGHTON, of Hoghton Tower THOMAS HOGHTON, his younger brother MARGARET (MEG) CRICHLOW, his daughter * The Household ROGER LIVESEY, steward of Hoghton Tower ROB TOMLINSON MARGERY GERRARD FULK GILLOM WILL SHAKESHAFTE THOMASIN ALICE SUSANNA * EDWARD HASTINGS/ EDMUND CAMPION

46


* The setting is Hoghton Tower, Lancashire: for these purposes, a general ‘Great Hall’ space, door towards back, with hearth downstage right, settle, long table (downstage left), benches, a couple of stools; and a staircase to an upper level. The action takes place between the winter of 1580 and the summer of 1581. * Scene I [Heavy knocks on a door. THOMAS HOGHTON – brisk, late fifties – enters noisily, discarding riding cloak, etc., to servants] THOMAS [loudly] Alex! Alex! Roger! Alex! Roger, where are you? [ROGER LIVESEY – in his forties; undemonstrative but capable of some very strong emotions – enters in nightgown, dishevelled and irritable] ROGER For Christ’s sake, Master Tom! D’you know what hour it is? THOMAS I’m not here for my health. Where’s Alex? ROGER I don’t care what you do or don’t do for your health, but you might think about your brother’s. THOMAS [slightly chastened] I know, I know. How does he go on? ROGER Not good. Six nights out of seven he won’t be asleep till around now. THOMAS [pause] How long? ROGER Doctor says nine months, maybe twelve, no more. [ALEXANDER HOGHTON – early sixties, heavy and formidable, slowed down by physical pain – has appeared at the head of the stairs, in nightgown] ALEX Nine if I’m lucky, twelve if I’m not. What the hell is all this, Tom? ROGER Master Tom can come up to your chamber; you need to be back in bed.

Shakeshafte

47

ALEX Well I’m awake. What’s the use? [comes slowly and painfully downstairs] Roger, get me a… [looks around; Roger pulls up a stool to the table] Ay, that’ll do. Now, find yourself some work; the whole bloody house’ll be awake thanks to Tom here. [Roger goes] This had better be important or I’ll have your guts. THOMAS [pauses] Have you slept? ALEX Not above an hour. Now: if I’ve got nine months left, I don’t fancy wasting them waiting for you to tell me what you’ve got for me. Bad news, right? THOMAS It’s Tom Cottam. ALEX They’ve taken him? THOMAS Last week in Dover, soon as he’d landed. I guess he’ll be put to the question any day. ALEX Christ. How do you know? THOMAS Letter from Jack in the midlands. He sent it to one of our people in Preston and they brought it to me last night. I rode straight here. ALEX You’ll want something. Roger! [Turns back to Thomas] What’s Jack Cottam after apart from prayers? because by God he’ll need those almost as much as Tom will. [Roger comes in] Get us some ale. ROGER Trouble? ALEX Bad trouble. Tom Cottam, Tarnacre. ROGER Ay. Taken, is he? ALEX Taken. It’s his brother writing to us, the schoolmaster down in Warwickshire, remember? [To Thomas] So what does he want? [To Roger] Ale. THOMAS Perhaps Roger should stay a moment. It’s about the household [sits]. ALEX How do you mean? THOMAS Tom Cottam came back to England with some of the Company, and he sent one or two of them to the Midlands with his list of known men. Jack Cottam introduced a few of his lads from the school to them. They’ll have their names any minute if they haven’t got them already. Jack says he’ll stay there as long as he can, but he thinks the lads need to get out before someone starts taking an interest. Specially as he thinks one or two might be headed overseas. He needs an answer soon as we can.

48


ALEX So he wants us to take them here? Bloody maniac. Doesn’t he know they’re watching us already? [turns towards fire] After all the fuss about William, God rest his stupid soul? Roger remembers that all right, don’t you Roger? [To Tom] Sanctimonious old bastard never forgave you or me. We had enough trouble then to last a lifetime, with the agents round yours and round here, sniffing for priests in the barns and the shithouse… [Back to others; more loudly] And so: we take on a few young men with Midlands voices and suspicious backgrounds trying to find passage on a ship? God help us; Jack’s as big a fool as William was. We might as well write to the justices and say, here’s a nest of foreign papists, come and collect them and while you’re at it we’ll be glad to oblige you on the rack and kindly pull out our fingernails. THOMAS Ay, well; Can’t quarrel with that. But what he says is there’s just one he wants us to take that he thinks might pass up here. Sixteen or so. Plays and sings, writes a good hand, he says, not just one of the yokels. His father’s an alderman or some such. ALEX One of ours? THOMAS Well, Jack’s got a bit to say about that. Sounds like the old man’s playing both sides. He’s paid the fines, but he paid for pulling down the images and whitewashing the church too. Jack says he’s a close old bastard and pays the fines for not going to church so that no-one has a chance to arrest him for his debts when he’s out and about; says it’s cheaper that way. ALEX [laughs shortly] Sounds like a proper hero of the faith. Is his son the same, then? THOMAS Jack says he’s been listening to the priests when they come and he doesn’t know what he should do, and he’s not happy about his father’s ways. ALEX Let’s see this letter, then [Thomas passes it over, Alexander scans it, Thomas wanders over to the hearth]. Well I see what he means about him passing up here; the name’s nearly right. There’s Shakeshaftes ten miles away. Maybe they’ve got a longlost cousin down south that they’re just about to discover. Roger, what do you reckon? Can we find room for a – what, for God’ sake? Player, tutor, dogsbody? Along with that other lad from Chester who’s coming?

Shakeshafte

49

ROGER I suppose. But you’re not telling me you want him here, are you? Him and his little trail of agents running after? It’s no time for you to be giving yourself more to trouble you. THOMAS If we get straight back to Jack, today, we may be ahead of any agents. And by the time they’ve picked it up, he should be here and we can sort out the story. [ALEX gets up, begins walking back to the stairs] But you’d better finish the letter. ALEX God, you mean there’s more? What? THOMAS It’s one of Tom Cottam’s friends from the Company. He’s travelling up here. He’ll need a place to come and go from a bit. ALEX Like I said; it’s not as if Hoghtons escaped notice round here. Here we are, lads, come and arrest us, eh? [sits again] Come and pick up the servants and the family and find out what the old man’s being saying in his cups, and… [trails away, rubbing forehead, very tired] ROGER [Fiercely] You’ve earned some peace; what business is it of yours if some fancy priest from overseas wants to come and stir things up? We can wait for changes. We don’t need… ALEX Shut up, Roger. [Silence. Reads. Sighs] Thing is, I’ll be dead in the year if they’re right. There’s not a lot they can do to scare me. And I’m going to have to face my Maker and say to him, I couldn’t be bothered when it would cost me nothing or next to nothing. I don’t fancy that. I’ve got enough on my slate to need a few good works in the balance. THOMAS [pause; then] Shall I get a message to Jack? ALEX All right. Yes. Get him a message, today. We’ll take his young man. And I guess we’ve no choice but to take this priest from the Company and all. Roger, you’re sitting there like a wet Sunday. [ROGER opens his mouth to snap back, thinks better of it, shakes head/tuts] Get some bloody ale for Christ’s sake! And another gown. I’m cold. [Rises slowly and starts for the stairs] [Blackout] Scene II [MARGARET CRICHLOW – mid-twenties, can seem older, selfpossessed, chilly –comes in, rapidly, followed by ROGER with ROB

50


TOMLINSON, local tenant farmer, about Roger’s age, awkwardly in the background] MARGARET You’re telling me he won’t see me? ROGER I am. I’ll not have him worried at like a fox with the dogs. MARGARET I need to see him, Roger. He owes me that, for Christ’s sake. Walter has to know about the money. ROGER Walter can bloody wait. You know how sick your father is, he’s not slept again, he’s got guests coming, I’ve got business with Rob here to settle before noon, there’s two new servant lads to see and I’m damned if I’m letting you upset the whole bloody household. Again. MARGARET [Level and arctic] I’m not forgetting this, Roger. And I’m not just going away. ROGER Right now that’s just what you’re doing, mistress. There’s no-one here with time for you. MARGARET Never is, is there? Never has been. But there will be soon. Think on. [She walks out: fast, bristling] ROGER Oh Christ Almighty. [Sits heavily on the edge of the table; Rob walks closer] He’ll have to see her some day. Force of bloody nature, that woman. [Gathers himself, turns fully to Rob] Anyroad, business. It’s two weeks. He comes in two weeks’ time. Edward Hastings. ROB Is that his name? ROGER It’s his name while he’s here. You know how it is. ROB So is he one of this – Company, then? ROGER That’s what Master Alex says. I think they’ve told him who it really is, ’cause he’s jumpy about it. My guess is he’s a big fish and there’s a small army of government fishermen after him. [dry] Great news for the rest of us. ROB [flops down on bench] Can’t get used to this, Roger. You get these priests coming from France, Low Countries, wherever, dressed up like players, feathers in their hats and garters round their bloody knees, calling theirselves by all kinds of fancy names and laughing to theirselves. Like bloody players. And they tell us that if we go to the Sacrament down in the parish, we’re – what did that last bugger say? – eating at the table of demons. [Gets up, downstage] Christ almighty; poor old Sir Philip in the parish, he’s a clothheaded old sod as spends more

Shakeshafte

51

time in the alehouse than the church, but he’s no demon. Tell you what, Roger, you know I’m all for the old religion, else I wouldn’t be here, God help me, but I can’t think these hard young men in fancy hats with fancy language are what we need. All right; Elizabeth Tudor’s a heretic perhaps, same as Sir Philip, and the service in English sounds bloody daft to me, but God looks after his own and likely when the Queen weds or comes to her senses, we’ll – ROGER [interrupts] Look, I’ve said it all to Alex, Rob, more times than I’ve had hot dinners. But I don’t know who’s in the right. Fancy young gents from overseas, from the Company or the, what d’you call it, seminary, you can say what you like but they’re not fools or cowards. It’s not the hats and the stockings they think about when the hangman’s cutting their balls off and sizing them up for quartering. ROB All very well, Rodge. All very well for them, if they want to risk having their balls off and their bowels out, good luck to them and no, they’re no cowards. [Sits again, looks at hearth] But it’s us too. When the agents come, it’s us they look at and it’s our balls and bowels they may be sizing up and all. Like I said – like players: only, they know the play; they’ve read the story, and we’ve not. ROGER Ay well. [Slips off table] Talking of players, the new lads arrived yesterday and I need to see them. Margery’s bringing them over. Fulk Gillom up from Chester, and this young lad from down south, from Jack Cottam’s school. ROB You said he was – ROGER Ay, he’s got a name while he’s here too, Will Shakeshafte. Should be easy to remember. ROB Is he some kin to Francis Shakeshafte over to Warrington? ROGER If it helps to think so. ROB Like that, then? ROGER Like that. You watch what you say about him or Hastings. Specially in the Charnock direction. ROB Do you reckon the Crichlows… ROGER Better safe – here they come, anyroad. Bugger off, Rob. And remember when Hastings comes – he’s not likely to be anyone’s fool, so don’t play the fool with him. I’ll collect you when I’ve done with these two. It’s Ashcrofts this morning.

52


ROB [grunts, gets up and moves away to exit, as MARGERY GERRARD – twentyish, handsome, a friendly but sharp manner – comes in with FULK and WILL; late teens, both of them, Fulk a bit earnest and slow, Will physically slight and restless]. MARGERY Morning Mr Roger; morning Rob. These are the new lads just come. This one’s Fulk, this one’s Will. [Grins] Will’s the foreigner. ROGER Left you alone so far, have they? [To Fulk and Will] Well let’s have a look at you. Off you go, love [Margery exits, Roger sits on bench]. You know where you’ve come to? FULK Me dad used to come here years back. He was the man who made the dresses for the players in Chester for the summer plays. He used to bring the stuff up here in winter sometimes, when they were playing at the Hall for Christmas. I come when I was ten, me and me little brother, and I… ROGER All right, all right, I don’t want all your touching memories. You can sit if you want. [They sit at the table] So you know about the Hoghtons? FULK Some, sir. WILL Nothing much, sir. Except what Master Cottam says. ROGER And what does he say? WILL That Hoghtons have one of the great houses in Lancashire, that they hold to the old religion – ROGER Like you do. WILL [pauses] Like – I do. ROGER Come on, lad, you need to do better than that if you’re to manage here. I know you’re here because Jack Cottam thinks there’s danger for his young men who’ve been talking with the priests from overseas, but this isn’t a safe place like Flanders or the bloody emperor’s court. If you’re here, you take the same risks. You need to know it’s worth it. WILL [expressionless] Yes sir. ROGER I know it wasn’t your choice to come. WILL [the same] No sir. ROGER Well… Anyroad, there’s more you need to know [across to sit on table as before]. Master Alex is a sick man. It comes and goes, but the doctor knows there’s a tumour and it’ll likely kill him. So you keep out of his way and you don’t make trouble in the village. Anything here that draws attention is trouble, right? The agents will be around and they’ll be glad to pay us a

Shakeshafte

53

visit and maybe more. Fulk, you know about the master’s brother, that built the Hall? FULK The one who went abroad and… ROGER Ay, he went abroad so as not to pay the church-fines, and they confiscated his land, and Master Alex and his other brother, they worked to keep him out so that he wouldn’t come back and be jailed or hanged, but he thought they were after his goods and they quarrelled and then he died last year. Which is why Master Alex is head of the family now and living in this Hall. Point is, after all that, there’s a good many folk have good reason to keep their eyes on Hoghtons and what goes on in their houses, so you give them no occasion, right? FULK Right. WILL [moving away a little, eyes to hearth] Master Cottam says you have some other visitors. ROGER Does he now? Well that’s the other reason you keep quiet. There’s plenty to do here with teaching the youngsters their music and writing for the revels and whatnot. And in case you’re thinking, there’s women enough here so you don’t have to be down in the village all the time. WILL Who is it we teach? Is it the master’s children? ROGER He’s got none. Well, he’s got one daughter out of wedlock, twenty something now, married to a man over in Charnock used to be cook here. [Looks towards exit] Poisonous bitch. You don’t need to know except to keep out of her way. No, there’s the children of the gentry on this estate and the next one or two, that get sent here for their nurture, nine of them last time I counted, Woottons, Savages, Pembertons. WILL [turning] And the other visitors? Do they come here to… teach as well? ROGER Don’t be too sharp for your own good. Ay, they come, and they have things to say, and the less you have to say about them the better. There’s one coming next week. Master Hastings. Belongs to the Company, if that means anything to you. FULK What Company’s that? WILL Do you not know? We had them back home. It’s the priests overseas, they call themselves the Company of Jesus, the Society of Jesus, and they make this promise to – ROGER I said, don’t be too sharp. What the Company means for you and me is that from next week there’ll likely be more eyes

54


on this house than usual. So you watch and keep quiet. And if you recognise this man who’s coming, this Hastings, you don’t say a word, right? Now look, you’ll find it strange these first days, specially you, Will, and they’ll be laughing at your voice and what not, but don’t fret and keep busy. Margery’ll show you where you eat today and where you get your liveries and the rest [stands; they follow suit]. God keep you. I’ve to ride down to Ashcroft’s with Rob and find out what happened to the bloody saltfish that’s due [Exit. Will and Fulk sit down again.] WILL You didn’t tell me about your father. FULK You were too busy telling me about yours. Cunning old bastard, your dad, by the sound of it. WILL Yes. Yes. I don’t know – what he thinks about all this. I think when Jack Cottam said I should go, he was glad, though. Glad to see the back of me for a spell. FULK Why? Worried about you getting some lass – [Will looks away] Oh. Right. Leave it at that, shall we? WILL Tell me about the plays in Chester. FULK Did you have plays back where you come from? WILL Only in Coventry. I never saw them, but my father did, and my aunt made some dresses for them sometimes. It’s a while since they’ve been played there, though. You know. Popish. FULK Aye, same in Chester. But me dad remembers how it was with the old Queen, when all the guildsmen went to Mass in the Abbey on Whitmonday around five in the morning, and the carts started up and the Rows sounded like a thunderstorm with it all, and you stood and walked till near sunset, and ate in the streets and you could see the ones you fancied twice or three times over [stands and wanders towards front]. And back home, the rooms were up to your armpits in cloth and leather, and me dad and mam would be up all hours stitching and embroidering for the guilds that asked them. Your auntie must have been the same, then, up all hours and the rest. Were you ever with her? WILL Don’t think she and my father got on. But he talked about her sometimes; talked about the plays a bit, too. Biggest day in the year, he’d say. FULK Aye, same as me dad says. There was three days off work with it all. They say now you have to call it the midsummer plays, on account of there being no Corpus Christi any longer, I don’t understand any of that, but last time it was still – well, still

Shakeshafte

55

mostly what it was, for a while longer anyroad, only no more plays about Our Lady on account of it being popish, like you say. Five years ago, it was; they tried to have the mayor put in jail because of it, but nothing happened. Folk wouldn’t let them. [pause; back upstage] Know something else me dad used to say? WILL [a little amused] Tell me. FULK [pause] Funny thing, I never really thought on it till lately, but he used to say as how this was one day in the year when every soul in Chester had the same story to tell. I couldn’t make much of that, ‘cause all the guilds had different plays to show, but he said it was all one story, and this one day of the year it was everyone’s story, everyone’s business. I thought, was it just that everybody had jobs to do in the same thing, you know, but he said, no, it were more than that. You look up there at the plays on the carts, he said, and what you see is you, you and your neighbours. ‘Cause Adam and Eve, they’re you, and Noah and Our Lady and Herod and Maudlin and all, it’s you, it’s you making a fool of yourself and you saying yes to God and you saying no to God and you trying to keep him away and, and… [embarrassed] aye, well, something like that. WILL Like you’ve got them all inside you, inside your head and your guts. FULK [animated] Aye, that’s it, like they’re all inside and then, sudden like, you see them all out there. Like a mirror. And you never knew. WILL Will they do them again, the plays? FULK [shrugs, turns towards hearth] Tell the truth, I don’t know. Like I said, there’s enough want it put down for popery, even if there’s many as’ll fight to have it still. But what I say is, what’s popish about Adam and Eve and Herod and all those? There they are in the Bible. [pause] There they are inside and all, if me dad were right. Bits of what you’re like. With only God knowing how it all fits together. WILL Yes. There they are. Inside. [stands, walks to join FULK at hearth] So what happens if there’s no play? What happens to all those folk inside? FULK What d’you mean? WILL Christ, Fulk. A man would burst open if he couldn’t see what he was like, if he couldn’t get his insides shown him before God or whatever. If he couldn’t see all that on the pageant,

56


played out in front of him in this… mirror, like you said, and he could say, Yes, that’s me, someone’s seen me, someone’s known what it’s like, I exist. I’m here, not just in my head, but here for God and man and… He’d burst open like – like a man on the scaffold, like a man with his insides being, being… [shivers] FULK [startled] Steady, Will. It’s only plays we’re talking of. WILL Course. It’s only plays. [Blackout] Scene III [MARGERY, THOMASIN, ALICE, SUSANNA – all late teens or early twenties – in foreground, other servants in background, talking] THOMASIN Which one, then? MARGERY Give over. They’ve not been here a week, hardly. THOMASIN Come on, Marge; you’ve seen more of them than we have. ALICE How much more is what I’d like to know [laughter]. MARGERY God you’re dull, you lot. Only one thing to talk about. THOMASIN And the young lad from down south isn’t dull? More things to talk about? Or is it more things than talking? SUSANNA If you ask me, he doesn’t fancy ladies. I reckon he’s got his eye on Fulk. MARGERY Don’t be filthy, you stupid slut. SUSANNA Oh! You know better, do you? MARGERY He’s all right. THOMASIN No more than that? MARGERY Like I said, it’s less than a week, for Christ’s sake! Anyroad, he’ll come and go… [laughter] Oh God, shut up, you can’t say anything with you, can you? SUSANNA So what do you know about this one that’s arrived now? Must be something special that we’ve all been told to come and greet him like this. MARGERY I heard Roger say there was something special. That he’s a priest with the Company, whatever that is, and the agents will be after him ’cause he’s been around in the south and stirred it up.

Shakeshafte

57

SUSANNA Stirred it up? Do you mean he’s for the King of Spain or something? MARGERY I don’t know, do I? I can’t think Master Alex would have him here if he was a proper traitor. THOMASIN Agents don’t know the difference, though, do they? That’s the point. I tell you straight, I don’t fancy this. I don’t want to be in front of the justices answering questions about whether I’ve been at Mass and being told I’m a traitor to the Queen if I have. SUSANNA Will we all have to go, then? To Mass? And confess and all? ALICE He won’t have time to confess you. He’s only here three weeks [laughter]. SUSANNA Straight, though? Do we go? Does the whole house go? What do I tell Sir Philip at the parish? MARGERY You tell Sir Philip nothing, right? like as usual. Not that the old pillock’ll notice any different, even if he’s sober for a change. You tell nobody outside this house anything, no names, no times, no places. You act dumb. Shouldn’t be difficult. [Susanna swings at her and there is a short scuffle]. Oh God, behave yourself, look it’s Master Alex. And that must be him. Christ, he knows how to dress for a priest! [Alex has emerged at the top of the stairs, Hastings with him, a middle-aged man dressed in the height of fashion. Roger emerges from the knot of servants and bangs his staff for silence] ALEX [awkward] Right. God keep you. You’re here to listen to Mr Hastings, who’s our guest these next few weeks. But before he talks: you don’t speak of him if you’re asked down in the village except to folk you know for sure are our own people. If Sir Philip asks anything, Mr Hastings is my cousin returned from the Low Countries and he trades in jewels. The rest he’ll tell you. HASTINGS [very formal and stately] Masters, brother and sisters, thank you: you are generous to a stranger and a stranger who may bring bad things to this house. You all know it as well as I know it, and I shan’t make sport with you by pretending it’s otherwise. Yet it is indeed jewels I trade in. I am a priest of the Holy Roman Church and a brother of the Society of Jesus [murmurs in audience]. If I hide this from the world, I don’t hide

58


it from you, because for you, as the Lord says, I open my treasury and bring out things new and things old, and to you I offer a pearl of great price. Why then do I hide it from the world? For fear of the pains it may bring me? They are terrible to contemplate and I do fear them; I pray each day to be spared – not from the pains but from any fear that would make me false. No: I hide this because your neighbours who do not share the gift of faith with you and me, if they knew me for who I am would step further into error and sin by hating what they saw. For your neighbours believe men such as me to be traitors to our sovereign and our land. They believe us to be idolaters and liars, and so, as the Lord says in his gospel, they think that by killing us they do a good deed. Shall I drive them into this folly and blasphemy? No. I hide who I am for love of them, until such day may come as they can truly know what I am and welcome it. [walks down a few steps, spreads hands] So you, you must share this love and share this secret. For from you I hide nothing. I dress like a worldly man and perhaps you will hear me speak like a worldly man, but you will know that this is only playing. You know that I am here for one thing alone and that is to make and keep you reconciled to Holy Church and steadfast in your religion until God opens the eyes of our neighbours and our governors. So may God keep you all faithful. Tomorrow morning at five and every morning when I am here I shall offer the Holy Sacrifice in the upper parlour and I urge you all to be present. If you need to make your duties tomorrow and to receive the Body of the Lord, I shall be in my chamber tonight after six, ready to hear your confessions. Remember: if my life depends on your silence, your salvation depends on my liberty to speak while I am here. God save you and God save our sovereign Lady. [He and Alex withdraw, to a buzz of comment]. ROGER Now then: back to your work. Off with you; back to work straight and you may have less to tell Mr Hastings in your confessions. [laughter as they drift off] SUSANNA So am I safe then if I go to Mass? Nobody tells, right? MARGERY Nobody tells. Nobody tells anyone outside the household except that we have a jewel merchant here who’s kin to Master Alex. And outside the household means Mistress Crichlow and all. She’ll go to the Sheriff soon as wink. THOMASIN [half-laugh] God you’re scaring me.

Shakeshafte

59

SUSANNA Nobody tells, they won’t know. [Will and Fulk fall in with them] WILL They know already. The agents know where all the priests are. THOMASIN What do you mean? Do you mean we’re all going to be taken and put to the question? I’m off if that’s it, I’m off. WILL Calm down. They know but they don’t need to do anything. They like you to know that they know, that’s all, to keep you scared. But they won’t take you or anyone unless it’s time to let them in London know they haven’t gone to sleep. And the further we are from London, the slower they get. SUSANNA How do you know, anyroad? WILL I saw a bit back home. They bide their time till there’s talk of treason in London, then they look for a few to catch and serve up to the Sheriffs. And maybe then they have a good quartering to look forward to, and everyone can feel safe. MARGERY Good Christ! Are you trying to cheer us up or what? WILL [shrugs] It’s where we are. Safer here than down in the Midlands because the justices here don’t fancy killing their kin, from all I hear. And no-one fancies killing servants, so you can settle yourself. They don’t need your evidence to hang a man. FULK Don’t let him frighten you. We all go to Mass with closed eyes so we’ve seen no-one there, and we keep the rest inside. I don’t say it’s easy, but it’s all we can do; and if some silly fool goes and leaves the household suddenly, that’s one thing as’ll draw the agents and the Sheriffs here in no time, so we stay and keep our counsel. WILL Right enough. Shut up the doors and light the torches. There’s hard winter nights out there. [The women leave, with one or two backward looks] FULK Will, you soft bugger. Do you want to keep them up all night panicking each other into convulsions? WILL They know what it’s like. And if they don’t, they need to learn. When the priests come, everything changes, all the words mean something different, no-one’s name is their own. You learn your words and if you forget, you don’t know what’ll follow. They need to know that. FULK Come on. There’ve been priests through here times enough before, if what they say is right. WILL Of course.

60


FULK You’re not convinced. WILL I’m not convinced. Old Roger thought I might know him. I do. Not just any priest, Mr Hastings. I met him down south; he had another name then. And Jack Cottam said he was one that the Queen herself would give a fortune to get taken. FULK God. Do you reckon they know, Master Alex and all them? WILL They will soon enough. Christmas games, Fulk, Christmas games. We’d better start learning our songs. [They go off. Blackout] Scene IV [WILL alone, with wine-cup, on a heap of playing cloths; sound of singing and loud conversation off stage. MARGERY comes in, a bit drunk, sits down near him; silence for a moment, then –] MARGERY They want you. They want another song. WILL Let them want. MARGERY Don’t be like that. They love hearing you sing. We all love hearing you. We all love you, Will, some of us more than others [small giggle]. Are you going to be kind to us? Are you going to be kind to me [hand on his arm]? It’ll be Lent tomorrow; you can make the most of it tonight. WILL Kind? Is that what it is? MARGERY Tired of your rough northern company indoors, are you? WILL No. No, it’s… [pause] MARGERY What? WILL I can’t hear. When there’s a crowd like that, I can’t hear. MARGERY You can’t hear what? You’ve got two ears like the rest of us, haven’t you? WILL I can’t hear what they’re saying. I can hear the noises, but I can’t… hear inside my head. I can’t hear where the noises come from. I can’t… God. I can’t… MARGERY For God’s sake, Will. [Pause] All right. Shall I go? WILL Do what you like. Go back to where people are kind. MARGERY I like being here. I like being with you. I want to listen to you. Even when you’re as mad as you are now. [Pause] Some

Shakeshafte

61

of them think you fancy me. [Pause; awkwardly] I didn’t know. Some of them think you fancy Fulk. I don’t… I don’t know how I can tell – WILL God. [Suddenly flaring] God! It’s a game with you, isn’t it? It’s a stupid bloody game with all of you. You think – Christ, I don’t know – you think it’s about fancying, like you fancy a meat pie or a new coat? Something you put on you. Something you put inside you. You don’t know anything. Anything. I’ve heard women say it: I want you inside me, they say. And I want… [thinks; change] yes, I want to be inside, yes, I do, I want to be in there, hearing where it all comes from, where it all… And sometimes, whether it’s a man or a … MARGERY Do you fancy Fulk? WILL For God’s sake! No! Is that what they’re saying? [desperately] How do I know? Do I want him inside me, do you mean? Me inside him? Yes, I want to know how I get to listen to where he comes from. I think of him for hours, how I can hear who he is. God, I think of you for hours, too. You, all of you… [fast, confused] That’s what happens, you know, when people meet. They want to be inside each other but they’re frightened to have someone else inside them because you know what its like? Do you know what it’s like for a man when someone wants to be inside him and you’re stabbed through like a trophy, like something you bring back from the day’s hunting? I’ve been… Ah God, I can’t… MARGERY [Backing away a bit; not knowing what to say] Stop it, Will. I don’t know anything about that. Don’t talk past me. It’s me here; not Fulk, not whatever man you… and not any woman from down South. It’s me that can’t hear… I don’t know how what to make of you when you go on like this. I can’t think… But you know what it is to… to want to come into a woman… to..? WILL [Savagely] I want to be in you. I want to be where I can hear you from way up inside your gut. I want to hear where you speak from. [Pause] Perhaps I want that with Fulk too. Like you said when you were joking with your friends. [Quieter] I don’t know. All I know is I can’t hear when you’re all there, all making your game, your barley-breaks and your… your… I want to be away from the noise. I want to be away from the wanting too. I don’t

62


want to go carrying bodies away from the hunting, jabbed through with a spear like, like hares or moles or, or… MARGERY Oh for God’s sake, Will. Can’t you be quiet now and just… [touches him again, nervously] WILL [pulls away] What? Be quiet and what? Do you think I can just quietly slip into you and say sugared things and slip out again and no wounds left, no traces on the skin… MARGERY Is it Father – Mr Hastings? WILL Is what Hastings? Do I want to be inside him? MARGERY My God, Will! You’re as filthy as the girls. I mean – you spent all that time with him when he was here before, you used to hang on the edge of all that talk I can’t understand. You used to listen to him as if your life depended. Is that what you want, to go off with him, to go overseas and be a priest and, and – then there’s no more of all this, and… WILL And get the executioner inside my own guts and groping for my heart? That would fit, wouldn’t it? The end of a man who wanted to be inside other people. Poetic whatever. No. It isn’t Hastings. He listens, though. He can hear in a crowd. He’s not interested in being kind either, not to anyone. I think he listened to me. I think he listened to something I can’t hear inside myself. But I don’t know if that means I have to speak what he wants to hear. He doesn’t know what I’m saying now. He doesn’t know what it is to want like this. MARGERY [Quietly] Whatever you want, Will; whatever you want. If you tell me to go, I’ll go. WILL Don’t go. [Pause] I don’t know where you are now, but I don’t want you anywhere else. Don’t go. [She puts out her hand. He begins to pull at her dress, uncertainly at first, then hard; kisses her savagely. She wriggles away. They face each other for a moment, then she stands and backs towards exit, beginning to unlace her dress. Blackout. The music outside fades and is replaced by something different, liturgical – Tallis, ‘In jejunio et fletu’, for example, or a Byrd Kyrie. The light comes up on the upper stage, showing Hastings, in vestments, with the ceremonial bowl of ashes for the liturgy of Ash Wednesday: a handful of figures approach; to each one he says the formula, ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you will return’.

Shakeshafte

63

Will enters, carrying his shirt, downstage left. Hastings turns, meets his eye; locks eyes, pauses. Will turns away and exits; Hastings continues. Lights fade.] Scene V [Evening, late spring. ALEX with WILL; papers on the table] ALEX Good. It’ll be as good a Whitsun as we can manage in these times. Two interludes? WILL Two. Mr Hastings thought we should have the second. I think it’s something he wrote. ALEX Aye. [Flat] He says he used to write plays for the Emperor’s court when he was overseas. Not that I said that, Will. You don’t know who he is. And you don’t know where he’s been since he was here last. WILL Of course. I don’t know who he is. ALEX Long way from the Emperor to here, eh? [Looks at papers] I’m not too sure he’s measured the miles if this is anything to judge by. Still and all. I’ll not deny him the pleasure. He’s here to keep us up to the mark. [Pause] Has he talked to you? WILL Once or twice. Not for long. ALEX I think he’s got his eyes on you. You know what I mean and what I don’t. There’s a good few have gone overseas for religion, Will, my own brother among them and your Jack Cottam’s brother and all, and I can’t make my mind up about it. Can’t see much to hope for here in England, even if I wasn’t coming to the end of my time. What I can see, Elizabeth Tudor’s set for a long haul, and if she’s not wed yet, chances are she’ll never wed, whatever they say. And if she doesn’t wed, there’s nothing as’ll make her change her mind on religion. If I was her, I don’t know as I would myself, what with all these silly buggers running round with the King of Spain and the Queen of Scots and God knows who. So I can see why a young man who wanted to practice his religion properly might travel, even set up with one of these seminaries or with the Society. What I can’t make out is why they come back and put us all in the way of the gallows and the knife. Shouldn’t say this, I dare say. I know the man’s here for our good, and it’s a comfort to have the sacrament and all.

64


But it strains a man’s heart to be always looking over his shoulder and watching his words and – wearing masks. Christmas guising all year round but damn all pastime in it. WILL Perhaps… perhaps there’s nowhere now… [stands, moves away] ALEX Eh? WILL … nowhere to be simple. Nowhere where you don’t have to watch your words and wear your masks. [Abstractedly, gradually forgetting Alex] Watch your words. You watch them like birds clustering and forming up for winter, or coming in to land or sitting so still on the trees you’d think they were wood or leaves, and all the time they’re breathing, quick, soft, ready to spring up and fly, and you can’t net them or bring them down with fowling-pieces and you can’t get them where you want them… ALEX Will. What the hell are you talking about? WILL Sorry, Master Alex. Only it seems everywhere you go you have to make choices now that people didn’t. You can – see words out there, all the different ways you could talk, all the different ways you could make sense of the world, nothing fixed, and you in the middle of it, whirling round and trying to catch a glimpse of something, something that’s really there, only all the little dances and masquings of people talking to each other are hiding it and – and you have to feel the stream running under it all, like, I don’t know… ALEX [Deadpan] Much more of this and I’ll be sending you overseas myself to get a bit of peace around her instead of listening to you rabbiting on like that. Anyroad, don’t you go yet awhile, Will, all right? I can’t see you in a black frock in the Low Countries, and I don’t fancy seeing you in red trimmings on the butcher’s block either. That second interlude’s fine; we’ll cope. What about the music for the first one? We have the two viols, but where we get five extra singers I don’t… [Door opens, ROGER enters, flustered] ROGER Sorry master. Mistress Crichlow, and she won’t be gainsaid. ALEX God. All I need. Well, let her come. [Roger leaves] Will, we’ll see each other in the morning about the rest of it. WILL Master [bows and begins to move. MARGARET (MEG) CRICHLOW pushes past him as she comes in]. Mistress. MEG [to Alex] Who’s this?

Shakeshafte

65

ALEX Will Shakeshafte. You’ve seen him here before. He’s with us from down south for a spell to help with the playing and the music. MEG You mean he’s another papist vagabond you’re looking after and risking all our lives and goods. Perhaps you need to remember that your property’s not yours for much longer and if you put it at jeopardy we’ll all suffer. ALEX Thank you, Meg. Do you know, I’d forgotten I was dying. Will, off you go. MEG Wait for me below. ALEX Since when do you give orders to my people? MEG Since you started showing you’re not fit for the governance of your own goods. [To Will] Go. [He leaves] ALEX You know how to make yourself welcome, Meg. What do you want? MEG I need to know what you’ve done for us. ALEX What I’m leaving you, you mean? MEG Yes. [Sits] We’ve a chance of buying Moss Side mill at Charnock. We need to know whether it’s going to be a quarter of the property we’ll have or more. We need to know this week. ALEX Christ, Meg. Can’t you wait a few months? This is hard, even for you. MEG Even for me? Do you want me to pretend I’ve come to pay a kind visit to my ailing old dad so that we can remember the happy days of childhood? ALEX Come on, Meg. Your mother had a house and a good marriage to Beesley. It’s not that you were left in a ditch with her. MEG I might as well have been. And you never knew what life in Beesley’s house was like. Thank God for Walter. He’s a fool but he leaves me alone. ALEX Don’t start on that again. I can’t say anything about what Beesley did or didn’t. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. MEG You’ve always known what you chose to know. Anyroad, I’ll not waste time in that. What can you tell me? ALEX [angry] Why should I tell you anything? You want my goods, you might try and make a friend of me. MEG A friend? God help us. Too late for that. And I’m not likely to make a friend of a known papist in these times. ALEX You’re still deep in with those bloody Puritan fools or whatever they call themselves now in Preston? Shaking the tree

66


to see what more fruit you can get to fall. As if there wasn’t enough already, lying on the grass and stinking because of you and your like, talking about reforming religion all over again. MEG Why should you tell me? What would you say if I said I was going to the Sheriff to talk about your guests? ALEX I’d say you always were a bitch but I didn’t reckon you were a traitor. MEG Traitor? You have the gall to talk about traitors when there’s enough traitors in your attics to hang the whole household. ALEX [Rising, very controlled; takes her wrists] If you talk like that again, I don’t care what you say to the Sheriff. Fleetwood’s not a complete fool and he knows malice when he sees it and he’s enough left of the old loyalties to his friends not to leap on his horse to London and fetch the agents. You try that, Mistress, and you’ll not get even a quarter. You’ll get my curse and a pennorth of rope to hang yourself if one of my people doesn’t get to you first. MEG [Equally cold, shaking off his hands] I need to know. You’ll not threaten me out of my rights. ALEX You’ll know soon enough. Now you need to leave. I’m a sick man, Meg, not just to spite you but because I am, and I need to go to my rest. Roger! [Roger opens door] ROGER Master. ALEX Mistress Crichlow is leaving. I’m for my bed. [Walks upstairs heavily and silently] MEG I told that lad to wait. I need to speak with him. ROGER You’ll speak with him outside this house, not here. This isn’t yours yet, and God grant it never will be. [MEG strikes him across the cheek. He stands still for a moment, then takes her by the arm, very hard. She winces.] ROGER [Face close up to hers] Not yet, Mistress. [He pushes her away and walks off. She stumbles, recovers herself, crosses the stage from the foot of the stairs. Light comes up on Will, seated, waiting] MEG [breathing hard] Come with me. Now. [Meg and Will exit together]

Shakeshafte

67

Scene VI [MARGERY comes in, followed by FULK] MARGERY [flatly, arms tightly clasped] No. FULK I don’t know, Marge, I only hear what they’re saying. He’s not – well, he’s not just pretending with you, I know that. He’s not one of those lads that, you know, talks himself into bed and then buggers off. And she… MARGERY No. He’s been in her bed all right, I don’t need anyone to tell me that. And you know why? Because he thought, ‘What’ll it be like to be in her bed? I’ve got to know, I’ve got to know what it’s like to be a betrayer, to know I’ve got another woman.’ I suppose it’s the same with whatever poor cow he’s got back in the South, I never asked about her. And you know something else? I think he asked himself, ‘What’ll it be like to be in bed with a bitch who’s going to betray me and all? What’s it like to play with a woman who could give us all into the Sheriff’s hands if she wanted? Who hates her father and everything to do with him? He wanted to live in another world for a bit, that’s what. He wanted to live in a world where there’s no promises and no kindness and no, no… [She chokes on her words for a moment. Silence] FULK I’m sorry. MARGERY Much use to me. FULK No, but I am. MARGERY [Sits] You don’t see it, do you? You think he’s like you, you poor sod. Or like me. You stand there, I stand here, and what I see, I see. And him, he wants to stand there and stand here and look out of your eyes and mine and – hers. Only you can’t do that, can you? You can’t step out of your skin? He hates living in his skin, I know that. In bed. It’s like I can hear him rolling around inside his skin as if he were tossing round under the sheets when they get too hot. He says less and less to me, you know. Only when it comes to it, he bites and pushes more and more, God help me. Christ, Fulk, I feel I’ve been eaten alive. And now – FULK He was never going to stay, was he? I mean, you must have known he wasn’t going to stay?

68


MARGERY I don’t know. I thought there was something I could do [Laughs harshly] God, that sounds pathetic. How many women do you suppose hear themselves saying that? I thought… [pauses] I thought I might stop him going off overseas and risking his bloody life with Hastings and them. [Turns her back to Fulk; muffled] I thought it was God I had to worry about. Not Mistress bloody Crichlow. FULK [Walks to hearth, leaning on settle] Well, say he has been… been with her. You know her. She doesn’t want him. Not, you know, him. She wants to know what it’s like and all, I reckon, what it’s like to take what you see, take it in your father’s face and… your God’s. She’s a walking itch, that woman, never rested, greedy for whatever’s there because she’s always been thrown the scraps. You get poisoned with scraps, I reckon, sooner or later. MARGERY [Looks at him with surprise, a half-smile] My God, Fulk. Some things you do notice, then. FULK Ay well… But if she has been with him, she’ll not stay at it. What worries me is what she’s going to get from him if she’s minded. If she really wants to make life hell for her dad and everyone here. MARGERY Like I said. Where she lives, there’s no promises. She’d see Alex out of here on the moors in his nightgown tomorrow if she could. Christ. I think she’d see him on the scaffold without a blush. [Stands, brushes herself down] Do you reckon he’s heard? Alex? FULK Couldn’t say. I’d be surprised if he hadn’t, but you can’t tell, specially not now he doesn’t move out much. It still looks to me as if he trusted Will. I guess he’ll be – bleeding a bit if he does know. MARGERY Shouldn’t he trust him? Do you really think she’s pressing Will for something, something important? FULK [Pause, moves downstage] I can’t say much. Only Will does know something about Hastings. He saw him down south, he said once, only he had another name then. So maybe if she got wind… And if he didn’t rightly know how much he was telling her or of he didn’t see how set she was against her father… MARGERY [Sharp] He’s not a fool. And whatever I said, he’s not going to send anyone to the scaffold if he can help it. I think –

Shakeshafte

69

God, I think he’d feel the hangman’s hands on his own body so much he couldn’t do it, never mind anything else. FULK [turns back to her] Do you think she knows about Hastings and the meeting tonight? MARGERY I reckon. We’re all bidden. He probably told her himself and all. Tell the truth. Strip the clothes off, strip the skin off. She won’t come, though, and my guess is she’d be none the wiser if she did. You’ve heard Hastings. Talks like a man walking a rope: all obedience to the Queen’s grace, no sedition, no word of criticism, nothing for the King of Spain to rub his hands over. All about returning to the truth that makes you free, so that nobody has to walk round in masks and disguises any more or come to Mass in the shadows with your cloak round you and your face hidden. [Pause] All very simple. Only it’s not. FULK Do you not think the old days will come again, then? Mass in the parish and Sir Philip’s woman out of the parsonage and back with her sister, and the plays in Chester town and the monks back in the Abbey? MARGERY Tell you something, Fulk, things don’t come back. Haven’t you seen that? Hastings lets folk think it’s about the old days coming again, all the good things, the times when we were just ourselves. Only it was never like that. It never was simple. Perhaps we never were ourselves. Christ, I sound like Will now. But what Hastings will bring isn’t the same, and there’s new – choices and new, I don’t know, new clothes to wear and new things to think. Once you know it could be different, it’s all changed. [Pause] Like when you know your man’s been in another bed. Things don’t come back. FULK I’m sorry. MAREGRY You said that. [Moves towards exit. Pause] We go in an hour, is that right? Ashcroft’s? FULK Ashcroft’s. There’s folk coming up from Preston. Be a long night. Alex is coming and all, Roger’s getting him ready, God help him. MARGERY [Pause] I – used to joke about it, but I need to say. The girls and all. They used to… we used to say he fancied you too. FULK Ay. I had heard. MARGERY And?

70


FULK And nothing. [Rallies] Tell you something, though. You don’t have to be in bed to think you’re being eaten alive. You can eat a man by listening, did you know that? You can eat a man through his eyes. And you cannot know yourself, not know who you are by the time it’s done. [Silence] MARGERY I’m sorry. FULK Much use to me. As they say. I’m going for my boots. [Pause] He wasn’t ever going to stay. MARGERY No. [They go off separately] Scene VII [ALEX, HASTINGS enter with ROGER and others, WILL hanging back. Cloaks, gloves, etc. removed. Alex and Hastings sit on settle by hearth, Roger pours wine, exits, Will sits on floor. First few exchanges as others drift off] ALEX Well. Well. Do you think the Queen’s Grace will thank you for that? HASTINGS The Queen’s Grace may thank me or not as she pleases. I spoke my thoughts. ALEX Did you? HASTINGS I spoke my thoughts and they all listened hard. Look. You know and I know that she has no passions in matters of religion. She’s shrewd, she’s careful for her safety; she knows that when the ground moves under her, she must move with it or be swallowed up. Oh, I know there are fools who talk about war and invasion and calling on the King of Spain to sort it out, God help us; and there are – well, I can hardly call them fools, can I? – in Rome who speak very large about these things as well, as if some idiot’s knife or bullet would put and end to... But fools is what they are. And I’m not, Alex, whatever else I am, nor is Elizabeth Tudor. If the ground moves… and it will, if enough of these folk believe they can find their way back to the old religion without blood and treason. ALEX Good argument, maybe. But since when has she or anyone ruled by argument? She rules by…

Shakeshafte

71

HASTINGS She rules by show and high state, like every prince since the beginning of the world. I know: I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. Princes are magicians, specially in these days when you can buy the sparkling toys and the machines to make people gasp. I saw it in Prague with the Emperor, poor softheaded soul. But – ALEX But there you have it. You don’t get a magician breaking his wand by choice. You don’t get a player stepping away from the centre of the stage when he’s in full spate. You’ve seen it, you’ve seen her. She loves that stage. They all love her on it… HASTINGS But think of it. What if your players here came out in front of you with no lines learned? Never seen the parts they were to play? What if they’d never even seen a playbook? I tell you, this realm tore up the playbooks fifty years back and no amount of pageant and state and jewelled dresses and fine allegories and magical machines will make up for it. Come on: she knows that half the courts in Europe call her bastard or whore or both. She knows there’s one thing she can’t buy and flaunt like another jewel, and that’s legitimacy, Alex, legitimacy. There’s no lawful ground beneath her, no playbook to say she’s speaking her part right. So she goes on spinning her webs for all she’s worth, a spider furiously stitching up all the little broken twigs, with more and more little bodies hanging on the web. It’s like what she wears, all the pearls hanging by little threads, all the lace so thin you could tear it with a fingernail. If you were she – if you were she, don’t you think you might be ready, sooner or later, to trade all that, all the terror and the panic of an actor on stage with no part learned, no part written, would you not think of trading that for recognition? For the courts and the Pope to look on and say at last, yes, I know what she’s saying, yes, this is a true performance, she knows her lines? ALEX Ay well, like I say: she won’t thank you for that! She won’t relish being called a spider, and I dare say she loves her clothes and all. But you see, I’m not so sure about her, Edward: you can love all this even when it’s panic and fear; you can be excited all the way up your virgin insides, if that’s what they are. And whose recognition is it that matters? When all the courts in Europe have had their say, it’s these folk here who see in her what they know and what they want. These are the ones she worries about at night, not some foreign papist holding his nose.

72


HASTINGS But if they, the ones she worries about, if they start to see that there’s more that they want, there’s more than she can give them maybe, if they see that she… WILL [awkward and louder than he meant] Father. Can I… what… ALEX [startled] Eh? God, Will, I thought you’d gone. WILL No, I – listened, when you were talking back there, and then I… ALEX What, then? Make sense to you? WILL Oh it made sense. But only if - if you know, if you really know, so that you’d die for it, only if you know there really is a playbook. But what if there isn’t? What if you really are pushed on that stage and no-one could have told you your lines anyway because, because there wasn’t… ALEX For Christ’s sake, Will! You’re not turning Lutheran? WILL I’m not turning anything, sir. I want to know how you know the playbook’s there, in Rome or wherever. Perhaps it’s only what someone else did, what someone else said, hundreds of years ago, when they were on their own on a stage and there were no playbooks. And – you know spiders? They spin it out of themselves, don’t they; they get it out of their bowels and… HASTINGS What’s in those bowels, though? You know your catechism. What’s in any of us except lies and tales and images of who we are, that we set up and worship? God, these reformers are simple! As if idolatry were only bowing down to images and paintings, not bowing down to what you see in the mirror, what you find lodged at the back of your imagination. What comes out of that nothing that’s in the heart? WILL You want me to say ‘nothing’, I know. But I don’t… I don’t think it’s like that. Perhaps you see just that: that you’re nothing and there’s only despair inside and so you have to – well, to look around and find someone else’s eyes and find an earth and a heaven and… HASTINGS A new heaven and a new earth out of your bowels, eh? That’s a clever spider, Will, but I’ve not met any spiders except the ones that spin in the dark corners for a night or two and then get swept away. All right: speaking of a playbook may be a foolishness, because I know about plays and you and your friends do too, but I’m here to tell you, and all those folk there tonight, that there’s something they can trust that isn’t just their

Shakeshafte

73

bowels and isn’t even just their prince. [pause: then, deliberately and unconvincingly light] And if I didn’t think that, d’ you reckon I’d be risking my own bowels for it? Eh? WILL [silent] HASTINGS All right. It’s late. Alex, you’re three quarters asleep. ALEX I’m four quarters confused, I’ll tell you that. HASTINGS Will: come back when you’re ready. I still have some things you need to hear, whether you think so tonight or not. Help Alex to his bed. WILL Yes. [pause] I don’t make light of it, you know. I’m not mocking. The pains, I mean and what might… HASTINGS [turns away slightly] All right. All right. I know what you mean and what you don’t. Come back when you can take it. [Blackout] Scene VIII [MEG alone. WILL comes in, looks around] MEG No, just me. If they told you Margery was looking for you, I expect there was a mistake. WILL What do you want? I can’t tell you more. You know I can’t. MEG There’s more to tell, then. WILL You can twist my words as much as you like. I’m not pretending. There’s no more. MEG You know about twisting words, I dare say. This house is full of people busily twisting words. You could make a bloody bedcover out of all the plaiting and knitting-up and fancywork here. They say that, you know, about papists. You can’t tell if they’re atheists or double agents or treble because they give all their skill to making these patterns of words that cover up the plain things, cover up all the treasons and devices. Who knows what they are when they’re not playacting? WILL And you? Who knows what you are? So you’ve taken on the part of a rejected bastard, like the cheap stories they show in the innyard. The bastard plots for his inheritance and the husband gets cuckolded and the wife schemes for freedom and the

74


servants get drunk. Don’t tell yourself, don’t tell me, you haven’t decided who you’re going to be. It’s not a difficult part to play. MEG Alex said you talked nonsense. You know what was done to me. WILL I know what was done to you. Why does that make you who you are? You still have to choose what to do. MEG Oh yes. So I do. So do you. I choose to stop arguing philosophy with you and you need to choose, you supposedly clever man, whether you want me again and what price you’re ready to pay. WILL I don’t pay. MEG Oh, very high-minded. You don’t pay Margery, and you don’t pay whatever whore you have back in the Midlands and you expect that women will never ask you. But some of us will, you know, some of us who don’t reckon ourselves so lucky to have you in bed that we don’t think of payment. Come on, Will. [He is silent] I tell you what, I’ll help you put your hand in your pocket for me. You said you’d seen him before? WILL Who? MEG Hastings. You said you’d seen him. WILL I never told you that. MEG There’s others can talk too. Don’t lie. You’d seen him before. So. You’re not what anyone would call a travelled man, so you saw him back in whatever sorry shitheap you lived on in the Midlands. So what connects that with here, that’s the only question I’ve got left, because if I can answer that I’ll have some information worth having. The only question is whether we both get something else along the way that might be worth remembering [moves towards him] WILL [flinching] I’ve no more for you. I don’t want any more… remembrances. [shakes off hand on his arm] I don’t want you [more and more harshly]. I don’t want you, I’m not going to betray anyone to keep your bloody inheritance safe. And if you think your father will give you what he’s promised if you go to the Sheriff or the agents, you don’t know him. He’s not afraid of dying, but I tell you something else, if it comes to breaking faith with his God and his honour, he won’t mind the rest of us dying either.

Shakeshafte

75

MEG He broke faith with his wife. That’s why I’m here. I don’t know whether he’ll give me what I want, but I do know his faith’s a little bit more fragile than you say. It’s worth trying. WILL He’s your father. Wait; keep your thoughts to yourself, he’ll do his duty by you. Try and force him and you’ll have blood on your hands and nothing else in them. MEG Do you know, I thought a shopkeeper’s son might be easier to manage than a gentleman. You’re as stupid as the rest of them when it comes to it, aren’t you? WILL He took me in when it was asked. He honoured his friendships. He’s been good to me and to Fulk… MEG And to Mr – Hastings So he was honouring friendships when he took you in. Thank you. So who does he count for a friend in the Midlands? [pause] Cottam; Jack Cottam of Tarnacre, went for a schoolmaster in – where was it? You’re one of Cottam’s boys, that’s it. You won’t tell me but it’s no great matter to find it out. I knew you’d tell me something, Will, and I’m grateful. But not that grateful. That doesn’t count as payment. [caresses him in passing; Will stares at her] So what shall I do with this little windfall? Once the Sheriff hears, he’ll have to act, whatever Alex says. He’ll find out who the big men were among the papists who’ve been through the Midlands these last few months and he can do well out of it if they net one of the great fish. I dare say you’ve heard of Mr Campion? Edmund Campion? No? [W. motionless] Quite a story. They talk about it even in Preston, do my friends. He was at the Emperor’s court, they say and now he’s here, been in England a year or more, leaving his little pamphlets on the seats in churches and begging for a disputation with the scholars in Oxford to show off his learning and persuade them all back into error and darkness. Mr Hastings writes, doesn’t he? Perhaps I might be persuaded by his scholarship, do you think, if I could see what he’s been writing. WILL You know nothing. Hastings is Hastings, that’s all I know. MEG Oh Will, you can do better than that. As you said: no-one is who they are. No one’s name is their real name. I am not what I am, yes? What I want to know is who was it who decided to be Hastings and come here to bring deceit and sedition. And when I know that – well, I may find out a few other things about my father and his household. And my future. You know, you were right earlier and I was wrong. You don’t know what was done to

76


me. But you were right too. I choose who to be. And I do not choose to be a slave in my father’s house or my foster-father’s – or my heavenly Father’s for that matter, if you understand anything about such things. [Pause] A pity you wouldn’t pay. I thought it a fair bargain. [exit, leaving Will alone in silence for a long moment] Scene IX [Late at night. HASTINGS in settle by the fire, in shadow, with wine, alone. Behind him the door opens and WILL slips in] HASTINGS It’s no good, Will. [Will starts] You’ll never make a servant in a great house. They know how to walk without noise. WILL God, Father, you gave me a shock. What are you doing awake at this hour? HASTINGS Come and drink some wine. What am I doing? I’d guess something different from what you’ve been doing at this hour. Meg or Margery? [pushes bottle and cup towards Will] WILL What? HASTINGS Meg or Margery? Or is there another I’ve missed? I hope it was Margery if I’m allowed any preference. WILL Meg is… Father, Meg wants to know who you are so that she can use it to force her father – HASTINGS Yes, it’s all about her inheritance, no? Not a stupid woman, even if she’s a murderous one. How much did you tell her? WILL What do you mean? HASTINGS Well, some women have a way of finding things out in bed. So they tell me. I wouldn’t know, of course. My guess is that you told her more than you expected to. They tell me that happens in bed too. But it’s no matter, I’m moving on the day after tomorrow. Back south. [more quietly] Things I need to finish there. WILL What about the papers you… HASTINGS I’ll send for them or come back for them. You’ve looked at them? WILL Yes. HASTINGS Any clearer about where you’ll be?

Shakeshafte

77

WILL [longish pause] I can’t come with you. HASTINGS Tell me. WILL I can’t. It’s – it’s not Margery or… HASTINGS I didn’t think so. WILL Doesn’t all that matter to you? HASTINGS [gets up impatiently, paces] For God’s sake Will! I’m not a first year novice in a nunnery. Men do what they do; if there’s enough in them, they find out sooner or later how to keep out of bed with boys or women, once they know where they have to be. Don’t you think I’ve seen worse than you and your friends, ten times over? You long for the game, then you need to come and confess it, then you’ll do without it when you have to. And you – I know something of men like you, men who know that when they get out of bed, whether it’s a boy or a woman, they feel they’ve spent something of their soul and the day comes when they don’t want to waste it any longer. Is that right? WILL [low] You know it is. But I said it isn’t that. If I knew, if I knew that all this, what the Company does, bringing this country back to the old religion, if I knew that was the, the story, the one story that would bring it all together, yes, I’d be there, I’d be away from women and the rest, I could make sense of [pauses] – HASTINGS The pains. You don’t have to be tactful, Will; I think of it quite often, you know. WILL Yes. But wherever I look, it seems there isn’t one story. The old religion is the only, the only – picture of things that speaks to me, yes, but it’s as if there were still voices all around me wanting to make themselves heard and they don’t all speak one language or tell one tale, and all that – it would haunt me if I tried what you do, and it would make me turn away from the pains and the question, because I’d know that there’d always be more than the old religion could say and it still had to be heard… [trails away] HASTINGS You remember a couple of weeks back, we talked about spiders. Spinning worlds out of their bowels. It’s a good picture, Will, but it’s not what gives you hope. [sits again] You may hear all these other voices. Do you think I don’t? But it’s not every voice that tells how things really are. ‘Test the spirits’, says Scripture. Oh yes, I can quote Scripture when I have to as well as any Lutheran or Disciplinarian and a damn sight better than poor old Sir Philip. Test the spirits: test the voices. Some

78


will let themselves be drawn in to harmony and some won’t; and the ones that won’t you have to leave alone. God speaks harmony. It’s one thing we do know, you and I, yes? WILL Yes. HASTINGS Music talks to us, it tells us how it all should be, as if it’s God’s hint to us of what he purposes, and when we talk and write, we think music is where we should be and music is what we should sound like. And there’s a cost to that. Not every voice comes in. I preach sermons about the saved and the lost, we all do. And when you get past the noise of parsons shouting, what’s that about? Some voices are going to be out of tune for ever. Leave them, don’t seek them out. They’ll soften your heart in all the wrong ways and you’ll forget that there’s a truth at all. WILL But what if they’re – shut out of the harmony because noone’s let them be heard? What if the only way to… this harmony you talk about is like letting God bring it about when every human spirit has its voice. So what you thought was harmony turns out to be less than what God can do? And for that to happen, you’ve got to listen to the ones that are – like you said – ‘out of tune’? HASTINGS So you get to stand in for God meanwhile, is that it, conjuring spirits out of the deep in great armies so that the harmony is bigger and deeper than Mother Church can guess? You get to put us all straight and show us how small our world is? Brave thought. I shan’t call it arrogant, because I don’t think that’s what you are, Will. But God gave his Church firm guidance, he gave us fathers and teachers, the creeds and the Pope and all of us priests, however stupid and sinful we are, because human hearts aren’t made for endless welcome to all the voices there might be out there. [Will starts to speak] No, shut up, Will, I want to hear what I’m going to say, because I’m not sure I know myself where I’m going. [Pauses; a half-smile] The air’s full of noises, full of spirits, and some send you mad, so you can’t tell what’s real from what’s not. Truth, Will; that’s what we’re fighting about. I hate the Lutherans and the Calvinists and your half-witted Puritans in this ramshackle Church here, but there’s one thing I don’t hate about them and that’s that they know they’re fighting for truth. They’re wrong about it, but they know it matters; and they don’t shrink from the pains of the gallows and the block either.

Shakeshafte

79

WILL So theirs are the voices you shut out? HASTINGS We have to. The devil has his choirs as well, and they can make you think for a moment that there’s harmony there, or that there might be, but it’s a song of the sirens. It’s shipwreck that way. WILL But… once you choose which voices you listen to, once you decide what clothes to wear, what beliefs to put on in the morning, how can you say that one of them is truth? HASTINGS [face to the fire, quite quietly] You don’t choose like that. You [glances at Will, then back to fire] – what do I say to you? – you surrender to the harmony you hear, you don’t make it up, you don’t write it like a tale or a fable out of your – [smiles] well, out of your bowels, as you elegantly put it. WILL And what if you just can’t help hearing more all the time? If what’s asking you to surrender is just… well, bigger than what you and the others say, bigger than the harmony you can imagine? It’s not that I want to make up the world out of my bowels. That was a foolish way of talking. I know I have to listen and when I listen I have to surrender. But, but I don’t know what it is that I submit to, not as if I was surrendering to you or the Pope – or the Archbishop or John Calvin or some mad Puritan clerk at Cambridge. HASTINGS [pauses, quite long] All right. So this isn’t the time when it’s clear. All right, Will, I don’t want you with me if you can’t hear this, if you can’t catch the harmonies. Because you’re right, you’re going to be asking every moment, have I heard right, have I heard enough, and that’s not the state of mind that holds you upright on the scaffold. But what is there here for you? This nation is a sad place, people seizing what they can and shouting loudly about their freedom, Elizabeth Tudor painting her face and looking around for a mirror and not knowing from one day’s end to the next what the world is except her theatre where she has to keep you all entertained, because when she stops entertaining you she’ll die and so will you. Do you seriously reckon you or anyone can hold up the other kind of mirror to her now that’d show her the truth? WILL [slowly] What if you could? What if you could make her say, This is me? HASTINGS Don’t hold your breath. How would anyone do that, now it’s all gone, the feasts and the saints and the Mass itself?

80


Because those are the real mirrors, that’s where you look to see who you are. Look, you’ve heard what I hope for and what I don’t, and I mean it. I hope she can be spoken to, that something will get through that great web she’s woven and let the light in. But I know – well, I know at this time of night, anyway – the chances are pretty small. I know you can’t just bring it all back in a night, the feasts and the abbeys and the pilgrims. I know whatever comes will be different. Perhaps after all the killings it’ll be – I don’t know, quieter or something. Because there’ll be plenty more deaths – mine, probably, and your schoolmaster’s brother and a few more, and the Society will go on sending us and the Queen will go on killing us. [Pause; he gets up to walk downstage] Here, in this nation, if you’re not with us you’re against us – more Scripture for you. But if you’re not in with the ones who want the old religion, who is there, what is there? An endless servile dance around an ageing courtesan. The old ways falling apart and poor men abandoned on the roads and the people’s wealth streaming into the hands of the Queen’s favourites, and buying ships and guns for stupid, stupid wars… WILL I can’t tell, Father. And the guns and the wealth and the courts – are you telling me the Catholic courts are any better? You ought to know. What with the emperor and all. It’s not as if this is the only sad nation in Christendom. What if we’re all doomed to be sad now, sad and stupid? What if there’s no way back to the old ways, if they ever were what we say they are? And the only thing now is to try and find room for the sadness to be – to be there, to be in front of your eyes and in your ears, so, so you know you’re, I don’t know, not asleep. HASTINGS So you go back to the Midlands, you get some lass with child, you marry and take over the business, and you look and listen for all this when you have time to spare from the children and the merchandise and filling up your barns with grain to sell off dear when there’s a bad harvest? There are plenty of things to make you deaf after a while. WILL Perhaps. Perhaps on my deathbed I’ll think, you know, he was right, that Father – Hastings, I’ll think, hell, I’ve got it all wrong. Or perhaps I’ll have forgotten what to listen for by then. HASTINGS [looks at him hard] Not quite that, I think. I don’t think you forget things. But remembering them won’t come easy for you. So I don’t know what you’ll do with all this, Will. I

Shakeshafte

81

don’t know where you put it. I just pray you don’t bury it. Ask yourself. WILL [Pause] You leave the day after tomorrow? HASTINGS I do. If I don’t see you tomorrow, Will, you have my blessing for all the God-knows-what that you’re going to do and my prayers that somehow or other you won’t forget whatever it is we’ve been saying, and at this hour of the night I don’t know any more than you what that is. [Pause; slight smile] And if the harmony ever starts up, you know where to find the brethren. Even if you won’t find me. Give me a prayer when you can. I’ll be needing it. [They stand. Silence. Will quickly kisses Hastings’ hand. They go out by separate exits] Scene X [ALEX in his bed, visibly weak; ROGER, THOMAS] ALEX Will he talk? THOMAS People do. I know he’s a brave man, they mostly are, but once the experts have got to work, they’ll get something, even if he doesn’t know what he’s told them. ALEX So how long do you reckon we’ve got? THOMAS Far as I know, they took him three or four days back. So it could be a week or two, depending who wants to talk to him. Did you know he was that big a fish? Been putting the universities in a fit as well as the court ever since he landed, by the sound of it. ALEX Ay, well; he told me a bit, did Edward – Edmund, I should rightly call him, I suppose. The Emperor’s court and all that. Young Will knew something too, he’d come across him back home, he said once, when he was using another name. And he knew about the Emperor. ROGER Will knew something? ALEX That’s right. Why? ROGER [Awkward] I’m sorry. I’ve got to ask. ALEX Margaret, right? ROGER Ay. Margaret. I did wonder.

82


ALEX You can go on wondering. I trusted him, and I think I was right. Don’t trust his judgement, though, letting himself get caught by her. Cause I never trusted her, and I was right there and all. But God knows what she got from him and how. Like you say, Tom, they don’t know what they’re telling sometimes when they start in with the instruments. I reckon it’s easier getting men out of the Tower in London than when they’re set on some woman who’s going to have their guts out in the other way. God knows why men go for it. I’d have spared him that, but I couldn’t find the… THOMAS It’s true they had something on Edward from here. They knew who he was when they followed him down to Berkshire. And the only one who’d want to talk from round here is Meg. ALEX She’s already called. Roger saw her this morning. ROGER [To Thomas] Ay. She wanted to speak to Master Alex and I wouldn’t have it, I told her where to go. If she’s going round with her own version of the rack or the needles, I’m not having him troubled, not now. But she made it clear enough who we’d got to thank for the news. ALEX Roger wants me to die in peace, God bless him [Roger pulls away angrily]. I dare say she wants me to die and all, whether in peace or not. And I’m with her there. There’s nothing to do now for Edward – Edmund, I should say – or Tom Cottam except pray. There’s the will, though. THOMAS Signed and settled? ALEX Signed and settled, four weeks back, after he went off south. In case. And the two lads go to you if you’ll have them, to Heskeths if you won’t. [Thomas tries to interrupt]. No, don’t say anything, you don’t have to decide till things get clearer. Till I’ve gone, anyway. So long as it’s there and you know it. Where they go from you or Hesketh and when, that’s up to you. THOMAS What about Meg? ALEX That’s what I wanted you both for. If I’d known all this for sure four weeks back – I guessed she would if she could, but I didn’t know. Couldn’t know till he was taken. She gets nothing, right? I want you as witnesses. Whatever’s written down there, she gets nothing, and she’ll have to go to law with you both sworn against her if she tries anything on. Problem? THOMAS No problem. But you could get the lawyer and straighten it all out on paper.

Shakeshafte

83

ALEX No. [With effort] Lawyer comes, sees what’s there, and if I don’t die in a week or two there’s plenty of time for him to let her know. He’s closer in there with that Puritan lot than he lets on. So she finds out, there’s time to make mischief for me and all of you. And the lads and all. Do it this way, with you swearing to what I said, and anything she says is going to sound like malice. You can drop a hint or two to the Sheriff about her and Will, and they’ll think I’m getting back at her and they’ll not want a thrown-off mistress tying up the law for months. If I change it and she sees it, she sees the plans for Will and Fulk, and she’ll have grounds for setting them on to the two of them. As things stand, the will’s made before anyone gets arrested or hanged, nothing suspicious you can put your finger on in law. No, she can wait, so long as you two will swear. Let her think I was afraid to cross her, let her think she’s going to get what she asked. And with good luck, the lads will have moved on by then. ROGER Will won’t stay up here. Fulk’ll go back to Chester, I reckon, but Will.. ALEX Nothing doing with Margery, then. ROGER [Laughs shortly] Christ, you don’t miss much, do you? She’ll get over it and nothing to show. ALEX Nothing to show, eh? All these months with Edward and Will and Fulk and the rest and nothing to show. No wounds on the body, is that it? Everything under the skin and life goes on. For some. Everything out of sight under the skin; or is it under the playing clothes? [Pause] Well. Off you go. If I’m going to die in peace, Roger, I’d as lief not do it just this afternoon to oblige you. I need to sleep. [They begin to leave]. I’ll see Will and Fulk in the morning. You can tell them. [Pause] God help us. Bloody times. [Blackout] Scene XI [Much activity, servants folding bedlinen, etc. MARGERY enters, obviously distressed, shaking off ROGER’s hand]

84


MARGERY I told them, I bloody told them, I said, he’s not twenty-four hours dead, I said, how can you come in here and expect us to turn inside out for you, and they just, they just… One of them said, ‘Well, he’s in luck, then’, and he said, that’s more than I can say for the rest of you… ROGER I know. It’s how some of them do business, these agents. Like no-one’s ever told them you need to behave like human beings when there’s birth and death and stuff around. I know you did your best, love. Have they all gone? MARGERY Thank Christ, yes. I tell you, Roger, if they’d stayed much longer I’d have had the kitchen cleaver out, and so would the rest of them. [Pause. Breathes hard and collects herself.] How much trouble is it, Rodge? Really? ROGER Alex did his best. I don’t reckon they’ll find any papers here, whatever Mistress Crichlow’s said. And they’ve not asked after – after the lads. MARGERY [Pause] He’s gone already. Of course. Do you know where? ROGER Tom took him, but he’ll not stay there, I know that. Back down south, I should think. MARGERY [Makes towards stairs] I need to turn out the chamber. Sir Philip’s asking when we want him buried. He’s been poking about and all. I didn’t say, I thought Master Tom would settle that. Only I wondered about – ROGER Don’t fret. There’s a priest in Lancaster as knows and he’ll do the necessary when he can. MARGERY [Sits] They’ve all gone. The master and Father Edward and – and Fulk. And Will. They’ve all gone. What do we do, then? ROGER You knew he’d go back. MARGERY Ay, I knew. Is that supposed to help me? ROGER Come on, love. Like you said, they come and go. Don’t get me wrong, but we’ve all had too much happening these last months, and now Master Alex is gone, God rest him, and old Hastings or whoever he really is – not that I’m glad he’s in those bastards’ hands in London, but you know what I mean… MARGERY I don’t think so. I don’t think so. You might not have noticed but things don’t go backwards. Will used to say that, when Father Edward tried to tell us it would be all right once the Queen or someone like that had seen the light. You… you see

Shakeshafte

85

something as was covered up before, and you think, it doesn’t have to be this, I don’t have to be this, I can dig inwards and find what I never met before and you can’t stop seeing it. Or I can look at you, Roger Livesey, and think, God, what’s in there, then, if you start digging? [Half-laughing] What’s going on behind that grey face, maybe it’s all festivals and dances in there, only he never lets it out and perhaps he’s laughing inside at the rest of us. And when I see him, I think, Christ, I don’t know him, though I see him every day of my bloody life. And that makes everything, makes it, I don’t know, more dangerous, more, more… ROGER What the hell are you on about? MARGERY Forget it, Rodge. Having you on, you silly old bugger. But still. What do we do, eh? When we know there’s something behind the curtains. Behind the – eyes. Father Edward had an answer. You peel yourself down when you confess and then you dress up again only you dress up in what he tells you to wear and you turn into someone new who does all the right stuff and tells their beads and signs the pledges to pray and goes to Mass and keeps away from the parish church and has a list of saints to help you along for every day of the week. Always someone to tell you who you are in case you forget, shove your name in front of you with a list of your jobs. Only, like, like Will used to say: when you know you’re choosing it, you know you don’t have to choose it and it’s another kind of play, another set of curtains and you’re still nowhere nearer who you are. ROGER So he wasn’t much use sorting it out either, was he? MARGERY Who said you could sort it? But you have to look at it. Inside, outside, you have to look at it. No-one to tell you who you are, but you can look. That’s what he thought. [Pause] But you know something, Roger, you can drown that way, like you want to jump into a river if you look long enough from the bridge. Jump into the dark inside you and everyone else. Like he did with Margaret and me. And whatever else he did. ROGER Don’t blame him for all this; it was bloody Meg, you know that. MARGERY Sometimes I imagine him talking to her, looking into the river of her, jumping in before he knew what he was doing. Betraying someone in his sleep. And is that when who you are comes through, then, when you’re asleep? Sleepwalking? Oh

86


God, I’m losing it. [Stands, walks up and down a couple of times, hands against sides] Sorry Rodge. You don’t deserve all this. ROGER Talk away, love. We’re all at sea these days. MARGERY At sea. Ay, that’s it. You can remember what it was like to stand on solid ground, only there isn’t any to be had any longer; and you look over the side when the wind drops and see your face and a great empty sky behind it. [Silence] I was going upstairs. Clean around a bit. Stop thinking who’s not here, isn’t that right? ROGER [With effort] All right. Say you… you look over the side, like you say. And you don’t just see your face but… other folk’s faces. All at sea, eh? All of us, you, me, Will, Edward. And the ship… goes on, like. And what you can trust is the wood and the nails and the sailcloth. MARGERY Christ, Roger! You can turn it when you’ve a mind to. ROGER No, I don’t rightly know what I’m saying, love. But does either of them need to be right, Edward or Will? Or Mistress bloody Crichlow? Or the Queen or the agents or the King of Spain or… The ship’s going and one day it’s going to run aground on the side of a little bank of earth six feet long, every bloody soul on board. MARGERY Ay, well. But folk won’t stop looking over the side. And they’ll think like Father Edmund, what’s down there, what keeps it all moving, or they’ll think like Will, is that really my face in the water or his or hers next to me and how do you know the difference. [Pause; then half-laugh] So it doesn’t get quiet on board. ROGER Not drowned yet, eh? It’s a start, love. Keep at it, so you don’t get drawn to jump overboard; keep singing so the sea doesn’t get into your lungs, is that it? Do you reckon they’ll keep singing? Edward and Will? When Edward’s under the butcher’s cleaver? Or Will making gloves with his dad in the Midlands and saving money to pay for whatever poor cow he’s got pregnant and wondering what he could have been if he’d stayed here or gone overseas with the Company or whatever? MARGERY Singing doesn’t come easy to anyone these days, far as I can tell. I reckon we need the nails and the cloth and what not. But it’s worth listening out for. ‘Cause when folk do sing in times like this, maybe it’s worth stopping for. ROGER Bloody times; that’s what Alex would say.

Shakeshafte

87

MARGERY He wasn’t wrong. Only when are they not? [Pause] I’ve got to clear the chamber. [She starts up the stairs, leaving Roger seated. From above, she starts singing, ‘In youth, when I did love’; Roger smiles wryly, sits and listens to the first verse, then joins in the second verse as he walks off stage and Margery begins to come down the stairs, arms loaded with bed linen; the lights fade to blackout as she finishes the song, alone.] In youth when I did love, did love, Methought it was very sweet, To contract, O, the time for my behove, Methought there was nothing more meet. But age with his stealing steps Hath clawed me in his clutch, And hath shipped me intil the land, As if I had never been such. A pickaxe and a spade, a spade, For and a shrouding sheet, O and a pit of clay for to be made For such a guest is meet.

Shakespeare’s Church and the Pilgrim Fathers: Commemorating Plymouth Rock in Stratford Clara Calvo

Abstract The presence of Americans and American interests in Stratford-uponAvon, England, stretches beyond the Shakespeare Memorial Fountain in Market Square. In the course of mapping this presence, this article reveals how the bond between America and Stratford, mostly forged by Victorian and Edwardian visitors and benefactors, rests on contradictory, ambivalent symbols. As so often happens in rites of remembrance, in which the commemorators often commemorate themselves, American presence in Stratford celebrates Shakespeare and asserts national identity at the same time. American commemoration of Shakespeare in Stratford works in two opposite directions, strengthening bonds with Shakespeare’s England while simultaneously asserting self-determination and memorialising independence from the nation that gave birth to Shakespeare. While exploring these issues, this article unpacks the links between one of Stratford’s iconic tourist destinations (Holy Trinity Church) and one of America’s foundational myths, Plymouth Rock, which are jointly construed as sites of remembrance and symbols of origin in a late-Victorian stained glass window erected with money from American donors in Shakespeare’s church. By arguing that the link between Shakespeare’s Stratford and the Pilgrim’s Rock is possible through the erasure of historical evidence, this article shows how communities remember and how communities choose to forget.

In 1896, the annual celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday acquired the proportions of a major cultural event, amply covered by local, national and international newspapers. 1896 was not a specially commemorative year – it didn’t mark any special centenary or half-centenary of the birth or death of the poet – but the arrival in Critical Survey doi: 10.3167/cs.2012.240205


Shakespeare’s Church and the Pilgrim Fathers

55

Stratford and prominent presence in the celebrations of both the U.S. Ambassador to the court of Saint James and the U.S. Consul in Birmingham turned Shakespeare’s annual birthday ritual into an occasion for what Melanie Hall and Erik Goldstein have called the ‘diplomatization of culture’.1 As the following pages will aim to show, Shakespeare and Stratford played a part in transforming Anglo-American relations, which evolved from open hostility after American Independence and the war of 1812 to diplomatic and military alliance in the course of Queen Victoria’s reign.2 In 1896, the evolution in Anglo-American relations was much concerned with the cultures of commemorating Shakespeare and with making Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church an American, not only a Shakespearean, lieu de mémoire. The presence of American heritage in Holy Trinity Church illustrates how societies remember through commemorative practices, but it also shows how societies that remember sometimes choose to forget.3 In Angela Carter’s novel Wise Children (1991), the Chance sisters, Dora and Nora, board a transatlantic liner carrying with them an earthenware urn, purpose-built in Stoke-on-Trent, in the shape of Shakespeare’s bust.4 Shakespeare, looking like ‘a decapitated doll’ (112) in Dora’s eyes, is hollow inside – his iconic bald forehead can be lifted up, effectively providing a lid. The interior guards a ‘precious gift’ sent from England to America: a handful of earth from Stratford-upon-Avon, ‘dug out of the grounds of that big theatre’, as Dora informs us (113). Dora and Nora travel thus, like Count Dracula, with a box full of earth, and their ‘sacred mission’ is ‘to bear the precious dust to the New World’ (113). Once the earth from Stratford has reached America, their ‘illegitimate father’, the Shakespearean actor turned filmmaker Melchior Hazard, will sprinkle it on the set of a lavish adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The sprinkling is programmed to take place before the shooting begins, consecrating thus the Hollywood studio as holy ground ready to receive Shakespeare. Angela Carter’s novel echoes – and also parodies – the sprinkling of Avon water and earth from Shakespeare’s garden on Shakespeare Theatre in Dallas, a replica of the Globe playhouse that could be admired at the Great Texas Fair in 1936.5 The replica Globe had previously been erected for a mock English village in Chicago’s World’s Fair (1893), also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, as it was meant to commemorate the 400th anniversary of

56


Christopher Columbus’ arrival. Chicago’s ‘English village’ was not the only attempt to recreate Shakespeare’s rural England on American soil. In 1916, as part of the Tercentenary celebrations, a replica of the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, England, was contemplated in Boston, Massachusetts. Although the replica village was never built, in 1916 the New York Times hoped that it would be finished in time for the celebrations of another tercentenary, as in 1920 Americans would commemorate the landing of the Mayflower Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock in 1620.6 Boston never achieved its permanent Shakespeare village and the Pilgrim Fathers had no replica of the Birthplace for their tercentenary celebrations, but the association of Stratford with Plymouth Rock and of Shakespeare with democracy recurred during the 1916 celebrations. In Boston, Shakespeare’s 1916 Tercentenary was celebrated jointly with the Declaration of Independence not on 23 April but on the Fourth of July.7 Scenes from Julius Caesar were performed on the steps of Boston Public Library. Mayor Curley praised Shakespeare and declared him ‘the poet of democracy’ and John Murray Gibbon, the Canadian poet and publicist for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), linked Shakespeare with the Pilgrim Fathers and the founding of America’s democratic nation.8 The desire to recreate Shakespeare’s Stratford in the United States has its counterpart in a persistent drive to leave a trace of ‘America’ in Stratford. The best-known, and more conspicuous, instance of U.S. presence in Shakespeare’s birth town is perhaps the Shakespeare Memorial Fountain and Clock Tower, donated by a Philadelphia journalist turned philanthropist, George W. Childs, in 1887. The American Fountain, which still stands today at the top of the town’s marketplace, is an example of tandem commemoration, as it celebrates Shakespeare together with Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.9 Like most memorials, it allows the commemorators to memorialise themselves – the joint presence of the lion and the eagle leave no doubt about their iconological significance and Shakespeare thus serves to unite England and America in Stratford. Phineas T. Barnum failed to purchase the Birthplace when it was auctioned in 1847 and therefore he could not transport it to America, but there are other instances of what Kim Sturgess has called ‘the gradual involvement of the American people in the material ownership of Shakespeare’.10 American money went into the building of the first Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, destroyed by fire on 6 March


57

1926, and the second Memorial Theatre, which opened on 23 April 1932. Well-known examples of American intervention in Stratford are Harvard House – bought by Chicago millionaire Edward Morris with the help of Marie Corelli at the turn of the twentieth century and donated to Harvard University – and a stained glass window, the Seven Ages of Man window in Holy Trinity Church, inspired by Jacques’s well-known speech in As You Like It (Figure 1). This famous stained glass window that filters light on Shakespeare’s grave was also donated by Childs and has long been an American site of pilgrimage in Stratford, more so since it inspired another famous window at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.11

Figure 1 Seven Ages of Man window. The Chancel, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK © John Cheal (Inspired Images)

58


Less conspicuous examples of American presence in Stratford include the stained glass window behind the altar in the Guildhall Chapel, on which John Shakespeare, the playwright’s father, is memorialised next to King Edward VI. Both Shakespeare’s father and King Edward appear in this window as Stratford benefactors (Figure 2). In one of its lower lights, below Sir Hugh Clopton, who rebuilt the church, and the coat of arms of Thomas Polton, Bishop of Worcester, who dedicated the Chapel, one can read the following inscription: ‘In the steadfast belief that the Church of Christ upon earth is one, these two panels are dedicated by the Rev. Robert W. Burns D.D. & the members of the Peachtree Christian Church, Atlanta, Georgia, USA’ (Figure 3).12

Figure 2 King Edward VI and John Shakespeare. Guildhall Chapel, UK


59

Figure 3 Dedication panels. Peachtree Christian Church, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. All these examples of U.S. presence in Stratford have something in common: they are the outcome of the generosity of one or several American individuals. By contrast, the stained glass window variously called ‘American window’, ‘New American window’ and ‘American Memorial window’ that covers the south wall of Saint Peter’s Chapel, situated in the south transept of Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church (Figure 4), bears an inscription boasting to be ‘The Gift of America to Shakespeare’s Church’.13 The stained glass was the work of a well-known Gothic Revival London firm, Heaton, Butler and Bayne. It was erected by the vicar of Trinity Church, Rev. George Arbuthnot, thanks to donations from numerous U.S. citizens. As The New York Times explained in 1896, the window was financed ‘with money received from American

60


Figure 4 The New American window, St. Peter’s Chapel © John Cheal (Inspired Images) visitors to Shakespeare’s tomb and from others whom the vicar interested in the project during a recent visit to the United States.’14 The window was unveiled by the U.S. Ambassador, Hon. T. F. Bayard, as part of Shakespeare’s birthday annual celebration on 23 April 1896, although, at the time, the stained glass was far from being finished. A postcard of the window dating from 1896 shows that only the three central lights had been completed by April 1986 (Figure 5).15 In spite of this, the window was unveiled, attracting considerable media attention.16 The 1896 celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, in fact, was marked by American interests. Together with the unveiling of the new American window in Holy Trinity Church, a


61

Figure 5 The New American window in 1896. © The Francis Frith Collection portrait of Edwin Booth was presented by G. F. Parker, U.S. consul in Birmingham, on behalf of The Players Club of New York, to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and Museum. The previous night, at the dinner of the Birmingham Dramatic and Literary Society, Parker, as its president, read a letter sent by President Cleveland. The cultural biography of this window links the ritual remembrance of Shakespeare and the presence of U.S. visitors as literary tourists in Stratford. The ceremony of its unveiling and the circumstances that surrounded it, including the speeches, the prayer of dedication and the extensive media coverage are part of the substructures of AngloAmerican diplomacy before the First World War. The cultural life of this window equally shows that what Nicola Watson has called ‘the thrills of literary tourism’ are often inseparable from the assertion of national identity and may contain a measure of political friction.17 The fact that the window was officially dedicated before it was completed poses additional questions, such as why it was felt necessary to

62


unveil it in 1896. Financial reasons were no doubt powerful, as, once unveiled, the window itself would encourage further contributions towards the cost of completing it – 1896 was also the year in which the Birthplace established an admission charge, initially fixed at sixpence.18 Arbuthnot’s decision to charge an admission fee to Shakespeare’s Church was objected to in the U.S., and the window was part of extensive rebuilding undergone by Holy Trinity Church in the late 1880s, some of which was not generally applauded, to the extent that the Vicar was labelled a ‘second Gastrell’.19 The American Memorial window consists of five upper and five lower lights crowned by a rose or wheel window. It contains a complex iconographical display, arranged around a central axis occupied by the Incarnation, or Madonna with child, in the upper light and the Epiphany, or Adoration of the Magi, in the lower light. On either side of Mary and Jesus, a series of eminent figures appear in the upper lights and the lower lights are dedicated to several narrative scenes. Upper and lower lights are thematically linked. Most of the figures depicted in the upper lights bear relation to the Anglican Church, to Stratford or to America (Figure 6).

Figure 6 The New American window. Upper Lights. © John Cheal (Inspired Images)


63

On the left, the English notables are Saint Wolfstan, Bishop of Worcester, who symbolises the continuity between Anglo-Saxon and Norman Christianity, and John of Stratford, the founder of Holy Trinity Church. Next to them stands King Charles I with Saint Egwin, Bishop of Worcester, who built the Abbey at Evesham and William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. On the right, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, holding a copy of his book No Cross No Crown, written during his imprisonment in the Tower of London in 1668, keeps company with Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus.20 To their right, Bishop Eric of Greenland, the first bishop beyond the Atlantic, stands next to Samuel Seabury, Bishop of Connecticut and the first Bishop of the American Episcopal Church. Each of the lower lights (Figure 7) is closely related to its corresponding upper light. From left to right (and excluding the central lower light that contains the adoration of the Magi), they illustrate the building of the South aisle of Holy Trinity Church under John of Stratford, the execution of Archbishop Laud, the Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock and the consecration of Bishop Seabury in Aberdeen in 1787. If read from left to right, these four narratives display an attempt to establish an historical continuity from the building of Holy Trinity to the origins of the American Episcopalian Church. In Foucaultian terms, this attempt is more a genealogy than a history, full of fractures and ‘the singularity of events’, despite its evident inclination for ‘origins’ and a linear conception of the past.21 The vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Rev. Arburthnot, had a powerful reason to include

Figure 7 The New American window. Lower Lights. © John Cheal (Inspired Images)

64


Bishop Seabury in the window, not only for his pioneering role in the American Episcopalian Church but also for the benefits involved in strengthening his connection to Holy Trinity Church. As he explains in his guide to Shakespeare’s Church: … attention should be directed, especially on the part of Americans, to a copy of the Agreement drawn up between Bishop Seabury and his consecrators, which is hung up in the Church for their inspection. It contains one clause to the effect that the Episcopal Church in Connecticut is to be in full communion with the Episcopal Church in Scotland; and appears of such interest to American Church people that it has been printed, and a copy can be obtained from the Custodian of the Church for twopence, any profits from the sale going to the adornment of the American Chapel in the South Transept.’22

Scotland, then, not England, is the link between American and British Episcopalian Churches, so Arbuthnot’s appropriation of Seabury for the American window is one of the fractures in the genealogy linking Shakespeare’s Church and America. The unveiling of the window in 1896 was a highly theatrical affair.23 The U.S. Ambassador arrived in Stratford from Birmingham by the Great Western Railway, with the U.S. Consul, G. F. Parker. After being met at the station by the Rev. Arbuthnot and the Mayor, Mr Smallwood, they drove off in open carriages to the church while the crowds watched and cheered. The service in Holy Trinity Church included several hymns and two speeches by Arbuthnot and Bayard. Arbuthnot spoke first while the window was still covered by a white cloth, describing the stained glass in detail before it could be seen. Bayard then pulled the cord and the white cloth came down, revealing the unfinished window. In his speech, Rev. Arbuthnot explained that the window aimed to show how ‘the Old World and the New were united in the adoration of the Incarnate Christ’ and its purpose was to carry ‘a message of peace and goodwill.’24 In 1896, this message was hardly there. When the window was unveiled, visitors could only see the three central upper and lower lights, which rather than peace seem to encode ideological friction. If the window celebrates the union of the Old World and the New, and the union of their Episcopalian churches, it is surprising that it chooses to memorialise such a large number of ‘martyrs’ and ‘dissenters’: Charles I, William Laud, William Penn and the Pilgrim Fathers (Figure 8).


65

Figure 8 Martyrs and Dissenters: Charles I, William Laud, William Penn and the Pilgrim Fathers. © John Cheal (Inspired Images)

66


If the aim of the window is to praise concord and religious tolerance, the presence of Charles I and Bishop William Laud next to the Pilgrim Fathers praying on Plymouth Rock after alighting from the Mayflower undermines its message. To see Charles I commemorated as ‘martyr’ next to the Mayfair Pilgrims presented as heroic freedom fighters giving thanks to God because they managed to escape Stuart tyranny is odd.25 The choice of the Pilgrim Fathers in a stained glass window that intends to strengthen the bonds between England and the U.S. only works if history is remembered selectively. The Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers are the iconic representation of a myth of origin linking England and America. Plymouth Rock symbolises freedom, republicanism and the promise of religious tolerance, i.e., the lucky escape of the Pilgrims from the land of religious intolerance that was Shakespeare’s England. For the joint commemoration to work, it is necessary to achieve a convenient erasure of unwanted historical detail from collective memory. As Paul Connerton reminds us, communities remember selectively and modernity knows how to forget.26 The lack of evidence of any link between Shakespeare and the Mayflower, the Pilgrim Fathers or early seventeenth-century New Englanders, such as Cotton Mather, is often conveniently forgotten or bypassed in attempts to establish links that relate the plays to the earliest colonists.27 As an American lieu de mémoire, the American Memorial window provides the literary tourist with a puzzling experience. The presence of Plymouth Rock on the stained glass window of Shakespeare’s Church is an unsettling sight, given that the Pilgrims who landed there were escaping precisely from what Holy Trinity Church stood for. The greatest act of erasure of collective memory is perhaps the attempt made by Rev. Arbuthnot to justify the presence of Charles I on the American window in his speech on 23 April 1896: ‘The propriety of introducing King Charles and Laud is apparent when it is remembered that they came immediately after Shakespeare’s time, and saw the rise and development of the Puritans, who had so much to do with colonising America’.28 In a previous phase, the design of the window was going to depict Charles I’s beheading, instead of William Laud’s execution. If the original design had been carried out, the window would have encoded, even more explicitly, the tension between monarchy and republic that make the U.S. different from Britain – and which was amply referred to in his speeches by the U.S. Ambassador, Mr Bayard. For Bayard, ‘Shakespeare was a


67

common bond of feeling and sympathy and admiration between the two great families of the English speaking people’, but, as he added, ‘Those who made their home in lands beyond the seas had chosen for themselves a different framework of society, having exchanged a Monarchy for a Republic.’29 At the luncheon served in the town hall after the service, the U.S. Ambassador rose after the toasts to claim that ‘Shakespeare was as good an American as he was an Englishman’ and struggling to reconcile the assertion of national identity with the appropriation of Shakespeare as ‘the poet of the English speaking race’, Mr Bayard declared himself ‘a Republican citizen but a subject of King Shakespeare’.30 The religious and political frictions that the American Memorial window addresses add to another element of tension in a window dedicated not to Shakespeare but to Shakespeare’s Church. On 23 April 1896, when the cord was pulled and the window revealed, Rev. Arburthnot said the prayer of dedication: ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, we bless and dedicate this window erected in the faith of Jesus Christ, and as a memorial of his servant, William Shakespeare. Amen’. In what sense the American Memorial window is a memorial to Shakespeare is not self-evident. A literary tourist that scans the window for references to Shakespeare will be hard-pressed to find a connection with the playwright or his works beyond his name at the bottom of the fourth lower light. Shakespeare’s iconic image is not found amongst those who link England and America. On the First World War Memorial in a stained glass window at the old college hall of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Shakespeare stands next to Chaucer to represent the forces of civilisation, while First World War soldiers repel the attack of demon-like invaders. On the window unveiled on his birthday in 1896 in Stratford, Shakespeare is only memorialised though the association of his name with Holy Trinity Church. In order to read the American Memorial window as a memorial to Shakespeare, one has to recall the 400 dollars from American visitors to Shakespeare’s grave that contributed to the cost of erecting it. The gift of America to Shakespeare’s Church is also the gift of Shakespeare’s Church to America, as it served to build a memorial to the founding myth of the U.S. – the quest for religious and political freedom – while at the same time, construing a link between the U.S. and Britain, through the Episcopalian Church and Shakespeare as the poet of the English-speaking world. Rev. Arbuthnot’s memorial window created

68


a new lieu de mémoire, a new site of pilgrimage for U.S. tourists, and a new reason for American visitors to visit Shakespeare’s Church, showing thus the circularity of cultural practices. In Wise Children, the handful of English soil from the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre never makes it to the set of the Hollywood adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When the occasion arrives, the Chance sisters find out that the sacred earth was defiled by a Persian cat during the railway journey from New York to California. For the duration of the shooting, Nora and Dora stay at a motel called the Forest of Arden, and they quickly find a way to replace the desecrated relic with earth just as meaningful: ‘We filled the casket up again with soil from the Forest of Arden, from the facsimile Elizabethan knot garden itself; we thought that would make it more authentic. So there was sacred earth, as good as new.’ (129). It is, then, American soil that Melchior Hazard scatters on the set before he gives it its benediction with two raised fingers (137), in a ceremony that rewrites Shakespeare’s last speech for Puck and Oberon and recalls, somehow, Garrick’s Jubilee. Just as Stratford was absent from and somehow present in the earth the twins used to refill the casket destined to commemorate the playwright’s birthplace, Shakespeare is also simultaneously absent and present in the memorial window paid for by Americans to honour his memory. The presence of Americans and American interests in Stratfordupon-Avon, England, stretches thus beyond the American Fountain in Market Square. The bond between America and Stratford, mostly forged by Victorian and Edwardian visitors and benefactors, rests on contradictory, ambivalent symbols and, as so often happens in rites of remembrance in which the commemorators often commemorate themselves, American presence in Stratford celebrates Shakespeare and asserts national myths and identity at the same time. American commemoration of Shakespeare in Stratford works in two opposite directions, strengthening bonds with Shakespeare’s England while simultaneously asserting self-determination and memorialising independence from the nation that gave birth to Shakespeare. The outcome of this double commemorative practice is that Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayfair return to England via the commemoration and memorialisation of Shakespeare. One of Stratford’s iconic tourist destinations, Holy Trinity Church, and Plymouth Rock are jointly construed as sites of memory and symbols of origin, tightly linked in the commemorative imagination.


69

Notes Research for this paper was possible thanks to Research Project FFI2011-24347, ‘Shakespeare and the Cultures of Commemoration II: Remembering Shakespeare’, financed by the Spanish Research Agency MEC-ANEP. 1. Melanie Hall and Erick Goldstein, ‘Writers, the Clergy, and the ‘Diplomatization’ of Culture: Sub-Structures of Anglo-American Diplomacy, 1820–1914’, in On the Fringes of Diplomacy: Influences on British Foreign Policy, 1800–194, ed. John Fisher (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). 2. Kim C. Sturgess has shown how the early anti-English sentiment which arrived in the New World with the puritans gradually gave way to the American appropriation of Shakespeare. See Shakespeare and the American Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26 and passim. 3. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 4. Angela Carter, Wise Children (London: Chatto, 1991). 5. Graham Holderness, ‘Bardolatry: The cultural materialist’s guide to Stratford-uponAvon’, The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 2–15, p. 2. 6. New York Times, 25 June 1916. 7. Shakespeare and the Declaration of Independence have a history of joint commemoration. In his will, actor Edwin Forrest specified that annual commemorative rituals would take place on 23 April and 4 July in his home for elderly or disabled actors. See Sturgess, Shakespeare and the American Nation, 133. 8. Boston Herald, 5 July 1916, front page. 9. Childs also donated memorial windows to William Cowper and George Herbert (Westminster Abbey), and to John Milton (St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster). For the dedication ceremony of the American Fountain, see Sturgess, Shakespeare and the American Nation, 187–88. 10. Shakespeare and the American Nation, 182. See pp. 181–86 for a discussion of Barnum’s failed attempt to buy the Birthplace and Mark Twain’s use of this anecdote in a letter to raise funds for the Memorial Theatre. See also Louis Marder, His Exits and His Entrances: The Story of Shakespeare’s Reputation (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1963), 243–44. 11. James G. McManaway, ‘The Folger Shakespeare Library,’ Shakespeare Survey, 1 (1948), 58–59. The window is located at the west end of the Gail Kern Paster Reading Room and is reproduced in http://www.folger.edu/imgdtl.cfm?imageid=777&cid=1333 (last accessed 14 September 2012). 12. The Peachtree Christian Church, founded in 1925, survives to this day in Atlanta. I owe this information to Christy Desmet. 13. The inscription is preceded by the acronym AMDG (ad maiorem dei gloriam). 14. The New York Times, 24 April 1896. As the visitors’ books kept in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library show, from June 1891 to August 1917, American visitors signed in a separate book. 15. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library and Archive (Ref. No. SC10/1/37268). 16. The New York Times, 24 April 1896. 17. Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist (London: Palgrave, 2006), 17.

70


18. Marder, His Exits and His Entrances, 245. 19. ‘Vandalism at Stratford-upon-Avon’, Shakespeariana, vol. 7, January 1890, pp.40–44; p.44. Christy Desmet alerted me to criticisms of Arbuthnot’s decision to charge an admission fee and of his handling of restoration activity in the Church in Shakespeariana, the journal of the Shakespeare Society of New York, edited by Charlotte Endymion Porter. The journal alerted its readers to the new admission charge of 6d for visitors to Trinity Church (vol. 6, November 1889, p. 494) and discussed the restoration process in several editorials, letters to the editor, and excerpts from the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald (including vol. 6, October 1889, pp. 459–60; vol. 6, November 1889, pp. 492–6 and pp. 502–506). One of these editorials (vol. 6, pp.459–60) quotes a sermon by Arbuthnot in which he reassures his congregation that the restorations are being handled by some of the best architects in England. The editorial objects to these ‘improvements’ that will transform the church into something very different from the church Shakespeare knew. In another editorial (vol. 6, p. 502) readers are warned that the ‘six-penny tax’ that the Vicar has imposed on American visitors will be used to pay for those restorations that lovers of Shakespeare may not approve of. Criticism of the building repairs in Trinity Church had already been given attention in Shakespeariana, vol. 5, March 1888, pp. 145–7 which reprinted part of a letter to the editor by J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps published in The Times (30 January 1888). Behind the accussations against Arbuthnot contained in these editorials and letters there is a concern about the destruction of historical and artistic heritage which, as far as is connected to Shakespeare, also belongs to Americans. Hence the comparison with Francis Gastrell, the eighteenth-century owner of New Place who cut down the mulberry tree and pulled down Shakespeare’s house. 20. William Penn is known to have owned Shakespeare’s plays, but they remained in England when he travelled to America. Penn’s secretary, though, had a copy of Rowe’s edition. See Marder, His Exits and His Entrances, 296. 21. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64. 22. George Arburthnot, A Guide to the Collegiate Church of Stratford-on-Avon, 10. 23. Birmingham Daily Post, 24 April 1896. 24. Ibid. 25. As Sturgess notes, after the Restoration, signatories of Charles I’s death warrant were hidden by Puritans and found refuge in New England. See Shakespeare and the American Nation, 26. 26. Connerton, How Societies Remember; How Modernity Forgets. 27. The supposition that Cotton Mather may have owned a copy of the First Folio is now dispelled, as it has been shown to have originated in a family myth. See William H. Scheide, ‘The Earliest First Folio in America?’, Shakespeare Quarterly 27 (1976): 323–33 and Sturgess, Shakespeare and the American Nation, 123. 28. Birmingham Daily Post, 24 April 1896. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid.

Shakespeare Remembered1 Graham Holderness

My theme is memory […] for we possess nothing certainly except the past. – Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Abstract The continuous active presence within contemporary culture of a body of work such as Shakespeare’s induces that form of amnesis encapsulated in Ben Jonson’s phrase ‘not for an age, but for all time’: that the past may be eternally present. Rituals of commemoration, such as the annual ‘Shakespeare’s Birthday Celebrations’ held in Stratford-upon-Avon, can operate to cultivate such obliviousness, as if the author were still alive and still piling on the years. A number of modern critical strategies in literary theory, historical analysis, textual editing, and creative appropriation have offered ways of generating anamnesis, jolting the reader into remembering that the past and the present are radically discontinuous. When Heminge and Condell introduced the First Folio, they explicitly connected the absence of the author, by death departed, with the posthumous reconstruction of his works. Their language mingles epitaph and preface, mourning and celebration. The plays, maimed, and deformed, dispersed like scattered body parts, are here restored and reanimated; but their completeness is haunted by the death of their author. The edited plays now stand in for the Shakespearean body, pieced together and made whole, cur’d, and perfect of their limbes. A living monument, a resurrection of the dead, a corpse re-membered. But what is the relationship between memory and the reality it remembers? In the garden of the church of St Mary the Virgin in Aldermanbury a memorial plaque, dedicated in 1896 to Heminge and Condell, states that the world owes to them ‘all that it calls Shakespeare’; in other words, all that we have left. This monument ironically commemorates not Shakespeare, but Shakespeare’s first editors; Critical Survey doi: 10.3167/cs.2010.220204


40


memorializes not the author, but the process via which the author’s works are transmitted to the modern reader and playgoer. Shakespeare’s grave in Holy Trinity Church may also be, metaphorically and even perhaps literally, an empty tomb. This paper examines the interactions of memory as recollection and memory as re-membering.

In the heart of the city lies a garden: hortus in urbe.2 Not far from the ruins of London’s ancient city walls; close to the Guildhall, former seat of London’s civic power; just round the corner from where Shakespeare used to lodge in Silver Street, a tiny space among the clutter of buildings marks out the site of the mediaeval church of St Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury. Only the ‘footprint’of the church remains. Some paved brick elevations, a bit of grass and a few trees, a couple of benches: just a pleasant spot for a tired city worker to sit for a while and drink his cappuccino. But the tiny garden is dominated by a granite memorial, dating from 1896, flanked about with inscribed bronze plaques, and surmounted by a bust of Shakespeare. Only indirectly, however, is it a memorial to Shakespeare, since it explicitly commemorates the lives of two men who dwelt in the parish, worshipped and officiated in the church, and are buried in the former churchyard: John Heminge and Henry Condell, editors of the First Folio.3 The monument, which was originally erected in the centre of the churchyard, was unveiled by the Lord Mayor of London on 15 July 1896, in a ceremony attended by the American Ambassador and Sir Henry Irving. The plinth is constructed of Aberdeen red granite, the plaques and the bust of bronze. The head of Shakespeare is modelled on the bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, and the Droeshout engraving.4 Underneath the bust is a pale grey granite representation of an open book, which looks at first sight like that typical feature of a Victorian gravestone, the book recording the name of the deceased and inscribed with an epitaph. These granite pages however commemorate not some dear departed’s book of life, but an actual book, the 1623 First Folio. One page displays the Folio title, the other an edited extract from Heminge and Condell’s dedication to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery: We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead … without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame; onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our S H A K E S P E A R E … IOHN HEMINGE. HENRY CONDELL.

Shakespeare Remembered

41

The full text in its original context reads: We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians; without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our S H A K E S P E A R E , by humble offer of his playes, to your most noble patronage.5

The abridged version on the monument deletes the patrons, and effaces the context of patronage. Nothing here is owing to the memories of the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. The edited quotation dwells rather on the disinterested and charitable work of the editors Heminge and Condell in collecting and publishing the plays, their conception of the First Folio as a memorial tribute, or even a funeral elegy (an ‘office to the dead’), and their intention of keeping Shakespeare’s name alive in the public memory. The bronze plaques on the four sides of the monument (numbered here 1 to 4, starting with the ‘front’of the monument and working clockwise round the plinth) thus commemorate the editors, along with the author, of the First Folio. Plaque 3 commemorates Heminge and Condell in the manner of a funeral monument, indicating that they and their families lived in the parish and are buried there.6 Plaque 2 presents an extract from their prefatory ‘Address to the Great Variety of Readers’. Beneath the stone Folio that clearly marks the ‘front’ of the monument, the primary commemorative page, Plaque 1, links Heminge and Condell together with Shakespeare: To the memory of JOHN HEMINGE and HENRY CONDELL, fellow actors and personal friends of SHAKESPEARE. They lived many years in this parish and are buried here. To their disinterested affection the world owes all that it calls SHAKESPEARE.7 They alone collected his dramatic writings, regardless of pecuniary loss and without the hope of any profit, gave them to the world. THEY THUS MERITED THE GRATITUDE OF MANKIND.

Plaque 4 however further commemorates Heminge and Condell as primarily responsible for the survival of Shakespeare’s work, the world indebted to them for ‘all that it calls Shakespeare’: The fame of Shakespeare rests on his incomparable dramas. There is no evidence that he ever intended to publish them and his premature death in

42


1616 made this the interest of no one else. HEMINGE AND CONDELL had been co-partners with him in the Globe Theatre Southwark and from the accumulated plays there of thirty five years with great labour selected them. No men then living were so competent having acted with him in them for many years and well knowing his manuscript, they were published in 1623 in Folio, thus giving away their private rights therein. What they did was priceless, for the whole of his manuscripts with almost all those of the dramas of the period have perished.

‘We remember Heminge and Condell’, wrote Laurie Maguire, ‘because they remembered Shakespeare’.8 The Aldermanbury monument states the absolute opposite: we would not remember Shakespeare if Heminge and Condell had not taken the trouble to remember him. ‘Though crowned by a bust of Shakespeare’, writes Philip Ward Jackson, ‘it is not he who is commemorated, but the men who gathered his opus together after his death and presented it to the world in the First Folio edition’.9 Without these facilitators, the work would have been lost forever. Culture is the bequest of the editor, rather than of the poet. This position was fully developed in an associated book, privately published in 1896 by the man responsible for funding, commissioning, and designing the monument, Charles Clement Walker.10 Walker was a Midlands industrialist, manager of the ironworks at Donnington in Shropshire, a respected philanthropist who established reading rooms and baths for his workers, and an amateur enthusiast for Shakespeare. The Vestry Minutes of St Mary Aldermanbury for 31 July 1895 contain a transcript of Walker’s formal application to erect the monument at the church, and show that other sites had been considered, such as Blackfriars and Southwark ‘where Shakespeare’s works were first published’. But the parish of St Mary was considered more appropriate, since Heminge and Condell were buried there. Walker explains that his motivation for installing the monument was a strong sense that Heminge and Condell were hidden in Shakespeare’s giant shadow, their names unknown to all but Shakespeare scholars. To commemorate them should have been a public duty, and the monument erected by public subscription, but since they remained unknown, he had to step in to correct this injustice: Without doubt a memorial to these men should have been raised by public subscription, but wide inquiry showed that while Shakespearian scholars well knew their merits and how much mankind owe to them, their names


43

are almost unknown to the generality of readers; and of their merits, not one in a thousand of English-speaking men was conscious.11

This is not as it should be, since among public benefactors worthy of monuments […] none are more worthy to be commemorated than Heminge and Condell, to whom alone the world is indebted for this first edition of what it calls ‘Shakespeare’. Their own story of the reasons which moved them to publish this collection is such a beautiful instance of unselfishness, singular love of Shakespeare, and unaffected modesty, that the writer felt it only needed to become well understood by the public for their merits to be appreciated. The most certain way to bring about this desirable result was to erect a monument to Heminge and Condell to be before the public eye.12

The monument then celebrates Shakespeare’s work, rather than Shakespeare himself. Walker had no doubts about the value of that work, and the importance of its preservation and transmission to posterity. He alludes to, but dismisses, the Shakespeare authorship controversy, at that time focused on Francis Bacon, on the grounds that the plays could only have been written by a man of the theatre.13 He concedes, on the other hand, that the genesis of the work from the life of ‘the Stratford man’ remains hard to explain. No mystery however surrounds the process via which the works were secured for posterity: ‘while we are unable fully to explain their production in such circumstances as developed Shakespeare, we have no such difficulty in showing to whom we are indebted for the preservation of his writings’.14 Shakespeare’s works are a ‘treasure’, produced, like precious minerals from the earth, by a process we cannot fully understand. But our access to that treasure depends absolutely on the good offices of the ‘treasure-keepers’, Heminge and Condell: It is now nearly three centuries since the volume we call ‘Shakespeare’ appeared before the world. Age has not dimmed its brightness; Time has proved its pre-eminence. There is probably no other masterpiece of literature which in the circumstances of its evolution has had a more remarkable history; and for the possession of this treasure we are indebted to […] John Heminge and Henry Condell.15

The Aldermanbury monument is a strangely hybrid construction, with multiple and at first sight discontinuous commemorative functions. It looks like a tombstone, with its open volume and lapidary inscriptions, and functions as such in relation to Heminge

44


and Condell, who were both buried in the churchyard. Plaque 3 memorializes their names and other details from the parish records, in exactly the manner of a gravestone. On the other hand, the head that caps the monument is of course that of another, Shakespeare, whose name also appears on the plinth. In this dimension the monument looks more heroic than funereal, and the dark bronze bust, foreshortened as one looks up, frowns down at the viewer rather as does Karl Marx’s head in Highgate Cemetery. At this point the red granite column, with its rectangular bronze plaques bearing a pointed recollection of those not to be forgotten names, begins to look more like a war memorial. Red granite was used for some memorials set up in the 1850s in memory of the Crimean War,16 and the polished stone plinth, with its sequence of plaques around the column, became the standard form for the war memorials that were established in or adjoining most English churches after the First World War. Heminge and Condell belong to those who are ‘fallen’, not in war but in time, and are here piously and reverently commemorated, ‘lest we forget’. This dimension of the Aldermanbury monument is apposite, since the garden in which it stands is itself a war memorial. Site of a church from as early as the twelfth century (the garden preserves the bases of some mediaeval columns), St Mary’s was destroyed in the Great Fire, and was one of the fourteen churches that began construction in 1670 under the rebuilding programme of Christopher Wren.17 Wren’s church stood until engulfed in a second conflagration, Dr Goebbels’ ‘Second Great Fire of London’, the Blitz of 1940, when its roof was struck by an incendiary bomb and the building partially destroyed, only the walls left standing. On this occasion there was no Wren to undertake the rebuilding. In the aftermath of the war, British authorities assessed the destruction inflicted by enemy bombing and debated whether severely damaged buildings should be rebuilt, demolished, or preserved. Churches in particular, as homes for worshipping communities, seemed to call for reconstruction; but some were damaged beyond repair, or could be rebuilt only at substantial expense. The Ministry of Town and Country Planning held that churches should not be rebuilt unless they were of significant architectural merit, or not too badly damaged. St Mary’s however was a church designed by Wren, and the Bishop of London’s 1941 commission ruled that that ‘no Wren church, not already destroyed, nor damaged beyond the possibility of satisfactory restoration, should be removed, except in a case of most urgent necessity, and after all the schemes for entire or partial preservation have been fully considered’.18


45

An alternative to rebuilding was to leave the bombed churches in their state of ruination, particularly in the City of London, as mute but eloquent testimonies to the violence that destroyed them. Such memorials would be at once beautiful, provocative of thought, and of practical use to City workers. Ruined buildings could function as ‘memory-bearing’ sites, housing or even becoming war memorials, testimonies to a violence and injustice that should not be forgotten. Architectural historian John Summerson argued that if a church was not needed as a place of worship, ‘why not let it remain as a shell, a witness – and a beautiful one – of the acts of these times as well as of its own’.19 The idea was floated in the Architectural Review in January 1944, and a letter appeared in the Times on 15 August of the same year, under the heading ‘Ruined City Churches’, and signed by leading cultural figures such as Kenneth Clark, Julian Huxley, Lord Keynes, David Cecil, architect H.S. Goodhart-Rendel, and T.S. Eliot. Churches that had been very severely damaged should not be either restored in an inappropriate pastiche of their former style, or replaced by an entirely new building, but be left as they stood: ‘preserved in their true condition, as permanent memorials of this war’. In a relatively short time, the proposers predicted, the City would be rebuilt, and no trace of the prime battlefield of the Home Front would remain. The time will come […] when no trace of death from the air will be left in the streets of rebuilt London. At such a time the story of the Blitz may begin to seem unreal not only to visiting tourists but to a new generation of Londoners.

Whilst serving as sites of relaxation and meditation in the heart of the city, such churches would also fulfil the prime function of a memorial: ‘to remind posterity of the reality of the sacrifices upon which its apparent security has been built’.20 This position was fully developed in a booklet, Bombed Churches as War Memorials, published by the Architectural Press (1945).21 This built upon the Architectural Review piece, using many of the same illustrations, and reprinted as its frontispiece ‘Ruined City Churches’ from The Times. Introduced by Hugh Casson, it contained detailed proposals for Christ Church, Newgate, and other bombed churches in London. Casson’s essay bears the Shakespearean title, ‘Ruins for Remembrance’, and advocates preservation of the ruins as sanctuaries, open spaces, and war memorials. Even in ruins, churches can disclose ‘significance’, ‘nobility’ and ‘great beauty’.22

46


They are aloof, but have not lost contact with us, and with us they have undergone the physical trials of war, and bear its scars. But though they stand today upon what is still a battle-field, it will not always be so. It will be many years before all traces of war damage will have gone, and its strange beauty vanished from our streets. No longer will the evening sky be seen reflected in the water-pools which today lie dark and quiet between the torn and gaping walls. Soon a pock-marked parapet or a broken cornice will be to future generations the only signs of former shock and flame.23 The shabby heaps of stones, flowering with willow-herb as pink and lively as the flames which earlier sprouted from their crevices, will disappear, and with their going the ordeal through which we passed will seem remote, unreal, perhaps forgotten.

‘A church like St Mary’s’, Casson argued, stands, even when in ruins, upon sacred ground. It is, even when scarred and broken, a piece of architecture, sometimes perhaps a masterpiece. Every stone – whether fallen or in place – is a fragment of the past, part of the pattern of history. To destroy all this just because it was in the way, or because on Sunday the pews were mostly empty, is surely indefensible, however many new churches are built elsewhere to take its place.24

St Mary’s remained in this condition, as an open-air ‘chapel of ease’ for prayer and meditation, for some twenty years.25 In the earlier consultations the Ministry of Town and Country Planning had suggested that some churches might be removed and relocated, freeing up inner-city space for redevelopment. In the case of St Mary’s Aldermanbury, this happened, some time later, with a vengeance. When Westminster College asked for a ruined church to be transported to Fulton, Missouri, to build a memorial to Sir Winston Churchill, the diocese of London gave them St Mary’s. The ruins of the church were in 1966 transported to America, and a simulacrum of Wren’s church rebuilt using the reclaimed bricks. In their history of the church Hauer and Young call it a ‘phoenix’ rising from the ashes of two major conflagrations.26 Back in London the empty ‘footprint’ of the church became the Aldermanbury garden, which preserves only a few stumps of fifteenth-century columns left after the Great Fire, and the Aldermanbury monument to Heminge and Condell. The longer history of the church and its double destruction is memorialized in a slate tablet installed by Westminster College. ‘Aldermanbury Gardens’ is thus a site of commemoration on a number of different levels. It recalls a mediaeval church destroyed by fire and a


47

Restoration reconstruction ruined by another flame. It is a memorial to the Second World War and the massive violence and suffering inflicted on the civilian population of Britain by enemy bombing. And it is a garden of remembrance for Shakespeare, his editors, and their joint publication the First Folio.27 Thus it combines the functions of heritage site, war memorial, cemetery, and library, all in one. Do these separate functions really hang together? To some extent the various features of the garden seem to cohere only accidentally, a random collection of contingent objects and traces that happen to have found themselves in the same place. The mediaeval columns are, literally and metaphorically, broken off from their history. Wren’s church has been given away. Few people using the gardens would be aware that it was once a ‘Ground Zero’ marking a past atrocity. And the statue of Shakespeare now seems oddly out of place, as if it would have been better located in Southwark, where the reconstructed Globe now stands, or in the theatre district of the West End, like the statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square. Walker claimed that it was the only public bust of Shakespeare to be erected inside the City of London, and this may well still be the case.28 The City certainly didn’t want Shakespeare’s theatre when it was active and alive, so there seems no good reason why it should want to remember him dead. In another sense the monument is less about the author and his editors as it is about the book, the First Folio. The material presence of the book itself gives form to the structure.29 The book is there, openly displayed for the observer to read. It is there in the bronze plaques that resemble pages, one of them duplicating an actual page from the Folio. It is there in the monument’s commemoration of the men responsible for its publication. Like an empty tomb that encloses only the memory of its incumbent, the monument inscribes the presence of the departed in literary form, combining the memorial capacities of sepulchre and book. John Weever’s definition of a monument recognized the parallel capacities of monument and book to act as memorials: A Monument is a thing erected, made, or written, for a memorial of some remarkable action, fit to be transferred to future posterities […]. Now aboue all remembrances (by which men haue endeuoured, euen in despight of death to giue vnto their Fames eternitie) for worthinesse and continuance, bookes, or writings, haue euer had the preheminence …30

48


This process of mementifying the book as proxy for the author’s fame is clearly operating at several removes, since the First Folio was itself so pointedly a memorial tribute to the author Shakespeare. The dedication is defined as ‘an office to the dead’, and throughout it echoes the language of the burial service: ‘we most humbly consecrate to your H. H. these remaines of your servant Shakespeare …’ The address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ makes it clear that the editors saw themselves as executors to a will, undertaking on behalf of the deceased the tasks he himself was prevented by death from fulfilling. The gathering of the works on behalf of the author announces his constitutive absence from the process, and renders the act of publication a posthumous service of commemoration. Heminge and Condell then extend this figure to suggest that in collecting the works the editors are in one sense reconstructing the author ‘by death departed’, piecing back together the fragments dispersed by time and corruption. Here the plays are presented ‘cur’d and perfect of their limbs’, as if in the process the body of the author is being restored, even resurrected. It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to have bene wished, that the Author himself had liv’d to have set forth, and overseen his owne writings; But since it hath bin ordain’d otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to have collected & publish’d them; and so to have publish’d them, as where (before) you were abus’d with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos’d them : even those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived the[m].

As Laurie Maguire puts it, deploying the pun that supplies my title, the editors ‘not only remember Shakespeare, they literally re-member him’, using a ‘language of embalmment’, and an ‘anthropomorphising vocabulary’ in which plays are conceived, maimed, deformed, cured, and furnished with limbs.31 The Folio, says Maguire ‘is both a relic of the deceased and a memorial to him’.32 She quotes John Weever’s more literal definition of a funeral monument as ‘a receptacle or sepulchre, purposely made, erected, or built, to receiue a dead corps, and to preserue the same from violation’.33 The Folio was designed to contain the corpus of the author’s writings, both to retain memory of them and to preserve them from violation (i.e. textual corruption, piracy etc.).


49

Thus the Aldermanbury monument is a duplication of the literary monument that is the First Folio. Since it honours Heminge and Condell rather than Shakespeare, it appears to commemorate the editorial construct rather than the eternally living author; in its lapidary form it memorializes the book above the lives of those who contributed to its publication. What the world owes to Heminge and Condell is not ‘Shakespeare’, but ‘all that it calls Shakespeare’, a culturally constructed artefact that inevitably seems detached from the originating author. But this detachment had already of course been effected in the paratextual matter of the First Folio itself, where Shakespeare the author is clearly absented from the scene of production, and the plays ritually called together in order to construct a new author-function that replaces the dead author. The monument completes this process of uncoupling Shakespeare the author from Shakespeare the man. Hence this literary monument to the First Folio belongs in the garden which was a churchyard, where it commemorates the buried editors who worshipped at the vanished mediaeval church. Or to put it another way, the Aldermanbury monument is a petrified duplication of the bibliographical monument that is the Folio. But does it have any but a coincidental connection with the subsequently acquired significance of the garden as a war memorial? We need first to establish what kind of war memorial this is. The garden remembers the Second World War from a particular perspective, one that is quite different, as the signatories to ‘Ruined City Churches’ observed, from the ubiquitous cenotaphs that remembered the fallen of the First World War. The latter list primarily the names of those killed in action, and are imbrued with the heroic and elegiac culture we see re-enacted on each annual Remembrance Day, encapsulated in the continuing use in inscriptions and church liturgies of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’.34 The Aldermanbury garden remembers the war on the Home Front, ‘the Blitz’, the war of Hitler’s strategic bombing campaign that devastated London and other British cities in 1940–1941. St Mary’s was struck by an incendiary bomb on the night of 30 December 1940. This is how The Times reported the devastation begun on the 29 December, when St Paul’s was hit:35 Fire Bombs Rained On London Waves of enemy aircraft attacked London for some hours last night, raining hundreds of incendiary bombs indiscriminately over a wide area of the capital and its outskirts. The enemy appeared to be concentrating on setting fire to as many buildings as possible.

50


The next night, 30 December, St Mary’s was one of eight Wren churches damaged or destroyed.36 Noel Mander, a soldier on leave, watched St Mary’s collapse: I saw that night St Mary, Aldermanbury; St Vedast-alias-Foster, my own church – I saw them all burn, and it was a sensation that I will never forget – hearing the bells fall down the tower, hearing the organ burn, because the hot air blowing through the organ pipes almost sounded as if the poor old organs were shrieking in agony at their destruction.37

The emphasis in the press reports is on the cruelty of the attacks, the intensity of the suffering inflicted, the heroism of firefighters and other Home Front defenders, and the refusal of the British people to accept defeat. As Prime Minister Churchill inspected the ruins on the following day, according to The Times, people sang snatches of the old First World War song ‘Tipperary’: ‘Are we downhearted? No!’ This music-hall insouciance of the blitzed population has been questioned, condemned as mere propaganda, and even ridiculed.38 But though the public emotion may not have been as ‘resolutely cheerful’ as The Times insisted, it was certainly one of heroic endurance and stubborn determination. Churchill’s speech of September 1940, cited in the same Times article, genuinely captured and set the tone of the nation:39 These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler’s invasion plan. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children that he will terrorize and cow the people of this Mighty Imperial city […]. Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners whose forebears played a leading part in the establishment of Parliamentary institutions and who have been bred to value freedom far above their lives […]. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagrations he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe, and until the Old World and the New can join hands to rebuild the temples of man’s freedom and man’s honour on foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.

Churchill went on to pay tribute to the men and women working for the nation’s defences, air-raid wardens and firefighters, those whose exemplary fortitude and courage constituted a form of domestic heroism:


51

I express my admiration for the exemplary manner in which all the air-raid precaution services in London are being discharged, especially the fire brigades, whose work has been so heavy and also dangerous.

These were the unsung heroes celebrated by T.S. Eliot, Kensington air-raid warden, in his ‘Defence of the Islands’: those ‘for whom the paths of glory are / The lanes and the streets of Britain’.40 The British people, Churchill says, are ‘a people who will not flinch or weary of the struggle, hard and protracted though it will be’, but will ‘rather draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival, and of a victory won not only for ourselves, but for all – a victory won not only for our own times, but for the long and better days that are to come’. As a war memorial, the Aldermanbury garden does not commemorate the heroism and sacrifice of the front line, as did the cenotaphs of the First World War. In this war, wrote the signatories of the 12 August 1944 letter to The Times, ‘conditions have been different. England itself has been in the battle and London is still in it’. The garden remembers not those warriors who fell on far-off battlefields, but rather the little people, the men, women, and children, the young and old and unborn, who endured the war on the Home Front. Those who, night after ‘interminable night’,41 suffered violence from the air, and day after day crawled out of the shelters or the ruins to begin life all over again; or were taken out dead from the rubble; or were never seen again, and remained to rest in unvisited tombs. And here we can identify the deeper congruence that links the meaning of the gardens, and the meaning of the statue that was erected some seventy years before the Blitz, and almost exactly a century before the church’s westward migration. For through the Aldermanbury monument, Heminge and Condell are commemorated precisely as such heroes of the people, ordinary men whose virtuous actions secured for them an extraordinary destiny. They were only ancillary participants in the gestation of the theatrical work that became the Folio, but without their disinterested and charitable intervention, there would have been no Folio: nothing for the world to call Shakespeare. In the same way the victims of the Blitz were passive sufferers, on the receiving end of military action, and yet essential contributors to the ultimate victory over fascism. In his treatise Charles Clement Walker provides a brief biographical sketch of Shakespeare, following the narrative of Rowe’s biography. He clearly had no problem accepting Shakespeare’s humble origins as the son of a tradesman, possibly a

52


butcher, and his lack of formal education. As a philanthropic Victorian industrialist Walker was only too happy to think of Shakespeare emerging from such an underprivileged background, and bearing with him to London a promising package of Victorian values. Shakespeare had both ability and ‘industry’, but also virtues of temperance and steadiness that rendered him a more reliable asset to the theatre than the typically dissolute university men who wrote for it. Shakespeare, says Walker, probably began to make his way as a writer since he was always there to patch up scripts while the wits were recovering from their debaucheries. As a craftsman, actor, and writer, Shakespeare was concerned only with professional success, and cared nothing about the preservation of his work. If the survival of the works had depended on him, then all would have been lost, either through careless dispersion, or in some such disaster as the burning of the Globe. There could hardly be anything more hopeless when the earth closed on Shakespeare’s grave than the expectation that any more would be heard of his unprinted plays, beyond the applause that they might be greeted with when produced at the Globe Theatre, whose property almost, if not entirely they were; for there were numerous other dramas which were played to suit the public taste for novelty and change, and there is no evidence that his plays would have had any other fate than those dramas, of which most have passed away, forgotten or perished.42

Fortunately for posterity, however, the works were rescued from the flames and preserved by men who were neither dissolute university wits, nor insouciant bohemian artists, but solid and public-spirited citizens.43 The works were salvaged from that moral and literal conflagration, conveyed across the river, securely deposited inside the City, and used to prepare the First Folio for publication. Heminge and Condell displayed themselves through this undertaking to be honest and ingenuous men, modest and unassuming in their approach, industrious and careful in their procedures. Their motivation was purely charitable, since they looked for no profit from the undertaking, and undertook the work purely out of friendship, concern for the public interest, and respect for the memory of their late friend and colleague. Although the monument was erected to remember Heminge and Condell, and their indispensible contribution to the preservation of ‘all that we call Shakespeare’, their lives are relatively anonymized rather than foregrounded. No attempt was made to represent them, since there are no surviving physical likenesses to reproduce, and it is


53

Shakespeare’s effigy that commands the structure. Although the monument was designed to install Heminge and Condell into the public memory, they are paradoxically huddled back under Shakespeare’s shadow. All three men are in another sense absorbed into the monument that is the book; but the book remains synonymous in the public mind with the name ‘Shakespeare’. In commemorating Heminge and Condell, Walker was trying to do what Thomas Hardy attempted at around the same time in Jude the Obscure (1895) for ‘the struggling men and women’ of the working class, those who were ‘the reality of Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster’. In this ‘palpitating, varied, and compendious […] book of humanity’ that is the common people, Jude recognizes himself: He saw that his destiny lay not with these, but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers live.44

In the end it is of course the name of Christminster that is remembered, but Hardy at least sought to reveal some of its hidden histories. As a war memorial, Aldermanbury Gardens remembers the past in a similar way, from the perspective of the disappeared. History is written here not from the vantage point of the victors, but on behalf of the defeated, the vanished who were buried under the rubble, many of whom share with Heminge and Condell the communal graveyard of blitzed London.45 Their bodies were dispersed and scattered, their names lost and forgotten. But they are there, buried ‘deep with the first dead’, to be mourned and ‘remembered’ in this quiet and unassuming spot.46 Their traces remain in the air, fittingly housed by the memory of the church that is also gone, but not forgotten. Jennifer Wallace wrote of another ‘blitz’, 11 September 2001, as an event that challenged the capacities of memory. She describes two ‘public projects for retrieving and mourning the dead’ from the World Trade Centre:47 One was the grim excavation of the rubble at Ground Zero and the search for traces of the 2,823 people who died there. The other was the daily publication in the New York Times of a brief biography of each victim, a 200–word profile accompanied by a photograph which soon became well known collectively as the ‘Portraits of Grief’.

54


The portraits are themselves ‘powerful works of tragedy bringing a human dimension to an inhuman disaster’, and ‘giving shape to the disaster by transforming ordinary lives into significant narratives’. Wallace then compares the search for traces of the 2,823 people who died with examples from classical tragedy: the literal and figurative disintegration of the body, and the human effort to reassemble or reconstruct, to re-member what has been dispersed and fragmented, to be found in The Bacchae and Hamlet. The archaeological excavation of Ground Zero was a search for certainty in the recovery of remains, a work of mourning like Agave’s desire to have the limbs of her dismembered son ‘joined decently together’; or like Hamlet’s mission to ‘set […] right’ a disjointed time. As the excavation progressed, it became increasingly obvious that nowhere near all the victims would be accounted for. Wallace quotes a firefighter, faced with a dwindling pile of rubble and a list of 1,800 people still untraced: ‘You’ve got a great number of people that you want to find, and you’ve got a certain amount of dirt that’s left. And there’s a gap. That gap is going to be a sorrowful one’. The ‘gap’ is literally, as Wallace observes, between ‘statistics and physical dust’. But as a ‘gap’ of sorrow, it also represents the space of tragedy, the lacuna between hope and despair, between ‘consolation and disillusion’. Such gaps are the enduring legacy of unnatural disasters like the Blitz, or 9/11, or the 7 July bombings in London. But gaps to be bridged, as Wallace observes, holes to be filled with memory and mourning, spaces in which to ‘write stories.’ Aldermanbury gardens is also one of history’s holes, a gap from which life and matter have been evacuated, leaving an empty space free for the exercising of memory. The Aldermanbury monument remembers Shakespeare not as a great individual genius, but as a pluralistic body consisting of many members. ‘For the body’, as St Paul observed, ‘is not one member, but many’ (1 Corinthians 12.14). Prominent among the associated members who are part of the body of Shakespeare are Heminge and Condell. Here, in this garden, they are appropriately remembered, their reputations fittingly restored, for as Paul says, ‘those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour’ (1 Corinthians 12.23). The monument invites a Eucharistic commemoration, in which every member is a part of the whole: ‘though we are many, we are one body’. On the site of the old church, the elusive traces of those disjecta membra that were our forebears are also brought together in the same kind of loving remembrance, ‘folded in a single party’.48


55

This double function of memory as reconstruction and recuperation is firmly embedded inside the First Folio. One of the commendatory poems affixed to the 1632 Folio edition of Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, under the superscription ‘I.M.S.’ depicts the dramatist’s mind as a mirror that can bring an image of the past into immediate visibility:49 A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear And equal surface can make things appear Distant a thousand years, and represent Them in their lively colours’just extent … (ll. 1–4).

The mirror of Shakespeare’s mind makes available, to present vision, images of a remote past, causes things that are ‘distant a thousand years’ to appear. But it also simulates a past reality by using a contemporary performative medium, makes present things appear to be distant a thousand years. To represent, and to re-present; to familiarize and to estrange. Shakespeare’s imagination could make things from a thousand years ago appear, but he could do so only by making his stage and his actors take on the convincing appearance of a thousand-year-old reality. The poem thus grasps the two-way process of commemoration, in which the past has to be made to be re-made, its reconstruction being also its initial construction. At the same time the ‘things’ recollected from the past clearly retain their own integrity, or there would be no sense in which they could be misrepresented. The past was alive, is now dead, but can be revived by the power of memory. We do not simply make up the past as we go along. But where is it? Confronted with the elegist’s question, ubi sunt?, we can only reply, Hic et ubique. Here, there, and everywhere. Not a trace remains on this spot of Wren’s church of St Mary Aldermanbury. Yet the garden remembers it. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth …50

Of the Blitz the garden formally commemorates, nothing beside remains. But the space is full of memory, and as Evelyn Waugh observed, ‘we possess nothing certainly except the past’.51 Chemical scientists speak of inanimate substances such as water having a ‘memory’. Experiments show that ‘much diluted solutions appear to behave as though they contain absent solutes that had once been

56


present’.52 These observations seem to confute the fact that the hydrogen bonds holding molecules of water together break so easily and rapidly. Yet as Martin Chaplin indicates, ‘the behaviour of a large population of water molecules may be retained even if that of individual molecules is constantly changing. Such behaviour is easy to observe: a sea wave may cross an ocean, remaining a wave and with dependence on its history, but its molecular content is continuously changing’.53 A church like St Mary’s, observed Hugh Casson, stands, ‘even when in ruins, upon sacred ground’. The sanctity conferred by the consecration of a building somehow survives that building’s destruction.54 But whence does such ‘sacredness’ derive? What the memory of the ruined church remembers is not merely an ecclesiastical ritual, but the suffering of a people. The churches have, in Casson’s words, ‘undergone the physical trials of war, and bear its scars’. This is the place’s memory, and it is in this sense that ‘every stone and fragment of the past is part of the pattern of history’.55 Walker presented Heminge and Condell as emblems of selfsacrifice, businessmen who yet undertook their work ‘without the hope of profit’, motivated by ‘disinterested affection’, unselfish love and ‘unaffected modesty’.56 The memory of the Blitz also recalls sacrifice, and the use of a commemorative monument would be ‘to remind posterity of the reality of the sacrifices upon which its apparent security has been built’.57 The British people, Churchill affirmed, would never admit defeat, but would ‘rather draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival’. The loss of individual prestige or personal fame entailed in publishing a great writer’s book, or in assisting anonymously in a great humanitarian war effort, represent parallel forms of the self-sacrifice theologically defined as kenosis, the voluntary emptying of the self into a greater purpose. In Dante’s Purgatorio the spirit of Arnaut Daniel begs Dante to remember him, and pray for him, in order to help assuage his suffering, ‘Tempra ma dolour’. Then he turns to embrace the purgatorial flame, and is lost in the refining fire: ‘Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina’. The story of Aldermanbury Gardens is a story of fire. Beginning with the destruction of the mediaeval church of St Mary the Virgin in the Great Fire of London, to the conflagration that ruined Wren’s church in 1940, the site has endured ordeal after ordeal, ‘consumed by either fire or fire’.58 Wren’s church was a phoenix that twice rose from the ashes, unfurled its wings, and flew away westwards. The


57

First Folio commemorated by the Aldermanbury monument was perhaps, if Shakespeare’s manuscripts did (as some have thought) perish in the fire that destroyed the Globe theatre, another phoenix resurrection, keeping alive the eternal flame of Shakespeare’s genius. ‘Age has not dimmed its brightness’, wrote Charles Clement Walker. The garden remembers the incendiary violence of war, but also that fire of patriotic pride identified (convincingly at that point in history) by Churchill with the great cause of humanity: What [Hitler] has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagrations he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe, and until the Old World and the New can join hands to rebuild the temples of man’s freedom and man’s honour on foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.

Churchill’s rhetoric echoes Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and the words Latimer is said to have spoken to Ridley before he was enveloped by the flames: ‘Be of good cheer, Ridley; and play the man. We shall this day, by God’s grace, light up such a candle in England, as I trust, will never be put out’. Thus the pyrotechnic devastation of London is redefined as creative sacrifice by reference back to the ‘intolerable shirt of flame’ worn by the Protestant martyrs.59 Amidst the ruins of London’s churches, in the aftermath of the Blitz, Hugh Casson saw the efflorescence of new vegetable growth replacing, but also replicating, the fires that had recently devoured them: ‘among the shabby heaps of stones, flowering with willowherb as pink and lively as the flames which earlier sprouted from their crevices’. Air-raid warden T.S. Eliot saw the same persistent synthesis of suffering and creativity, the same ubiquitous merging of flower with flame: When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.60

Like the church at Little Gidding, Aldermanbury Garden is another place where it is possible to find ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’; England and nowhere; never and always.61 A place where silent voices can be heard. A place where the dead can, at last, have their say.

58


And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.62

Notes 1. This empirical study builds on previous critical and theoretical work I have undertaken concerning history, memory, and mourning. See especially Shakespeare: The Histories (London: Macmillan, 2000); Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003); ‘Vanishing Point: Looking for Hamlet’, Shakespeare 1:2 (December 2005), 154–73; ‘“Mots d’escalier”: Clio, Orpheus, Eurydice’, in Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories, ed. Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Dermot Cavanagh, and Steve Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 219–40; and ‘“I covet your skull”: Desire and Death in Hamlet’, Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007), 223–36. I have left implicit the obvious parallels, especially in terms of reconstruction debates, between the Blitz of 1940 and 9/11; but for the latter see my ‘Shakespeare and Terror’, in Shakespeare Yearbook: Shakespeare after 9/11, ed. Matthew Biberman, Julia Reinhardt Lupton, and Graham Holderness (Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010). I am grateful to my wife Marilyn Holderness for finding Aldermanbury gardens, and for help with ‘the memory of water’. 2. A garden in the city. 3. It has of course been argued that they did not act as editors. See John Dover Wilson, ‘The Task of Heminge and Condell’, in Studies in the First Folio (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 54–55. Doubt has also been cast on their authorship of the dedication and address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’. The monument is a tribute to practical men, commemorating what they did, rather than what they said, and my arguments do not depend on any assumptions about their literary or scholarly capacities. 4. Philip Ward Jackson describes the bust as ‘a painstaking attempt to amalgamate the two portraits of Shakespeare which were supposed to possess a flawless pedigree’. See Public Sculpture of the City of London (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 2. 5. ‘To the Most Noble and Incomparable Paire of Brethren’, in Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies: A Facsimile of the First Folio 1623 (London: Routledge, 1998). 6. Heminge and Condell both served as ‘sidesmen’ in the church. Charles Connell in They Gave Us Shakespeare: John Heminge and Henry Condell (Stocksfield: Oriel Press, 1982) incorrectly describes them as ‘churchwardens’. In the Anglican church sidespeople report to churchwardens. 7. The same qualifying assertion is to be found in Connell’s They Gave Us Shakespeare, which begins with a survey of the Aldermanbury monument, and recuperates Walker’s tone and line of argument: ‘without their devotion, assiduity and indefatigable efforts, the world would have been poorer by what is generally referred to as the Shakespeare canon’ (2). See also Christian E. Hauer, Jr., and William A. Young, A Comprehensive History of the London Church and Parish of St Mary, the Virgin, Aldermanbury: The Phoenix of Aldermanbury (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994): ‘their contribution to the preservation of his works cannot be overestimated’ (80).


59

8. Laurie E. Maguire, ‘Composition/Decomposition: Singular Shakespeare and the Death of the Author’, in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 135–53 (p. 139). 9. Jackson, Public Sculpture, 2. 10. Charles Clement Walker, John Heminge and Henry Condell, Friends and Fellowactors of Shakespeare, and What the World Owes to Them (London: privately printed, 1896). 11. Walker, John Heminge and Henry Condell, 3. 12. Walker, John Heminge and Henry Condell, 4. 13. Henry Irving placed the same emphasis in the speech he delivered at the unveiling. In October of the same year, laying the foundation stone of the Dulwich Public Library, Irving had eulogized Edward Alleyn as a fellow ‘player’; and in his speech at the unveiling in Aldermanbury of a monument to Heminge and Condell, he had taken the same tone: ‘these two players who lived in affectionate friendship to another player, William Shakespeare’. Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving (London: Longman, Green, 1908), 2:254. 14. Walker, John Heminge and Henry Condell, 6. 15. Walker, John Heminge and Henry Condell, 5–6. 16. An example is the red granite obelisk in the grounds of St Philip’s Cathedral in Birmingham. 17. Eric de Mare, Wren’s London (London: Folio Society, 1975), 87. 18. Quoted in Peter J. Larkham and Joe Nasr, ‘Bombed Churches as Memorials and Mementoes: Physical Traces in the Urban Landscape’, 12–13. Available at www.lhds.bcu.ac.uk/.../Birmingham_churches_conference_paper_spoken_2.doc [Accessed 2 February 2010]. 19. Quoted Larkham and Nasr, ‘Bombed Churches’, 6. 20. The Times, 15 August 1944. 21. Bombed Churches as War Memorials (Cheam: Architectural Press, 1945). A reprint of the August 1944 letter to The Times forms the frontispiece. 22. Bombed Churches as War Memorials, 21. 23. Cf. T.S. Eliot: ‘Water and fire shall rot / The marred foundations we forgot / Of sanctuary and choir’. ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 216. 24. Bombed Churches as War Memorials, 11–12. 25. Hauer and Young, Phoenix of Aldermanbury, 359. 26. The Doha Players Theatre, destroyed by a suicide-bomber, is planned to re-appear as the ‘Phoenix Theatre’ of Qatar. See Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, ‘“Rudely Interrupted”: Shakespeare and Terrorism’, Critical Survey 19:3 (2007), 107–23. 27. A management consultancy company offering ‘strategic counsel’ and investment advice goes by the name of ‘Heminge and Condell’, though the names of the partners are Wilkinson and Eidinow. The company name invokes the historic Heminge and Condell partnership as a model of constructive facilitation. 28. ‘It may be noted that this is the only public bust of Shakespeare in the City of London’ (Walker, John Heminge and Henry Condell, 26). One of the residential blocks in the Barbican is called ‘Shakespeare Tower’ (see my Shakespeare Myth [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988], ‘Introduction’). 29. The illustration in Walker’s pamphlet (facing p. 25) enhances this effect by showing the Folio enlarged and re-scaled relative to the monument.

60


30. John Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments (London, 1631), B1r. 31. Maguire, ‘Composition/Decomposition’, 142. 32. Maguire, 139. 33. Maguire, 138. 34. Walker’s phrase ‘Age has not dimmed its brightness’ echoes Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (‘Age cannot wither her’) and anticipates Binyon’s now famous ‘Age shall not weary them’ from ‘For the Fallen’. 35. The Times, 30 December 1940, p. 1 36. Hauer and Young state that the church was hit on 29 December, but the Times reports appear to indicate that it was on the following night. Phoenix of Aldermanbury (353). 37. Quoted in Hauer and Young, Phoenix of Aldermanbury, 354–55. 38. Especially in Angus Calder’s The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990). 39. Quoted in The Times, 12 September 1940, p. 1. 40. ‘Defence of the Islands’, Collected Poems. 41. T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, 220. 42. Walker, John Heminge and Henry Condell, 13. 43. A grocer and a publican, as they are sometimes scathingly described. 44. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Penguin, 1995), 118. 45. ‘Ruined City Churches’ calls for ‘a memorial to the thousands of Londoners who died in the Blitz for whom those walls of calcined stone were once not monuments, but tombs’. 46. Dylan Thomas, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London’, Deaths and Entrances (London: J. M. Dent, 1946), 8. 47. Jennifer Wallace, ‘Tragedy grapples with gap between human meaningfulness and despair’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 6 September 2002, p. 16. Later expanded as ‘“We Can’t Make More Dirt …”: Tragedy and the Excavated Body’, Cambridge Quarterly 32:2 (2003), 103–11. 48. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, 220. 49. ‘I.M.S.’, ‘On Worthy Master Shakespeare and his Poems’ (1632), in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xli. 50. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Collected Poems, 196. 51. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (London: Penguin, 1945), 203. 52. Martin F. Chaplin, ‘The Memory of Water: An Overview’, Homeopathy 96:3 (July 2007), 143. 53. Martin F. Chaplin, ‘The Memory of Water’, 144. See also my ‘“Dressing Old Words New”: Shakespeare, Science, and Appropriation’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1:2 (Fall/Winter, 2006). 54. For the difficult relationship between place and the sacred see my ‘Rome, Multiversal City: The Material and the Immaterial in Religious Tourism’, Cross Currents 59:3 (Autumn 2009) (New York: Wiley Blackwell), 342–48; and ‘“The undiscovered country”: Philip Pullman and the “Land of the Dead”’, Literature and Theology 21:3 (September 2007), 276–92. 55. ‘History is a pattern / Of timeless moments’. See ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, 222. 56. Walker, John Heminge and Henry Condell, 4. 56. The Times, 15 August 1944. 57. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, 221. 59. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, 221.


60. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, 223. 61. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, 215. 62. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems, 215.

61

Physical Trauma and (Adapt)ability in Titus Andronicus CAROLINE LAMB

Abstract The homology between the fragmented body politic and its suffering physical bodies in Titus Andronicus seems to suggest that Shakespeare represents physical disability negatively: as corruption, disorder, incapacity. By relying upon a corporeal metaphor of fragmentation to characterise the political state of Rome, Shakespeare makes the traumatised or dismembered body bear a negative ideological burden; political inefficacy seems to be equated with the violated body. Inversely, and to the same effect, Titus and Lavinia’s violated bodies seem to render their access to political and social agency difficult, if not impossible. However, at both the metaphorical and material level, Shakespeare endows the dis-abled body with the capacity to heal or adapt itself under the most extenuating circumstances. Overcoming physical barriers to communication and action, Titus and Lavinia enable themselves to enact revenge. This essay argues that the adaptability of the political and physical body in Titus suggests a potentially affirmative way of reconceptualising the physically incomplete body – not as a disabled entity but as a body that can suffer partial losses and still survive, succeed even, if its constituent parts form their own internally coherent body. ‘The body may have imperfections and deformities, yea may be bereaved of whole parts, and yet retain still the name and nature of a body.’ Edward Forset (1606)

In an article on disability and visuality, disability theorist Lennard J. Davis writes, ‘the disabled body is always the reminder of the body about to come apart at the seams. It provides a vision of, a caution about, the body as a construct held together willfully, always threatening to become its individual parts’.1 Davis’s comment resonates powerfully with Shakespeare’s depiction of bodies, both Critical Survey doi: 10.3167/cs.2010.220103

Volume 22, Number 1, 2010: 41–57 ISSN 0011-1570 (Print), ISSN 1752-2293 (Online)

42


metaphorical and tangible, in Titus Andronicus, where both the body politic of Rome and the bodies of its citizens ‘come apart at the seams’. ‘Headless’ at the beginning of the play, Shakespeare’s Rome suffers from an inability to unify its constituent parts under one harmonious politico-civil paradigm, an inability that is hauntingly echoed in the physical mutilations and dismemberments of the Andronicus family. The homology between the fragmented body politic and its suffering physical bodies in Titus seems to suggest that Shakespeare represents physical disability negatively: as corruption, disorder, incapacity. By relying upon a corporeal metaphor of fragmentation to characterise the political state of Rome, Shakespeare makes the traumatised or dismembered body bear a negative ideological burden; political inefficacy is equated with the violated body. Inversely, and to the same effect, Titus and Lavinia’s violated bodies seem to render their access to political and social agency difficult, if not impossible. However, at both the metaphorical and material level, Shakespeare endows the disabled body with the capacity to heal or adapt itself under the most extenuating circumstances. Overcoming physical barriers to communication and action, Titus and Lavinia enable themselves to act and to revenge. These characters demonstrate an adaptability that, despite their fatal absorption into the revenge cycle, further enables another body, the broken political body, to heal and reassemble under a new head. In Titus Andronicus, physical trauma does not represent or engender an immutably disabled condition, but rather becomes the condition by which bodies strategically adjust and adapt, allowing ability to flourish. The play’s persistent interest in how the parts of a body – whether political (Rome’s body politic) or tangible (Titus and Lavinia’s bodies) – relate to the whole, leads me to focus on the theme of corporeal structure and unity. Titus consistently links a body’s ability (or disability) to the relationship between its constituent parts, signaling this linkage early on in the play by highlighting the importance of putting an appropriate head on ‘headless Rome’ (1.1.186).2 When the people of Rome name Titus in the election for emperor, he responds by alluding to the need for harmony among the body parts of the political body, when he claims his head is unfit: ‘A better head her [Rome’s] glorious body fits / Than his that shakes for age and feebleness’ (1.1.187–88). Throughout the play, Shakespeare not only continues to invoke and draw upon the ubiquitous body politic trope, but, like other Tudor writers, highlights within this

Physical Trauma and (Adapt)ability in Titus Andronicus

43

metaphorical body ‘the division and specialization of labour among individuals constituting the proper arms, legs, heart, brain, and other members of the body politic’.3 Titus Andronicus shows that in order for a body politic to flourish, the parts of the body (its people) must concordantly work with one another, paying due attention to their appropriate roles. In examining the fragmentation and restoration of Rome’s body politic in Titus, I show how the success or failure of such a body is seen to rest upon the unified interrelationship of its parts. As I move from the paradigm of the ‘properly functioning’ body politic as a cohesive sum of its parts to an analysis of the physical body, I raise the possibility that the way Titus and Lavinia navigate their own bodily challenges might also be related to the idea of internal cohesion. Suffering the loss of crucial body parts, both characters are forced to rethink the internal relationship between all parts of their bodies, to develop a new physical habitus that enables them to communicate and to act. In Titus Andronicus Shakespeare endows the body – whether political or personal – with a remarkable persistence and adaptability, enabling it to suffer loss, fragmentation and trauma and yet generate its own recuperation. Within this discursive model, the body is enabled, not disabled, by challenges to its own structural integrity, since it is ultimately able to reinstate a functional and effective relationship between the parts and the whole. To underscore the body’s adaptability, the play subjects both the metaphorical body of Rome and the tangible bodies of Lavinia and Titus (all analysed in turn in this paper) to extreme trauma and potential dissolution. One clear instance of a potentially devastating fragmentation of the body politic occurs in the early conflict between Titus and his sons. Shakespeare uses a familial rift to demonstrate on a microcosmic level the logic that holds the larger body politic together: when the parts do not mutually service the whole, they also sacrifice their ability to harmoniously relate to one another, disrupting the entire bodily structure. When Titus and his sons do not agree upon Bassianus’s actions early on in the play (when he usurps Lavinia from Saturninus), they demonstrate underlying differences of opinion regarding their own roles in supporting the ‘whole body’ of Rome. In Titus’s view, by facilitating Bassianus’s claim to Lavinia, Lucius and Mutius commit ‘treason’ against the emperor; the allegiance of these ‘traitors,’ however, is to the logic of ‘suum cuique,’ and thus to Bassianus, who ‘in justice seizeth but his own’ (1.1.280). These men differently conceive of their roles as honorable,

44


law-abiding citizens of Rome. Their parts are at odds with one another. Their rift demonstrates how the logic of structural harmony that holds the political body together may become ruptured under circumstances such as these. In order to serve the state well, contributing to its total well-being, Titus and his sons must coordinate their efforts. The sound structure of Rome’s body derives its strength not just from the discrete relation of each part to the whole (what might be termed a ‘vertical’ relationship to power), but also from the ‘horizontal’ concord among multiple parts. Indeed, this is the message given to us by the ‘belly fable’ in Coriolanus. Political and social fragmentation could threaten a body politic if the ‘instruments’4 (or parts) of the nation’s body did not ‘see and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel, / And, mutually participate, [to] minister / Unto the appetite and affection common / Of the whole body’ (1.1.99–102).5 A clash among ‘instruments’ of the nation can be both cause and effect of the way these instruments differently interpret their individual connections to the ‘whole body’. When Titus and his children cease to ‘mutually participate’ in an agreed upon greater socio-political good, they concomitantly lose a shared understanding of their own roles and the structural interrelationship between these roles. In this microcosmic instance, the proper roles are those dictated by the hierarchy of familial structure, wherein paternal authority is honoured and obeyed. The established paradigm of filial obedience is one which Shakespeare uses in turn to stand in for the intrinsic hierarchy dictated by the paradigm of the body. Since Titus’s sons transgress and violate the hierarchical structure in which they are inscribed, Titus repudiates his paternal ties, claiming Mutius and Lucius are no sons of his, and refusing to admit Mutius’s body within the family burial site. Marcus, Quintus and Lucius plead for Mutius’s proper burial and reinvoke the discourse of filial/fraternal love, in an attempt to reinstate the normative terms of hereditary and social bonds. They address Titus as ‘father’ and ‘brother’ (1.1.367–71). Yet their very use of these terms points to a deep fissure between Titus and his kin with regards to how each man understands his part in the communal structure comprising the larger political body. For only moments earlier, Titus has expressed to Lucius his rejection of such kinship relations: ‘Nor thou, nor he [Mutius], are any sons of mine; / My sons would never so dishonour me’ (1.1.290–91). The text uses this conflict concerning the nomenclature and structure of familial


45

relations to indicate a discord among parts that threatens to vitiate the body politic, emphasising in this metaphorical treatment of the body the importance of internal cohesion. Though Shakespeare places much of the play’s action in an interim period of disorder, corruption and fragmentation of the body politic, he does so to ultimately depict the body’s resilience, using the metaphorical restoration of Rome’s political body in tandem with the tangible resilience of Rome’s physical bodies, as I show below. This resilience is shown in the body’s ability to ultimately restore functional internal order, to achieve structural harmony by ‘knitting’ together its ‘broken limbs again into one body’ (5.3.69–71). Stress or trauma inflicted upon a physical or metaphorical body need not permanently disable it if that body can foster and maintain an internally functional structure, wherein each part possesses ‘membership in a greater totality’ and the whole ‘logically joins with the part to form a dialectical partnership’.6 Rome’s body is dysfunctional during Saturninus’s reign because its constituent parts work against each other, and thus against the whole, according to the logic driving the body politic. Yet I argue the text gives us good reason to believe that the traumatised political body can achieve genuine unity under Lucius, attesting to the body’s regenerative potential if it can form a cohesive sum of its parts.7 The difference between Saturninus and Lucius as leaders suggests that the failure of Saturninus’s political regime issues forth from an unsound bodily structure, a shaky support for the body’s head, which only generates further disjointedness within the state-body. By the end of his rule, even Saturninus himself acknowledges it is Lucius whom ‘the common people love so much’ and that ‘they have wished that Lucius were their emperor’ (5.1.72, 76). Molly Easo Smith persuasively argues that Lucius’s crowning ominously parallels Saturninus’s, noting how ‘the “common voice” hails Lucius as emperor even as it had done Titus in the opening scene’ and that ‘Marcus again appears as a spokesperson for the commoners in their choice’.8 While Smith is right to point out Lucius’s involvement in the ‘central tragedies of the play’9 I would suggest that Shakespeare repeats the aforementioned aspects of Saturninus’s election with a crucial difference that Smith’s reading ignores.10 In the electoral process Saturninus did not acquire his position directly by common consensus of the people; although he claims to have been robbed of their hearts (1.1.207) by Titus, he is not the people’s first choice but

46


is rather chosen by proxy, by someone who stands in for the voice of the people. The substitution and displacement of authority here at first seems to operate upon a principle of synecdoche perfectly acceptable within the normative model of the body politic that Lucius comes to represent: Titus transfers his title to Saturninus with the ostensible agreement of the people, and thus the would-be ‘head’ (Titus) speaks for the body as it is sanctioned to do. It seems as though in this instance ‘a part represents a whole’11 in accordance with the logic of synecdoche in early modern political doctrine that defines the relationship of political leader to his or her people. Yet there is a crucial difference to be teased out in the way synecdoche operates in the respective elections of Saturninus and Lucius. In the former, Titus asks the ‘people of Rome’ and the tribunes who speak for them (1.1.217) if they will allow him to pass on his authority, and the tribunes sanction him to do so. Until this point, however, Titus has only implied that Saturninus will be the ruler he names in his stead, and so the tribunes do not directly approve Titus’s choice of Saturninus, but rather promise in advance that ‘the people will accept whom he [Titus] admits’ (222). As soon as Titus asks for Saturninus to be crowned, it is only Marcus that responds to Titus’s specific choice, and yet Marcus claims to speak for ‘voices and applause of every sort, patricians and plebians’ as he pronounces, ‘we create Lord Saturninus Rome’s great emperor’ (1.1.230–32; emphasis mine). These voices of ‘every sort’, however, are never heard from directly, as they have no speaking parts and so are only represented at this point in the text as ghostly lacunae that seem to belie the wideranging authority Marcus claims to command. The exclusion of patrician and plebian voices in the first election becomes more significant when, later, the text gives a speaking part to the ‘common voice’, who reportedly ‘cry’ for Lucius to be their new emperor (5.3.139). In this instance, after Marcus and Lucius address them, the Roman people directly hail Lucius as new emperor: ‘Lucius, all hail, Rome’s royal emperor!’ (5.3.140). By constructing these two electoral scenarios with noticeable similarities, Shakespeare also calls upon us to be attentive to their differences; the textual presence of the common voice in the second election renders the absence of the populace’s vocal assent in the first election suspicious. In his depiction of Lucius’s newly formed political body, Shakespeare offers convincing proof that Marcus and Lucius truly represent the interests of the people. This new state


47

‘head’ fits the body of Rome in a way that Saturninus did not. Indeed, Lucius’s model of the body politic is actively focused upon knitting together its ‘scatter’d’ parts into ‘one mutual sheaf’, and so it promises to flourish as one organic whole rather than remaining a fragmented ‘broken body’ (5.3.69–71). In presenting both models of the body politic, Shakespeare suggests the adaptability and regenerative potential of the body. By re-ordering its internal parts, Rome’s body can resuscitate itself, an act of self-healing that is catalysed by the trauma it is made to bear temporarily. Rome’s ‘disabled’ state proves to be impermanent, and the language of incapacity suggested by the ‘broken body’ metaphor works not to characterise disability as corruption and degradation of the body, but as a potential catalyst of growth, regeneration and newly (re)formulated bodies or bodily paradigms. Titus Andronicus also suggests a linkage between trauma suffered by the political body and the physically violent trauma inflicted upon the human bodies of Rome’s citizens. At the microcosmic, physiological level, Shakespeare reproduces the association between ability and internal concordance of parts already suggested in his depiction of the body politic. He does so, I argue, by exploring how the physically ‘incomplete’ or vitiated human body can recuperate its capabilities if its constituent parts form their own internally coherent entity. Strategically changing how their body parts serve the whole is what enables both Titus and Lavinia to develop alternative modes of physical and social expression post-trauma. In his dramatisation of Titus and Lavinia’s struggles, Shakespeare allies these adaptive skills with a subject’s ability to cultivate personal ability and agency. In light of what distinguished disability theorists Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell identify as literature’s ‘discursive dependency upon disability’,12 Shakespeare’s focus on the disabled body’s material, human existence is important. Snyder and Mitchell argue that literary narratives habitually rely upon the idea of disability/the disabled body. This dependence oftentimes results in the very same metaphorical appropriation of being disabled that Susan Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor critiqued in 1978, before the advent of disability studies as an academic discipline. Much in the way that Sontag asserts it is the patient (the ill or ‘disabled’) who bears the brunt of illness-as-metaphor, Snyder and Mitchell argue that the concept of disability has been used in literature and art at the cost of marginalising disabled people themselves. Mitchell and

48


Snyder call this literary dependency upon disability ‘narrative prosthesis’, and claim that it surfaces as either a mode of characterisation or as ‘an opportunistic metaphorical device’ in literature.13 Given Titus’s striking use of a disabled body politic metaphor, we might wonder whether Sontag was right to name Shakespeare in her critique. In Titus, the metaphorical life of the disabled body (that is, the ‘broken body’ of Rome) is undeniable. However, as I argue below, the play exhibits a notable attentiveness to the personal and social negotiations disability engenders, especially in terms of how Titus and Lavinia face the potential of losing normative modes of corporeal expression (speech, gesture, writing). Snyder and Mitchell argue that ‘disability supplies a multiple utility to literary characterizations, even while literature abandons a serious contemplation of the difference that disability makes as a socially negotiated identity’.14 Yet in Titus, conceptual or metaphorical representations of disability do not outweigh the contemplation of disabled people and their concrete experiences. Instead of relying on ‘narrative prosthesis’, the play counters the erasure of which Snyder and Mitchell write by closely depicting the specific material existence of disabled characters, and their bodily lives and identities, in addition to treating disability metaphorically. Shakespeare first approaches the ‘serious contemplation’ of a disabled person in the figure of Lavinia. It is my contention that he does so in a way that affords Lavinia a modicum of agency through the recuperation of her body’s abilities. Importantly, Lavinia adapts to her ‘disabled’ state in a way that challenges the equation of physical mutilation or loss with inability. However, I also acknowledge the severity of her trauma, one function of which I believe is to emphasise and affirm the importance of her eventual achievements. Her hands and tongue amputated by her rapists, Lavinia seems at first to have lost the capacity for self-representation, the ability to ‘point the finger’ at her rapists or to verbally express herself and her grief. Chiron and Demetrius’s taunts make clear it was their intention to rob her of self-expression: ‘Now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak, / Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee’; ‘Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so, / An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe’ (2.4.1–4). The ensuing dialogue between the brothers seems to confirm her utter helplessness, as they imply she has lost even the ability to wash herself or commit suicide in shame. Here, as in the following scenes, the logic of synecdoche


49

is applied: the loss of bodily parts is taken to indicate a totalising loss of ability. Because Lavinia has suffered the dismemberment of crucial limbs and organs, her body as a whole is seen to lack functionality, both in the physiological and social senses. As Lavinia’s mutilation is discovered in turn by Marcus and Titus, her corporeal loss of function leads others to claim the authority or ability to tell Lavinia’s story for her, the assumption being that she cannot do so herself. ‘Shall I speak for thee?,’ Marcus asks in his extended contemplation of her ‘lopp’d’ and ‘hew’d’ state (2.4.33,17). Marcus’s citation of the Ovidian myth that provides a textual precedent for Lavinia’s violation only furthers the sense that another explanatory text, another identity, is being imposed upon Lavinia from without. Indeed, Titus does not ask as Marcus does, but rather presumes to interpret for Lavinia, because he ‘understand[s] her signs’ (3.1.143). And yet I agree with Douglas Green that the text suggests that Lavinia ‘can and should overcome the severest of restrictions on communication’.15 Part of this process will be not only to renegotiate an interpretive space where she can effectively communicate with those who speak for her in order to finally ‘speak’ herself, but also to redeploy her body’s resources, since the most immediate channels of communication – speech and writing – are no longer available to her, or so the text has suggested thus far.16 In this redeployment, Lavinia will reinstate a functional relationship between the parts of her body, using them to service her ends in new ways that account for her altered physical state. The scene wherein Lavinia reveals her rapists points to an explicit connection between Lavinia’s newly claimed agency, however contingent it may be, and her body’s ability to develop and manifest a new mode of communication in response to her trauma. At stake in my argument is not whether Lavinia is instructed by others as to how she might express herself – and, indeed, I prefer to see her actions as redeployments of resources she makes her own, further illustrating the adaptability she manifests in her newly articulated bodily habitus as well. When Lavinia uses Ovid’s Metamorphoses to signify her rape, and uses a staff to name Chiron and Demetrius as her rapists, she herself validates Marcus’s Ovidian interpretation of her violation (first made explicit at 2.4.26), and also his suggestion for how to communicate that violation (as it is Marcus who first writes his name in the sand by guiding a staff with his mouth and feet). In other words, she makes herself a direct agent of communication and self-

50


expression, via a concretely physical act that demonstrates how ability might be generated from what all other characters, including her own father, had previously construed as disability. In a macabre echo of Chiron and Demetrius’s assessment of Lavinia’s corporeal inabilities, Titus had earlier confirmed her mutilated state as a thoroughly disabled one: ‘Thou hast no hands, to wipe away thy tears: / Nor tongue, to tell me who hath martyr’d thee’ (3.1.106–7). Using her mouth and ‘stumps’ in tandem to write, Lavinia challenges her father, her family, and us, to think differently about the traumatised body’s capabilities for action and expression. Although I can attend to issues of performance here only in passing, it is worth considering how much more Lavinia’s performing body might resist the limitations attributed to her as a result of her injuries. Pascale Aebischer notes that ‘the elision of the rape in the playtext and the subsequent textual silence of the rape victim, is made up for, in performance, by the actor’ because Lavinia’s mutilated body ‘is insistently kept before the audience’s eyes for six scenes’.17 Yet if Lavinia’s material presence reminds audiences of the visceral, unspeakable horror she has endured, it also insists that we take note of how she uses her body to name her rapists. Onstage, Lavinia’s body both performs her trauma and performs in the sense of carrying out or executing an action. If spectators are made acutely aware of the actor’s body in performance, as Aebischer argues, then they are also confronted with a body which defies the implication that a loss of hands and tongue means a loss of ability or of tangible functionality. Contesting these limiting definitions of disability, Lavinia redefines the ways in which her body and its constituent parts function together, so that she may effect, or perform, the crucial task of communication. She does so in an act that affirms her agency, not her erasure, in relation to the larger revenge schema of the play. Like Lavinia, Titus’s body proves to be remarkably resilient in the face of potentially disabling trauma. In tandem with Lavinia, Titus contemplates and puts into action a new corporeal self-image that responds to and accounts for the dismemberment of his hand, Lavinia’s mutilation and the beheading of his two sons. Importantly, this adaptive bodily paradigm is also closely allied with Titus’s quest for socio-political agency; when, for example, he is unable to garner mercy for his wrongfully accused sons, he expresses his sense of disempowerment by fantasising a repudiation of his own hands, that have ‘fought for Rome’ only to have served him to ‘effectless use’


51

(3.1.73, 76). As Katherine Rowe shows, the figure of the hand in Titus, seemingly invested with so much thematic import, represents only contingent, ephemeral agency. Rowe demonstrates that agency itself does not inhere within the hand, that Titus ultimately constructs hands as ‘temporary’ and ‘precarious’ vessels of power.18 What Rowe’s conclusions suggest for my argument is that handlessness, or being an amputee, becomes an equally viable condition for agency as the normatively ‘complete’ body. This recognition is exemplified by Titus’s assessment of Lavinia’s amputated limbs: ‘’Tis well, Lavinia, that thou hast no hands; / For hands, to do Rome service, are but vain’ (3.1.79–80). In Titus’s estimation, Lavinia is not disabled, but has rather done away with something that was expendable in the first place, because ‘effectless’ (useless) to garner and secure social power. The injustices Titus endures even before the loss of his own hand confirm the notion that the physically intact body is no guarantee of one’s place in the social order. For forty years, Titus was able to use his ‘victorious hand’ (1.1.163) in war, acquiring the respect and adulation of Rome’s people and their tribunes, and yet he is unable to use his physically functional hand, or the reputation it procured him, to prevent injury to his family. The success of Aaron’s ruse in Act Three indicates that the physical prowess suggested (up to this point) by the victorious hand is no more effective than the severed hand itself in achieving Titus’s goals. To assert that the martial body – a culturally constructed paragon of capable physicality – holds the same relationship to power as a dead limb, is, in Rowe’s opinion, ‘to dramatically deconstruct the possibility of [Titus’s] body – or any body – holding or signifying political agency at all’.19 Is this deconstruction as totalising and dark as it seems, though? I would argue that the process of interrogation Rowe mentions reaches its climax with Titus’s amputation, after which the play moves on to consider the relationship between physical ‘inability’ and power – in fact, redefining ‘ability’ and ‘inability’ altogether. In questioning the association of physical ability with access to power, Shakespeare makes room for bodies that do not meet normative standards of physicality to cultivate their own access to power, to define their own abilities. In his attempts to redress the wrongs done to the Andronicus family, Titus demonstrates how the physically damaged body can be instrumental in achieving social or political ends. Indeed, the failed barter of his hand for the lives of his two sons becomes the most powerful incentive to action for Titus, suggesting that Titus’s

52


amputated state provides, even promotes, the necessary conditions for agency in a way that his formerly ‘whole’ body could not. Shortly after the return of his hand and his son’s two heads, Titus abjures his grief and tears, and vows to find ‘Revenge’s cave’ (3.1.269). Although in the earlier parts of this scene Shakespeare allows the newly handless Titus a period of mourning in which to vocally protest in ‘deep extremes’ (3.1.215) the violence done to his family, Titus only remains in a static state of lament temporarily. As he remarks, ‘come, let me see what task I have to do’ (3.1.274), the abstract, figurative language characterising his grief-stricken speeches up to this point gives way to the discourse of concrete action. He demonstrates that after sustaining serious bodily trauma one can indeed ‘speak with possibility’ (3.1.214) as Marcus had urged him to do moments prior. Creating future goals rather than rehearsing past losses, in this moment he lucidly sets himself to delegating specific actions to Marcus, Lucius and Lavinia. Refusing to be dis-abled, Titus uses his one hand to bear the head of his son and has Lavinia use her teeth to carry his hand, showing that he and his daughter may be as equally ‘employ’d’ in the act of revenge as others. At this crucial turning point in the play, Shakespeare directs our attention beyond the horror of the visceral spectacle, by offering an alternative to the equation of physical loss with loss of capability and power. It is not simply the case, then, that the disturbing images of Act Three draw our attention to ‘the play’s central images of powerlessness, Lavinia’s bleeding stumps, and Titus’s own severed limb’.20 Capabilities – both social and bodily – are no longer only the properties of subjects who embody the norm. Post-trauma, the handless Titus still finds ‘much to do’ (3.2.286) to empower himself and right his family’s wrongs. Social agency for these physically impaired characters emerges as a tangible prospect because they adapt to, or work to develop, new bodily possibilities. Just as Lavinia creatively works with(in) her body’s newly altered means of expression, Titus consistently enacts or imagines the uses to which the ostensibly ‘damaged’ body can be effectively put. He beats his heart with his one hand to ‘passionate’ his grief because he cannot fold his arms hand over hand (3.2.5–11); he suggests to Lavinia an alternative (albeit macabre) strategy to grieve by proposing that Lavinia use her teeth to bore a hole in her heart with a knife so she may drown it in tears (3.2.16–20); he kills Chiron and Demetrius with his one hand while Lavinia again holds an object for


53

him with her stumps (this time a basin for their blood). These key moments in the narrative that involve Titus in physical and imaginative relationships with hands, whether his own or Lavinia’s, sharpen our awareness of how he rethinks the functional structure of the amputated body, and highlight his ability to move beyond a model of the body that would equate impairment with inability. Rather than continuing to mourn his and his daughter’s bodily losses, Titus considers how their bodies might function effectively outside the norm. He adopts a mindset open to the current (and future) possibilities of adapting the body’s relationship to itself – that is, the way the body’s constituent parts work together – and to its social and physical environment. The spectre of a formerly ‘whole’ or ‘able’ body is abandoned in favour of a new bodily habitus that responds to the physiological changes brought about by physical trauma. When Titus, Lavinia and Marcus exit at 3.1.286 bearing decapitated heads and a severed hand, the violence memorialised in the dead body parts is tempered by a foreshadowing of the innovative uses Titus and Lavinia will find for their own newly changed bodies. In this scene, functionality – the ability to carry without a hand or hands, and the accompanying promise of revenge despite severe trauma – overwrites the dead uselessness of body parts that stand for physical and psychological injuries sustained by the Andronicus family. Enabling himself, and Lavinia, to act and exact revenge, Titus remodels the traumatised body’s capabilities in a way that emphasises ability over disability, both at the physical and sociopolitical level. The treatment of bodies, both physical and political, in Titus Andronicus suggests what I argue is a potentially affirmative way of reconceptualising the physically traumatised body – not as a disabled entity, but as a body that can suffer partial losses and function as a whole, if its constituent parts can harness their intrinsic capability for adaptation. Titus and Lavinia, and the political body of which they are a part, recuperate their integrity and function by reordering and redeploying the interrelationship between the body’s parts. Because they emphasise the relationship between the parts and the whole, these strategies the violated body cultivates to enable itself and (re)claim agency need not involve prosthesis, cure or rehabilitation – what disability scholars have identified as the traditionally normative modes of compensation many narratives feature as a response to disability.21 When Lavinia uses a staff to write

54


in lieu of speaking, she relates to this seemingly ‘prosthetic’ object in a way that rejects the normalising logic behind prosthesis; whereas prosthesis in literature may often seek to ‘return the incomplete body to the invisible status of a normative essence’,22 in Lavinia’s case the prosthetic device functions temporarily as a writing instrument. It is an object Lavinia uses to service her own immediate needs, rather than a supplement that suggests she is deficient without it. To respond to and overcome trauma and loss, Lavinia and Titus experiment with alternative uses of the body’s parts, defining ability not by what a body should do – speak with a tongue, write with hands – but by what it can do. In doing so, they achieve what many disability theory scholars argue is achieved by writings and performances by/about people with disabilities: a ‘critique’ of the ‘system of normalcy’,23 and a challenge to readers and audiences ‘to redefine able-bodied notions of what it means to be disabled’.24 For the bodies in Titus Andronicus, to come apart at the seams is not to disable the entire bodily structure, but to instead provide an opportunity for adaptation; what is ‘scattered’ or ‘broken’ can be ‘knit again’ (5.3.69–71). Taking this opportunity, Rome and the unseamed Andronici display the ability to change the structural function of their elemental parts, remaining open to harnessing the body’s resources in new ways. That Titus and Lavinia do not ultimately survive after the deaths of their enemies indicates the success, not the failure, of their abilities as tragic revengers, and their efforts ensure that Rome’s temporarily shattered body continues on where Titus and Lavinia’s bodies have left off. One approach to reading the conclusion of the play is to interpret the murders of these two characters as a purgation necessary to the health of ‘whole’ Rome, in the same way that the restoration of the political body seems to depend upon the punishment and expulsion of Aaron, Saturninus and Tamora (and through Tamora’s body, Demetrius and Chiron as well). Following this line of interpretation might lead to the conclusion that the ‘disabled’ body politic normalises itself by casting off its ‘abnormal’ members. Yet Lucius, the representative of Rome’s newly healed body, keeps Titus and Lavinia symbolically and literally within the fold of this larger body, by burying them in the family’s ‘household monument’ (5.3.192–93). Their bodies ‘closèd’ (5.3.193) in a respectable Roman space, they are accepted into rather than abjected from the political body. Titus and Lavinia die not because the new Rome cannot tolerate their physical difference, but because ‘the death of the


55

revenger is a virtually unbreakable rule in English Renaissance revenge plays: the success of his plot incurs a blood-guilt for which his life must satisfy’.25 Nor do we need to exclude Lavinia from Maus’s masculine revenge-hero formulation; Titus’s vengeance is also Lavinia’s, and, as I have shown, she has been both catalyst and accomplice in the murders of Chiron and Demetrius. Even if the renewed capabilities of these traumatised revengers enable them ‘only’ enough to enact retribution but not enough to survive, this ‘only enough’ in fact places them in the same league as Hamlet, Hieronimo, Vindice and the like. Like these famous revenge tragedy heroes, Titus and Lavinia fulfill their generic destinies, and along the way they work within the structure of the revenge genre to suggest how disability can become opportunity. Where Shakespeare’s exploration of such opportunity meets its limits is the point at which the imperatives of revenge tragedy intercede. What may be risked in inscribing a challenge to normative concepts of bodily disability within a tragic revenge narrative that eventually consumes the bodies of its protagonists is gained, I believe, by what Shakespeare shows is the remarkable resilience and adaptability of the body pushed to, and beyond, its traditional limits. Notes 1. Lennard J. Davis, ‘Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability and Visuality’, in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 51–70, 55. 2. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997). All subsequent references are to this edition. 3. Maurice Hunt, ‘Corporeal Reconstitution, and the Body Politic in Cymbeline’, Studies in Philology 99:4 (2002): 404–31, 405. 4. The word ‘instrument’ here and ‘engine’ in Titus (referring to Lavinia’s tongue in 3.1.83) both anticipate the vocabulary of post-Cartesian constructions of the body-asmachine. However, the prevailing discursive model informing both Titus and Coriolanus is one that positions the body as an exemplar of larger structures, both divine and man-made. As Jonathan Sawday explains in The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995) pre-Cartesian views such as these allowed the body to serve as ‘a rich source of metaphors with which to describe systems of government’ (29) – an analogy that was thrown into question by the body’s subsequent discursive ‘mechanization.’ Although Shakespeare’s word choice here encourages us to consider how a variety of discourses informed early modern representations of the body, in this paper I adhere to the pre-Cartesian lexicon for describing the body and its metaphors, taking my lead from the language Shakespeare uses most often in Titus.

56


5. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997); emphasis mine. 6. Grant R. Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’, in ELH 68:3 (2001): 593–613, 596. 7. In Q2, Q3, and F, at the very end of the play Lucius promises to ‘order well the state’ to prevent history from repeating itself, reinforcing and openly acknowledging, as Saturninus does not, the importance of sound structural order within the body politic, suggesting his forthcoming governance will succeed where the former emperor’s failed. At this crucial juncture near the end of the play, Lucius’s structurally coherent corporeal model, emphasising genuine harmony between its parts and its ‘head’, installs itself as the affirmative and hopeful counterpart to Saturninus’s disorderly model. I have subordinated this point because these lines, although extending the play’s characterisation of Lucius, are not Shakespeare’s (see both the Riverside Shakespeare and the New Cambridge Shakespeare editions for a full textual analysis of the provenance of these lines). 8. Molly Easo Smith, ‘Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus’, in Studies in English Literature 36:2 (1996): 315–31, 321. 9. Ibid., 322. 10. Smith is not alone in her mistrust of Lucius – see especially Anthony Taylor’s ‘Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus’, Connotations 6:2 (1996): 138–57. Responses to Taylor by Jonathan Bate, (‘“Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus”: A Reply’, Connotations 6:3 [1996]: 330–33), Maurice Hunt (‘Exonerating Lucius in Titus Andronicus: A Response to Anthony Brian Taylor’, Connotations 7:1 [1997]: 87–93), and Philip Kolin (‘“Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus”: A Reply’, Connotations 7:1 [1997]: 94–96) attest to Lucius’s ability to polarise critics; Bate accounts for both ‘positive and negative’ interpretations of Lucius (333), while Kolin champions Lucius as ‘among the first in a long line of savvy saviors who bring an unconventional resolution to their respective plays’ (96). My goal here is not to engage in this critique of Lucius himself, but rather to examine the optimistically portrayed structural qualities of his newly formed body politic – that is, the way in which its parts and their ‘head’ coalesce. Whereas critics like Taylor are also troubled by Lucius’s alliance with the Goths, I take Lucius’s ability to cultivate a politically successful relationship with the Goths as indicative of his attention to the needs of the changing body politic. His openness to restructuring that body in an ‘unconventional’ manner aligns his efforts with those of Titus and Lavinia (as argued below), and upholds the value of strategic adaptation as a response to the body’s traumatically altered structure. 11. Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body’, 596. 12. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47. 13. Ibid., 47. 14. Ibid., 10. 15. Douglas Green, ‘“Her Martyr’d Signs”: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40:3 (1989): 317–26, 324. 16. The implications of Lavinia’s relationship with the men who try to interpret (for) her are too many to account for here, and have already received considerable attention elsewhere; see, for example, Mary Fawcett’s ‘Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in Titus Andronicus’, ELH 50:2 (1983): 261–77, and Green’s article (cited above). Green’s


57

sense that Lavinia escapes total determination by Titus’s colonisation of her signs supports my reading of Lavinia as someone who reclaims her body and its capabilities for herself. More recently, in Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), Gina Bloom has argued that Lavinia’s breath itself becomes a source of ‘unexpected vocal agency’ because it allows the ‘tongueless Lavinia’ to express her trauma ‘through blood that is imagined to be pushed out of her mouth by her “honeyed breath”’ (18). 17. Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26. 18. Katherine Rowe, ‘Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45:3 (1994): 279–303, 294. 19. Ibid., 294. 20. Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction With Documents (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 1216. 21. See especially Johnson Cheu’s article ‘Performing Disability, Problematizing Cure’, in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 135–146. Cheu argues that ‘medical cure, the possibility of a ‘normal’ body, is a perspective that is assigned by the able-bodied viewer to the disabled body’ (138; emphasis in original). Ableist viewers who ‘assign’ (138) the impaired body its (possible) cure cannot in fact recognise or properly ‘see’ this body. Rather, the anticipated or applied medical cure becomes the point at which the disabled body ‘vanishes’ and becomes phantasmatically reconstructed and whole in a normative sense. 22. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 8. 23. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, ed., ‘Introduction: Disability Studies in Commotion With Performance Studies’, in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 1–12, 20. 24. Cheu, ‘Performing Disability’, 140. 25. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Four Revenge Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), xxi.

Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition MARGARET LITVIN

A scorpion, its poisonous tail torn out, runs desperate circles around a piece of burning coal. A small boy sits in front of a screen, watching a film of a play translated from one language he does not understand into another. Twenty-five years later, these two events – an upperEgyptian game, a Russian film of an English play – coalesce into a one-act play called Dance of the Scorpions, an Arabic-language offshoot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This, at any rate, is the simple etiology offered by the offshoot play’s creator, Egyptian playwright/ director Mahmoud Aboudoma.1 Let me summarise Aboudoma’s offshoot play and two versions of his first Shakespeare encounter before pointing to the larger questions these stories help to frame. This article will then make a start at addressing those questions.2 Aboudoma’s play, Dance of the Scorpions, is part of an Arab Hamlet tradition that has produced countless citations, allusions, adaptations and other intertextual appropriations in the past half-century. Written in the 1980s, it was performed in Egypt in 1989 and 1991.3 Its five characters carry Shakespearean names: Hamlet, Horatio, Claudius, Polonius and the Ghost. However, many Shakespearean ingredients are altered or absent. There are only five scenes, no Gertrude or Ophelia, no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no Players, no metaphysics and no poetry.4 Aboudoma’s unimpressive protagonist is not eloquent and lacks any deep (‘Hamletian’) sense of consciousness. Instead, the play offers a sharp meditation on misgovernment: Horatio becomes a folksy narrator and double agent; a council of nobles is staged as a puppet show with life-sized dolls; and an ambiguous ending shows a group of domestic revolutionaries mounting a successful coup (Polonius escapes).5 Arguably the central character is Claudius, the ‘scorpion’ of the title: an unapologetic tyrant who conspires with foreign enemy Fortinbras, rigging a fake war to sideline his political opponents and defraud his people. Were Critical Survey doi:10.3167/cs.2007.190305

Volume 19, Number 3, 2007: 74–94 ISSN 0011-1570 (Print), ISSN 1752-2293 (Online)

Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition

75

it not for the familiar character names, a Western reader or spectator might not have recognised this play as a version of Hamlet at all. An Arab playgoer might have found Aboudoma’s play surprising as well, but for a wholly different reason. The play departs from an Arab theatrical convention, typical of 1960s criticism and early 1970s stage productions, of portraying Hamlet as a political hero, a seeker of justice brutally martyred by an oppressive regime. I have termed this type of protagonist ‘the Arab hero Hamlet’.6 Aware that the ‘time is out of joint’, he makes every effort ‘to set it right’.7 As one scholar has observed: With the exception of early productions of Hamlet (e.g., [an 1893 adaptation]), Hamlet has always been viewed as a romantic hero who sets out to fight corruption, and dies for the cause of justice.8

In sharp contrast to this archetype, Aboudoma’s Hamlet is naïve and spineless, always a few steps behind. Other characters mock him. Even the Ghost does not recognise him at first: ‘Are you Hamlet?’ he verifies (114). This departure from the norm is flagged for the audience in the play’s opening moments: Aboudoma’s Horatio, welcoming the audience like a hakawati (traditional Arab storyteller), announces that he has been telling Hamlet’s story ‘for five centuries, until I got bored with telling it the same way every night. So I will try to tell it to you tonight in a different form’ (113). Thus one of the main Brechtian tricks driving Aboudoma’s play – its dramatic irony – depends on his audience’s background familiarity with (a stock Arab interpretation of) Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Already we can see that Aboudoma’s rewriting, rather than simply engaging with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, engages with a whole tradition of Hamlet appropriations. Nor is that Hamlet tradition limited to earlier Arabic adaptations and interpretations. Rather, it draws on what I would like to call a ‘global kaleidoscope’ of sources and models. In the early period, French translations and Italian styles played a formative role in Arab Shakespeare translation and staging (a point stressed by Bayer’s and Hanna’s essays in this collection). Of course, colonial education and the anglophone Shakespeare industry (Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare, A.C. Bradley, Laurence Olivier etc.) also figured prominently. But for Aboudoma’s generation, writers who came of age during the postcolonial period and the Cold War, those British and Western European sources were already in the background. More impressive and perhaps more influential were

76


Soviet and Eastern European models, which showed how Shakespeare could be simultaneously highbrow and topical. In an email exchange about five years ago, Aboudoma traced his acquaintance with Shakespeare as follows: I have not read [Shakespeare’s Hamlet] in English at all, as my English does not allow me to understand it. But when I was young, I saw a Russian black and white film: it was Gamlet, with no Arabic subtitles.9 I saw this film more than 10 times, like a deaf young man. The first time I read Hamlet it was in Muhammad Hassan al-Zayyat’s translation,10 with a big introduction. At that time I had not heard about Tom Stoppard’s play [Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead]. I had no idea about versions [of a play] or [even] what the word means. I spent part of my life in Upper Egypt, where I came from. In my childhood I saw some people catching a big scorpion and pulling out its tail, which was full of poison, and they put the scorpion beside the fire (a round piece of charcoal). The circumcised scorpion started to turn around the fire, the people were laughing and singing for him, ‘Dance, dance, dance. .The scorpion turned faster and faster until it threw itself inside the fire. They call this game ‘The Dance of the Scorpion’. This image lived in my memory up till now. Concerning the discourse of the play, it is as if you are listening to a polyphonic piece of music, but you pull out all the [accompanying] instruments and just feel the core, I mean the song, which is hidden inside the piece itself. So [in writing my play] I depended on the major tones to realise the song. For me Hamlet is a political song, so I depended on the motivations of the game, the intersection of the dreams.11

The Shakespeare source Aboudoma emphasises is Grigorii Kozintsev’s film Gamlet (1964).12 His stylised description of his viewing experience (‘more than 10 times’, ‘like a deaf young man’) conveys how formative he considers it. He later understands what versions are, and he seeks out additional information – a translation, a scholarly introduction, other readings and rewritings – to further mediate his encounter with Shakespeare’s text. But Kozintsev’s interpretation remains decisive. When the former ‘deaf young man’ contemplates the music of Hamlet, he hears a political tune. In a recent autobiographical short story, ‘Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet’, Aboudoma fills in some of the political context that frames his encounter with Shakespeare.13 The short story, in a collection entitled Nostalgia, describes Nikita Khrushchev’s May 1964 visit to Cairo through the eyes of a small boy. (The Soviet Premier was in town to celebrate the completion of the first phase of the Aswan


77

High Dam project.14 Aboudoma, born in 1953, would have been nearly eleven at the time.) After watching Gamal Abdel Nasser and Khrushchev hold hands in a parade, the boy stumbles into the Russian Club at the very end of a showing of Kozintsev’s Gamlet. Fascinated, he comes back the next night to see it in full. On the way out, a man in the doorway hands him an Arabic translation of the play (‘for free’) and tells him to come back often. Aboudoma’s prose captures the hope and innocence of the moment: the air full of exhilarating slogans (‘the great nationalist dream, justice, the alliance of working people’s forces, the fight against colonialism, the Egyptianization of culture, and the rockets pointed toward Israel’, 38); Russian officers in the streets; the Russian greetings he learns at school; the sword fight on the cinema screen; the long plait of the little blue-eyed Russian girl (‘in my head, I was looking for one line of a pretty love story’, 40–1) in the seat next to him. Of course, the point is to underscore Egypt’s loss of innocence in the post-Nasser period: the abandonment of socialist ideals, Anwar Sadat’s peace with Israel and turn toward the West, and more recently U.S.-dominated globalisation. Aboudoma’s first meeting with Shakespeare represents a magical window, now closed. In the story’s last paragraph, the narrator complains that ‘the tree has abandoned its roots’ (41). The Russian Club where he saw the film has vanished, its banner replaced by ‘another sign, also red, showing a picture of a man smiling for no reason and the words Kentucky Fried Chicken’ (42).15 Aboudoma’s reception and rewriting of Hamlet highlight three facts that will be central to my argument. (1) Aboudoma’s encounter with Shakespeare’s Hamlet is mediated by other texts. He has never read Shakespeare’s text in any ‘original’ English version, and only belatedly comes to a full Arabic text. Rather, he receives Shakespeare through a ‘global kaleidoscope’ of sources and models. (2) Geopolitical factors and local cultural politics help determine which facets of the kaleidoscope gain particular prominence in a given place/time. Aboudoma’s first mediating text happens to be a Soviet film, Grigorii Kozintsev’s Gamlet. Other Soviet and Eastern European models were significant for other writers and artists in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. (3) Yet Aboudoma is free to revise the Hamlet he inherits. His late1980s play sends a political message of his own choosing; it does

78


so precisely by playing off his audience’s expectations of a heroic Hamlet. Retaining Kozintsev’s film’s emphasis on tyranny and the quest for justice, Aboudoma transposes its thundering ‘political song’ into a minor key. As we will see, reception and appropriation histories like Aboudoma’s (and of course, every Arab rewriter has his or her own history of Shakespeare encounters) cannot be generalised into a predictive theory. But they do illuminate a rich and multifaceted Arab Hamlet tradition. More broadly, they help flesh out the idea of ‘local Shakespeare’, illustrating some actual mechanisms by which local priorities and options intersect with Shakespeare’s texts.16 And they let us at least ask the question about appropriation studies: why would a scholar ever imagine that there could be a direct bilateral relationship between an ‘original’ text and a later writer’s ‘response’? If the point illustrated here (about the complexity and mediatedness of the relationship between Shakespeare’s text and its Arab rewriter) is as obvious as it seems, then why and under what circumstances do certain intertexts become invisible? The Global Kaleidoscope Since about 1990, scholars of international Shakespeare appropriation have sought ‘a theory of cultural exchange that might help us understand what happens when Shakespeare travels abroad’.17 The paradigm of ‘influence’ is clearly inadequate: it overprivileges the influencer and denies the agency of the influencee. It thus fails to explain why different writers take different things from Shakespeare and bring different things to him (and why many writers familiar with Shakespeare do not appropriate his texts at all). But subsequent explanations, for all their professed desire to ‘provincialise Europe’,18 have not moved past the basic idea of a binary relationship between original texts and rewritings. The still dominant model, that of anticolonial rewriting, posits a straightforward statement–response (or dominant–resistant) relationship between an authoritative original and the rewriter who challenges or inverts it.19 This pattern serves well for cases in which nationalist writers in the colonies do in fact ‘write back’ to the metropole – e.g., the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête


79

(1968), or, in a different vein, the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi’s Tragedy of Cleopatra (1927).20 However, the postcolonial model has two well known flaws. First, it reinscribes the same conceptual dichotomy that it aims to critique (albeit while drawing attention to it, at least).21 Second, and worse, it is helpless before the many cases where the theatre or literature that borrows from Shakespeare ‘is not anti-colonial’, does not seek to subvert anything in particular, and, as Ania Loomba notes, is actually not interested in Shakespeare at all, except as a suitably weighty means through which it can negotiate its own future, shake off its own cramps, revise its own traditions, and expand its own performative styles.22

Approaching such works is a challenge. If the former coloniser is not the implicit addressee, then who is?23 If Shakespeare appropriation is not an ‘aggressive binary action’, then what is it about?24 Recently globalisation has seemed to replace postcolonialism as the mot clef – but so far without unlocking new insights about who tends to borrow what from Shakespeare, when, why and how. Tired with all these, some talented scholars have called for ‘more supple and comprehensive theories of cross-cultural Shakespeare encounters’ (ibid.). They have meanwhile returned to the working notion that what shapes a given community’s engagement with a foreign text are the specific talents and interests of local writers, theatre-makers and audiences. This has produced some rich and sensitive scholarship on ‘local Shakespeares’, but it provides no framework for integrating larger historical currents back into the analysis. This article proposes a new approach to Shakespeare appropriation based on the observed relevance of a global kaleidoscope of sources and models. This approach would begin with the fact that each rereading and rewriting is created in active dialogue with a diverse array of readings that precede and surround it. It would attend to the contextual factors that help condition both the way an Arab appropriator receives and interprets Hamlet and, later, the shape of the new version he or she ultimately produces. (The ‘global kaleidoscope’ model is itself in dialogue with Bakhtin’s ‘dialogical’ speech appropriated from a web of previous speech, H.R. Jauss’s idea of a dialectical question–answer relationship between context and text, and Paul Friedrich’s notion of a ‘parallax’ in which the gifted individual language user negotiates and in turn helps reshape surrounding norms of grammar and culture.25

80


Bourdieu’s ‘regulated improvisations’ are surely in the background as well.26) The first phase to notice is the reception. As Mahmoud Aboudoma’s story shows, it is unrealistic to assume a direct bilateral relationship between ‘original’ and ‘rewriter’. Reception is rarely direct. Aboudoma and other Arab writers (and, I would argue, most writers in any language) do not first encounter Hamlet just by sitting down and reading it. In general, the reception of a prestigious foreign literary work never entails a tabula rasa, a direct, unmediated relationship with an authoritative original. (The more prestigious the work, perhaps, the more mediated the encounter.) It is thus important to examine the kaleidoscope of indirect experiences – school assignments, abridged versions, stage productions, films, translations, critical articles, conversations, literary allusions and other materials – that offer the raw materials for an Arab appropriator’s refashioning of Hamlet. These experiences come from multiple cultural traditions (not just the ‘original’ source culture) and arrive in various languages. They offer conflicting interpretations that require sorting out. Some experiences reshape the text itself: to cite an extreme example, a writer who had read only Jean-François Ducis’ French version (first published 1770)27 would know Hamlet as a play with a decisive hero and a happy ending.28 Other experiences, such as reading Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, work by grinding the lenses through which the appropriator views any version of the text. Most Shakespeare experiences do both, in subtle ways: for example, the Boris Pasternak translation of Hamlet used for Kozintsev’s film re-edits the text somewhat; for viewers who do not know Russian, however, the main effect is to superimpose Pasternak’s sonorous poetic cadences on whichever edition of Shakespeare’s play they eventually do read or see. Already we begin to get a sense of the background to any particular act of Shakespeare appropriation: a complex three-way dialogue between a text, a gifted individual rewriter, and his or her surrounding culture. Of course, political and other historical circumstances help determine which facets of the kaleidoscope gain prominence at certain times. Foreign relations, domestic preoccupations and local cultural predilections make certain versions more readily available or more relevant. The rewriter may/must choose what to be influenced by, but only from the material available. Perhaps a good analogue is a pop music ensemble choosing its ‘influences’.


81

After forming an idea of the received text, the appropriator can choose whether and how to ‘sample’ or ‘orchestrate’ that text for an artistic and/or polemical purpose. Options include quasiliteral reproduction, political allegory, poetic meditation, parody, ironic quotation or allusion, sloganisation etc. This is a second phase of free decision within a limited sphere of possibilities. While open to imaginative play, the choice is circumscribed by audience considerations: what would resonate culturally and pay off politically. Each generation’s reception and reinterpretation in turn becomes part of the kaleidoscope for the generation that follows. Unlike postcolonial appropriation theory, the global kaleidoscope model does not claim to generalise about the purpose of rewriting a respected literary work or to predict the direction that such a rewriting might take. Instead, its main virtue is to provide a framework (a set of questions) within which to consider the individual rewriter’s imbrication in a multifaceted and dynamic tradition of Shakespeare use. In particular, it draws attention to the great variety of actual sources through which an appropriator acquires a ‘source’ text. Thus it can help extricate Shakespeare appropriation studies from the vexed and self-reproducing dichotomy variously termed dominant/ subversive, original/rewriting, empire/colony, centre/periphery and West/East. The Arab Hamlet tradition The case of Arab Hamlet appropriation illustrates the model’s usefulness. For one thing, the Arab Hamlet differs somewhat from the cases of Arab Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, which have all, for obvious reasons of plot, attracted more explicitly anticolonial rewritings.29 (However, most Arab Othello offshoots have instead focused on jealousy and gender violence.30) Hamlet is also not part of a second group of Shakespeare plays, those that have been shown or claimed to possess elements of Arab or Middle Eastern origin.31 It heads the third and largest group of Shakespeare plays, those for which most Arab critics have not raised the issue of Occidental or Oriental identity at all. Other major plays in this group include King Lear, Richard III and Julius Caesar – also, incidentally, plays that feature autocracies and their problems. Already this shows the futility of trying to generalise about the way

82


Shakespeare will function in a given cultural context. Different plays, due to their particular resonances with local circumstances, are perceived and deployed very differently. Further, Hamlet’s reception history contravenes the postcolonial model. The play did not arrive in the Arab world only or mainly through Britain’s colonisation of Egypt. Nor was Shakespeare’s work presented as a single, colonially imposed, authoritative set of texts. Certainly there were British schools with obligatory English classes and schoolboy abridgements in both English and Arabic; the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare were translated at the turn of the twentieth century.32 But the first knowledge of Shakespeare came through stage versions influenced by French and Italian theatrical conventions. There were French-mediated translations with neoclassical happy endings (as mentioned above), travelling productions and films,33 and Arab and translated literary criticism. After 1952 the Arab world’s turn toward socialism led to extensive cultural exchange with the Eastern bloc, opening the door to Soviet and Eastern European artistic models. Egyptian, Syrian and other Arab students who pursued advanced degrees abroad (in Moscow, Sofia, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Paris, Rome, London or various American cities) returned with books and ideas. Thus, influential versions of ‘Shakespeare’ came from Britain but also from France and Italy, the United States, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Moreover, as the global kaleidoscope model would predict, younger Arab Hamlet appropriators have responded to their own times and also to the Hamlets popularised by their elders. Starting out as a prestigious foreign import, Prince Hamlet has become a fixture in the domestic political conversation of Egyptians, Syrians and other Arabs, and a vehicle for expressing their criticisms of and hopes for their societies. His famous question, which speechmakers and journalists tend to translate as ‘Shall we be or not be?’, has become the chosen phrase for the most pressing existential question of Arab identity.34 Adaptations of the play have also responded to this question. While the postcolonial Arab conversation about Hamlet has always centred on justice and political agency, its emphasis has shifted over the past half-century. We can identify three main phases of postcolonial Hamlet appropriation in the Arab Near East:35 (1) In the period of Nasserist revolutionary optimism (roughly 1952– 1967), Hamlet served mainly as a ‘classic’ text to be mastered,


83

a piece of ‘world-class’ theatre whose competent performance could testify that ‘the Arab nation’ deserved a prominent role on the world stage.36 The character of Hamlet served in this period as an emblem of interiorised subjectivity and psychological depth; Egyptian dramatists endowed their protagonists with recognisably Hamletian thought and speech patterns as a shorthand for their status as fully fledged moral subjects and hence credible political agents.37 (2) After the complete Arab military defeat in the June War of 1967 and especially after Nasser’s death in 1970, Arab writers came to believe that a leading role on the world stage had to be seized rather than earned. Hamlet thus became an Arab revolutionary hero, a martyr for justice meant to mobilise audiences against the Claudius-like domestic tyrants whose corruption and indifference were blamed for the defeat. Hamlet’s contemplative side lost importance; the most successful productions played him as a Che Guevara in doublet-and-hose.38 (3) But that effort, too, quickly hit a dead end. Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi dramatists of the past thirty years (since about 1977) have instead deployed Hamlet for dramatic irony. Their predecessors’ hero-Hamlet has become a foil for pointedly inarticulate and ineffectual protagonists, including Aboudoma’s in Dance of the Scorpions. The only really empowering role available, these bitter plays suggest, is the power to set oneself above one’s circumstances through ironic laughter.39 Kozintsev’s Gamlet Although the dominant Arab staging of Hamlet did not shift from contemplative to revolutionary until 1970, an important seed of that reimagining was planted in 1964, when Grigorii Kozintsev’s Gamlet arrived in Egypt.40 The film is indeed, as Aboudoma says, ‘a political song’. Downplaying the Hamlet–Gertrude relationship and the problem of delay, it focuses instead on the relationship between human decency and brute power. Claudius is a bull of a man, selfsatisfied and cruel.41 Hamlet’s moral and political struggle against the Claudius dictatorship leaves little room for doubt. His soliloquies are sharply cut; the most self-searching ones are omitted entirely.42 The first soliloquy (‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt’,

84


I.ii.129ff) is trimmed (no talk of incest) and played in voice-over, with Hamlet walking silently through a crowded room as a stream of conformists rushes past in the opposite direction. After its first appearance (a black shadow with a billowing cloak, announced by an urgent low-brass-and-tympani motif) the Ghost literally haunts Hamlet’s mind; the decisive and fiercely angry young man seems to see his father everywhere. Hamlet’s blazing eyes and wind-blown hair announce his inner turmoil. The only break from the prison of Denmark is the crashing sea. Kozintsev’s Gamlet was produced in response to a uniquely Soviet set of concerns.43 Epitomising Soviet society’s disenchantment after the bitter revelations of the Khrushchevian thaw, the film became ‘a symbol for the decade’ of the Soviet 1960s.44 But while its presence in Cairo was due to Soviet and Egyptian cultural policies, Gamlet’s resonance in Egypt had more to do with the mood on the ground. Some communist-leaning intellectuals saw the film soon after their release from Nasser’s prisons, where they had spent several years after a crackdown on political dissent in the late 1950s. Others were prepared by Egyptian theatre and film: the revolutionary agit-prop style of the 1950s had given way to regime-critical political allegory by the 1960s, but both tendencies placed stories about power into immediate dialogue with the regime. In Egypt, any portrayal of an autocratic leader – whether a Pharaoh, a Mamluke, a fairy-tale Sultan as in Tawfik al-Hakim’s The Sultan’s Dilemma (1960), or a drug pusher as in Mikhail Ruman’s Smoke (1962) – was instantly construed as a reference to Nasser.45 Such an audience could not have missed the police state iconography of Kozintsev’s film: eavesdroppers, armed guards, ubiquitous portraits and busts of Claudius. It was prepared to note the concrete sociological reality (fawning courtiers, war-torn villages, the toiling peasants turning the drawbridge in the opening scene, the ragged poverty of the Players) underlying the film’s intricate web of visual symbols and musical motifs. All this combined with heartrending performances by Innokenty Smoktunovsky (Hamlet) and Anastasia Vertinskaya (Ophelia), as well as Shostakovich’s rousing score, to make the film a lasting sensation in Egypt. The film was shown many times starting in 1964: at Russian clubs (as Aboudoma recalls), at Cairo’s Odeon cinema, and later on television, with subtitles pirated from a 1960 Arabic translation by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.46 It became a public event. A 1965 meeting of


85

Cairo’s Theatre Club where it was discussed drew an astonishing seven hundred attendees.47 A recent reminiscence by Egyptian literary critic Gabir ‘Asfur reveals that viewing it was not only a private revelation (as Aboudoma describes) but also a widely discussed communal experience: I cannot forget to mention the Russian film based on Hamlet, which joined exceptional direction with splendid music and riveting performances, especially the genius Russian actor who played Hamlet, as well as the actress who played Ophelia, who captured the delicacy and innocence and then the madness that led to her suicide. And I have not forgotten how much I enjoyed the rhythms of the poetic sentences pronounced by the actors in the Russian film – and no wonder, as the film depended on the poetic translation by Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, author of the famous Doctor Zhivago and winner of the Nobel Prize, who translated several Shakespearean tragedies. Therefore we appreciatively enjoyed the poetic rhythm of the Russian language in the actors’ mouths, despite our lack of comprehension of it.48

A generation older than Aboudoma, Asfur knew other Hamlet versions before Gamlet. He refers to ‘several translations’ (unable to recall which he read first) and mentions other films, including Laurence Olivier’s (1948) and later Franco Zeffirelli’s, starring Mel Gibson (1990). Yet he vividly recalls, more than thirty-five years later, how he and his peers responded to the Pasternak translation and the Kozintsev film. A Contested Golden Age Even the multifaceted global kaleidoscope is only a beginning. There is more: each of the multiple source texts through which Shakespeare is received will itself be interpreted and assimilated in multiple ways, and its meaning may be further revised in retrospect. Here again, the reception of Kozintsev’s film in Cairo is a good example. For Mahmoud Aboudoma, as we have seen, 1964 represents a golden age of principled politics. Egypt still knew what it stood for; its pursuit of Nasser’s socialist goals was, in Hamlet’s phrase, ‘unmix’d with baser matter’ (I.v.104). Yet Aboudoma’s description of Gamlet itself superimposes some later doubts about this revolutionary single-mindedness. One terse paragraph of his short story ‘Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet’ suffices to convey the child narrator’s memory

86


of the plot (and his confusion because someone had told him the film was about the Battle of Stalingrad): They turned out the lights and the show began. This time I saw the film from the beginning. It was about revenge for the father whom death had taken from the world. The mother was corrupt, and the uncle was corrupt, and the minister was corrupt, and maybe the absent father was corrupt too. But his son was as confused as a prophet, though one without a scripture. As I sat there waiting for the epic of the World War or at least to hear the word Stalingrad, I read on the screen the most beautiful phrase, which stuck in my heart from then on: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’ (41)

At the heart of a black-and-white story about principled resistance and craven pragmatism, this plot summary hints at a problem: Hamlet may be a prophet ‘without a scripture’. His cause – his father’s cause – may be without merit. Of course, this summary misremembers Kozintsev’s film in some ways.49 It does so by incorporating Aboudoma’s own later take on Hamlet, and perhaps his later disillusion with Nasserism. Both are more apparent in Aboudoma’s offshoot play. In Dance of the Scorpions, rot and corruption are indeed everywhere. But Abouduma’s babbling and blubbering Hamlet is a far cry from Smoktunovsky’s charismatic man of principle. This Hamlet does see himself as a prophet, a Saviour rejected by his people (117). But in a pivotal scene he learns that his creed – the sacred memory of his father – is as hollow as the pieties mouthed by the hypocritical Claudius regime: HAMLET:

Yes! He was more virtuous than all the kings in the world … My father was pure and untouched, but you contaminate everything. CLAUDIUS: Does that make you feel better? Yes, he was pure and clean, and you don’t want anyone to tell you the truth. You always went out of your way to find someone who would mislead you. I suppose you haven’t heard anything and have not seen fit to follow the news of the war. HAMLET: What war? If this is true, then the war is over. If this is true, then for whom did I waste those days sitting and planning revenge? Was it for nothing? (Looks confused) Father. Answer me, for the sake of my humiliated pride. Everyone was on the right path except Hamlet. Everyone said, ‘Do it, Hamlet.’ Do it. But what should I do when everything has become just words? Revenge is words and war is words … Words, words, words won’t heal the wound (139–40).


87

A recent essay by Aboudoma’s near-contemporary, Egyptian-British novelist Ahdaf Soueif, assimilates Kozintsev’s Gamlet into a quite different matrix of political priorities. Here too, Hamlet reception is invoked to eulogise a mid-1960s golden age which has disappeared – and in whose historical authenticity the narrator has an enormous stake. However, Soueif (born in 1950) recalls not revolutionary slogans and ‘rockets pointed toward Israel’ but just the opposite, a moment in which the politics of Arab identity did not dominate Arab life. She sketches a happy hybrid space, ‘Mezzaterra’, where cultures met and mingled; in this vision, the Russian and Soviet ingredients were just a natural part of the mix: Growing up Egyptian in the Sixties meant growing up Muslim/Christian/ Egyptian/Arab/African/Mediterranean/Non-Aligned/Socialist but happy with small-scale capitalism … . In Cairo on any one night you could go to see an Arabic, English, French, Italian or Russian film. One week the Russian Hamlet was playing at Cinema Odeon, Christopher Plummer’s [BBC film] Hamlet at Cinema Qasr el-Nil, and Karam Mutawi’s Hamlet at the Egyptian National Theatre … . We saw ourselves as occupying a ground common to both Arab and Western culture, Russian culture was in there too, and Indian, and a lot of South America. The question of identity as something that needed to be defined and defended did not occupy us … . Looking back, I imagine our Sixties identity as a spacious meeting point, a common ground with avenues into the rich hinterlands of many traditions.50

Soueif ’s 2005 reminiscence, self-conscious and gently ironic (‘looking back, I imagine’), is nonetheless sincere. In the context of an impassioned call for global ‘unity of conscience’ (21) and a mass migration to the common ground (23), she perhaps cannot afford to question the extent to which this common ground ever really existed.51 Instead, as a kind of secular scripture, she invokes her kaleidoscopic memory of Hamlet. The play is Soueif’s only example of a cultural object at the happy crossroads of cultures. The ‘Russian Hamlet’ she cites is of course Kozintsev’s film. Vanishing Intertexts We have seen how Kozintsev’s interpretation of Hamlet (itself mediated through Pasternak and other sources) became part of the Egyptian cultural landscape in the mid-1960s. Elsewhere in the

88


Arab world, directors and writers readily identify other Soviet and Eastern Bloc models and interlocutors. Syrian director Riyad Ismat’s account of his swashbuckling 1973 Hamlet adaptation invokes Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, among other models.52 In the introduction to his bitter and hilarious political satire Forget Hamlet (2000), Iraqi playwright Jawad al-Asadi invokes Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine and Yuri Lyubimov’s 1971 Hamlet at the Taganka (starring the Russian antiestablishment icon Vladimir Vysotsky).53 Examples could be multiplied. So if such mediating texts are so obvious and seminal, why is it sometimes so difficult for critics and scholars to consider them? One reason may be an intertextual anxiety that drives critics to abstract from an intervening interpretive tradition, instead imagining a direct relationship between contemporary author and venerated source text. A sort of high-cultural fundamentalism, this approach strives to show that a given reading is directly available from – hence authorized by – Shakespeare’s text. For instance, in her introduction to Aboudoma’s play, Egyptian critic Nehad Selaiha treats Dance of the Scorpions as a direct binary engagement with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, not as an intervention in an ongoing international tradition of Hamlet reworking: Mahmoud Aboudoma does not use Hamlet as a vehicle on which to load new, external meanings, meanings not found in the original text; rather, he abbreviates the original text to one of its dimensions, namely the political dimension, and focuses on it, interprets it; and his imagination plays in it, calling on some of the imperceptible signs that he notices in the pleats of the text, and then explodes it from inside (30).

Selaiha insists that Aboudoma does not ‘load new, external meanings’ on Hamlet: his play is an authentic interpretation or exegesis of Shakespeare’s ‘original text’ (or one of its dimensions).54 This argument aims to defend Aboudoma from charges of misappropriating Shakespeare’s symbolic capital. It is not irrelevant: the rewriter surely wants his audience to admire the cleverness of his engagement with Shakespeare, or else why would he use the familiar Shakespearean names at all? But, as we have seen, it leaves out part of the story. I think there is something more specific at work here. Most observers today tend to overlook Eastern Bloc contributions to modern Arab culture. The Soviet Union’s collapse did not erase the legacy of Russian and Eastern European cultural influences, but it


89

shifted the political ground and diverted the attention of scholars and writers. Today, despite all the talk of a ‘new cold war’ with the Arab or Muslim world, the literary legacy of the old Cold War is largely forgotten.55 The dominant rhetoric (even Soueif ’s) speaks only of adjusting the relationship between ‘Arabs and the West’. Even among the best-intentioned scholars, this missing pole has obscured formative cultural relationships, simplified chains of cultural transmission, and, in particular, created the illusion of a têteà-tête with Shakespeare. The abstract idea of direct bilateral contact blocks out the reality of a multifaceted field of reception in which unpredictable – and sometimes politically potent – interpretations can take root. Reading Aboudoma’s ‘Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet’ today, we may smile at the irony of a Soviet embassy using Shakespeare’s Hamlet to push its cultural imperialist agenda. After all, is Shakespeare not a British ‘imperial institution’?56 Is Hamlet not the poster boy for Western individualised subjectivity? But this irony is only apparent – the artefact of an untheorised ‘West and the rest’ outlook that erases the Cold War from view. Aboudoma’s and Soueif’s accounts of their early Shakespeare encounters, nostalgia and all, help readjust that perspective. Such stories draw our attention to a highly charged historical moment that no longer exists, but whose impact continues to ramify through contemporary Arab rewritings of Shakespeare. Notes 1. A playwright and director based in Alexandria, Egypt, Mahmoud Aboudoma is currently the head of theatre programming at the new Biblioteca Alexandrina. 2. I am grateful to Graham Holderness, Sameh F. Hanna and the members of Shannon Miller’s seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America (2007) for very helpful comments and suggestions. 3. Mahmud Abu Duma, ‘Raqsat Al-‘Aqarib’ [Dance of the Scorpions], in Ja’u Ilayna Gharqa; Al-Bi’r; Raqsat Al-‘Aqarib (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriya al-‘Amma Lil-Kitab, 1989). Further references to this work are in the text. All translations from Arabic, unless otherwise noted, are mine. 4. The absence of female characters renders the play’s family politics at once less complex and more claustrophobic, boiling them down to the triad of father–son–uncle. Hamlet’s sexual puritanism is omitted. 5. As Egyptian critic Nehad Selaiha points out in her introduction to the published playtext (Abo Doma, ‘Raqsat Al-‘Aqarib’), 7–35, this revolutionary threat is adumbrated in Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Laertes’ entrance ‘in a riotous head’ in IV.v.

90


6. For this history see Margaret Litvin, ‘Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Adventures in Political Culture and Drama (1952–2002)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2006). 7. I.v.196–7 in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1997). Subsequent references are to this edition. 8. Mahmoud Al-Shetawi, ‘Hamlet in Arabic’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 20.1 (1999), 49. Actually al-Shetawi’s ‘always’ is an oversimplification. This portrayal of Hamlet has been more honoured in the breach than in the observance; it did not become archetypal until the mid-1960s, and writers had begun to subvert it by the mid-1970s. 9. ‘Gamlet’, as we will see, is Russian for Hamlet. 10. I have been unable to locate any Shakespeare translation either by Muhammad Hassan al-Zayyat or by his contemporary Ahmad Hassan al-Zayyat. What Aboudoma most likely read was the translation by Muhammad Awad Muhammad, published as part of the Arab League’s 1955–1965 Shakespeare complete works translation project. In a recent email Aboudoma specified that the translation he read was published by ‘the Arab League’s educational department’ (personal communication, 13 July 2007). 11. Personal communication from Aboudoma (in English), 6 October 2002. Edited for grammar but otherwise verbatim. 12. The film is available on DVD with English subtitles from RusCiCo. 13. Mahmud Abu Duma, Nustalgiya: Hikayat Kharifiya [Nostalgia: Autumn Tales] (Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat, 2006), 35–42. The collection, also containing stories about the Upper Egypt of Aboudoma’s youth, is written in Egyptian colloquial Arabic (still a fairly unusual choice for published fiction). For a summary in English, see Hala Sami, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 14 September 2006. 14. The project was a major bragging point for Nasser’s regime. Also in attendance were the Yemeni president Abdullah al-Sallal, the Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella and the Iraqi president Abdel Salam Arif. 15. ‘Kentucky’, as Egyptians call it, plays a large and ambivalent role in urban Egyptian culture. It is the symbol of globalisation and U.S. influence par excellence; for instance, protesters broke the windows of one ‘Kentucky’ restaurant in Cairo during demonstrations against U.S. and Israeli policies in the autumn of 2001. On the other hand, MacDonald’s and Kentucky also offer safe (glassed-in, well lit, relatively upscale) spaces for religious and/or upper-middle-class women to meet with their friends, in contrast to the forbidding malecentric ambience of most traditional cafés (ahawi). 16. For emerging work on ‘local Shakespeare’ see Martin Orkin, Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (London: Routledge, 2005); and Sonia Massai, ed., World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005). 17. Dennis Kennedy, ‘Afterword: Shakespearean Orientalism’, in Foreign Shakespeare, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 300–301. Kennedy goes so far as to call this ‘the most important task Shakespeareans face … much more important than linguistic analysis, textual examination, psychological assessments, historical research, or any of the Anglo-centered occupations scholars have traditionally valued and perpetuated’. 18. This is an agenda informed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?’ Representations 37 (Winter 1992); and more recently Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1–24.


91

19. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 20. Shawqi’s play deliberately goes around Shakespeare, drawing on earlier sources to present a fervently nationalistic and anticolonial Cleopatra. See Ahmad Shawqi, Masra’ Kliyubatra [The Tragedy of Cleopatra] (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijariya al-Kubra, 1964). Studies on the play include Rafik Darragi, ‘Sexual Politics and Textual Patterns: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, 161–75, and Ahmed Shawky’s Death of Cleopatra’, in Theatrical Violence: Shakespearean and Other Studies (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2001); and Waddah Al-Khatib, ‘Rewriting History, Unwriting Literature: Shawqi’s MirrorImage Response to Shakespeare’, Journal of Arabic Literature 32.3 (2001), 256–83. 21. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). 22. Ania Loomba, ‘“Local-manufacture Made-in-India Othello Fellows”: Issues of Race, Hybridity, and Location in Post-colonial Shakespeares’, in Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 163. 23. See Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999). 24. Irena Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 5. 25. See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); H.R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Paul Friedrich, The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Paul Friedrich, Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979). 26. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 78. 27. Ducis (1733–1816) admitted that he spoke point l’anglois (no English at all); his version was itself based on a prose summary and verse excerpts by Pierre Antoine de la Place (1707–1793). It ends with Hamlet killing Claudius (offstage), Gertrude committing suicide and Hamlet taking the throne. See Jean-François Ducis, Hamlet, tragédie, imitée de l’anglois (Paris: Chez Gogué, 1770); and Romy Heylen, Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French Hamlets (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 28. This helps explain the much-deplored infidelity of the early Arabic Shakespeare adaptations. Turn-of-the-century adaptors such as Najib al-Haddad (1867–1899) and Tanyus ‘Abdu (1869–1926), as well as the later ‘classical’ translator Khalil Mutran (1872–1949), all worked from French versions. Nadia al-Bahar has suggested that Abdu’s Hamlet consulted Ducis’ text in particular; see ‘Shakespeare in Early Arabic Adaptations’, Shakespeare Translation 3.13 (1976), 13–25. 29. On postcolonial versions of Othello see Ferial J. Ghazoul, ‘The Arabization of Othello’, Comparative Literature 50.1 (1998), 1–31. Two quite different examples of Othello appropriation are Doditello (2001), Sameh Mahran’s farce incorporating the story of Dodi Fayyed and Diana, Princess of Wales; and Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, [1969] 1985). On The Merchant of Venice see Mark Bayer, ‘Shylock’s Revenge: The Merchant of Venice and the Arab–Israeli Conflict’ (paper presented at the Shakespeare Association of America, Bermuda, 2005); and

92


Mahmoud Al-Shetawi, ‘The Merchant of Venice in Arabic’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 15 (1994), 15–25. 30. Othello was the first Shakespeare play to be performed in Arabic. Badawi notes that the earliest production was subtitled Hiyal al-Rijal (The Wiles of Men) and emphasised gender relations over questions of religion, race and nation; see M.M. Badawi, ‘Shakespeare and the Arabs’, Cairo Studies in English (1963/1966): 181–96. On Khalil Mutran’s Othello (1912), see Sameh Hanna’s article in this volume. 31. For an argument that the frame stories in Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer Night’s Dream echo the structure of Arabian Nights tales, see Ibrahim Hamada, ‘Urubat Shaksbir: Dirasat Ukhra Fi Al-Drama Wa-Al-Naqd [Shakespeare’s Arabness and Other Studies in Drama and Criticism] (Cairo: al-Markaz al-Qawmi lil-Adab, 1989); and Ferial J. Ghazoul, Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996), 108–20. For the Sufi resonance of the mystical discourse of love in Romeo and Juliet, see Abdulla Al-Dabbagh, ‘The Oriental Framework of Romeo and Juliet’, The Comparatist 24 (2000), 64–82. 32. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales From Shakespeare (Philadelphia: Altemus, [1898]), 320. On the Arabic translation of Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare see Tawfiq Habib, ‘Shaksbir Fi Misr’, [Shakespeare in Egypt] Al-Hilal, 1 December 1927, 201. 33. Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet at the Abbas Theatre in Cairo in 1908. Alec Guinness’ Hamlet toured to Egypt in 1937; John Gielgud’s in 1940 and 1946; and Derek Jacobi’s in 1977 (he also went to Jordan). 34. This phrase has been used in this sense since 1952 by Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi and Palestinian public intellectuals including Islamists, nationalists and liberals. Prominent users include the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Qatar-based Islamist preacher Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. 35. ‘Arab Near East’ is probably the best term here. This analysis is based on a study of Egypt, Syria and Iraq and would also apply to Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. It does not consider Hamlet appropriations by Gulf or North African writers or by Arab writers based in Europe, whose work responds to different sets of cultural/political dynamics. For an example of a 1968 Paris-based Moroccan rewriting that shares the characteristics I attribute to post1976 Arab work, see Khalid Amine’s essay in this collection. 36. Many emerging national movements have used Hamlet in this way. See, for example, Laura Raidonis Bates, ‘Shakespeare in Latvia: the Contest for Appropriation During the Nationalist Movement, 1884–1918’ (PhD, University of Chicago, 1998). For a satirical example involving Azerbaijan, see Kurban Said, Ali and Nino, trans. Jenia Graman (New York: Random House, 1970), 218. 37. The clearest examples come from the work of Alfred Faraj, especially his plays Sulayman of Aleppo (1964) and Prince Salim (1967). See Alfrid Faraj, Sulayman al-halabi, 2nd edn (Cairo: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi, 1969); Alfrid Faraj, Al-Zir Salim (Cairo: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi, 1967); and Rasheed El-Enany, ‘The Quest for Justice in the Theatre of Alfred Farag: Different Moulds, One Theme’, Journal of Arabic Literature 31.2 (2000), 171–202. Nehad Selaiha has pointed to the protagonist in Salah Abdel Sabur’s Tragedy of Al-Hallaj (1964) as another example of Hamlet-derived interiority: see Nehad Selaiha, ‘Poet, Rebel, Martyr’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 18 April 2002. 38. On the best known of these, Muhammad Subhi’s 1976 Cairo production, see Litvin, ‘Hamlet’s Arab Journey’, 57–62.


93

39. Besides Aboudoma’s play, other examples of this trend include Mamduh ‘Adwan, ‘Hamlit … yastayqizu muta’akhkhiran’ [Hamlet Wakes Up Late], Al-Mawqif al-adabi, no. 65/66 (1976): 178–228; Nadir ‘Umran, ‘Firqa masrahiya wajadat masrahan … famasrahat hamlit’ [A Theatre Company Found a Theatre and ‘Theatred’ Hamlet] (Amman: unpublished manuscript, 1984), performed at the Festival of Arabic Theatre in Rabat in 1984; Jawad al-Asadi, Insu Hamlit [Forget Hamlet] (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2000); and ‘Abd al-Hakim al-Marzuqi, Isma’il Hamlit [Ismail/Hamlet] (Damascus, unpublished manuscript, 1999), performed by Masrah al-Rasif [Sidewalk Theatre] at the Carthage Festival in 1998 and in English translation at London’s International Festival of Theatre in June 1999. The playwrights’ countries of origin are Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Tunisia, respectively. I would argue that Kuwaiti-British playwright-director Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Al-Hamlet Summit bears a complex relation to this tradition, being composed outside it but gradually reappropriated into it by Arab audiences; see Sulayman Al-Bassam, The Al-Hamlet Summit Arabic and English, edited by Graham Holderness (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006). 40. In general, 1964 was a high point of Shakespeare-related activity in the Arab world, due mainly to the celebration of Shakespeare’s quadricentennial. For instance, in that year Egypt’s National Theatre staged its first production of Hamlet (it opened in December), and Al-Masrah [Theatre] Magazine devoted a special issue (April) to Shakespeare. 41. He is associated with taurine imagery throughout. For instance, dancers wearing oversized bulls’ heads accompany the raucous torchlit banquet at the beginning of I.iv. In his director’s notes from the 1950s, Kozintsev writes: ‘[Claudius’] figure strikes me as a perverted unity of something heavy, coarsely powerful, bullish, and at other moments affectedly refined. There used to be winged bulls, and here another kind of nonsense: a bull with peacock feathers’. G.M. Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 222. This taurine Claudius echoes through many post-1976 Arab versions of Hamlet. 42. On Hamlet’s resulting loss of ‘interiority’ see Patrick Burke, ‘“Hidden Games, Cunning Traps, Ambushes”: The Russian Hamlet’, Shakespeare Yearbook 8 (1997), 163–80, 172. 43. All its major contributors had suffered under Stalin. Pasternak had turned to Shakespeare translation in search of both a livelihood and an artistic outlet. Kozintsev had been denounced as a ‘formalist’ by the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1946. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich had also been attacked for ‘formalism’ in 1936 and 1948, but he had joined the Communist Party (perhaps under duress) in 1960. Innokenty Smoktunovsky, who played Hamlet, had been imprisoned in a labour camp in Norilsk, Siberia, after World War II. See Anatoly Smeliansky, The Russian Theatre After Stalin, trans. Patrick Miles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15. 44. See Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 42. 45. On Nasser-era allegorical plays see Farouk Abdel Wahab, Modern Egyptian Drama (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1974), 27. Such readings-à-clef are common in regimes where the censor is active. They were not without precedent in Egypt, where Khedive Ismail (r. 1863–1879) and later King Farouk (r. 1936–1952) had censored some productions that cast long-ago rulers in an unfavourable light. See Jacob Landau, Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), 63–65; and Joel Gordon,

94


Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2002), 59–60. 46. Jabra, a Palestinian poet/novelist/critic/translator living in Baghdad, later expressed indignation at this piracy. Comparing his role as translator to that of Pasternak he noted that the latter was prominently acknowledged in the film’s credits. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, ‘Shaksbir mudtahadan wa-qadaya ukhra’ [Shakespeare Abused and Other Issues], in Mu‘aishat alnamira wa-awraq ukhra [Living With the Tigress and Other Papers] (Beirut: al-Mu’assassa al-‘arabiya lil-dirasat wa-l-nashr, 1992), 117–27. 47. ‘Nadi al-masrah: hamlit’ [The Theatre Club: Hamlet], al-Masrah [Theatre] 14 (1965), 73–75. 48. Gabir ‘Asfur, ‘Hamlit fi bustun’, [Hamlet in Boston] Al-Hayat, 30 May 2001, 19, emphasis added. Asfur, who now heads Egypt’s National Centre for Translation, formerly served as head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture, head of Arabic at Cairo University, and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Fusul. This reminiscence opens a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet, starring Simon Russell Beale, which came to Boston while Asfur was a visiting professor at Harvard in 2001. 49. At least in the DVD version, the film does not begin as he describes. Besides, Aboudoma does not read Russian. Rather than a literal memory of a first impression, then, this ‘beautiful phrase which stuck in [his] heart’ must be taken to represent Aboudoma’s composite impression of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in light of the film. 50. Ahdaf Soueif, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 5. I owe my knowledge of this passage to Graham Holderness. 51. Elsewhere she calls it ‘the world that my generation believed we had inherited’ (7, emphasis added). 52. Riyad ‘Ismat, ‘Hamlit kama akhrajtuhu’ [Hamlet as I Directed It], in Shaytan almasrah [The Devil of the Theatre] (Damascus: Dar Talas, 1986). 53. Jawad al-Asadi, Insu hamlit (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2000); and see Jawad al-Asadi, Forget Hamlet, trans. Margaret Litvin (Brisbane: Faculty of Arts, University of Queensland, 2006). 54. Her word ‘interprets’ is the same word used to describe commentaries on the Qur’an. 55. See Fred Halliday, ‘The Unpublished Book of the Cold War’, The Round Table 90.358 (2001), 103–10. 56. See, for example, Michael Neill, ‘Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing Away From the Centre’, in Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 172.

Early Modern Subjects, Shakespearean Performances, and (Post) Modern Spectators BARBARA HODGDON

For some time now, attempts to reconstruct and re-mark the history of how interiority and the subjectivity to which that belongs emerged in Western culture have been making critical headlines. According to the proponents of this explicitly anti-humanist and anti-essentialist master narrative, that moment can be precisely located at the time of Shakespeare. Using Hamlet as his example, Francis Barker argues that bourgeois subjectivity comes into being only in the late seventeenth century; challenging idealist conceptions of literary culture and history, Jonathan Dollimore promises to deliver Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the misrepresentations of essentialist humanism. Similarly, Catherine Belsey claims that to search for characters’ ‘imaginary interiority’ is to map modernist notions of a unified, coherent humanist subject onto early modern texts. According to Margareta de Grazia, those texts do represent motives for interiority, or, as Raymond Williams has it, conditions of possibility for occupying such a personal space; but, as Peter Stallybrass maintains, the early modern subject encountered in Shakespeare’s texts is not an ‘individual’.1 Although that subject may indeed possess a ‘self’ (in the sense of being distinct from others), he does not have an ‘identity’ – a term that is also absent from Shakespeare’s texts and that does not appear, in the sense of denoting individuality, until 1638. In short, we have met the early modern subject, and he is not us. Or is he? Stallybrass argues persuasively that subjects precede individuals, yet it is also the case that the materialist conception of subjectivity which he and others espouse post-dates the individual. Indeed, the EMS – an acronym suggesting his status as a syndrome – can be seen as the Foucauldian product of certain rearrangements of knowledge: his rediscovery emerges from a poststructuralist critical practice which, by embracing the notion that selves are socially and culturally constructed, would displace, even erase, modernism’s naive © CS 1997

2


essentialism to bring back a repressed term. But this new archaeology materialises less as a revolution than as a radical (readerly) restoration – one that aims as much at mapping a continuity between early modern subjectivity and our own fractured postmodern condition as it does at recuperating historical distinctions. Inscribing yet another version of the desire to gain transparent access to Shakespeare’s texts, current reconstructions of early modern subjectivity may simply work to remake Shakespeare’s characters in the image of our own unstable selves. Such reimagining informs Alan Sinfield’s search for the ‘faultlines’ in ideology and drama, those slippages which promote subjects’ ‘dissidence’. Thinking of characters not as essential – or essentialised – unities but as simulated personages apparently possessing adequately continuous or developing subjectivities, Sinfield offers a kind of local reading practice able to accommodate textual discontinuities rather than iron them out or rationalise them into some overarching framework.2 As a program for rereading, these ideas generate a diffuse, disrupted version of subjectivity in which character and discourse, working as each other’s accomplices, maintain character-inprocess, without foreclosure. Given that Sinfield’s revisionary characterology inflects Shakespeare’s representations of early modern subjectivity with postmodernist configurations and so maps a reading effect which is the sign of a cultural effect, its suggestive resemblances between historically situated constructions of subjectivity invite appropriating its vocabulary as a means to explore, even (perhaps) to rediscern, how character, as it is materially configured in present-day performance, may be read. By pursuing a microanalysis of several filmed performances, I want to investigate the consequences of this ongoing flight from essentialist humanism. Each of these performances is generated by acting strategies predicated upon modernist notions of interior selfhood: these, in turn, align with Stanislavskian protocols as well as with assumptions about textual and characterological fidelity and subtextual vitality governing dominant modes of activating Shakespeare’s texts for performance. Precisely because of these conditions, the performances in question offer an ideal test case for reading one discourse against the grain of the other, for attempting to discern discontinuities and gaps in performances that aim for a seamless classical realism.3 Here, choosing film rather than stage performances offers particular advantages, for film’s semiotic and representational conventions afford means of framing and alienating behavioural and spectatorial

Early Modern Subjects

3

options which are ideally suited to exposing subjectivity as a construction. Admittedly, I have also loaded the deck in several other ways. For one thing, two of the moments I have chosen blur the boundaries between stage and film, for they exist as video records of stage performances of the English Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses (1991); they also are among the very few available videotexts that register audience response, which will figure, at several points, in my analysis. For another, each of these performances entails a moment in which royal (male) subjectivity comes under strain, exhibits signs of rupture between agency and circumscription, subjectivity and subjugation, that work to destabilise both person and (im)personation. In mapping how these performances do (or do not) mark such strains, I will be putting particular pressure on how voice, body, and framing renders the actor’s work to reproduce character as a construction. How, I want to ask, can this work be rethought productively through current notions about early modern subjectivity? If such ideas propose to deliver early modern texts from modernism’s humanist impulses, can they also deliver modern performances from the discursive strategies which sustain them? Consider, first, a sequence from the first play in the ESC’s Wars, Richard II’s so-called deposition or Parliament scene (4. 1. 153–308).4 Although traditional readerly protocols label the scene as a dialogue that includes a series of set speeches, in performance it functions more as aided soliloquy, one that, in negotiating an exchange within monarchy, records what it means to make a king into a subject and, conversely, what it is to re-character a subject as a king. Here, I am especially interested in a vocal itinerary as the primary site of analysis – that is, what the actor (Michael Pennington) is doing with and to words, either by placing lines in particular contexts of utterance or by modifying tempo and stress, and in how changes in voice mark subject positions which problematise his embodiment as ‘king’. From the outset, rituals of state oversee and monitor the performance of self, and Pennington’s Richard, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s modernist phrase, does the state in different voices. Asking whether he must be both priest and clerk, he first speaks from a subject position other than that of king as he pronounces ‘Amen’; then, having ‘undone himself’ by casting off kingship’s symbolic property – the crown, sceptre and orb, figured here by ‘real’ stage properties – his ‘God send him many years of sunshine days’ mocks Michael Cronin’s silent Bolingbroke, as does his ‘Good king, great king – and yet not greatly good’ (a throw-away

4


aside, prompting spectator’s laughter). These voices mark shifts where auditors can recognise the presence of quixotic others: arguably, they work to replicate the crisis of self dramatised by the text and texturised by Pennington’s performance.5 However, rather than representing some single, Archimidean point of transcendent commentary, these voices serve instead to make the seam between person and person audible and thus to distribute Richard’s character among several subject positions – re-personing the king, one might say, from the outside. Curiously enough, just at the moment when Richard exhibits a progressive motive toward what Foucault terms the interiority of the confessional and meticulously ‘turns [his] eyes upon [him]self’, the videotext registers that by framing his figure in relation to those who witness him, marking Richard’s inward turn in terms of the social.6 Although one might expect this sequence to privilege Richard and to capture his fragmented (Kristevan) subject-in-process7 in closeups, the cinematic sign of interiority, the framing constructs his self-dispossession primarily in relation to Bolingbroke’s still, silent figure – a sign of power around which Richard stages a series of posturings or positionalities – and reserves the close-up for instances where the motive for interiority is most at risk as well as moments where the subject position of king has been, or is being, both un-personed and re-personed. Here, editing and framing construct a doubled gaze, so that the Richard who searches his reflection in the glass is also a mirror for Bolingbroke. However, the moment that most interests me occurs after Bolingbroke remarks, ‘The shadow of your sorrow has destroyed the shadow of your face’, and Richard replies (it is a cocky challenge), ‘Say that again’, to which Bolingbroke responds, exceeding his scripted role. With this rupture in Pennington’s riveting performance of Richard’s grief, he steps outside king and reveals himself as an actor, or at least that would be how to describe the moment in neo-Brechtian terms.8 But in the terms Sinfield suggests, what spectators hear makes visible a moment in which ‘actor’ constitutes another subject position within the fiction, one perhaps best characterised by Richard’s earlier ‘I must nothing be’. However difficult it may be for an actor to play ‘nothing’, that term is somewhat analogous, in the early modern drama, with the social position and role of ‘the fool’. Reading this moment through Lear’s ‘Who is it who can tell me who I am?’ and Fool’s reply, ‘Lear’s shadow’ (1. 4. 212–13), suggests such layers of meaning, for (again, arguably) two kings and two fools are embodied here: Bolingbroke


5

speaks as Fool – but so does Richard. Significantly, at the instant where the character that Richard has been trying out through all his other-ing voices finally emerges and can be situated in terms of yet another theatrical stereotype, the audience laughs. Now if Richard’s ‘say that again’ un-characters him as a shadow – that is, an actor who is making a theatrical effect – then I think the effect of that laugh is double: it’s a laugh with Bolingbroke for exposing Richard, re-charactering him as fool, but it’s also a laugh with Richard, whose discourse of and about the self most vividly and fully turns the king’s body inside out to reveal that there is nothing there. In other words, the effect seems tantamount to recognising the inaccessibility of the ruler’s interiority, which cannot be (re)presented. Talking about reading text, not performance, Edward Burns argues that the mirror marks a space the self can never inhabit, for it is only the reflection of an historical-theatrical world peopled by other characters. The self is always theorised within the constraints of the mirror, which always gives back something the looker would not otherwise know as himself.9 And even though, some moments later, Pennington’s ‘ooh, Fair cousin’ and ‘Oh, good! Convey’ – both captured in close-ups – may collapse king and nothing into the same subject position, this is not the same as claiming their coherence. Nor can one determine, I think, exactly how to mark the character, person, or self who, at scene’s end, leaves the stage. The distinctions between how Pennington’s and Cronin’s performances mark multiple subject positions or register a series of subjectivities can be put into bold relief by observing Laurence Olivier’s performance of ‘Upon the King’ from his 1944 Henry V (4. 1. 227–81). Writing on ideology and the set speech, Tom Cartelli notes rhetorical similarities between Richard’s un-kinging and Henry’s meditation on kingship, both of which slip from self-referential discourse into the style and structure of public address; arguing that ‘Upon the King’ represents an instance of a set speech masquerading as soliloquy, Cartelli maps Henry’s slippage between two bodies or subject positions, one that sees ceremony as a mere fiction, another who views it as an undeniable fact of life. Although the soldiers’ objections to dying for Henry’s cause leads auditors to expect a candid and altogether ‘unofficial’ self-examination, the speech concludes by effecting a nostalgic reconstruction of the king as hero which reaffirms his difference from what Althusser terms ‘the real relations which govern the existence of individuals’.10 In emphasising how ideology not only gives credence to the articulation of subjec-

6


tivity and agency but so saturates the space of interiority that it becomes a stand-in for the self, Cartelli’s reading of Henry’s speech offers an apt gloss for Olivier’s performance, which functions to make Shakespeare’s king the spokesman for a nation’s integrity. As the set-speech-soliloquy begins, Olivier’s Henry is seated with his back against a spreading tree and with the sleeping boy at his side; he appears naturalised, one with the land and its people. Filmed as one long uninterrupted take, in which the only shift from Henry’s still figure occurs as the camera slowly dollies out and pans right to include the sleeping boy, the sequence constructs and magnifies modernism’s unitary human subject par excellence. Moreover, Henry seems to be whispering – a sign that the voice speaks from ‘within’, suggesting that auditors have transparent access to his thought. Yet Henry ‘himself’ is and is not speaking, for the entire utterance occurs in voice-over, the most powerful speaking position on film and one which works to invert the usual image/sound hierarchy. In this case, however, since Henry speaks from a position closely adjacent to events represented on the image track, the two tend to converge. But only partially so. For Henry’s voice becomes what Kaja Silverman calls a ‘voice on high’: transcending the body, it hovers over the image track in an invisible spatial register to assume a position of superior knowledge or theological status from which it imposes itself upon and reads the image.11 It is as though, in attempting to display what is ‘inaccessible to the image, what exceeds the visible’, the moment anatomises Henry’s embodiment, turning it ‘inside out’ to reveal, in Olivier’s carefully modulated verbal music, the body of Shakespeare’s text.12 Here, ‘Shakespeare’ functions as a kind of communion wafer through which Henry and Olivier become one (liberal humanist) person – the essentialised heroking and father to his countrymen which, as Dudley Andrew has noted, so perfectly serves the film’s historical moment.13 Nearly fifty years later, Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) borrows Olivier’s cloak, brazier, and whisper, much as though these have become transhistorical cinematic signifiers giving body and form to Harry the King. These, as well as Branagh’s seated figure and his initial vocal inflections, could morph nearly perfectly into Olivier’s Henry with essentialising ease. But the cinematic resemblances which code Branagh as Olivier’s theatrical heir and cinematic imitator begin to dissolve when the camera dollies in to Branagh’s king, passing across his sleeping soldiers in a move that almost literally seems to lay their bodies ‘upon the king’, as it travels toward the


7

(imaginary) space of his interiority. Drained of colour, the sequence hovers just outside black and white representation, a choice which in itself marks off the moment’s difference. At first it appears as though Branagh, like Olivier, speaks in voice-over, for while the voice sounds ‘close’, the image is not. Yet it is only when the camera comes to rest on Henry’s face that sound and image synch up within the frame. Initially, this representational strategy deliberately seems to align Branagh’s subjectivity with Olivier’s, but once Branagh’s Henry reaches ‘No, thou proud dream’, he disavows that connection. Not only does he throw off Olivier’s fantasy of a unified subject together with his cloak to (literally) stand apart from his performer-father (or God-father), but a cut further distances him from the aura of Olivier’s performance. Whereas Olivier is a still, silent figure who gives a little touch of voice to Harry in the night, Branagh’s king becomes a moving body that the camera follows as he traverses the space, and his gaze – at the camera, at the growing dawn – defines his agency within it. As he speaks, accompanied by the soft, elegiac sounds of woodwind and strings, he situates particular ideas in relation to objects within the space, minimal markers of the social that frame the recessed space of interiority to which he seeks access. Yet since these signs – armour, a battle flag, a sleeping figure – bear no relation to the objects he names – the balm, the sceptre, the ball – ‘ceremony’ becomes demystified, translated into the ‘real’ effects of its power, into war’s material fodder. However much this Henry may try to distance himself from the royal fiction that constructs him, to re-character himself as a kinder, gentler, everyman monarch, the attempt fails. For although his movement codes a potential flexibility between ‘king’ and ‘wretch’, any desire to un-character the politics of royal interiority or to reinvent the king’s person collapses back, as the speech ends, into something like Olivier’s subject position – a severe isolation that reaffirms the king’s difference from ordinary men. If Branagh constructs his Henry in relation to Olivier’s harmonious, stable, utopian image, a different sort of material resemblance surfaces in Michael Pennington’s Henry, again from the ESC’s Wars. To play the semiotic game, Pennington’s features – the turn of his head, the tilt of his chin, the aristocratic Received Standard Pronunciation which marks his class – recode, or re-character, Richard II as Henry V, inviting spectators to re-member Richard’s body, and voice, as Henry’s. Just as doubling across the seven plays in the ESC’s Wars insisted on such connections, similar resemblances existed in the

8


material circumstances of the early modern theatre, whose spectators might expect to witness a sort of traffic between character and character, person and person, in which some residue of subjectivity transfers from one to the other – a phenomenon most easily visible to postmodern spectators when, in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1991 film, Lethal Weapon’s Martin Riggs spills over into Mel Gibson’s Hamlet.14 Backed by a rumbling storm, Pennington begins the speech standing but then crouches, and the camera observes him in mid-shots which produce the illusion of close-up – even, at times, of extreme close-up. But this is not, as with Olivier, a long take, nor does it, as in both Olivier’s and Branagh’s films, attempt to smooth over the relations between ideology and interiority to make one a vehicle for the other. Instead, five cuts construct the moment, occurring either on questions (‘what have kings but ceremony …?’; ‘what drinks thou oft …?’) or to mark Henry’s situatedness in the king’s person – ‘I am a king that find thee …’ – and his self-referential answer, ‘Not all these, laid in bed majestical …’ If, as with Olivier and Branagh, a ‘unified’ voice marks Pennington’s performance, these cuts also suggest ruptures in that unity, so that Henry seems to be addressing an ‘other’ across the cut – a strategy that produces at least a minimal illusion of dialogic interchange between subject positions. But what is especially striking here in relation to both Olivier and Branagh’s films is that the ideotextual mise-en-scène – a sand-bagged bunker set behind Henry’s figure – includes no other human presences: the focus rests entirely upon the king, who seems to float above his own references to the material conditions of his subjects’ lives. So freed from the social, character emerges as ‘not-character’ – as, rather, an embodiment of royal ideology. Pennington’s bitter, condescending Henry reveals a king subjected to his own sovereignty, interpellated into a subject position which, like that of Richard II, is emptied of ‘person’ or of a self-expressive interiority. Put in the words of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield – whose thinking lies behind this production – a spectator can see how the subject position of ‘king’ ‘engrosses in himself the ideological coherence of the state and then, asked to take responsibility for the likely defeat of Agincourt, claims to be an effect of the structure he seems to guarantee’.15 That Henry’s ideological project may not be entirely successful can be measured by the presence of social others on the sound track, which registers traces of a number of British subjects, coughing like crazy. On at least that one night at Swansea’s Grand Theatre, where


9

Wars was filmed, Pennington’s king must make an unusual effort to reconstruct himself in the face of unruly auditors. Are they ‘dissing’ ‘Shakespeare’? The speaker, Henry V? The actor’s (im)personation? The future King-who-may-never-be, in the person of Prince Charles? Given the readerly as well as performative histories of this moment, which work to conflate all these subject positions into a serviceable cultural construction, it would be hard to say. I choose, however, to imagine that this coughing multitude – and their silent (presumably attentive) opposites – figure double spectatorly subject positions which, in turn, figure the problem of rethinking the relations between early modern subjectivities and the guises accorded them by performance at this juncture in critical history. On the one hand sits the spectator-subject who desires to see represented before him a self-determined entity who exemplifies ‘human nature’ according to Shakespeare. On the other, there is the observer who can come to recognise, in a performance that goes some way toward subverting the nostalgic reconstruction of King Harry’s heroic state-of-the-nation persona, the social, historical, and political shapes of his own constructedness. The faultlines, one might say, are not in our star performances, but in ourselves, that we are all subject(ive) readers. Or, to rewrite another famous line, there is discontinuity, no end of discontinuity, even when that may seem to be an individual matter.

Notes An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1995 Shakespeare Association of America conference. My thanks to Richard Abel, Nancy Taylor, Valerie Wayne and Bill Worthen for their helpful comments. 1. See Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 31–37, 58; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984); Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 41–42, 48; Margareta de Grazia, ‘Motives for Interiority: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Hamlet’, Style 23. 3 (Fall 1989): 430–44; Peter Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 593–612. See also Katherine Eisaman Maus, ‘Proof and Consequences: Inwardness and Its Exposure in the English Renaissance’, Representations 34 (Spring 1991): 29–52; and Emily C. Bartels, ‘Breaking the Illusion of Being: Shakespeare and the Performance of Self’, Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 171–85. For a trenchant critique of current accounts of early modern subjectivity, see David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Mod-

10


ernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject’, in Culture and History: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177–202. 2. Alan Sinfield, ‘When is a Character Not a Character? Desdemona, Olivia, Lady Macbeth and Subjectivity’, chapter 3 of Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. 61–63. 3. Phrasing the issue differently, how can a lit.-crit. strategy be adapted to read a performative one? 4. Act, scene, and line numbers refer to William Shakespeare, The Complete Works eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 5. On the problematic relations between ‘text’ and ‘performance’ in the actor’s work, see W. B. Worthen, ‘Staging ‘Shakespeare’: Acting, Authority, and The Rhetoric of Performance’, in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance ed. James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), 12–28. 6. See Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 19. Theorising representation on the early modern stage, Robert Weimann suggests that the distinctions between locus and platea blur at the point where early modern society tries to call the modern self into being. See Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimensions of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), esp. 73–85. 7. In particular, see Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, Signs 7 (1981): 13–35. 8. Watching this scene, my students were embarrassed by what they read as excess (‘he’s too much into his sorrow’); they also were disturbed when Pennington fractured the fiction he had sustained – a response which reveals their familiarity with and dependence on naturalistic acting strategies as well as their desire for coherent characters. 9. See Edward Burns Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), esp. 79–86, 131–33. 10. See Thomas Cartelli ‘Ideology and Subversion in the Shakespearean Set Speech’, ELH 53 (1986): esp. 5–10. 11. See Kaja Silverman The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Pyschoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), 48–49. 12. The quoted phrases are from Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’ Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 41. 13. See Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 151. For a fine reading of the entire scene, see Peter S. Donaldson, ‘Claiming from the Female:’ Gender and Representation in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, chapter 1 of Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Winchester, MA and London: Unwin Hyman, Inc., 1990), 16–18. 14. See my ‘The Critic, the Poor Player, Prince Hamlet, and the Lady in the Dark’, in Shakespeare Reread: The Text in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. 282–93. 15. See Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V’ in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 223. For the directors’ acknowledgement of Dollimore and Sinfield, see Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington, The English Shakespeare Company: The Story of ‘The Wars of the Roses’ 1986–1989 (London: Nick Hern Books, Ltd, 1990), 27.