Native Shakespeares : Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage

NATIVE SHAKESPEARES

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Native Shakespeares Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage

Edited by CRAIG DIONNE Eastern Michigan University, USA and PARMITA KAPADIA Northern Kentucky University, USA

© Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Native Shakespeares 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Adaptations – History and criticism 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Translations – History and criticism 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Appreciation – Foreign countries I. Dionne, Craig II. Kapadia, Parmita 822.3’3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Native Shakespeares: indigenous appropriations on a global stage / edited by Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7546-6296-9 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Adaptations—History and criticism. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Translations—History and criticism. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564– 1616—Appreciation—Foreign countries. I. Dionne, Craig. II. Kapadia, Parmita. PR2880.A1.N38 2008 822.3’3—dc22 2007052206 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6296-9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction: Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia

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Part 1 Lowly Subjects: Transposing Tradition 1

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The Face in the Mirror: Joyce’s Ulysses and the Lookingglass Shakespeare Thomas Cartelli

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Commonplace Literacy and the Colonial Scene: The Case of Carriacou’s Shakespeare Mas Craig Dionne

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“The Forms of Things Unknown”: Richard Wright and Stephen Henderson’s Quiet Appropriation John Carpenter

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The Fooler Fooled: Salman Rushdie’s Hybrid Revision of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Through “Yorick” Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan and Ana Sáez Hidalgo

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Part 2 Local Productions: Nationalism and Hegemony From the Third Space 5

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Jatra Shakespeare: Indigenous Indian Theater and the Postcolonial Stage Parmita Kapadia

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Nationalizing the Bard: Québécois Adaptations of Shakespeare Since the Quiet Revolution Jennifer Drouin

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An Aboriginal As You Like It: Staging Reconciliation in a Drama of Desire Maureen McDonnell

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Movers and Losers: Shakespeare in Charge and Shakespeare Behind Bars Niels Herold

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Part 3 Translating Across: Between the National and the Cultural 9 10 11 12

Shakespeare and Transculturation: Aimé Césaire’s ésaire’s saire’s A Tempest Pier Paolo Frassinelli

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Twin Obligations in Solomon Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho Ameer Sohrawardy

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In Fair Havana, Where We Lay Our Scene: Romeo and Juliet in Cuba Donna Woodford-Gormley

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“I am no Othello. I am a lie”: Shakespeare’s Moor and the Post-Exotic in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North Atef Laouyene

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Afterword: The Location of Shakespeare Jyotsna G. Singh

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Index

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List of Illustrations 1

“Are You Challenging Me?” from Finding Forrester. Prof. Robert Crawford played by F. Murray Abraham. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Courtesy of Sony Pictures, 2000.

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L’Officier du Rhin-Pierre -Pierre Bourgault (leader of the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale [RIN]), Horatio-René Lévesque (founder of the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association [MSA] and later the Parti Québécois [PQ]), ), and Hamlet-Québec, the principal nationalist figures in Robert Gurik’s Hamlet, prince du Québec. Courtesy of Robert Gurik. 113

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During the storm scene, the two Shakespeares huddle under “a “ typically British umbrella” and then “jump into, with eloquence and historical attention, […] the long narration of Clarence’s dream (authentically excerpted from the great William’s RICHARD III),” oblivious that they are being drowned, like Clarence, by “cat pee” that the Fool rains down on them. (Ronfard, Lear 46–8, 50; my translation, italics in original).

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Publicity photograph of Deborah Mailman in Company B’s As You Like It. Directed by Neil Armfield (1999). Photograher: Julian Watt. Courtesy of Christine Bradburn and Company B, Sydney, Australia.

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Celebration scene of Company B’s As You Like It. Directed by Neil Armfield (1999). Photographer: Heidrun Löhr. Courtesy of Company B, Sydney, Australia.

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Kristine Hutton and Deborah Mailman in Company B’s As You Like It. Directed by Neil Armfield (1999). Photographer: Heidrun Löhr. Courtesy of Company B, Sydney, Australia.

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Kristine Hutton and Deborah Mailman in Company B’s As You Like It. Directed by Neil Armfield (1999). Photographer: Heidrun Löhr. Courtesy of Company B, Sydney, Australia.

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Cabaret-style head shot of Deborah Mailman in Company B’s As You Like It. Directed by Neil Armfield (1999). Photograher: Julian Watt. Courtesy of Company B, Sydney, Australia.

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Notes on Contributors John Carpenter is an Assistant Professor of English at Indian River College. His recent scholarship focuses upon cultural interpretations of music in early modern drama, and his current publications include “Placing Thomas Deloney,” in JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory, and “Fulfilling the Book: Shakespeare, Music, Identity, and Kwame Dawes’ ‘Requiem’” in The Humanities Review. Thomas Cartelli is author of Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (1999), Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (1991), and most recently co-author, with Katherine Rowe, of New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007). He teaches at Muhlenberg College where he is NEH Professor of Humanities. Craig Dionne has published on Shakespeare in popular culture, history of the early modern underworld, rogues and class history. He has co-edited two books that showcase inter and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Disciplining English: Alternative Histories and Critical Perspectives (SUNY 2002), and Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2004). He is editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Jennifer Drouin is a postdoctoral fellow with the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiatives “Making Publics” project at McGill University. Her research focuses on Shakespeare, Québécois adaptations, and early modern gender and sexuality. Her articles on these topics appear or are forthcoming in Theatre Research in Canada, Borrowers and Lenders, and the volume Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. Niels Herold’s essays on Shakespeare pedagogy and historicism have appeared in JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Shakespeare Yearbook, Shakespeare and the Classroom, CEA, and Shakespeare Quarterly. He is an Associate Professor of English at Oakland University, where he teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature. He is currently at work on an essay about Shakespeare Behind Bars and the early modern performance of repentence. Pier Paolo Frassinelli is a Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published several articles in the areas of Early Modern and Postcolonial Studies and has recently written the Introduction to a new edition of C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectic. His current projects include a co-edited volume entitled Traversing Transnationalism (with David Watson and Ronit Fainman-Frenkel) and an anthology of writings on Shakespeare by Caribbean authors, which he is co-editing with Shane Graham.

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Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan teaches Postcolonial Literature at the University of Valladolid (Spain). He is interested in Comparative Literature, African and Caribbean authors, Exile and Rushdie. Ana Sáez Hidalgo teaches Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the University of Valladolid (Spain). Her main research interests are Comparative Literature, Translation and Rewriting and other forms of Cultural exchange. Parmita Kapadia has done extensive work on postcolonial Shakespeare in India. She is Associate Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University where she specializes in Shakespeare studies and postcolonial literatures. Her current projects include a co-edited volume entitled Transforming Diaspora (with Robin Field) and a writing handbook for the Shakespeare classroom. Atef Laouyene is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is currently finalizing his dissertation entitled “The Post-Exotic Arab: Orientalist Dystopias in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction.” He has a forthcoming article, “Canadian Gothic and the Work of Ghosting in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees.” Maureen McDonnell is an Assistant Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she teaches courses in early modern literature, women’s studies, and women’s literature. She received her joint Ph.D. in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan; her dissertation explored the cultural dimensions of global Shakespearean drama and performance. Presently, she is engaged in research on performance studies and early modern drama. Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor of English as Michigan State University. She is the author of Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism,” and The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics. She has also co-edited Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period. Ameer Sohrawardy is a doctoral candidate in the English department at Rutgers University. His interests include literatures of the early modern period and postcolonial theory. His dissertation examines the role of the intermediary in facilitating AngloOttoman interactions in 16th and 17th century drama and travel writing. Donna Woodford-Gormley is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the English program at New Mexico Highlands University. She earned her B.A. in English and Spanish literature at California State University, Northridge and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English at Washington University in St. Louis. Her publications include a book, Understanding King Lear, and several articles on Shakespeare, early modern women writers, and other topics in British literature.

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Introduction

Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia

Introduction: Possess his books ... “... Remember First to possess his books; for without them He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not One spirit to command” The Tempest 3.2.86–9 “I, Sheikh Piru, bean-ribbed, straggle-bearded, far from any glittering court, will update you on some of the things you talked about. You are famous, English immortal. You told your story. I stand on the margin of your story. Aha! But that puts you on the margin of my discourse. Marginality is in the eyes of the beholder, the holder of the book, plumchum, sweet Swan. All the world’s a reflection. Reflect on that Willybaba! This is my turn.” Eastwords, Kalyan Ray

When Kalyan Ray posits a revisionist postcolonial narrative in his Eastwords— revealing the mythical roots of Midsummer Night’s Dream and Tempest to be Indian in origin—he works within a language shared by a global audience that is assumed to delight in the second-person asides and clever allusions.1 “Tears would drown the wind,” the narrator begins, “Ah, the magic wrought by words, dearest Willyum. No matter. Let me confess that we two must be twain, like the East and the West. ‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed. I’ll tell this story my way. My move” (7). Deflating the stultifying moral codes of the British bourgeoisie seems natural to this language; the irreverent tones and complex manipulations of language through scandalous conceits and bawdy metaphors borrowed from the bard seem “at home” in Ray’s aphorisms and phrases. Countering England through Shakespeare, through its prized national poet, by making Shakespeare “native” to other peoples and cultures feels at first counterintuitive. Ray’s a good example because his own complicated 1

Ray, Kalyan. Eastwords. Penguin Books India, 2004.

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faux-Rushdie style delights so much in Shakespeare’s turns of phrase that at times it reads like an homage rather than a biting satire. But there is in Shakespeare’s writing the capacity to release voices and agents that exceed the canonical uses to which he is traditionally put. Shakespeare’s plays are the perfect texts for such appropriation since his works depict clashing personalities and perspectives but also because his works have been historically constructed as the author of pluralism, and not only as the icon of British hegemony or the poet of a fading traditionalism.2 As much recent historicist criticism of modern Shakespeare adaptations have claimed, Shakespeare can be found at the heart of many of the most volatile nationalist and progressive debates about the nature of democratic government, the strictures of colonial and postcolonial identity, the construction of the nation–state, and the limits of Western liberalism.3 In as many guises and investments, off the stage as on, Shakespeare’s language has been treated as the master commonplace book, the quotation manual, of contemporary thought in English diction.4 Shakespeare is not, however, the open, endlessly malleable text the proponents of the liberal humanist model might suggest. As Thomas Cartelli eloquently puts it, “Appropriation is not the one-way street some might like it to be; even self-constituted sponsors of Caliban bent upon acts of linguistic or cultural usurpation may be sucked into the vortex of the Shakespearean unconscious and made subject to a colonization of the mind” (17). Shakespeare in some contexts can indeed be identified with bourgeois culture, English identity, and the withering effects of British rule. But this association is itself the product of a long process of cultural appropriation.5 Since he was ceremoniously installed by Garrick in 1769 as the national poet of England and his work made to fit the standards of eighteenth-century critical taste, taught and performed thereafter in England and her colonies as the unifying art of a civilizing culture, Shakespeare is “home” to those who want to sink their teeth into the very meat of British culture.6 By implication, Shakespeare is the site of contest for those peoples who seek to express their own identities, in complicated ways, with, next to, and against British literary traditions. Shakespeare is “native”—the place to which one returns—when rethinking the possibility of resistant forms of self and culture in the postcolonial context. Postcolonial theories and literatures teach us that it is those icons of an established cultural authority that, in the symbolic politics of seeking a mode of address outside the paradigm of Western doxa, naturally become the locus of a defiant 2 See Michael Dobson’s The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769, Oxford University Press, 1995. 3 See Martin Orkin and Ania Loomba’s Post-Colonial Shakespeares, Routledge, 1998; Dennis Kennedy’s Foreign Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 2004; and Roger Pringle, Tetsuo Kishi, and Stanley Wells’ Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, University of Delaware Press, July 1994. 4 See Terence Hawkes’ Meaning by Shakespeare, Routledge, 1992. 5 See Michael Bristol’s Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare, Routledge, 1990, and Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present, Oxford University Press, 1989. 6 See “Is Shakespeare Still Too English?” in John Elsom’s Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? Routledge, 1990.

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culture.7 Shakespeare is the center of this process of reshaping the new through the old. Caliban’s line, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” is often quoted as expressing the inverse logic of postcolonial identity8; but it is Caliban’s adept insight into the dislocated politics of colonial literacy— “Remember / First to possess his books; for without them / He’s but a sot”—that best summarizes the axiological strategy that resistance must assume in relation to the discursive nature of colonial authority and its residual hold on indigenous voices. Steal the books. Go to the source of Prospero’s very power. And for those who live the effects of British colonialism, what better to steal than the very words, figures, and plots of the bard? Not the preserve of a refined dramatic culture or a rarefied metropolitan entertainment, Shakespeare is therefore intimately linked to local traditions that tell the story of how native cultures bear the imprint of contact with those peoples who were part of its history. The various social groups who live in the penumbra of Western colonial cultures seek to “profit on” the language they were taught; to recoin (to work with the same metaphor), or reinvent, from the books they were taught, and to reassert the value of their own pre-existing traditions and practices.9 Shakespeare is adapted, reclaimed—or perhaps it is best described as repossessed— by indigenous societies across the globe as the source of cultural difference and identity. Consider that every spring, groups of women on the Caribbean island of Carriacou prepare elaborate costumes for their boyfriends, husbands, and sons, who will wear the regalia in the long-standing annual ritual known as the Carriacou Mas, a contest in which local men dance and deliver famous passages from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The contemporary Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih pauses over page while writing Season of Migration to the North to consider the vexed experience of expressing an Arab nationalism, and what comes to mind is the face of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Sudanese experience of expressing an Arab identity fixed and localized through the tragic hero’s story of betrayal. The Maori broadcasting agency Te Mangai Paho chooses its first film to promote the New Zealand language te reo, Te Tangata Whai Rawa O Weneti [The Maori Merchant of Venice] using Shakespeare’s romantic comedy to resurrect a native language. Such examples speak to the hybridity of Shakespeare’s influence but also the densely woven nature of his “local habitation.” Take as another example of this dense narrative weaving the Bollywood film Maqbool (2003; cover shot) directed by Vishal Bharadwaj, which places the narrative of Macbeth in present-day Bombay, translating the story of medieval Scottish kingmaking and rebellion into the story of Indian gangster warfare. Many interesting transpositions were made to Shakespeare’s tragedy: The witches appear here as two corrupt, fortune-telling male cops; Macbeth is a hired assassin (named Maqbool), a loyal and dutiful hit man working for the gangster warlord Abbaji. In a moment of cheeky self-referentiality, Macbeth is given as his underworld territory Bollwood 7 See Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, 1996, and Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins’ Post-Colonial Drama Theory, Practice, Politics, Routledge, 1996. 8 Greenblatt, Stephen. Learning to Curse. Routledge, 1992. 9 See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, Routledge, 2002.

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itself, where he must muscle actors for protection money. The film has the hallmark of a traditional Bollywood film, particularly its so-called masala mixing of melodramatic elements with gangster films; star-crossed love, in this case, with elements of The Godfather; folk dancing; and seeming burlesque use of song-dance clips interjected at random moments (“item numbers” as they are called in Hindi cinema) in places out of sorts with the graphic violence in the story. The major change is in making Lady Macbeth the mistress of the boss; effectively, Lady Macbeth is Lady Duncan at the beginning of the movie, and Duncan is the obstacle to the two lovers joining. This is no subtle change. Oddly, it is not mentioned in the promotional material and in very few of its reviews. How to read the appropriation? The question allows us to reflect on the puzzling aspect of such overt “adaptations,” not as derivations, excisions, or manipulations, but as forms of continuation and congruence. One way to read these changes is to say that Bollywood is making Shakespeare familiar to its audience, revising the heterogeneity of Shakespeare’s own “mingle-mangle” tragic-comedy-burgomask elements so that they find their equivalents in a contemporary world more alive to the nuances of the original cultural expressions of the text. Contemporary Bombay becomes a kind mirroring medium through which the different discourses of Shakespeare’s text can more accurately find valence, where mixed forms are not collapsed or closed off to one controlling vision. There is a kind of counterintuitive logic to such anachronistic displacements. In the postcolonial political context, this is articulated as a kind of cherry-picking of textual elements that affirm a counterculture’s identity. Christy Desmet describes this process in Shakespeare and Appropriation as one “in which post-colonial societies take over those aspects of imperial culture ... that may be of use to them in articulating their own social and cultural identities” (19). Gérard Genette has examined the ironic aspect of such “heterodiagetic transpositions” (where setting and characters are changed, plot is playfully shuffled) as forms of appropriation that on the surface look like quixotic rearrangements within the text but in fact work to redeploy the reworked plot and resolutions in a medium that allows the theme to affect its audience in a way consistent with the original. In heterodiagetic transpositions, the world outside the narrative framework re-creates elements internal to the narrative—in Genette’s words, where “Dido might for example be turned into an all too hospitable innkeeper and Aeneas into an ingenious traveling salesman” (296). Such changes seem to reimagine the text whole-cloth, abandoning in postmodern fashion any sense of an original. But the inverse is true: Compare Maqbool with Ray’s Eastwords quoted at the beginning of our introduction. Ray sticks to original characters and chronology of plot to Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although the homodiagetic transposition seems to “stay true” to the original, it in fact reimagines the entire life-world of the text by following the inner logic of its narrative to its ultimate (implicit) conclusions. Genette explains the implications: One might perceive some degree of incompatibility between the two approaches, owing perhaps to a double compensatory movement: heterodiegetic transposition emphasizes the thematic analogy between its plot and that of its hypotext (“my hero is not Robinson, but you will see that he goes through a very similar adventure”) conversely, homodiagetic

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transposition emphasizes its own freedom of thematic interpretation (“I am rewriting a the story of Robinson after so many others, but let there be no mistake: I am giving it an entirely new meaning”). (310)

In this context, Genette’s careful distinction between homodiagetic and heterodiagetic tranpositions helps us understand how Maqbool’s seemingly anachronistic impositions on the text feel “faithful” in the sense of being honest about how they engage viewers on their own terms. Making Macbeth a lovesick hero seems to draw on too slim a thread of Macbeth’s original motive, but perhaps only by shifting Macbeth’s moral question internally—to a question of private love versus duty to paternal authority—could modern subjects fully appreciate the weight of his conflict. To make the residual medieval morality tale of a soldier torn between vaulting ambition and communal honor intelligible to a contemporary audience, a melodramatic Oedipal romance narrative is inserted in its place to give voice properly to the modern “angst” of relenting to a repressed passion, a self-destructive gesture. How else could a modern audience “see” past its own semantic horizon, a tale that is meant to speak outside its moment? This is what Genette means by saying that in heterodiagetic appropriations anachronisms are “incidental,” a “dissonance in relation to the overall tone of the action.” But on what grounds do such transpositions stand if they have to speak across a divide defined not just in terms of history but by national and ethnic difference? When is appropriation not a reconciliation to colonial identity? Bharadwaj does not seem to be overtly concerned with these questions. However, by making Shakespeare a reference point to contemporary Indian identity—Hindu versus Muslim tensions, clash of metropole and traditional cultures, familial versus generational investments—he must necessarily deploy the Western theme that conflicts “of the heart” are timeless (and by implication fixed and perhaps immutable), if not transcendent. Maqbool is a powerful example of a local appropriation that troubles the simple binary that Shakespeare must always represent a univocal Western tradition. But at what point does Shakespeare end and Bollywood begin? There has been, in the last 10 years, an explosion of critical interest in the way Shakespeare has been made to accommodate local cultures across the globe, a critical trend that works concurrently and in concert with the global English-speaking media aspiring to shape Shakespeare as an international art. A new progressive internationalism has slowly and—some would say “at long last”—reshaped the academic discourses of intellectual labor in the profession of English in the United States, creating the opportunity for truly multiregional conferences and festivals to address a new “global Shakespeare.” Shakespeare studies had to create an opening to address the collision of these multiple forces and opportunities. Building off the trend in Renaissance new historicism to situate readings and interpretive paradigms in local institutional sites of contest, there has been an increase in scholarly projects that explore Shakespeare in the context of appropriations and national cultures. Books such as Thomas Cartelli’s Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (Routledge 1999), Kim Sturgess’s Shakespeare and the American Nation (Cambridge 2004), Martin Orkin’s Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (Routledge 2005), Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz’s India’s

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Shakespeare (University of Delaware Press 2005) and Sonia Massai’s World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (Routledge 2005) attempt to account for various historical conditions of how Shakespeare’s work was constituted from the end of the nineteenth century till today. While our collection builds on these books, what distinguishes our collection compared with these others is that it is not focused exclusively on stage productions or film, but rather it expands the category of appropriation to examine how Shakespeare is situated in a range of social practices: various educational, artistic, and political discourses, social rituals, and revisions in novels. Shakespeare is made “native” to a host of cultural practices that often fall outside the focus of traditional literary scholarship, which tends to emphasize stage productions. Although the project of accounting for different local traditions is reflected in some of the essays of these books, no index can ever be all inclusive. We hope to trace the different levels of cultural appropriation within distinct national and cultural discourses, providing essays from a spectrum of theoretical vantage points. But to delineate what makes our collection unique would beg the point: It is more the case that Native Shakespeares builds off the diverse work of these scholars, positioning itself as a collective project meant to illuminate the global discussion already started, in the separate but overlapping international critical work of accounting for the distinct nature of Shakespeare in the local customs and traditions around the world. For the contributors of Native Shakespeares, the local–global axis prompts scholars to plot how Shakespeare’s texts, iconicity, and cultural capital reflect the uneasy relationship between the hegemonic and the subaltern, the West and the rest. This collection seeks to explode the prevailing binary logic that typifies much of the current scholarship by foregrounding the connections among the local appropriations, adaptations, and translations and the global discourse that shapes and is shaped by them. Within this interstitial space, we may tease out the implications of how local Shakespeares contribute to the global manifestation of the Shakespeare industry even as they work to dismantle it. Local Shakespeares suggest powerful strategies of intervention, and it is their growing cumulative impact that increasingly informs Shakespeare scholarship. Responding to this growing context, Native Shakespeares presents essays from a worldwide group of scholars focusing on these distinct strategies of appropriation, subversion, and translation that revise Shakespeare and decenter, if not erase, his British birthright. As privileged texts that were taught as models of British history and experience, Shakespeare’s plays appeared in many “native” translations, adaptations, and performance contexts. Today, reconstructions and revisions of Shakespeare’s works continue as the plays are co-opted by postcolonial and minority cultures, further shattering the notion of the universalist interpretation that privileges Western experience as primary. As such, Shakespeare’s plays can no longer signify an exclusively British, or even Western, identity; instead, they function as sites of contest reflecting a manifold of cultures. The essays in this collection examine how Shakespeare is rewritten, reinscribed, and translated to fit within the local traditions, values, and languages of various communities and cultures around the world. Regardless of the medium—theater, pedagogy, film, literary studies—Shakespeare is increasingly “rooted” in the local customs of a people in ways that challenge

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the simple notion that his drama promotes a Western idealism. Native Shakespeares examines how the persistent indigenization of Shakespeare complicates the traditional vision of his work as the voice of Western culture and colonial hegemony. Probing the deeper theoretical question that lies at the heart of the revisionist strategy, the essays in this collection ask, How are Shakespeare’s works used to assert competing national and immigrant or minority identities? Put simply, the critical stake in the revisionist gesture is whether the new literary form is merely an adaptation of the original text, implying that the original play in some way remains stable and has a guiding influence on its use or reproduction. As many of the essays in Native Shakespeares assert, productions of Shakespeare on stage, in translation, in film, or in critical appropriations assert a site of contest where identity and ideology converge but perhaps never cohere into a unified vision, suggesting a more fluid or performative space that provides a meeting place of different agents or social voices on a mutually even playing field. The appropriation or contest spectrum is suggested in William Worthen’s description in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1997) of the play–text as a “slippery,” unstable object that hovers always between the two poles of “fidelity” and “creativity.” Even though Worthen intends to describe the director–critic as a kind of postmodern writer who is forceful in determining the significance of the text, the use of the word creative to describe the agency afforded the newly adapted Shakespeare is problematic because it subtly invokes the humanist handsaw against “overread” interpretations of his plays and similarly suggests that the hand revising the play is being inventive with— or, more appropriately over—an otherwise fixed and coherent object. Native Shakespeares intends rather to question the political and theoretical uses to which his plays are put in the context of a global stage. That is, one of the things many of these essays does is put the humanist handsaw to the test. The familiar essay by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest,” suggests that “in order to speak of the Shakespearean text as an historical utterance, it is necessary to read it with and within series of ‘con-texts’” (195). The authors promote “con-texts with a hyphen, to signify a break from the inequality of the usual text/context relationship. Contexts are themselves texts and must be read with: they do not simply make up a background” (236). Do local appropriations of Shakespeare extend, complicate, or even undermine this model of con-textual reading? Do they interrogate these contexts, altering our understanding of them? Do they fully break free from the original pull or cultural logic of his dramatic works, supplying a new matrix of con-texts? In the moment of revision, does the original text remain as a mold, or a kind of shell, exerting pressure on the final form? Our project seeks to provide different and compelling responses to this ongoing discussion10 within the narratives of nativist, nationalist, and postcolonial contexts. Do contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare entirely reshape what poststructuralism identified as the “grain” of these texts, grounded as they are in 10 See John Drakakis’s Alternative Shakespeares, Routledge, 1985; Terence Hawkes’s Alternative Shakespeares Vol. 2, Routledge, 1997; and Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin’s Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, University of Calgary Press, 1990.

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the various early modern perspectives and literary traditions—Renaissance theater and learning, colonial expansion, discourses of humanist pluralism, the traditions of popular holiday customs, and Renaissance philosophical skepticism? To complicate the deeper political implications of these questions, the very choice of Shakespeare, some might argue, hints at an unspoken endorsement of the Western culture, which the revision was originally meant to challenge. That is, do such negotiations, to follow the idea of Shakespeare as a site of contest, vitalize or enshrine an unspoken aesthetic conservatism, even though they intend to call it into question? Although idiosyncratic productions of Shakespeare mean to assert a native culture’s autonomy, could it not be argued that that they also subtly—perhaps inevitably—promote the myth of a global culture that is, in the last analysis, an assertion of Western capitalist expansion? Take as an example the latest the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)’s “The Complete Works” project, the Stratford UK 2006 year-long play season, which boasts “23 plays throughout the year” with “visiting companies from around the world presenting their versions of the plays.”11 The ambitious goal of the project is to invite acting companies and directors from around the world to perform “their take” on productions in Stratford, England. Alongside traditional play venues, then, will appear revisions and “responses” to Shakespeare’s original plays, like “The Indian Boy,” “written in response to A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” by Rona Munro, whose play, as the promotional literature explains, is “set in an ancient forest. When a property developer builds houses on protected land, the wilderness fights back. A feral child is found in the forest and he seems to have been there for generations, as trees turn to stone and resist the chainsaw. What are the powers being unleashed and what does the Indian Boy know?” The language of this advert—the “ancient forest,” the “feral child”—and the RSC’s coupling of “The Indian Boy” with A Midsummer Night’s Dream reasserts the same binary logic exposed by Edward Said’s Orientalism. The theatrical parallel articulates an East that is childlike, wild, and ancient alongside a West that is enlightened, rational, and blindly progressive and expansionist. Midsummer Night’s Dream, by implication, exposes this unseen binary, making Shakespeare the catalyst of self-critique, if not anti-capitalist activism. Consider also “The Baghdad Richard,” performed in Arabic by the Culture Project originally out of Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre, directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam. The billing invokes both the international appeal of Shakespeare, and his native “voice”: “Shakespeare’s mesmerizing portrait of human evil,” we are told, “provides the doorway into the dark inner workings of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the mid 1980s, an era when the Iraqi tyrant was still regarded as a hero incarnate of both Arab and Western worlds alike.” Decontextualized from their local settings and paired with their canonical counterparts, these native frames fail to respond, to reconfigure, and to alter genuinely our experience of Shakespeare’s plays. A backstage tour of the RSC Theatre offers a “behind-the-scenes” narrative that explains a hidden motive to the use of companies from around the world. The RSC Theatre, visitors are told, will be torn down at the end of this year to be replaced by a much larger arena-style playhouse with a much larger platform stage. “The Complete Works” offerings are indeed historic, as many of the films, lectures, and productions present Shakespeare 11 See promotional site: http://www.rsc.org.uk/content/completeworks.aspx.

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as a local “voice” of many peoples throughout the world. However, a deeper metaphor may be suggested in the gesture to use native voices and “responses” to his work as a form of flexible labor to expand the economic potential of the RSC itself, as the ideology that promotes a “native” Shakespeare—acting companies from Chicago next to actors from South Africa—subtly reproduces the logic of global capitalism, a kind of outsourcing of labor at a time of economic expansion. The RSC’s appropriation of local appropriations suggests both an ironic reversal of fortune—the empire is not only writing back but is being asked to read aloud—and a subtle reassertion of colonialism. Does the appropriation of native Shakespeare produce a genuine pluralism, as hinted at by the promotional tone of RSC’s ambitious project? Or does the appearance of pluralism become a kind of guise to promote an even deeper British imperialism that prospers from many adaptations as signs of his universal importance? The way out of the appropriation–adaptation debate is, first, to take the textual– essentialist risk of thinking through the possible options available to the reader– director in establishing the posture toward the text, risky because the very act of thinking through the object relations of text and reader reinforces a certain textual idealism that flies in the face of the last few decades of poststructuralist criticism. But the risk is worth taking because it helps ground the question of appropriation, as Cartelli suggests, in the phenomenological ground of real material intention: What are the ends, finally, of the assertive reworking of the text? The complicated nature of defining the “text” is itself made more difficult in this instance because of the dense historical nature of Shakespeare’s writing. Any appropriation of Shakespeare’s plays will always be an interpretation of Shakespeare’s image, reputation, and status as well as a complicated response to the historical tradition of the specific play in an ongoing historical context (and not necessarily, as it were, the play in itself).12 If we agree that the literary text has a grain—an identifiable set of voices and historically conditioned ideological concerns that are, though open to different interpretive strategies, constitutive of its thematic design—then we are closer to thinking through the way the adaptation–appropriation “pulls” the text one way or another. Put simply, the ideology of the text can be reinforced or resisted. If we can say that the Shakespearean text places such limits on the phenomenal contours of its world, then we can begin to consider the types of postures one can assume in relation to it. If seen as a spectrum, on one end would be the openly oppositional appropriation, which self-consciously asserts a worldview or political agenda against that of the text. On the other end would be the celebratory mode, an appropriation of the play’s most ostensible gestures put to the use of celebrating the text for its own sake. Between these poles—arguably “idealistic” in the sense that they perhaps only exist in the abstract since any example provided would test the very limits of the categories themselves—exists the subtle gradations of postures with and against the various voices and agents of the text. In Repositioning Shakespeare, Thomas Cartelli advances a set of critical categories to define the middle ground and more nuanced 12 See Brian Vickers’s William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Routledge, 1996, and Stephen Orgel’s Shakespeare and the Literary Tradition, Routledge, 1999, and Shakespeare and the Interpretive Tradition, Routledge, 1999.

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positions of this spectrum. The most important form of appropriation for our purposes is the transpositional mode, where the reader seizes upon a voice or grain of the text and brings it to light. Building on Genette’s idea of the heterodiagetic mode, the transpositional appropriation, Cartelli explains, “identifies and isolates a specific theme, plot, or argument in its appropriative objective and brings it into its own, arguably analogous, interpretive field to underwrite or enrich a presumably related thesis or argument” (17). The idea here is that there is a correspondence between one particular voice or grain of the play and that of the reader’s, who works to bring this dimension of the text into its own element. Similar to this form of appropriation is the dialogic appropriation, “which involves the careful integration into a work of allusions, identifications, and quotations that complicate, ‘thicken,’ and qualify that work’s primary narrative line to the extent that each partner to the transaction may be said to enter into the other’s frame of reference” (18). Like the idea of transposing the reader’s–director’s “voice” into that of the text, this latter tips the scale in the play’s favor, registering the agency of the text to speak back to the world that releases its energies; while the contemporary world is recognized within the allegory suggested in the reproduction of the play, it is rendered differently; as such, Shakespeare is made to inhabit more substantially the phenomenological world of the reading. Our volume is organized into three sections. The first section, “Lowly Subjects: Transposing Tradition,” examines the ongoing project of producing Shakespeare as an icon of the univocal tradition of Western thought within the seemingly arbitrary but nonetheless powerful references and allusions to his writing off the stage, in educational practices, novels, literary criticism, and film. The essays in this section challenge conventional literary discourse by looking at Shakespeare as a contact zone in which this process of tradition making is consistently reproduced and negotiated in different periods of Anglo-American history. In particular, the history of these iconic uses shows a pattern where Shakespeare is used to contest or reformulate the idiosyncratic and historically topical aspect of Shakespeare’s writing. While some critics help to naturalize his work as native to the later preoccupations of modern bourgeois or colonial interests, others use the iconic gesture of allusion to question Western identity and its univocality. Focusing particularly on allusions, references, and textual fragments across genres, this group of essays explores how isolating specific pieces from a play–text reconfigures traditional literary interpretation. In Chapter 1, “The Face in the Mirror: Joyce’s Ulysses and the Lookingglass Shakespeare,” Thomas Cartelli examines one of the more provocative twentiethcentury restagings of Hamlet, Joyce’s Ulysses, where Shakespeare is variously quoted, parodied, and treated with bardolatric reverence by Joyce’s principal characters, Stephen and Bloom. The evocation of Hamlet in Joyce’s novel, he suggests, ultimately interrogates the bourgeois myth of a unified consciousness; Stephen’s allusions and references challenge the notion of a single unified subjectivity and “crack the glass” or mirror of the Subject, postulating a more polyvalent perspective of identity that it is not whole. Similarly, Craig Dionne reads the countertraditional appropriation of allusions and quotations of Shakespeare as its own form of literacy that has a history with deep roots in American teaching practices. In Chapter 2, “Commonplace Literacy and the Colonial Scene: The Case of Carriacou’s Shakespeare Mas,’” Dionne argues that the Carriacou Mas festival—a carnival involving costume, dance, and

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recitation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—is a rich parody of dominant Western culture’s “commonplace” use of Shakespeare as a compendium of great phrases for public speaking and elocution. Using the place of the “lowly subject” of the Mas as countertradition, Dionne historicizes this form of literacy, reading it back through the use of classroom “readers” in the American colonies, a cultural practice meant to make narrative texts vehicles for oratorical culture, a culture of self-display and selfmaking. Chapter 3, “‘The Forms of Things Unknown’: Richard Wright and Stephen Henderson’s Quiet Appropriation,” John Carpenter explores how the transposition of Shakespeare’s great phrase can be an empowering gesture. He examines how Richard Wright’s embryonic philosophical work, published collectively as White Man, Listen (1957), changed the face of African-American literary criticism with the inclusion of a section describing “folk utterances, spirituals, blues, works songs, and folklore” as “The Forms of Things Unknown.” Carpenter explores how Wright’s uncredited use of Shakespeare’s phrase, which African-American scholars and writers followed, raises a number of compelling questions about how Shakespeare is used to represent the “native” aspects of African-American culture. Carpenter charts this discourse through many iterations, showing an ironic case of Shakespeare having been “co-opted and rearticulated as ‘native’” by scholars whose allusions construct a legitimizing critical heritage for postcolonial literature “outside the humanizing sphere of the colonial project.” Finally, In Chapter 4, “The Fooler Fooled: Salman Rushdie’s Hybrid Revision of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Through ‘Yorick,’” Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan and Ana Sáez Hidalgo examine the literary pastiche of Rushdie’s “Yorick,” whose constant intertextuality promotes a fragmented discourse that ultimately challenges the Bard’s version of history. In “Yorick,” Rushdie foregrounds narrative subjectivity through his ironical rewriting of Lawrence Sterne’s version of Shakespeare. The digressive, endlessly self-referential, fragmented intertextuality suspends the reader in a state of literary agitation between the iconic Shakespeare, the canonical Sterne, and the postmodern Rushdie. The second section, “Local Productions: Nationalism and Hegemony from the Third Space,” features essays on specific theatrical productions from India, Australia, and North America. Using the discourse of “Third Space theory,” each essay localizes Shakespeare within a specific cultural, political, and national context. Homi Bhabha theorizes that there is a meeting ground where, in his terms, the “act of communication between the I and the You” is mediated by the contingent “location” of the cultural dialogue. This “space” is a process of negotiation: both a mediating force and a catalyst for the convergence of new forms—“which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot ‘in itself’ be conscious” (36). In Chapter 5, “Jatra Shakespeare: Indigenous Indian Theater and the Postcolonial Stage,” Parmita Kapadia considers how intercultural and intracultural theater in India offers such a meeting ground, a counterhegemonic site of contestation that promotes Shakespeare as a uniting figure who transcends communal and ethnic differences. Kapadia details the material practices of a contemporary production that combines the English language with indigenous theatrical forms, particularly jatra. Resituating Shakespeare’s texts within a local, “Indian” aesthetic, Kapadia argues, frees directors

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from the plays’ colonial origins, subverts the notion of a reinstated British authority, and ultimately endorses a postcolonial “Indian” identity and nationalism. In Chapter 6, “Nationalizing the Bard: Québécois Adaptations of Shakespeare Since the Quiet Revolution,” Jennifer Drouin examines how Shakespeare’s texts function as legitimizing influences on an emerging national theatre in the context of Québécois drama, striving for respectability as well as potent symbols of national identity. By choosing Shakespeare as their “source text,” Québécois dramatists distance themselves from French influence and resituate Shakespeare within the contexts of Québécois politics, disassociating the texts from their British past. Similarly, in the same vein, Chapter 7, “An Aboriginal As You Like It: Staging Reconciliation in a Drama of Desire,” Maureen McDonnell reads the 1999 production of As You Like It performed by Sydney’s Company B theatre, whose chief innovation was its insistence on the cast’s “Australian-ness,” expressed primarily through the presence of the Aboriginal actors. McDonnell finds different modes of transformation exhibited in this performance, where categories of gender, the notion of a visibly apparent race, the transmutability of erotic affiliation, and other categories were continually shifted, which points, she argues, to the ways in which Aboriginal and Australian identities are represented in current debates about national reconciliation. While the critics recognized the play’s political critique in terms of land ownership, McDonnell shows how these responses completely overlooked the ways in which Rosalind’s exile resonated, particularly in its reception on the international—and theatrical— stage. Finishing this section, Chapter 8, “Movers and Losers: Shakespeare in Charge and Shakespeare Behind Bars,” Niels Herold contrasts two peculiar appropriations of Shakespeare in America—the use of Shakespeare’s plays to teach chief executive officers’ strategies of business management and the productions of Shakespeare by prisoners—to examine the differing poles of perspective on hegemonic American ideals, a contrast that emphasizes the class divide between Shakespeare’s current place in popular culture. Whereas the corporate-sponsored approach to Shakespeare reveals a rather single-minded ratification of an ideology of entitlement and selfpromotion—interpretations that “could only occur in a culture single-mindedly devoted to profit, where everything, including but maybe especially Shakespeare, is up for self-determining grabs”—Herold discovers in the prison performances a narrative that points to the other side of this quintessentially American practice of appropriating Shakespeare, a use of the play–text as a keystone of emancipation and self-development, as prisoners find “their redemption in the cathartic performance of roles that allows them to act out aspects of their personalities repressed by guilt and shame.” Herold examines the deeper attitudes toward performativity that underpin both models of appropriation. Finally, the third section, “Translating Across: Between the National and the Cultural,” looks at how Shakespeare is used to problematize nationalist identity and frames the discussion within the larger critical conversation about the politics of translation. In Chapter 9, “Shakespeare and Transculturation: Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest,” Pier Paolo Frassinelli investigates a West Indian reimagining of The Tempest through the prism of the black experience in the New World. Written under French colonialism, this Martiniquais text permanently altered the reception of Caliban as Shakespeare’s “deformed slave,” a figure that came to embody the symbol of the non-European identity. Césaire’s work encourages a transcultural interpretation, Frassinelli suggests, an approach that allows us to refashion Caliban

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but, equally and significantly, Prospero. Emphasizing the interconnectedness shared by colonized and colonizing cultures, Frassinelli maintains that Césaire’s play constructs a complex intertextual relationship between the texts that problematize the binary division between “original” and “translation.” In Chapter 10, “Twin Obligations in Solomon Plaatje’s Diphosho-phoso,” Ameer Sohrawardy looks at the Sestwana translation from one of the major figures of the New African Movement, Solomon Plaatje’s The Comedy of Errors. Both Plaatje’s life and his translation have been at the center of debates between postcolonial responses to “native assimilation” (to borrow Fanon’s expression) and defenders of South African reappropriations of a “universal” Shakespeare. Solomon Plaatje’s work reflects the contradictions within the New African Movement, rooted in the work of Xhosa intellectuals. Dismissed by later writers and theorists as a mere “Christian convert,” Plaatje reflects an ongoing tension between national and cultural identity. Demonstrating how Plaatje embraced European education, particularly the empowerment afforded by the English language, Sohrawardy re-evaluates Plaatje’s translation of Shakespeare as one that negotiates between reifying the dominant culture while opening a space for the repressed voice of the marginalized in the face of a hegemonic culture bent on keeping its privileged separatism intact. Also looking at translation in the context of national identity, Donna Woodford-Gormley examines in Chapter 11, “In Fair Havana, Where We Lay Our Scene: Romeo and Juliet in Cuba,” the complicated history of Cuban colonialism and independence through various translations and adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. By focusing on different versions of a single play, Woodford conveys the ambivalence accorded to Shakespeare in Cuba—in Nobel prize–winner Pablo Neruda’s definitive “revolutionary” version, Grupo de Teatro’s treatment of family divided by immigration, in The National Ballet’s curious adaptation that includes a character named Shakespeare that directs other dancers—all of which enact a subtle process of cultural transformation where Cuba asserts its national identity through Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy. Finally, in Chapter 12, “I am no Othello. I am a lie’: Shakespeare’s Moor and the Post-Exotic in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” Atef Laouyene considers how Salih appropriates Othello to open a space through which Sudanese colonial experience can be articulated and legitimized. The novel’s examination of the West’s construction of the eroticized Arab reflects the oppositional poles of both Self and Other, belonging and alienation. Accordingly, Season’s appropriation of Othello disrupts postcolonial Arab discourse by foregrounding a still-emerging Arab identity and by fracturing traditional Renaissance conceptions of Moorishness. The Afterword of the collection is written by Jyotsna Singh, whose many publications in and around the area of postcolonial history and culture, particularly in Shakespeare and the colonial context, have done much to place Shakespeare at the center of debates about the transmission of colonial culture and its role as a shaping force in theorizing about identity and society.13 Singh’s Afterword accesses the usefulness of addressing the idea of the “location” of Shakespeare in the vexed and politically fraught discourses of postcolonial theory and histories. 13 The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics, Blackwell, 1995; Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Language of Colonialism, Routledge, 1996; Travel Knowledge: European Witnesses to Navigations, Traffiques, Discoveries in the Early Modern Period; forthcoming.

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Works Cited Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Barker, Francis, and Peter Hulme. “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest.” The Tempest: Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. R.S. White. New York: Palgrave, 1999. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bristol, Michael. Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1990. Callaghan, Dympna C., Lorraine Helms, and Jyotsna Singh, eds. The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994. Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. New York: Routledge, 1999. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Drakakis, John. Alternative Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1985. Elsom, John. Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? New York: Routledge, 1990. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama Theory, Practice, Politics, New York: Routledge, 1996. Greenblatt, Stephen. Learning to Curse. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hawkes, Terence. Alternative Shakespeares, Vol. 2. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. Meaning by Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1992. Kennedy, Dennis. Foreign Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Maqbool. Dir. Vishal Bharadwaj. Perfs. Irfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapus, Nasseruddin Shah, Om Puri. Kaleidoscope Entertainment and Vishal Bharadwaj Pictures, 2003. Massai, Sonia, ed. World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. New York: Routledge, 2005. Orgel, Stephen. Shakespeare and the Interpretive Tradition, New York: Routledge, 1999. ———. Shakespeare and the Literary Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999. Orkin, Martin. Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power. New York: Routledge, 2005. ———. and Ania Loomba. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1998. Pringle, Roger, Tetsuo Kishi, and Stanley Wells. Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Ray, Kalyan. Eastwords, New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies. Singh, Jyotsna. Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Language of Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1996.

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———. Eds. Dympna C. Callaghan and Lorraine Helms. The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics, Boston: Blackwell, 1995. Sturgess, Kim. Shakespeare and the American Nation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Trivedi, Poonam, and Dennis Bartholomeusz. India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Vickers, Brian. William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, New York: Routledge, 1996. Worthen, William. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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PART 1 Lowly Subjects: Transposing Tradition

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Chapter 1

The Face in the Mirror: Joyce’s Ulysses and the Lookingglass Shakespeare Thomas Cartelli

I One of the most provocative twentieth-century restagings of Hamlet, and recontextualizations of Shakespeare, begins in the first episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, which is famously set in a tower that “beetles o’er its base to the sea” in the suburbs of a late colonial Dublin that Stephen Dedalus mock-heroically styles “the seventh city of Christendom.” Adaptation is hardly the word for what Joyce does to and with Shakespeare in this and other sections of Ulysses, Jonathan Dollimore’s notion of creative vandalism serving as both a more accurate and expressive term for describing Joyce’s sustained commerce with the bard.1 Shakespeare is variously quoted, parodied, distorted, dislocated, caricatured, misrepresented, and treated with bardolatric reverence by Joyce’s principal characters, Stephen and Leopold Bloom, and by the narrating presence that speaks above, around, and through them in the course of the novel.2 Hamlet, of course, avowedly operates, along with Homer’s Odyssey, as one of the official ur-texts of Ulysses and is most prominently featured in those sections of the novel that witness Stephen Dedalus combating the usurping 1 Jonathan Dollimore, “Middleton and Barker: Creative Vandalism,” program for Royal Court production of Women Beware Women, published with a text of the play as Playscript 111 (London: Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1986). All quotations of Shakespeare are drawn from David Bevington, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). 2 In the most inspired work yet done on Joyce’s treatment of Shakespeare in Ulysses, Andrew Gibson writes in a clearly apposite vein: “Emulation, imitation, simulation, admiration, degradation, domination: all are aspects of what Joyce does with Shakespeare” (76). While Gibson addresses many features of the present argument, his chapter on “The Shakespeare Controversy” is especially notable for its detailed analysis of how Joyce has the young “Fenian upstart” Stephen “massively beat” Edward Dowden, a staunch Unionist and arguably the leading literary scholar of his time, “at his own game” (67, 66). Pace Dollimore’s notion of “creative vandalism,” we also find Gibson comparing Joyce’s approach to Shakespeare with that of Walter Raleigh, another contemporary bardolater, in the following way: “If Raleigh conceives of himself as the designer of a monument to Shakespeare in the national cathedral church, Joyce is the vandal who desecrates it” (77).

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agency of Buck Mulligan, Haines, and Mr Deasy in the book’s opening chapters and attempting to free himself of the “mind forg’d manacles” of Irish literary nationalism in his Shakespeare lecture in the National Library. Though Joyce charted these opening episodes to reflect dramatically the situation of Telemachus as he rouses himself to action in the effort both to resist the suitors and to discover news of his father in The Odyssey, he chose Hamlet as Stephen Dedalus’s text of first resort for modeling what he takes to be his more than figurative entrapment by Ireland and the Irish, the church of Rome, and the British imperium. The evocation of Hamlet in these first sections of the novel starts with Stephen dressed in mourning black playing Hamlet to Buck Mulligan’s Claudius (and to Mulligan and Haines’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), includes Stephen playing a truant Irish Catholic Hamlet/Laertes to Mr Deasy’s Unionist and anti-Semitic Polonius, and culminates in Stephen’s meanderings across Sandymount strand, wearing what he calls his “Hamlet hat” and scribbling words on his “tablets” while thinking “He has the key. I will not sleep there when the night comes” and imagining himself “in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood” (U 3.276,281).3 The “he” who “has the key” is, of course, “stately, plump” Mulligan, Joyce’s version of the anglicized Irishman, intent on playing both treacherous Claudius to Stephen’s Hamlet and “willing native informant” (Cheng 152) to the Englishman Haines who, in turn, plays cultural tourist seeking an insider’s insight into the Celtic revival, or what will come to be called the Irish literary renaissance (see Cheng 151–62).4 As Vincent Cheng has noted, the Haines/Mulligan connection models for Joyce the tributary relationship of the Irish artist singing for his supper at the behest of the Englishman who, as it were, controls the “key” to the treasury; it also helps model for Stephen what he takes to be “the symbol of Irish art,” namely, the “cracked looking glass of a servant” (1.146). As the “Shakespearizing” Stephen might say, this glass or mirror is cracked for the reason that it is not whole, or, better, because it reflects what we today might term “subjects” not only in considerable need of formation but incapable of recognizing or registering what a fully formed or defined subject might look like. (Stephen is throughout acutely aware of his legal status as subject of, and state of subjection to, the British imperium.) The consequences of this doubly disabled and disabling condition of subject-deformation are twice alluded to in the Library episode when John Eglinton (the anglicized pseudonym of William Kirkpatrick Magee, whose emulative self-modeling on “England” or the Shakespearean “eglantine” Joyce no doubt found irresistible) avers that “Our young Irish bards ... have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (9.43–4) and states, “Our national epic has yet to be written” (9.309).5 3 All quotations from Ulysses are drawn from the corrected text edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986). 4 Vincent Cheng’s account of the “dynamics” of this episode is cleverly couched within the framework of an “ethnographic encounter with a ‘native’ population, in which the British anthropologist ventures out in the wilderness to study the primitive ‘wild Irish’ and their folkways, in the presence of a willing native informant (Mulligan) and the latter’s semiwilling specimen of study (Stephen)” (152). 5 Gifford and Seidman have instructively noted the connection between this statement and an essay in which the “real” Eglinton/Magee imagines such an epic proceeding from “a

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This brief exchange may suggest that for Joyce the Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet had considerably more to contribute to the national epic he was writing than did the “native” Celtic myth of Kathleen ni Houlihan. It also indicates how profoundly complicated (and complicating) Joyce found the problem of Shakespeare’s national and cultural positioning in relation to his own. Indeed, only a few pages into Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture, Joyce has Stephen deliberately misrepresent a comment of Robert Greene’s on Shakespeare, averring that Shakespeare, not lust (as Greene actually wrote), is “the deathsman of the soul,” before rather perversely adding: Not for nothing was he a butcher’s son wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palm. Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one, Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne. (9.130–35; GS 201)

Stephen treats with calculated abandon here the seemingly strained connection between what amounts to a predictable body count for the notoriously “bloodboltered” last acts of Jacobean tragedies and the notorious concentration camps Lord Kitchener set up in South Africa “for holding Boer civilians, often women and children” (GS 202), which were “sung” by Swinburne in such Boer War poems as “On the Death of Colonel Benson.” He also plays similarly fast and loose with a host of “sophistications and admixtures” promiscuously gleaned from all manner of recent accounts of Shakespeare’s life (Gibson 74–80).6 As Len Platt observes, “This muscular declaration is more accusation than biographical footnote, and what makes it accusatory is the creative historicism which allows Stephen to fuse the hobnailed brutality of Hamlet Act V with contemporary English revenge inflicted on the Boers” (Platt 82). While I will have other things to say later about just why Joyce may have wished to deform and distort the text of Shakespeare’s life and art, for now it seems worth entertaining Enda Duffy’s notion of Ulysses’ operation as a “‘guerrilla text’ in which the violence erupting in Ireland while the novel was being written” and the violence writer of the type of Cervantes rather than [from] an idealizing poet or romance writer,” which would feature “a hero as loveable as the Great Knight of the Rueful Countenance [who] had addled his brains with brooding over Ireland’s wrongs” and whose Dulcinea would be none other than “Kathleen ni Houlihan herself” (Gifford & Seidman 214). Although Joyce may have taken a cue from Eglinton/Magee in fastening on the persona of Leopold Bloom to serve as his version of Dublin’s Don, Eglinton’s notion of the kind of figure to “set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet” would seem to run closer to the grain of Joyce’s xenophobic Citizen than to the self-consciously Hamletic Stephen Dedalus whose own ghostly author–father is herein cleverly rattling the chains of his own epic presumptions. 6 As Gibson notes, “’Scylla’ seems to set out deliberately to put the tradition inaugurated by [Edmund] Malone into reverse. Where Malone wanted to purge Shakespeare of fabrications, contaminations, modernisms, alien additions, Joyce deliberately introduces them. Where Malone’s was a labour of purification, Joyce’s is one of corruption” (78). Connections might be drawn, on this account, between Joyce’s corruptions of Shakespeare at the beginning of the century, the carnivalesque inversions of the Carriacou Shakespeare Mas, and Salman Rushdie’s hybridizing approach to “Master Chackpaw’s” productions at century’s end, as recounted in Chapters 2 and 4 of this volume.

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erupting elsewhere in the empire around the time at which it is set eventuate in “the straining of realist conventions in the blatancy of repeated coincidence” (Duffy 10–11). To put it somewhat differently, Stephen’s strained (and conscientiously distorted) readings of both Shakespeare and Hamlet underwrite a comparatively unstrained (and largely accurate) attack on “the English policy of coercion in the 1880s” (GS 202) against Irish insurgents (alluded to in Stephen’s “Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot,” which “quotes” the command, “Don’t hesitate to shoot,” allegedly made by a British captain in the process of putting down a riot in County Cork in 1887) and the considerably more sustained and virulent mistreatment accorded Boer women and children in South Africa, which from the start had generated violent confrontations between pro-Boer demonstrators and the police in Ireland and which became “an important factor in the uniting of the Irish Parliamentary party in 1900” (P.J. Mathews 90; see 66–91). In the process, Saxon Shakespeare, who at best can be called an apocryphal butcher’s apprentice, and a tragedy he authored, which in its fifth act is like virtually every other tragedy crafted in the decade of its making, are yoked together by violent coincidence with actions undertaken by the military wing of an empire that did not exist at their own moment of production.7 We may choose to record this either as an instance of Stephen’s “’fenian’ subversion of Shakespeare” (Gibson 79) or as a form of textually directed guerrilla warfare (Duffy). But Stephen assuredly takes pains to foreground here the racialcolonialist component of the Shakespeare question, which turns the plays, Hamlet among them, into privileged outposts of British imperial power and presumption and, more narrowly, of Saxon racial identity (if one can really isolate such a thing as “Saxonicity” from the hybrid production that is Britishness). In the passage in question, Stephen’s channeling of the brilliantly beset and embattled Hamlet effect of the Telemachiad— which Joyce redeploys in the Library episode as a displaced projection of Shakespeare’s own background and biography, both actor and acted upon in the play that dramatizes his fate—becomes something and someone else entirely, as all differences between Shakespeare and Swinburne, the fifth act of a Jacobean revenge tragedy and a coldly rational imperial policy, are swallowed up in a formulation that insists upon correspondence and sameness. In this transaction, Shakespeare himself suffers displacement and dislocation, with his signature work, Hamlet, a repository of skepticism, irreverence, and resentment, which Stephen has heretofore deployed with the precision of a “cold steel pen” (1.153) in his countercolonial thrust against Mulligan, Haines, and Deasy, now enlisted as a sponsoring party—indeed, a forecast—“of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne” and of the violent suppression of anticolonial insurgencies in Ireland and South Africa.8 7 As Len Platt writes, “This is a violent invasion of [George] Russell’s historical void. The timeless wisdom that he sees rising from the pages of the Shakespearean text is ousted by Stephen’s conception of a macho Shakespeare whose family background in the art of butchery nicely conflates with his later incarnation as a poet of empire” (82). 8 As my next paragraph suggests, the charge leveled against Swinburne was particularly well targeted. Swinburne not only “sang” the concentration camp in poems like “On the Death of Colonel Benson” but contributed much more in kind to what one contemporary scholar has

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The lines Stephen next silently quotes from Swinburne’s jingoistic Boer War sonnet, “On the Death of Colonel Benson,” have the jarring effect of bringing another uncannily apposite Shakespearean reference to the surface: “Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none/But we had spared” (9.137–8). This instance conflates the mothers and children of “murderous” Boers (whom, Swinburne would have us believe, only the English would have the civility to spare) with the “freckled whelp,” Caliban, and his “wicked dam,” Sycorax, in The Tempest (1.2.283,321) whose “vile race / ... had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with” (1.2.359–61): a conclusion that leads Prospero to the “stying” of Caliban “in this hard rock” (1.2.343–4) and implicitly leads Stephen to contest the Prospero-like presumption of Lord Kitchener and his literary propagandist, the otherwise renowned aesthete Swinburne.9 The lines Stephen quotes are themselves “sponsored” by Stephen’s memory of serving as “mute orderly” to his friend Cranly in the act of “following battles from afar” (9.136), a reference, no doubt, to the conversational promenades the two would take in the space-time of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when the news from the South African front would be fresher than it is now. Oddly enough, the memory of both the moment and the lines prompt a final self-reflexive turn in which Stephen silently situates himself “between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea” (9.139–40), adding Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” to the mix of dangers he must sail between, the idiom of what he will elsewhere call “Patsy Caliban, our American cousin” (9.756–7).10 The state of “betweenness” that these last phrases inscribe obviously is meant to resonate with the reigning mythic paradigm of the Library chapter as a whole, namely, Scylla and Charybdis, with Saxon England here playing the role of falsely smiling devil–monster to both Anglo-Ireland’s and Yankee America’s idiomatic whirlpool into which so many émigré Patsy Calibans have sunk. But who or what exactly is traveling between them? Is it Irish art, the Irish artist, Stephen Dedalus in association with both? What has Ireland to do with him or he with it? He certainly would not wish to claim the degraded title of “the chap that writes like Shakespeare” that called the unprecedented “mountain of print and pictures” with which the second Boer War was represented in newspapers, journals, and pamphlets of the time (Attridge 2003:3). Though primarily known as the aesthete of aesthetes, in poems like “Transvaal”—which concludes with the admonition “Strike, England, and strike home”—Swinburne rose to the occasion of the Boer War as if he were channeling the conflict’s more renowned, and renownedly vulgar, propagandist, Kipling. 9 Contrary to Swinburne’s claims in “Colonel Benson” that none but the British would have undertaken “mercy’s holiest duties” on behalf of “whelps and dams of murderous foes,” Boer women and children were generally treated with a combination of outright brutality and cool indifference in the concentration camps in which they were housed after been forcibly displaced from their homesteads and farms. Approximately 27,000 of them died over the course of the conflict of starvation, disease, dehydration, and exposure. For his part, Horatio Kitchener (made Lord Kitchener for presiding over the defeat of the Mahdi in the Sudan in 1898) was chiefly responsible for developing strategies to counter the Boer guerrilla campaign. These strategies included burning Boer farms and killing livestock, and moving non-combatants into concentration camps. 10 See Cheng’s commentary on Boer War references as well as on “Patsy Caliban,” 227–9.

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Mulligan sarcastically claims for Synge (9.510–11). Indeed, Stephen’s semicolonial/ anticolonial/incipiently postcolonial construction of a Saxon Shakespeare implicitly in league with “Khaki Hamlets [who] don’t hesitate to shoot” Irish insurgents and Boers in South Africa could well be construed as a fairly marginal component of Stephen’s otherwise friendly, even proprietary, appropriation of Shakespeare both in the Library episode and in Joyce’s Telemachiad, more a provocation of the library’s bardolatrous Anglo-Irish aesthetes than a carefully constructed, much less deeply felt, political position.11 In these sections of Ulysses, Stephen generally seeks to assimilate Shakespeare to his own project of self-fashioning and subject formation: to ally himself with this “lord of language” in his struggle against the shallow poetasters and self-styled patriots who would seek to keep him “cabin’d, cribb’d, and confined” by the nets of race, religion, and nationality. But the aggressiveness of the “Khaki Hamlets” formulation, which challenges the Romantic conception of Hamlet and Shakespeare maintained by the Library’s bardolaters, also resonates in revealing ways with the unusually contentious rendering of the Hamlet effect and Hamlet persona Joyce develops in his Telemachiad. In these opening sections of the novel, Hamlet is refeatured as a rebellious, underregarded, and avowedly betrayed artist figure, haunted by the ghost of his mother, who mightily resents having been recalled from Paris–Wittenberg to dance attendance on her memory—“Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! / No, mother! Let me be and let me live” (1.278–9)—and play the “server of a servant” to Mulligan as well as “the servant of two [additional] masters,” namely, “The imperial British state [...] and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” (1.638, 642–3). The Stephen who speaks so bitterly here of his colonial servitude—and who takes such umbrage at being slighted by the milkmaid who misconstrues Haines’s spoken Irish for French (9.424–5)—seems more animatedly political than does the Stephen who so insistently resists being drawn into the “net” of Irish cultural revivalism and nationalism in A Portrait and who willfully courts the disaffection of the selfstyled Irish literary vanguard in the Library scene itself. Yet he also anticipates, and 11 Whereas Declan Kiberd has recently identified Ulysses as “a supreme instance of the postcolonial text” (Kiberd 329) and other scholars have edged closer to doing the same, I tend to see Ulysses as pursuing an altogether more complicated and circuitous path around the colonial question. If I had to choose my prefix from among the three I have put on display, I probably would opt for semicolonial, but not necessarily for the same, rather too periodized reasons given by Andrew Gibson. According to Gibson, “The condition of Ulysses is not freedom. Ulysses is not a postcolonial novel. It is rather concerned with an extraordinarily arduous struggle toward a freedom that its author knows is at best partial or equivocal ... Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes are precise: Ulysses is in fact a ‘semicolonial’ novel, a novel of the last years of colonial rule in Ireland” (Gibson 19). By contrast, I find the following statement by Enda Duffy more nuanced and persuasive: “Ulysses [...] is not a manifesto for postcolonial freedom, but rather a representation of the discourses and regimes of colonial power being attacked by counterhegemonic strategies that were either modeled on the oppressor’s discourses or were only beginning to be enunciated in other forms” (Duffy 21). Interested parties may consult the Introduction to my Repositioning Shakespeare (1999) for a more detailed exposition of the vexed problems of classification that beset the category of the postcolonial.

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seems closely linked to, the Stephen who will conclude his adventures in Nighttown by baiting Private Carr with provocative comments that refer to the King as “He [who] wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for some brutish empire of his” (15.4568–70). In these episodes, Joyce not only gives us an Irish Hamlet to “set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” but a more self-assured version of the character, capable of playing the protean roles of intellectual gadfly, Irish nationalist, critic of empire, freethinking visionary, drunken “layabout,” and dispossessed son and heir as the situation demands. As noted above, Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean character with whom Stephen is directly associated. Joyce has Mulligan pointedly echo Oscar Wilde as he comments on Stephen’s irritation at having his shaving mirror pulled away in the first pages of the novel: “—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you” (1.143–4). As Cheng remarks: While Buck may be willing to condone the English racialization and simianization of the Irish as a native “Caliban,” the Irish response [...] was often the rage of the Irishman precisely at seeing his face represented in the English mirror as Caliban, and the parallel rage of not seeing in one’s reflection oneself as one’s own master. For Stephen’s response to Buck is that the mirror is “a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking glass of a servant,” a comment which voices and reasserts the resentment of the Irish at being forced (and racialized) into the servitude of a Caliban. (Cheng 152–3)

Cheng fails to note, however, what Mulligan’s immediate (if temporary) change of tone toward Stephen (as a result of Stephen’s bitter response) represents. As Mulligan “suddenly” links his arm in Stephen’s for a turn around the tower, the narrative reads, “It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them” (1.150–51). Mulligan’s qualifier has the effect of dissociating Stephen from the Caliban identification, just as Stephen’s comment has the effect of dissociating what Stephen aims to accomplish by refusing to play the role of servant to the British imperium, to the deformed and deforming Irish social and artistic dispensation, or to the memorially reconstructed ghost of his mother. The fact that Stephen does “have more spirit than any of them” is what helps inform the other role he assumes in this chapter as a militantly activated Hamlet who aims to employ “the lancet of my art ... The cold steel pen” (1.152–3) in the interests of freeing himself from the distorted mirroring relationship with Englishness that has heretofore made Irish art seem a “cracked looking glass.” Though he will arguably be employing the Saxon Shakespeare (distant cousin to the “Sassenach” Haines) as his accomplice in this process, he will, as the Library scene demonstrates, do so not in bardolatric deference but with all the irreverence of the committed skeptic and iconoclast. Having already mastered a literary canon that has made tributary spirits of his auditors, Stephen will remake Hamlet and Shakespeare into living images of himself, thereby appropriating for his own uses what has heretofore functioned as a sign and symbol of Saxon domination over the Irish imaginary and over what can be imagined in the name of art.12 Joyce effectively casts Stephen as a dispossessed 12 Cf. Gibson 67–79, especially, “if there is ‘fenian’ subversion of Shakespeare in ‘Scylla’, there is also a lyrical identification with him, a celebration of the beauty of Shakespearean

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cultural iconoclast who employs the prestige of the Saxon Shakespeare to conduct a series of raids against both the colonizing force of Saxon domination and an emerging Irish literary nationalism, which in its backbiting, defensive, and regressive tendencies, holds him in bondage to a milkmaid’s failure to recognize that it is he, not Mulligan or Haines, who deserves her deference and recognition; he, not Yeats or George Russell (aka AE) or Douglas Hyde, who will write what for all rights and purposes will become the Irish national epic.13 II As Joyce represents it, Stephen’s Hamlet lecture constitutes an all-out act of appropriation or repossession of Shakespeare, an inspired effort by a quondam Caliban to seize his books and take the magic of them upon himself. Stephen remakes Shakespeare as a figure who is always and ever inscribing the story of himself, who is at once Hamlet fils and Hamlet pere, “the ghost and the prince,” “all in all,” both “bawd and cuckold,” “his unremitting intellect” equal to “the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him might suffer” (9.1023–4): an overmatched Adonis permanently disabled by Venus who is in turn cuckolded by brothers uncoincidentally named Richard and Edmund (9.249–60, 898–9). Not only is Stephen’s Shakespeare condemned to repeat and reproduce the most crucial turnings of his life; he is also a materialist and opportunist whose “pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm” (9.753–54) and who made “all events ... grist to his mill” (9.748). Stephen’s conflation of “a Mafeking enthusiasm”—a mass-mediated exercise in projective patriotism which for 217 days in 1899–1900 made Robert BadenPowell’s strategically ingenious Boer War defense of a small South African town against overwhelming odds a sustained subject of imperial celebration—with the nationalist fervor presumably generated by a play like Shakespeare’s Henry V, wherein a similarly overmatched band of British brothers defeat the French at Agincourt, is as insidious as it is apposite. Whereas a poet like Swinburne was only one of many unofficial (and unpaid) propagandists of the British war in South Africa, Shakespeare is presented here as the opportunistic exploiter of a nationalist enthusiasm he had himself helped generate in the interests of making his own commercial sails “fullbellied” (a phrase Stephen provocatively draws from Titania’s language, an attempt to emulate it, a wicked production of neo-Shakespeareanisms, a use of Shakespeare against revivalist and English culture. [...] The Shakespeare of ‘Scylla’ is profoundly pluralized, multipurpose if you like, a Shakespeare with whom it is always possible to play, a plaything but also a playfellow” (79). 13 Cf. Len Platt: “Stephen’s debunking of Shakespeare has very little to do with the question of literary value. He does not reject Shakespeare, he appropriates him, and in more senses than one. The John Bull Shakespeare is under the ownership of an Irish critic [presumably Dowden]; the cuckolded Shakespeare, whose works are powered by feelings of resentment and bitterness, is the creation of an Irish artist, one who, having refuted the authenticity of revivalist culture, proceeds to signal his own intentions to make art from the ignobility of usurpation” (84).

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playful association of fully laden merchant ships with her pregnant votress’s body in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Yet Stephen charges Shakespeare with catering to a Mafeking enthusiasm—and also claims that his creation of “Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive” (9.748–51)14—not merely because he believes such claims are “true” and, if true, damning, but because the mere possibility of their truth constitutes a powerful counterblast to the Irish bardolaters’ idealization of Shakespeare on the one hand and the mystifiers of British imperial policy on the other. Arguing that “All events brought grist to his mill,” Stephen brings Shakespeare into history in a way that demystifies “Shakespeare” and “history” alike, revealing the extent to which most established articles of belief are the products of successive acts of representation and fabrication.15 Indeed, making topical events grist to his mill is so central to Joyce’s own relentlessly materialist artistic practice that it arguably functions here in a selfreflexive and self-defining manner as Stephen baits both the brightest and dullest lights of the Celtic revival. But the aggressiveness and abandon of Stephen’s raid on the Shakespearean corpus also indicate that Stephen’s performance in the Library is meant to evoke not just the Hamlet of Shakespeare’s first two acts, who is prey to every doubt and uncertainty, but the activist and activated Hamlet of the Mousetrap scene and thereafter as he rises out of his torpor to take command of a drama that has heretofore rendered him marginal, the Hamlet who might say with Stephen: “They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour” (9.465). Very like Hamlet as he recklessly identifies the poisoner in The Murder of Gonzago as “one Lucianus, nephew to the King,” Stephen everywhere identifies himself here as an unbridled spirit, a tap that will not suffer being turned off until he has said (and thought) his fill and made certain that not one of the Pharisees, nor any of the literary gods they worship, has gone unrepresented in such spoken or silent formulations as “Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet” (9.648), “tame essence of Wilde” (9.532), or in the imaging of AE and friends “[creepycrawling] after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow” (9.87–8). Having surrendered the key to his own private Elsinore in the novel’s first act, Stephen effectively restages Hamlet’s activated engagement with his enemies in the 14 If Stephen’s use of the term sheeny sounds off-putting to the contemporary ear, evidence suggests Joyce meant it to. While Stephen pointedly contests Mr Deasy’s anti-Semitism in Nestor as a piece of conventional ignorance (and further reverses its momentum by referring here to “Dan Deasy’s ducats” [9.534]), he is not above being conventionally ignorant himself, as his regaling of Bloom with the anti-Semitic song of Little Harry Hughes in Ithaca indicates (17.801–49). The fact that his casual anti-Semitism is echoed by Mulligan who, upon Bloom’s entrance, cries “The sheeny!” and refers to Bloom as “Ikey Moses,” seals Stephen’s guilt by association (9.605–7). See Brian Cheyette, “Jewgreek is greekjew” (1992) for one of the best recent assessments of Joyce’s rather tangled take on “the Jewish Question.” 15 For a sustained analysis of how this kind of imperial patriotism was projectively generated in late Victorian and Edwardian England, see Steve Attridge (2003). Attridge interestingly notes that, in the second Boer War period, the place name “Mafeking” actually generated a derivative verb form—“to maffick”—whose meaning “hover[ed] between the celebratory and threatening” (99).

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dead center of Joyce’s presumptive national epic, which is itself set in a national library metaphorized as a dead temple of “coffined thoughts”.16 What I term Hamlet’s activated engagement—rendered both in his planning of, and participation in, the play-within-the-play and in the wild and whirling words with which he subsequently assails Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and his mother in the Closet scene—is recreated here by the “tingling energy” with which Stephen transacts his performance and deploys whatever comes to hand to advance his aims: “Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices” (9.158). Like a performance artist putting on a seemingly impromptu display of both his learning and creativity, Stephen is also “putting on” (assuming the role of, mocking, parodying) Hamlet himself as well as taking-on or “taking-off” (in an opportunistic act of seizure, even usurpation) the authority of Shakespeare. Carving his virtuosic path through 200 years of Shakespeare scholarship and folk wisdom, Stephen appropriates what fits his purpose, jettisons what does not, keeping always the demands of the performance in mind while eschewing any claim of his own to authority. In the process, he recovers, reassembles, reincorporates the Shakespearean corpus, breathing new life into the anatomized body, reanimating a body of work he may surrogate to his own process of gestation while his own life and work await realization, “as though to acknowledge that staging [works like] Hamlet is always an exercise in reincarnation, a surrogate performance taking place in a memory space on which modernity presents ‘period revivals’ from the Shakespearean canon” (Hodgdon 192).17 As Stephen ranges farther afield, baiting and teasing his listeners and interlocutors, falling silent as this or that distraction runs its course, parrying incursions against his momentum ventured by Eglinton, Lyster, AE, or Mulligan (who Stephen silently, but brilliantly, rechristens “Puck” [9.1125, 1142]), Joyce widens the field of discourse to take in not only the play Stephen is performing but the internal, possibly richer drama that interanimates it and prompts Stephen to speak. From this internal drama we learn that, even as Stephen states with respect to Shakespeare, “A father ... is a necessary evil,” what inhabits the elision is the same Stephen “battling against hopelessness” (the full sentence reads: “A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil” [9.828]), whose Shakespeare lecture is increasingly invaded by thoughts of his own father, mother, and recently aborted flight to Paris, a Stephen also struggling against the very compulsion to speak: 16 Len Platt would go further and have us “Consider the scenario in its broadest sense,” to wit: “A Catholic dispossessed initiates and sustains a debate among Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Ireland’s National Library on England’s greatest literary figure. There is something deeply subversive in this set-up. It is as if Stephen is forcing down the throat of Anglo-Ireland recognition of its cultural origins. His rough handling of the bard is designed to produce demonstrations of a continuing commitment to those origins. [...] In other words, it is through his theory that Stephen challenges the credentials of an Anglo-Ireland that purports to speak for Ireland” (80). 17 See Joseph Roach, “History, Memory, Necrophilia,” in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds., The Ends of Peformance (1998:27). Indeed, what Roach says of the effects of the acting of Thomas Betterton may also be applied to Stephen’s performance in the Library: “To act well is to impart the gestures of the dead to the living, to incorporate, through kinesthetic imagination, the deportment of once and future kings” (Cities of the Dead, 80).

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What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea. Are you condemned to do this? (9.846–9)

Like Hamlet who (in soliloquy) calls himself a drab for unpacking his heart with words and imagines mockers all around him who variously call him coward and villain and knock him on the pate, Stephen employs the privacy of inward soliloquy to cast doubt, uncertainty, and self-contempt on his evolving project. The inward drama becomes in this respect, as in Hamlet, a kind of psychodrama that inflects and qualifies what gets transacted in the public performances of playmaking, highwire speculation, and antic disposition. And it is, I would submit, this same inward drama—in which Stephen plots a final reckoning with the ghost of his mother, amor matris, his king, country, and religion alike—that later informs Stephen’s encounter with the face of Shakespeare in the mirror as well as with the ghost of his mother in Circe. III Although Stephen’s commerce with the dead and the living alike may seem to lead to no grander conclusion than his directionless wandering out from 7 Eccles Street on the morning of June 17, 1904, Stephen’s “journey” achieves a different kind of fruition in a series of earlier encounters in Circe, which echo and bring to climax his earlier transactions with Shakespeare. The first of these encounters occurs when Stephen and Bloom gaze into Bella Cohen’s mirror and “The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall” (15.3821–3) and speaks thus: (In dignified ventriloquy.) “Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. (to Bloom) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze. (he crows with a black capon’s laugh.) Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymournun. Iagogogo! (15.3826–9)

Taking this image of Shakespeare as more a mirrored reflection of the states of mind of its viewers than one in a long series of Circe’s projectively realized events (which have more textual significance for the reader of Ulysses than they do dramatic significance for its established cast of characters), William Schutte claims: Stephen and Bloom together do make up a kind of Shakespeare, but it is a Shakespeare shorn of masculine vigor (the figure is beardless); a Shakespeare in whose life the creative elements are paralyzed; a cuckolded Shakespeare, who is not master of his own house. When he speaks, this “lord of language” [...] utters a dignified platitude worthy of a Bloom [...], then cackles like a capon [...], and finally shows his noble rage by stuttering a few words indicating the cause of his impotence. (Schutte 144–5)

The “stuttered” words to which Schutte refers appear under Shakespeare’s second and last speech prefix in Circe where he states “(with paralytic rage) Weda seca

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whokilla farst” (15.3853), which roughly translates back to the Player Queen’s protestation that “None wed the second but who killed the first” in the Mousetrap scene in Hamlet (3.2.178) and forward to Bloom’s latter-day cuckolding as it has just been graphically re-enacted in the preceding pages (15.3742–818). The text’s subsequent stage direction reads, “The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare’s beardless face” (15.3854–5), at which point we imagine this new image of a paralytic Shakespeare morphing back into the bard’s earlier association with the respectable gentleman who first appears in Dubliners and whose bearded face Bloom earlier likens to Shakespeare’s: “Martin Cunningham’s large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent. Like Shakespeare’s face” (6.343–5). Circe is, of course, the novel’s delegated space of metamorphosis, which refuses to confirm or deny that what it presents in the guise of wildly improbable fantasy or hallucination is something that Stephen or Bloom actually experiences. In this instance, the face of Shakespeare that Stephen and Bloom appear to see, and that speaks directly to Bloom in particular, is something that neither character specifically acknowledges or remarks. Does this matter? How do we discern what the relationship is between the characters themselves and the face in the mirror? Why does the face speak here “in dignified ventriloquy,” and what are we to make of what he or it says? We may isolate a cue for interpretation in a phrase uttered by Stephen’s old friend, Lynch, which prompts Stephen and Bloom to “gaze in the mirror” in the first place. Pointing to the mirror, Lynch proclaims, “The mirror up to nature,” and laughs, “Hu hu hu hu hu!” (15.3819–20), thereby drawing implied (if mockingly designed) connections between what art and the artist presumably do, that is, hold the mirror up to nature; Mulligan’s reference to “the rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror”; Stephen’s earlier characterization of Irish art as “the cracked looking glass of a servant”; and the present instance. The mirror, in this case, may be said to be Shakespeare himself, who has (as Stephen argues) both realized and displaced his own experience (or “nature”) through the expressive medium of his art but who, through the medium of Joyce’s inspired ventriloquy, has become a fractured pastiche of tics, tricks, and dislocated quotations from his plays.18 This Shakespeare, who variously utters nonsense “in dignified ventriloquy” and stutters “with paralytic rage,” has become a broken record, a system winding down, a haunted site of taglines, tired citations, and repetitions, which anticipates the crisis of continuous 18 After observing that “this hybrid Shakespeare addresses himself not to Stephen, the aspiring artist and Hamlet-theorist, but Bloom,” Richard Halpern notes that “Bloom is repeatedly reflected in or associated with mirrors in the course of Ulysses, a fact that pertains to his status as Jew and to his role as the uncanny double of Shakespeare.” Halpern cites one particularly “interesting example” in Ithaca “when Bloom contemplates ... his home library, including ‘Shakespeare’s Works [...] reflected in a mirror [which] causes the ‘inverted volumes’ [...] to read from right to left, like the Hebrew which Bloom imagines his dead son Rudy studying” (Halpern 170). As for what Joyce, through Stephen’s Hamlet-lecture, has done to Shakespeare, Halpern writes: “Stephen’s Shakespeare soon distintegrates under the combined assaults of interruption, interrogation, and skepticism, until Stephen is forced to admit that even he doesn’t believe in his own theory” (176).

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Shakespearean reproduction documented in such places as Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine and Richard Halpern’s chapter on “Hamletmachines” in his book Shakespeare Among the Moderns (1997).19 Whereas Schutte understandably reads the face as commenting on and reflecting the various disabilities and limitations of Stephen and Bloom, we might alternatively concentrate on the cracks and distortions that this passage inscribes on the face and voice of Shakespeare himself. Reducing this “lord of language” to the stature of a castrated cuckold, Joyce has him speak a vacuous line from Goldsmith that is more worthy of Polonius than it is of Hamlet; directly indicate in another the applicability of his “reindeered” head to the cuckolded condition of the dissimulating, evasive Bloom; and then utter a third sentence, which cannot be confidently translated but says something to the effect of “Iago! How my dad chokes his Thursday morning. Iago!” In his second incarnation, the descent of Shakespeare’s language into a kind of simulated dementia (fuelled by “paralytic rage”) continues as the Player Queen’s line devolves into “Weda seca whokilla farst.” Each of these lines and their physical adjuncts (paralysis, rage, the cuckold’s horns, the state of castration that informs the “black capon’s laugh”) contribute to an exaggerated vision of a possibly permanently disabled Shakespeare whose component parts Stephen has already assembled in the National Library but which Stephen had redirected there into a rigorously detailed explanation of what shaped and animated Shakespeare’s art. Although the imagery in particular may well speak directly to Stephen’s current Telemachian/Hamletic state as “beardless” bard and, even more specifically, to Bloom’s as newly made cuckold, respectively, the fractured lines also indicate that at this moment in Ulysses Joyce (and, by extension, Stephen) may be ready to jettison a preoccupation with the bard that has analogously both beset and enabled their own projects. Saxon Shakespeare is, after all, only one of several significant destinations Stephen will revisit in the succeeding pages of Circe. And Circe itself is not only a space of disordered perceptions but for both Stephen and Bloom a medium of psychological and emotional release and purgation and for Joyce the place where he most decisively demonstrates his virtuosity as an artist. Deforming or disabling Shakespeare in the process of asserting one’s artistic mastery becomes Joyce’s supplement to Stephen’s own successive face-off with Shakespeare; casting off his mother’s last grasp at his heart (15.4155–242); taking up his “sword” against the oppressiveness of time and space (15.4241–5); and taking his stand against British king and Irish nationalist alike, the latter figured forth by the similarly decayed and iconically charged avatar of Kathleen ni Houlihan, 19 Halpern’s chapter on “Hamletmachines” begins with a discussion of W.S. Gilbert’s 1892 stage-satire The Mountebanks, which featured “the two world renowned lifesize clockwork automata, representing Hamlet and Ophelia,” which are made to seem “so realistic that they [are] detained by the police at Palermo for lack of passports” (227). As Halpern writes, “The clockwork Hamlet of The Mountebanks satirically literalizes the problem of cultural repetition that afflicted Victorian productions of the play. [...] Gilbert proposes a radically new, if merely farcical, solution to the antagonism between novelty and mechanicity; he produces a ‘fresh’ Hamlet not by making him more lifelike or ‘human,’ but by deepening the cultural petrification that has already settled over him” (235). See also Halpern’s discussion of Muller’s Hamletmachine (268–76).

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“Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat ... the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast” (15.4578–80), to whom Stephen states: “Aha! I know you, grammer! Hamlet, revenge! The old sow that eats her farrow!” (15.4578–82). In this dramatic transaction, the Irish milkmaid of the first chapter morphs into Old Gummy Granny, both embodying Ireland itself, “the old sow that eats her farrow,” as Stephen, in the voice of Hamlet’s father, urges on Stephen, in the role of Hamlet, son, to revenge. Stephen will characteristically rise to this occasion and take his implied revenge against Catholic Ireland and imperial Britain alike not by using, but by refusing to take, the dagger Old Gummy Granny proffers him so that he might become 1904’s version of a suicide assassin and Ireland’s latest savior–martyr (15.4736–9). Having previously told Private Carr (while tapping his brow) that it is “in here [that] I must kill the priest and the king” (15.4436–7), Stephen takes his blow on the “pate,” successfully resisting all claims that he be anything other than “that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be” (9.382–3), thereby taking an important step toward his own decolonization. This sequence, which begins with Stephen and Bloom’s face-off with the lookingglass Shakespeare, conducts Stephen through the last act of his applied reading of Hamlet in a manner that effectively frees him both from the Prince’s fate and from the deformed and disabled fate of Shakespeare himself, as that fate is figured forth in Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture and in the face in the mirror. Haunted from first to last by the ghost of a mother that is (in Mulligan’s words) “beastly dead” (1.198–9) and whom (according to Mulligan’s aunt) Stephen has “killed” (1.88), Stephen does not, as the father-haunted Hamlet does, attempt to reshape his will to parental demand or become, like his reassembled Shakespeare-machine, a “deathsman of the soul.” Finding it entirely against his nature to submit and “repent” (15.4198), he envisions his mother, through the transformative medium of Circe, as “the corpsechewer,” a creature of “raw head and bloody bones” (15.4213–15), “a green crab with malignant red eyes [sticking] deep its grinning claws in [his] heart” (15.4221–2), and blanching as if he must die, decisively resists her claim on him, declaring, “The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all! Non serviam!” (15.4226–8).20 Stephen’s reiterated refusal to serve, which has its roots in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, achieves something like a fruition here as it becomes prelude both to his apparently successful exorcism of his mother’s ghost and his dramatic smashing of Bella Cohen’s chandelier with his ashplant–sword, the effects of which are textually recorded thus: “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (15.4244–5). Though the cosmically charged implications of Stephen’s action are par for the course in Circe, and the action itself motivated as much by drunken hysteria as by the need for emotional purgation, Stephen’s exorcism of his mother’s ghost breaks the hold on Stephen of the family obligation that so disables Hamlet and makes Elsinore not only his point of departure but his final destination. It is, moreover, 20 As Gibson observes, “Colonial power is partly what is at stake in [Stephen’s] last battle with his mother’s spirit. For all the strength of his love and pity, Stephen must oppose her pathos and resist a Catholic culture of sacrifice which can only mean continuing in servitude and dereliction” (196).

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not coincidental that the Stephen who declares he will not serve next encounters in the form of an abusive brace of “Khaki Hamlets,” Privates Carr and Compton, yet another “naturalized” product of the degraded face in the mirror, whose demand for his submission prompts him to consider yet another act of exorcism—“But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king” (15.4436–7)—which also clearly gestures toward a process equivalent to decolonization. As Andrew Gibson notes, “In ‘Circe’ [...] specific discourses are less important than a sense of the extent of the English presence in Dublin and its culture; in effect of the colonization of the Dublin unconscious” (Gibson 183); indeed, “The British presence in Dublin’s ‘nighttown’ [effectively] encloses the chapter” (184). Gibson goes on to demonstrate how frequently the many “allusions to English literature in ‘Circe’” are recycled “at the level of popular culture” and how, in particular, “quotations from Shakespeare are travestied” by Joyce, both in the interests of displaying Dublin’s colonial “hand-me-down culture of ‘orts and offals’” (189–90) and of serving as a medium of Joyce’s “retaliatory aesthetics” (199). Noting that “Shakespeare himself is ‘brought on stage’ to mouth childlike mock archaisms (15.3827) or set before us as a figure maniacally incoherent with sexual jealousy and rage, mangling quotations from his own plays,” Gibson concludes that “’Circe’ is full of blasphemous distortions of the imperial master’s language and literature. Caliban casts out Ariel. The Yahoos overrun the Houyhnhnms” (Gibson 200). As convincing as I find virtually everything Gibson has to say here, I differ with how he configures the specific sponsoring parties that contribute to his conclusion. From the first entrance of Joyce’s “Khaki Hamlets,” Privates Carr and Compton, “singing in discord,” to the moment Private Carr is “pulled away” from Stephen (15.3995– 4797), it is, I believe, more a case of the Houyhnhnms resisting the Yahoos, of Ariel casting out Caliban, and, moreover, doing so in consistency with the same discursive impulse that reduces Shakespeare to the status of a broken record, a language and signifying machine winding down. Joyce forges here a crucial connection between a British empire that has lost its political and cultural bearings both in Ireland and in South Africa and the brutishness of its soldiery, indeed, between a privileged elite ruling class that writes its official script (represented here by “Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet”) and its illiterate, subaltern overseas “ambassadors” who bear even closer resemblances to Shakespeare’s Stephano and Trinculo than they do to Caliban: PRIVATE CARR (to Cissy) Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss? LORD TENNYSON (gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded) Theirs not to reason why. PRIVATE COMPTON Biff him, Harry. (15.4393–9)

Joyce forges an equally crucial connection here between Stephen’s Hamletic compulsion “to reason why” at every turn and his commitment to freeing his own colonized unconscious from the corrosive and disabling taint of “priest and king”: from a mind-set committed to mindless aggression against “others” and abject

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submission to established authority. Even Biddy the Clap and Cunty Kate are astute enough to take notice when Stephen first answers Private Carr’s aggressive taunt, “Say, how would it be, governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?” with the commonsensical “How? Very unpleasant” (15.4409–13), and, later, “My center of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down and discuss.” (15.4432–4): BIDDY THE CLAP He expresses himself with such marked refinement and phraseology. CUNTY KATE Indeed, yes. And at the same time with such apposite trenchancy. (15.4442–4)

When all Private Carr can do is rephrase his aggressive taunt, “What’s that you’re saying about my king?” as Edward VII himself “appears in an archway,” sucking “a red jujube,” and holding “a plasterer’s bucket on which is printed Defense d’uriner” (15.4446–9, 4454, 4456–7), one gets the distinct sense that at least on the level of Joyce’s imagination, if not on that of the “actual” Dublin street, established attributions of civility and incivility, rational and absurd behavior, are being decisively reversed, with quondam Calibans not only casting out Prospero but making a mockery of such discursive formations themselves. His own aggressiveness having apparently been drained out of him by the conquest of space and time effected by his ashplant–sword, Stephen initially tries to engage in a comradely exchange with Private Carr: “You die for your country. Suppose. (he places his arm on Private Carr’s sleeve) Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn’t want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!” (15.4468–74). This is not a terribly well-annotated passage in Circe, nor is it as well-articulated by Stephen as we might like. Our attention predictably fastens on Stephen’s egotistical self-regard, on his apparent preference for his nation to suffer for him rather than otherwise. But our curiosity should surely be piqued both by the unusual concern for his country evinced by lines like “Up to the present it has done so. I didn’t want it to die,” as well as by the surprising solicitousness of Stephen’s approach to Private Carr. Stephen’s effort to engage Carr—who is, after all, not only a potential killer of Irish patriots and South African Boers, but their potential victim as well and nothing but a degraded spear-carrier in the scheme of things—seems doubly consequential in light of Carr’s later attack on Stephen (performed to the tune of “I’ll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king” (15.4643–5) and the specific way Joyce wants us to visualize and register the immediate re-emergence of said king: EDWARD THE SEVENTH (levitates over heaps of slain, in the garb and with the halo of Joking Jesus, a white jujube in his phosphorescent face) My methods are new and are causing surprise To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes. (15.4475–9)

Joyce even has Stephen appear to consciously register this apparition, “Kings and unicorns! (he falls back apace)” (15.4481–2) in a manner that parodically echoes Hamlet’s response to his first viewing of his father’s ghost, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (1.4.39), as if his own words (which include “I have no king

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at the moment. This is the age of patent medicines” [15.4470–71]) have summoned up this quintessentially modern phenomenon: a genial, jesting, salesman king, congratulating himself on his mastery of the tricks of the trades of patriotic propaganda and mystification as he floats above the “heaps of slain” his “new methods” have generated. If this vision is Stephen’s as much as Joyce’s, then Stephen’s articulate and principled resistance to doing the bidding of phantasmagoric marketers of the Irish political unconscious that next rise to the surface of Circe becomes more comprehensible: Prompted to cut his oppressor’s throat by the distorted embodiment of Irish patriotism that is Old Gummy Granny—“(thrusts a dagger towards Stephen’s hand). Remove him, acushla. At 8:35 AM, you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free” (15.4736–9)—Stephen falls back on an earlier arrived at Falstaffian alternative, “Long live life!” (15.4474); effectively redirects the admonition, “Hamlet, revenge!” against the “old sow” herself (15.4581–3); sustains like an unbowed Boer what the Khaki Hamlets have to offer; and survives to commune with Bloom under “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” (17.1039) in Ithaca. Works Cited Attridge, Derek, and Marjorie Howes, eds. Semicolonial Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Attridge, Steve. Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds. Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London: Routledge, 1999. Cheng, Vincent J. Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Cheyette, Brian. “Jewgreek is greekjew”: The Disturbing Ambivalence of Joyce’s Semitic Discourse in Ulysses. Joyce Studies Annual 3 (1992): 32–56. Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern Ulysses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Gibson, Andrew. Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare Among the Moderns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Hodgdon, Barbara. “Re-Incarnations.” In Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche, and Nigel Wheale, eds. Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres and Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 190–209. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Joyce, James. Ulysses: the Corrected Text. New York: Random House, 1986. Mathews, P.J. Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement. Field Day Monographs 12. Cork: Cork University Press, 2003.

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Platt, Len. Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival. Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. ——— “History, Memory, Necrophilia.” In Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds. The Ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Schutte, William M. Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. A Channel Passage and Other Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1904.

Chapter 2

Commonplace Literacy and the Colonial Scene: The Case of Carriacou’s Shakespeare Mas Craig Dionne

“Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds ...”

Every year in mid February, young men from small villages on Carriacou island— villages like Top Hill and Hillsborough—gather wearing colorful costumes made with crowns of ficus roots and masks of wire-mesh screens painted with drawings of animals. The men carry whips made of telephone wire wrapped in plastic. Each participant in the ritual, like his father and grandfather before him, has prepared for this event by studying carefully his book, a weathered edition of The Royal Reader, the grade-school textbook used throughout the British West Indies from the 1880s through the 1950s. Like many textbooks from the common-school era in our own country, The Royal Reader contains examples of fine oratory: condensed versions of literary masterpieces and sections of recitations from the biographies of Napoleon, Queen Victoria, or William the Conqueror—chunks of text cut and pasted free of narrative sequence or original context. As an instance of colonial literacy, at least in the context of Carriacou, the “book,” as it is called, has been appropriated into a piecemeal ceremony of Christian carnival and African-American folk ritual. The sections of The Royal Reader that attract the attention of the young men who gather each February are the passages of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The famous speeches from this play form the heart of the Carriacou ritual—the verbal duel known as the “Shakespeare Mas”—which requires each participant to perform from the play as many key speeches as possible: Antony’s funeral oration, Cassius’ forgiveness speech, “Cassius is aweary of the world,” Calpurina’s plea to Caesar, and others. As reported in the original ethnography of Joan F. McMurray and Joan Fayer, the carnival involves challenge matches between groups of men from different villages who test each others’ memorization and oral performance of lines from Shakespeare’s famous Roman tragedy.1 Participants who are able to “relate” the most lines—never in any particular order or in any particular sequence—are 1 I would like to thank Joan F. McMurray and Joan Fayer for their gracious assistance with references on this project. Also, Christine Neufeld, Claire Sponsler, and Vaidehi Ramanathan offered much needed advice and feedback.

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rewarded with the opportunity to whip their opponent as a show of superiority. After much celebration and merrymaking, the winner is then followed to the next scene of confrontation and the practice is repeated. The Shakespeare Mas is a composite of previous forms of carnival rituals—what Antonio Benitez-Rojo has described in his Repeating Island: The Carribbean and the Postmodern Perspective as the “syncretic artefact[s] of difference” of a vast “polyrythmic machine” that make up the amalgamated character of European, African, and Asian influences in Caribbean music, dance, and literature (10–16). The Carriacou Shakespeare Mas—Mas is an idiomatic contraction of the word “masque”—is a synthesis of Old World holiday customs and African–Caribbean carnivals. What interests me is how this local adaptation of Shakespeare challenges the hermeneutic structures that guide our approach to Shakespeare’s plays. It is too easy to understand this performance of Shakespeare as “native” or “other,” a pedestrian misuse of his writing. As a performance text that does not pretend to offer an interpretation of Julius Caesar, the Mas challenges what Michael Bristol defines as the “erotics of readings” found in critical responses to Shakespeare in the Western academy that approach his narratives as an endless reserve of “multiple and polysemous” orientations and perspectives that are released from the text in the form of allegorical readings mirroring an unchanging or univocal experience. Such allegorical privileging of Shakespeare’s cultural authority in ... “new discourses, irrespective of ideological content” has the potential to reproduce implicitly a subtle and ambiguous ideology central to humanism; the gesture insidiously identifies the experiences of people outside the penumbra of Anglo-American literature and culture as somehow prefigured and thus sanctified by Shakespeare’s writing. The Shakespeare Mas resists the closure inherent in such appropriations. As a unique form of “mimicry,” the Mas demonstrates Shakespeare’s importance to the colonial project and the contradictory ways his writing is used to construct identities.2 Although it is an anti—or “post”—hermeneutic interpretation of Shakespeare, Carriacou’s Mas has the potential to defamiliarize Western uses of Shakespeare by revealing the actual material role Shakespeare’s writing played in colonial education, particularly the way rote learning played in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American oratorical pedagogy, a form of literacy that still survives in various forms in middle-brow appreciation manuals and in some of the current literacy debates. In what follows, I explore how the Carriacou Mas plays back for 2 Following Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins’s definition of all postcoloinal drama, I wish to approach the Mas as s a “counterdiscourse” belonging to a complex political dynamic that “seeks to deconstruct significations of authority and ... to release its stranglehold on representation” (16). I want to grant the Carriacou Mas its own authority to function as a critique of mainstream Western appropriations of Shakespeare, not to reproduce a universalism that appropriates the Mas as yet another instance of a dominant literacy practice. If my reading of the Mas risks such appropriation, then it is in the spirit of approaching the Carriacou ritual as a legitimate cultural practice that has something to say about how different overlapping and competing literacies—Renaissance commonplacing, editing styles for schoolbooks, oratorical education, miming pretension in parodic holiday ritual—share common historical connections that broaden our understanding of our own continuing middlebrow consumption of Shakespeare.

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Western readers an image of our own native use of Shakespeare that “we”—us, subjects of the Western academy—would very much like to ignore, or at the very least like to forget as marginal or of slight historical importance in the ways we privilege interacting with his play–texts rather than his use in popular cultural forms. The Mas is a telling illustration of a postcolonial culture reading us in an inversion of Emerson’s famous dictum: “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds”—since in this one case other men are reading Western minds through the texts we typically use to engage in our own self-examinations. The Shakespeare Mas belongs to a tradition of comic carnival rituals that dramatize scenes of colonial contest and resistance in which there are strong parallels to English medieval guild shows. Like many of the popular practices that made up popular festivals—maypole, wakes, lords of Misrule, beating of the bounds, and city waits—contemporary carnival traditions are composites of past rituals whose origin and authenticity seem to exist like a lived palimpsest in the rote memory of habit. Distinguishing carnival rituals—and thinking about their possible influences—invites one to make broad comparisons, particularly in the Caribbean context, in which ancient rituals from Europe and Africa converge in hybrid forms. As Claire Sponsler explains in her Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America, the syncretic forms of Old and New World carnival are necessarily veiled because of the complex political realities involved in expressing resistance through codified yet unstable forms of preserved cultural practices, where Native Americans or African Americans borrow European traditions to express their own identity, or vice versa, in ways that are sometimes confused, seemingly arbitrary, and often contested by the dominant culture. “New World cultures reproduced and re-created themselves,” Sponsler explains, “by filling gaps in their cultural and social fabric and by reinventing themselves in the face of revolutionary circumstances” (6). These rituals are fragmentary and seemingly ludic, though they often dramatize political injustices that reside under the surface of their festive dance. “As a subculture responds to shifts and fragmentations in social and economic relations,” Sponsler notes, “it develops a repertoire of strategies and rejoinders that offer ways of coping with and resisting any dominant cultural order” (7). The rituals Sponsler investigates— the Matachines Dance of New Mexico, the Pinkster Festival of Albany’s AfricanAmerican community, the Philadelphia Mumers parades—vent unspoken hostilities resulting in colonial oppression or class inequities while enacting powerful retributive fantasies focusing on key historical moments in the history of the participants. The Shakespeare Mas, similarly, provides an interesting medium for its participants to cope with and resist colonial culture. Like many carnivals that involve costume, music, and dance in the West Indies, the Shakespeare Mas is organized around particular dramatic scenes.3 The Mas is similar to the extinct Trinidad “Pierrot Grenade” (or 3 See Nowak’s work on Shakespeare’s legacy in Carribean theater, especially specific play adaptations as counterdiscourse. See also Brody, Carr, David, and Payne for the context of the Grenade and Jonkonnu rituals and history. Brody’s work, along with Abrahams and Mason, helps to provide European comparisons, while Koningsbruggen explores the larger political character of Mas rituals in the Trinidad context. McDaniel and Wynter provide a framework to see other Carriacou cultural practices linked to past slave history and community.

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the “mokoto mas”), which included a jester character who is a “scholar” with “deep learning” challenged by a student–character to spell long words and recite longer lectures on esoteric knowledge—occasionally, “passages from Shakespeare,” but also “agricultural garden methods and ... political, social and economic matters with spicy bits of satire” (Carr 284). The Creole or French Patois performances were comic and meant to lampoon the pretension of schoolteachers and how the decorum of colonial education relies on disciplinarian tactics. In the context of comic inversions of pretension, the Shakespeare Mas could be compared tangentially to the “drunken sailor carnival,” a parade involving young men dressed in white uniforms carrying women’s lingerie, acting intoxicated and lascivious, meant to lampoon the immoral behavior of Imperial navy men on shore leave in the islands. Both the Peirot Grenade and the Drunken Sailor are good examples because of the doubling foregrounded in the performance: There is an appreciation for the liberating empowerment of the colonizing position but also a deeper comic inversion that pulls the veil on its violent reality (again, a medieval parallel is suggested in the rough music of the charivari or Lord of Misrule). This double nature accounts for how the Shakespeare Mas is, for its participants, a genuine expression of their love for his language while at the same time something of a crude parody of oratorical pedagogy. According to Fayer and McMurray, “One player in describing the tradition of speech Mas claimed that the histories of William the Conqueror and Queene Victoria had been used in the past but that Shakespeare was better, or in his words, ‘sweeter,’ and he recited Antony’s familiar oration—‘O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth’ as an example of their sweetness” (8). Underlying Shakespeare’s use in the speech, Mas is something of a populist version of Arnoldian culture that rationalizes the ennobling quality of his poetic language as its own end. The challenge match at the center of the Shakespeare Mas can best be understood as a carnival that plays out—or functions as a semiotic double—of dominant Western culture’s commonplace use of Shakespeare as a compendium of great phrases for public speaking and elocution.4 Some historians have assumed, naturally perhaps, a primal scene where West Indian parodies of Shakespeare develop out of first-hand viewings of performances where, for instance, “slaves would ... be allowed to watch the play from an upper gallery [which developed into] the development of farcical versions of scenes from Shakespeare ... by the Actor Boys of Jamaica’s Jonkunnu festival” (Stone 14). I do not doubt such scenes of cultural transmission took place, but the emphasis is on set speeches from Julius Caesar, mentioned in the same breath with other writing that appears in The Royal Reader (note that William the Conqueror and Queene Victoria are mentioned as alternatives). According to Homi Bhabha, 4 See the last chapter of Doug Brewster’s Quoting Shakespeare for a picture of the inherited practice of quotation as oratorical exercise in the context of Modernist inventions of the Renaissance through the quoting of Shakespeare; however, Brewster’s main emphasis is on the intertextuality of the Renaissance stage. Also, see Richard Halpern’s reading of Julius Caesar’s representation of the public sphere as it reflects on its own role in the “vibrant tradition of oratorical education” (pp. 78–92). I explore the commonplace practice as a middlebrow literacy in “The Shatnerfication of Shakespeare” and point to the larger industry of quotation manuals that still fuels a significant part of the popular print culture surrounding Shakespeare.

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colonial culture’s defining feature is its emphasis on the surface-level repetition of colonial discourse. The colonizer requires that the subject adopt the outward forms of its culture through mimicry and impersonation while always defining the colonized as ontologically different and thus always incapable of truly internalizing a Western ethos. The contradiction at the heart of mimicry, as Bhabha describes it, is a destabilizing energy, an “ironic compromise ... the desire for a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (86). In his Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, Bart Moore-Gilbert describes the consequence of this compromise as “quite contrary to the ‘intention’ of the colonizer, in that mimicry produces subjects whose ‘not-quite sameness’ acts like a distorting mirror which fractures the identity of the colonizing subject and—as in the regime of stereotype—‘rearticulates [its] presence in terms of its ‘otherness,’ that which it disavows” (120–21). This contrary impulse of colonial culture—to rely on techniques of replication and simulation to reproduce itself in dominated provinces of the globe, techniques that ultimately reveal Western culture as a composite of performances and impersonations rather than essences and spirits—is intimated in moments of arresting clarity is Shakespeare’s drama. Othello realizes, for example, that his ethnicity is defined by the trading cartel of Venice in terms of his rhetorical facility: ... Haply, for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have ... (3.3.288–90)

The power of Othello’s language to “woo” the brothers of the state—or, certainly, their daughters, and perhaps too the audience—is proof enough of the irony of these lines. Othello may not have the softer parts of conversation key to Elizabethan court culture, but he has internalized its central logic and has become a liminal figure whose own linguistic prowess and rhetorical dexterity crack the glass of the play’s racial categories. Colonial culture wishes to “Anglicize” the colonized subject through the civilizing influence of language, but in so doing it has to codify identity as process and not ontology.5 The Shakespeare Mas similarly decenters language as the civilizing tool of colonial reformation. The aesthetic richness of Shakespeare’s language—its celebration of sweetness and light—appears as a disciplinary appendage to the more real and material practice of reciting Shakespeare in a verbal duel: “Recite for me ... Antony’s fare well speech ‘That I did love thee, Caesar, ‘tis true.’” Renaissance Roots: Mnemonic Self and Its Table of Memory The Shakespeare Mas foregrounds how young children were (and still are in some cases) taught to read on the Grenadine islands. That Carriacau participants get their passages from late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century textbooks used throughout 5 Thomas Cartelli’s essay in this volume explores how Joyce negotiates this use of Shakespeare as the touchstone of a civilizing language; Joyce constructs a Saxon Shakespeare to “conduct a series of raids against both the colonizing force of Saxon domination and an emerging Irish literary nationalism.”

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the British West Indies, the Royal Readers—structured very much like American “McGuffy readers”—tells us that the act of performing Shakespeare as a status ritual belongs to an institution and history that use literature as a small part of a broader literacy meant to make narrative texts vehicles for oratorical culture, a culture of self-display and self-making. This mode of rote literacy used by the British colonies privileged a Eurocentric worldview through its promotion of an Anglophone oratorical pedagogy.6 As a way of reading, oratorical literacy was meant to integrate the speaking subject into an ideal moral culture. The discontinuous logic of these texts is organized around themes important to the moral development of children: expediency and trust, ambition, loyalty, and turpitude in parable form, “Little Robert the Trapper,” next to “Home Sweet Home,” next to “The Voice of Spring,” while the occasional chronological order orients the student toward a distinctly Anglicized history, like “Outlines of British History—Divison Three”—“House of Lancaster, House of York,” Scotland ...” etc. Common sense suggests that this use of Shakespeare is meant to remind readers of the play they have already encountered, that such scenes form a background consensus of shared knowledge of the whole play–text. But we must remember that as primers into a literary culture, the students of these texts would be encountering Shakespeare in written form for the first time as a composite of disconnected scenes that would in themselves compose a primary “consensus” of knowledge about the stories. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1890, in America reading literature in grammar schools meant precisely this: reading aloud passages from the countless “readers” used throughout this country as textbooks. What many historians overlook when considering how Shakespeare was experienced during this time is that aside from civic theaters and polite society reading groups, Shakespeare was experienced by a vast majority of the middle class as a mass of excerpted speeches, pasted into popular readers, standard textbooks containing endless examples of ready-made oratories from a rather random assortment of sources: Mangnall’s “The Planetary System” next to “Incentives to Devotion” by H.K. White, next to Campbell’s “Hope Triumphant in Death,” next to “Address of Brutus to the Romans” from Julius Caesar.7 Experiencing Shakespeare in such a context must have been, to say the least, freefloating, his writing a distant voice in a cacophonous stew of literary and cultural documents. As much as this compendium logic meant to canonize Shakespeare the 6 See Pennycooks’ English and the Discourses of Colonialism for the role memorization and rote learning played in colonial pedagogical practices of providing models of “the golden tongue” of English (pp. 129–59). 7 Shakespeare first appears in McGuffy’s 1836 Sixth Eclectic Reader. Signaling the “eclectic” nature of these anthologies in their title, many of the readers attempted to classify the different types of literary excerpts and speeches. John Pierpont’s American First Class Book, or Exercises in Reading and Recitation (1824), for example, breaks down such set pieces into morally inscribed categories: “Narrative Pieces, Historical or Fictitious” (containing, among others, “The Chinese Prisoner” from T. Percival, “A Morning in the Highlands of Scotland” by Rob Roy, and a “Romantic Story,” from the Quarterly Review); “Descriptive Pieces”; “Didactick Pieces”; “Pathetick Pieces”; “Dramatic Pieces”; “Humorous Pieces”; and in case one excerpt could not be made to fit into these, “Miscellaneous Pieces.”

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author, the contradiction at the heart of this pedagogy was that it reinforced a rather haphazard attitude toward the original plays themselves, making Shakespeare an empty signifier that preceded a snippet of dialogue or a set speech. But this is only in those readers that included the names. Author and titles of texts were sometimes omitted entirely. Such collections of maxims, speeches, and aphorisms are reminiscent of the commonplace books of the Renaissance. The comparison is a fruitful one, I think, because it asks us to think about the kind of mind that was produced by this style of reading and to consider how the nineteenth-century habit of placing passages in textbooks was inherited from an earlier period of European history. During the Renaissance, students were taught to transcribe golden passages into their own journals, to give the words of ancient authority a “common place.” This practice made the experience of reading over the vast amount of classical and vulgar literatures a kind of egg hunt. From our perspective, reading in this fashion seems odd or out of place since it goes against our understanding of reading sequentially, from start to finish, an idea on which many contemporary theories of the interpretation, if not the “reader” itself, depend. When “commonplacing,” the student is not necessarily reading a series of books that belong to a fixed chronological narrative. Rather, reading is made to resemble an accounting of enshrined passages, a composite of asynchronous moments of wisdom it is the task of the student to transcribe and set to memory. In this sense, the act of reading resembles a kind of word play where students approach the book as an aggregate of epigrammatic chunks that can be consumed and rewritten into their own journals under headings of their own devising: Acting, Art, Avarice, Babel, Betrayal, etc. One can imagine that reading in this fashion meant that students invested more time to some passages and less to others and that their attention shifted when useful passages appeared on their interpretive horizons. The commonplacing of books made the act of reading very much an intensely personal one, a study for action, asking the reader to develop nuanced repertoires that, as time went on, became sophisticated discursive frameworks that shaped the readers apprehension of the order of things in their social world. John Brinsley, an education reformer and someone who advocated the printing of the commonplace book as a pedagogical tool, explains in his Ludus literarius (1622) that the commonplace book helps the student preserve in their memory useful frames of reference for “making Theams [and] to furnish schollars with al store of the choisest matter ... to understand, to speak or write of any ordinary Theame, Morall, or Politicall, such as usually fall into discourse amongst men in practice of life” and how “to runne through those places curiously in their mindes” (Moss 216, 217). A famous example of the way commonplacing worked discursively to mediate the students accounting of the world can be found in an interesting passage in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. After talking to his father’s ghost, the young prince pledges his vengeance in ways that dramatize how much of an impression his father’s image has made on him: Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee?

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Native Shakespeares/Dionne Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. (1.5.95–104)

The conceit shows Hamlet erasing each page of his own personal commonplace book, and the subsequent impotency that follows is a reflection of the radical revision such an act would have on the student’s prior collection of maxims that were to help him study for action. The passage is important because it demonstrates how the practice of reading was so deeply connected with the development of what Hamlet calls his “table of memory.” Hamlet’s conceit points to how profoundly layered and mediated the experience of a young pupil’s life is by the act of editing the textual fragments collected in his “table,” his book of memory. Hamlet’s oath is a discursive purification of his memory from the ephemeral “trivial” records, all “saws” and maxims from a to z, a renunciation of his life as a passive recorder of passages. But his following lines do not bode well his ability to transcend the principal act of recording in his tables, suggesting that he is succumbing to the passivity of setting down his revenge rather than enacting it: Yes, yes, by heaven. O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling damned villain! My tables, My tables—meet it is I set it down That one may smile and smile and be a villain. At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark. [He writes] (1.5.104–111)

The representative categories that write for him his comprehension of his uncle as a typical villain become a kind of stultifying return to the fixed routine of parsing the world into its typical taxonomies—articulating the difference between “hawks and handsaws,” say—but not an engagement with the moral dilemma his father’s murder calls for. Commonplacing was so pervasive in the Renaissance that it proved a rich metaphor for Shakespeare to articulate how the limitations of human intellection are shaped by customs, in this case, the strongly rooted pedagogical habits of mind. Considered in the longer history of literacy, the practice of commonplacing is the product of a contradictory history. Its emphasis on the transcription of the book belongs to a medieval discursive mode meant to instill in the student a sense of veneration and wonder toward the great auctors. As a highly codified form of learning meant to predispose the student to recall a statement of authority from classical literature, commonplacing became immanently important to the larger national goals of real politick by placing in the hands of a new bureaucratic class the skills to sanctify a patron’s will by providing precedent in classical authoritative commentary. Commonplacing was, then, as a form of writing, a class-bound activity,

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a mode of transcription taught exclusively to that class of administrators—clerks, clerics, and attendants of the court—who were excluded from the inner corridors of patristic power even though their own skills, in a sense, helped advance the interests of this power. The class-conscious group of “middling sort” found the technology of tabulating set speeches of profound importance when sharpening their mimetic powers of self-invention. Ann Moss explains, in her Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, that commonplace books “find their home in a discourse which is essentially social in its orientation, be it the wider society of public politics, or the more intimate society of private individuals devoted to a discipline of listening, reading, and written composition” (226). It is perhaps not a surprise to see two and half centuries later in the pages of the first literature textbooks—known simply as “readers”—the ghostly shadows of this distant relative, the commonplace book. There is a valuable story to be told about how the Renaissance project of self-fashioning is kept alive in the very logic of the modern-day textbook and how modern pedagogical theory reproduced the cultural ideals of commonplacing in the design of its primers, which functioned as storehouses of set speeches used to give birth, Frankenstein-like, to the mnemonic character of public speaking. The history of Renaissance commonplacing shows us an important chapter in this shaping of the public voice, particularly the eerie role Shakespeare had in this material invention of the human. Moss argues that the printed commonplace book died out in the seventeenth century when nature was set free from the shroud of ancient learning and the Aristotelian model of knowledge was supplanted by the empirical mode of inquiry codified by the new breed of gentleman scientists. “The commonplace-book was vulnerable,” she explains, “and not only to new methods of enquiry and to a growing sense that evidence was empirically and scientifically measurable across a spectrum of probability. It also fell victim to a social code of polite behavior and to a consensual aesthetic of good taste which were inimical to its primary qualities of abundance and display; and its open ended acceptance of variety ... was a potential irritant to a political culture centered on uniformity” (225–6). But there is a real sense in which the commonplace book did survive the Enlightenment. The image of Hamlet frantically caught reliving the act of transcription can be read as a rich allegory of the persistence of commonplacing as a form of literacy. The Renaissance table of memory evolved into the classroom reader; the new stock textbooks—now mass printed, based on the archive of an unseen Master Reader—were used as a storehouse for oratorical models, a kind of cookie-cutter approach to the individualized practice, in the Renaissance humanist context, of selfselecting passages from one’s library. Moss admits a similar connection when she says, “The commonplace book was so firmly entrenched in the European mentality (and in the school system) that even writers who saw little or no intellectual profit in its quotations and places, did retain it as a working tool” (226). Like the Renaissance commonplace book, the nineteenth-century textbook provided discursive frameworks through which students could fashion their thoughts, a kind of strongbox of speeches empowering students to cull textual fragments of different writers to compose their public persona. If Harold Bloom’s idea that Shakespeare invented “the human” seems an odd idealism lost in some backwaters of Romantic aesthetics, then we might consider the materialist counter to this argument that emphasizes the pedagogical

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infrastructure it presupposes: What technologies were involved in the composing of this self, the actual mechanisms used to stitch or tether the unified Subject into being through the composite of random texts of Western culture? Shakespeare played a significant role in the training of students to “act” human, that is, how to speak with craft and invention. But the Shelley metaphor belies the magnitude of the enterprise: not produced in the private laboratory, the many high school “readers” published in America during the nineteenth century were produced in mass, made to answer on a vast scale the call for moral instruction and to provide, in the terms of Daniel Adams’s Monitorial Reader (1839), “the practical matters of Life—truth, integrity, honesty, industry, temperance, forethought, frugality, patient endurance of adversity, and whatever tends to form and fix the character of Youth” (Simon 16; emphasis original). These readers were the ideological arm of such middle-class moral instruction. Lindley Murray’s “English reader,” seen by many as British model of the American handbooks, sold by the millions throughout the earlier nineteenth century; it sold nearly three million by 1826 (Simon 14). Daniel Adams’s “The Understanding Reader, or Knowledge before Oration” (1803) stole much of Murray’s market by offering an American version. It sold successfully for 37 1/2 cents and went through several editions (three different publishers would eventually boast of having printed it).8 To a large degree, Shakespeare’s appearance in classroom readers is meant to symbolize a pragmatic acceptance of drama as a vehicle to teach and study speech. It is also a moment in the history of Shakespeare’s influence in the English language where we see his words married to the industry of mass publishing since it is in the copious editions of these readers that Shakespeare’s language will literally infuse itself into the pedagogical imaginary. It is estimated that between 1836 and 1920, 122 million copies of William McGuffy’s readers were sold—it went through several editions— and became the industry’s standard (Simon 26). Key scenes from Shakespeare’s plays were grist for the mill and were repackaged to fit the moral “parable” of the editor’s choosing. The titles give a clue to the way in which Shakespeare gets edited through this form of consumerism: The Knave Unmasked (All’s Well That Ends Well) The Folly Intoxication (Othello) Prince Henry and Falstaff (Henry IV, Part 1) Hamlet’s Soliloquy (Hamlet) (Simon 26)

These books were used as part of a larger social machinery to shape a collective culture around solid American virtues. In fact, these ideals could very well be seen as the unwritten themes that organize the collections of speeches in most readers. “From 8 Others followed suit: William Collier’s “The Evangelical Instructor” (1810); Abner Alden’s “The Reader” (1814) went through four editions. Shakespeare appeared in the reader only after the ideas of Thomas Sheridan (father of the English dramatist) had been accepted. Sheridan wrote dictionaries and pamphlets on pedagogical reform proposing models of elocution as a basis for education. John Walker’s “Elements of Elocution” (1810), a book whose dedication to Samuel Johnson was meant to signify this English influence, included “A Complete System of the Passions ... Exemplified by a Copious Selection of the Most Striking Passages of Shakespeare” (Simon 18).

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1865, Shakespeare was gradually introduced into the history of literature courses in high schools,” Kim Sturges argues in Shakespeare and the American Nation. “Across the United States, familiarity with Shakespeare’s text, brought about by exposure to it in the school classroom, helped to secure a position for Shakespeare within national culture, coming at a time when America was both choosing and celebrating symbols that were to represent American identity” (146–7). To understand the way in which this national identity was constructed—how it was textually framed, if not built—let us look more carefully at how John Pierpont’s American First Class Book (1824) employs Shakespeare. Any modern reader would immediately find Shakespeare’s place in the table of contents a bit perplexing: Dramatick Pieces Dialogues, Addresses, and Siloquies [sic] Lesson 139. 163. 165. 176 178. 179. 182. 187 189 191 192 194 195 198 201 205

The Alderman’s Funeral Scene from Percy’s Masque The Church-yard—first and second voices Lochiel’s Warning Extract from a dialogue between a satirick poet and his friend Prince Edward and his keeper Arthur, Huburt, and attendants Extract from “Heaven and Earth,—a Mystery” Hamlet and Horatio Gil Blas and the Archbishop from Le Sage Alexander the Great and a Robber Solioquey of Macbeth Malcolm, Macduff, and Rosse The Street-scene, between Brutus and Cassius The Tent-scene, between the same Soliloquey, on the Immortality of the Soul

Page Southey Hillhouse Karamsin Campbell

308 370 377 406

Pope Miss Baille Shakespeare Byron Shakespeare 436 Dr. Aiken Shakespeare Ibid

410 412 418 428 431

Shakespeare Ibid

450 457

Addison

468

438 441 442

Pierpont divides his book into two sections: Prose and Poetry. Each of these sections is further divided into subsections: “narrative pieces,” “descriptive pieces,” “didacktic pieces,” “pathetic pieces,” and so on. The section above is from the “Second Part: Lessons in Poetry” and the subcategory “Dramatick Pieces.” Pierpont’s purpose, as he instructs in his preface, was to avoid arranging all types of speeches together “in succession, to lessons of any one kind, whether narrative, didactick, or descriptive ... in an unbroken series.” He continues: I have studiously avoided that method which to some may seem indispensable to the reputation of every literary work, and have been governed by considerations of practical utility, in so arranging the following lessons that they may be read in course, and at the same time present that variety, in the frequent alteration of prose and poetry, and the constant successions of different subjects in each, which will relieve both learner and

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Native Shakespeares/Dionne teacher from that sameness, which makes it an irksome task to either give or receive instruction. (4)

So the teacher gets to choose the “lessons” or “genres.” To use them as lessons, the teacher would have her students read the selections in the book from start to finish. Lesson 1, then Lesson 2, and so on: a poem, a section of prose, a scene from a play and so on. Or the teacher could ignore the sequence of lessons altogether and read all the various dramatic texts together, skipping through the book and just reading the poems or the narrative pieces: As they are named above, this would mean starting with Southey, Hillhouse, and on to Karamsin. But even this begs certain questions. What would be the connection between these texts exactly? What are these lessons about? And what kinds of genres are we talking about? Reading the various passages in the order of their appearance is like reading a Renaissance commonplace book without their thematic categories signaled at the top of the page to provide a semantic context. The passages do not come with anything that appears like citations, not even a reference to a title, acts, or lines. The lack of indexical clues to the original scenes and plays facilitates a rigorously intertextual mode of reading I call textual grafting, clipping a passage from its narrative context and fusing it to a rootstock scene or narrative context that can make it speak to a commonly held ideology or conception of the world.9 While coding a text in such a way admits to the Derridian commonplace that the signification of the text is determined by “chains of supplements,” the gesture of grafting one text to another has the effect of naturalizing its own aggressive reading of the original scene from Shakespeare, as if to say, “This is evident in the text.” The effect is that of close textual allusion: The flow of truth emanates from the bard, and our experience confirms the author’s insight. However, the posture toward the “great book” is not one of blind reverence to a fixed universal experience. It is rather that of bold revision and contextual invention; we tend to forget that Shakespeare’s lines are grafted to a different tree, scions whose dormant shoots bear fruit from alien soil. The classroom readers teach students to approach the play–text as a compendium of passages one can freely integrate into one’s own social encounter, making all texts a passage from a courtesy book of social protocol, a compendium of intertextual references that has been identified recently by Matthew P. Brown as the “thick style” of the conduct literature of another early modern colonial reader, the devotional “steady readers,” that were popular collections of religious writing organized around a similar collative style of indexing. Although Brown misses the link to the commonplace book, he does historicize the steady reader as belonging to the longer tradition of literacy practices enabled by what he calls the codex format technology: “navigational aids and cross-referencing techniques that developed over a millennia—word separation, page numbers, tables of contents, indexes, concordances, library catalogs—it modeled for the digital age the potentialities of random access” (71). Indeed, Brown’s description of the steady reader implies a 9 Compare with Joseph Roach’s idea of surrogation, which emphasizes ritualized performances as automata, repeated practices that fill “perceived vacancies” in the social relations due to loss or death (2–3).

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commonplace organization, and if we imagine that readers of the late seventeenthand early eighteenth- century colonial context had to learn to read within the codex format, the classroom reader—with its random assortment of intertextual scripts for “thickly referenced” consumption and oratorical performance—suggests itself as the vehicle used to naturalize this literacy practice for younger initiates. “Deliberately discontinuous,” Brown explains, the collative style “advances a nonlinear form of literacy, and the manuals implicitly refer to the advantages of book technology in pressing readers to collate ... passages and cross-reference their reading matter” (73). Such a collative style certainly distinguishes the random organization of the classroom readers and helps us account for Shakespeare’s uncanny if not unpredictable place in this common form of collating famous quotations for public speaking. Students are asked to commonplace a scene from the play, to take it out of its original sequence, and place it next to the passages of other texts, to make it speak in an open circuit of reference to the individual’s own worldly concerns. The thematic grafting of the text inverts our own impulse (post-New Critical close reading) to privilege the text’s own thematic contours as a limiting force in determining its larger social meanings. The radical intertextual nature of the tabling of Shakespeare demands that the scenes be put to the individual, contingent uses of the reader. This is precisely what students were asked to do. Pierpont stages these moments of thematic fusion by modeling how a student might bring the play into his or her own ideological orbit. A good example of this is his use of the “dagger of the mind” soliloquy from Macbeth (2.1.33–64). Pierpont fuses the lines using commonplace logic: What begins as a play supporting the divine right of Jacobean ancestors ends up a play about American nationalism. Pierpont entitles this passage: “Lesson CXIV: Soliloquy of Macbeth, when going to murder Duncan, king of Scotland— Shakespeare.” Before the reader even sees these lines, however, it is preceded by an excerpt from a poem by the poet Thomas Moore about the invasion of Naples. Pierpont entitles this lesson (Lesson 63) “Lines written in 1821; on hearing that the Austrians had entered Naples—with scarcely a show of resistance on the part of the Neopolitans, who had declared their independence, and pledged themselves to maintain it,” an 11-stanza lament of the shame of the Neopolitans who declare their freedom although they bow to a foreign power. The final stanza ends: For if such are the braggarts that claim to be free, Come, Despot of Russia, thy feet let me kiss:— Far nobler to live the brute bondman of thee, Than to sully even chains by a struggle like this!

After this, Pierpont continues with the story from Macbeth by providing a substantial chunk of the play where Macduff is told of the death of his wife and sons (4.3.160– 243). Pierpont does not tell us much else about the story of Macbeth; there is no synopsis of the plot or background on the characters. This lesson, “Lesson CXCV: Dialogue from Macbeth—Shakespeare,” is meant to provide a kind of resolution to the theme in Moore’s poem—the theme of forsaking one’s duty to defend country and home. After being walked through Moore, readers see the passages from Shakespeare as a tale about the failure to act with courage and resolve against tyranny. By the time they get to the lines uttered by Macduff in response to Ross’s awful news:

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50 Macd. Rosse. Macd. Rosse.

My children too? Wife, children, servants, all That could be found And I must be from thence! My wife killed too! I have said.

The order of the reading suggests a thematic inroad into the play typical of Macbeth’s place in the American canon: as a play about tyranny and patriotic resolve. In this case, we are invited to participate in Macduff’s loss and read his introspection—how he could “play the woman with [his] eyes / And braggart with [his] tongue!”—in the specific context of Moore’s indictment of Neopolitan “braggarts that claim to be free.” Like Moore’s Neopolitans, Macduff must suffer under the rule of unchecked tyranny, and his life proves the awful example of what happens when we do not truly live up to nationalistic ideals. Students learn to see the results of letting down one’s national guard. Importantly, they learn to internalize Shakespeare as “the book,” in which all moral tales are reflected and expressed. Pierpont is walking students through the process of grafting scenes of life with scenes from Shakespeare. As public speakers, their instincts will be to quote such lines out of second nature— “to con state without book”—to speak the short hand that Shakespeare’s drama provides. “To play the braggart” invokes a tableaux about hypocrisy, patriotism, and resolve. The fragmentary editing of the reader makes the scenes seem ready made for such consumption, connected in a vast, textually woven table of memory that allow speakers to convey complex frames of reference through the process of quoting lines from the plays out of habit. “Remember Thee?”: Performing Shakespeare in Middlebrow Culture “What powers? Send in the Marines? “I can call spirits of the vasty deep’ ... And Hotspur replies, ‘Why so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call them?’” John F. Kennedy’s response to Civil Rights Commissioner Erwin Griswold that the President should use the National Guard to suppress the Birmingham riots of 1963.

The performance of the public self was the aim of this pedagogy. Under its surface is a radical notion of the polyvalent text, open to appropriation and other native uses. A walk down any Shakespeare aisle of Barnes n’ Borders today—something of a living codex of this popular cultural form—will show us examples of contemporary versions of the early modern commonplace book that have made the bard its central “book,” Shakespeare’s Insults, Shakespeare’s Witty Comebacks, Words of Love by Shakespeare, predigested collections of famous quotations taken out of their original contexts in the plays. Often ignored as vulgarized popular forms of “Shakespeareana,” these books, as I have argued, belong to a long tradition with deep roots in the project of American self-development. Emerson himself acknowledged that Shakespeare is “the only modern writer who has the honor of a Concordance”—“pulverized into proverbs”—he complained in another key, even though his own advice on how to

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read his plays for their “flattering painting of Nature” could be said to epitomize the practice of commonplacing: “I must say that in reading the plays,” he writes, “I am a little shy where to begin; for the interest of the story is sadly in the way of poetry. It is safer, therefore, to read the play backwards” (Journals 10:23, 31). Emerson was speaking at a time when Bartlett’s grand dream of a concordance of Western thought was not yet fully realized, but his attitude that the plots to Shakespeare’s plays got in the way of the poetry could easily defend the editorial style of nineteenth-century schoolbooks, which, like the speech books and quotations manuals that appeared later, taught generations of public speakers and intellectuals how to use allusions and references from Shakespeare to frame their own ideas. In the context of this commonplace tradition, the Carriacou Mas does not look too terribly out of place, as trans-Atlantic appropriations of Shakespeare go, a ritualized form of appropriation that signals the gamesmanship at the heart of the commonplace gesture so crucial to our own middlebrow literary culture. The Carriacou Mas turns this commonplace practice into something of a carnival dance. On the surface, it strikes one as such an odd, bizarre use of Shakespeare. Why Julius Caesar? We are tempted to see the speeches as somehow thematically connected to Caribbean history of the island or to current events in the lives of the participants. But this would be to miss the larger point: What is being staged is the literacy practice itself, as the seemingly natural Western practice of transcribing random segments of texts into a concordance for public speaking is estranged and made to look like the performative act it really is. The residual practice of oratory is reproduced, the process of selfinvention at the heart of the practice—its contingent worldview, its rich but arbitrary appropriations of scenes and passages, the bricolage of an instrumentalized textual fetish, is laid bare, made to seem erratic. From this perspective, the Mas takes on the character of a parody as it discloses the social contest that resides under the surface of such common spectacles of quoting Shakespeare. There were different Royal Readers published for separate regions of the British Empire—for India, for different provinces of Canada, one in Arabic, and one for Asia. When thinking of the living history of the Royal Readers, it is interesting to speculate that for the different colonized regions of Britain’s Imperial history, many young children were experiencing a codex Shakespeare very similar in sound and feel to the actual referent of the Shakespeare Mas, free of the elaborate carnival regalia but perhaps not so free of the whip. Do the citizens of Carriacou ever have the opportunity to see a production of Julius Caesar? In the context of the history of pedagogical practices, we might ask this another way: Which version of the play—the Mas version or a stage production—is closer to the printed edition of the play? McMurray and Fayer explain that the Royal Readers have, in the last couple decades, slowly been replaced with dog-eared paperback versions of Julius Caesar, and yet it is a testament to the strength and vitality of the Mas ritual that the full-text versions of the play are still read as prompt-books of famous speeches for participants to memorize, as if the Royal Readers work as a ghostly template to the full-text play itself—the story “sadly in the way” of the golden phrases of “pressures past.” In the Shakespeare Mas, the commonplace gesture is treated to a carnivalesque inversion, where learning Shakespeare is shown to be the status ritual it really is, one of memorization, performance, and, importantly, contest. The story of Shakespeare

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as a vehicle of colonial domination is demystified in the Mas ritual, the ideology of learning to read out loud properly and with appropriate comportment is disrupted by a local culture’s traditions. The violence inherent in the civilizing process of colonial education is decentered in the Mas as contestants are whipped for forgetting lines or losing the contest. Picture a World Wrestling Federation version of the “Weakest Link”—a game show whose distinct entertainment value resides not in watching contestants win, but in the enchantment of observing them get summarily upbraided and canned. As McMurray and Fayer note, violence can erupt during the Mas, but this is itself part of the spectacle of the event. As one player was asked what he liked best about the Mas, he responded without hesitation, “The whipping.” What the citizens of Carriacau enact in the Shakespeare Mas is a clever, unmasking of such commonplace literacy, a highly festive spectacle that plays out the power relations that obtain not only in the colonial scene of West Indian postcolonial “Shakespeare,” but perhaps, too, our own native uses of Shakespeare as a speaker of poetic passages best employed free from thematic or narrative context. Richard Helpern has remarked that “Even after its decay, oratorical culture survived as ‘public speaking’ in American high school education, and with it the almost universal experience of being made to read Julius Caesar, whose preeminence in the secondary school curriculum is a topic too little remarked on” (75). Although Shakespeare is taught differently in the public schools after the influence of New Criticism, which produced a generation of teachers and administrators who see close reading as its own end, and after many episodes in the history of democratizing education from the 1970s onward, the public debate about the canon and the role of Western art and culture is still haunted by the nostalgic image of a “book of virtue” that will, like the readers of the late nineteenth century, instill a sense of moral duty in our youth. The quoting of Shakespeare is still seen by some conservative pundits as a form of cultivated literacy, as a touchstone of civility and grace compared with the progressive pedagogy that means to free learning from any and all of its aristocratic roots by emphasizing self-reflection through a more genuine (no less romantic) form of expression. In this sense, commonplacing Shakespeare is truly a residual social practice, a literacy invoked to signal either the halcyon days of moral certitude—by those like William Bennet—or the mechanical nature of rote learning of the past. I want to conclude by looking at a recent Hollywood movie that plays out the millennial anxieties of loss at the center of this debate between the old and new literacy: Finding Forrester (Columbia Pictures 2000), starring Rob Brown as the young Jamal, apprentice to the elusive and bookish William Forrester, played by Sean Connery. Our thrill in watching this movie hinges on the scenes of encyclopedic literacy represented as duels between contestants out to prove mastery of the great works. The movie poses two forms of literacy: Forrester’s world is presented as an authentic and soul-searching world of knowledge as private, written self-exploration, while the pretentious and affected schoolmaster’s world (given in a great performance by F. Murray Abraham) is one of public display, quotation, and paraphrase from the great “book” of Western knowledge. In one important scene, the dynamics of commonplace literacy is staged: The effete and pretentious schoolmaster Professor Crawford bullies one of his students, named Mr Coleridge, to identify a passage written by the Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The scene is drawn out to dramatize the

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young student’s anxiety at being unprepared for class and generally incapable of internalizing the ennobling aspects of art: Crawford: Very Good Mr Wallace ... Perhaps your skills extend a bit farther than basketball ... Now if we can turn to page ... You may be seated, Mr Coleridge ... turn to page 120, the little blue book ... Jamal: Further! Crawford: I’m sorry? Claire: (behind him, whispering) Don’t! Jamal: You said my skills extend farther than the basketball court. Farther relates to distance. Further is a definition of degree. You should have said further. Crawford: Are you challenging me, Mr Wallace? Jamal: Not any more than you challenged Coleridge. Crawford: Perhaps the challenge should have been directed elsewhere ...? “It is a melancholy truth that ... [interrupted] Jamal: ... great men have poor relations.” Dickens! Crawford: “You will hear the beat of a horse’s ...” [interrupted] Jamal: Kipling! Crawford: “All great truths begin ...” [interrupted] Jamal: Shaw! Crawford: “Man is the only animal ...” [interrupted] Jamal: “That blushes, or needs to.” It’s Mark Twain. Come on, Professor Crawford. Crawford: Get out! Get out! Jamal: Yeah, I’ll get out.

While the movie positions us to accept Forrester’s genuine approach to selfdevelopment, it nonetheless positions the audience to thrill in the status game that is commonplace literacy. The climax scene above shows Jamal outperforming Professor Crawford and identifying each of the quotations before they are even out of his mouth, his knowledge of great phrases and quotations so vast that he wins the implicit status match by demonstrating he has indeed assimilated the great book that is Western Culture. The shot of Professor Crawford at the board is from the angle of one sitting in his class, peeking over the shoulder of the “whipped” Mr. Coleridge (Figure 1). We are asked to participate in the duel through the positioning of our viewpoint: We, too, are sitting in the class, being challenged by Crawford’s stern, authoritarian gaze. “Are you challenging me?” is directed at us, and we are meant to feel a participatory thrill in Jamal’s rising to the challenge: The reverse shots on him are at eye level. If this movie is any indication of our own popular definitions of the cultural work of literary knowledge and, most certainly, Shakespeare as the great compendium of quotations, then the Carriacou Shakespeare Mas is not all that unfamiliar as performances go. Ask yourself how you felt when you skimmed the epigraph at the beginning of the paper: Didn’t you want to shout, Emerson! And if you didn’t know, didn’t you feel like you had lost the round? At least the players of the Mas can laugh at this impulse, knowing that it belongs to a larger festive world of comic table-turnings and buffetings, while we whip ourselves, perhaps in ways unseen, all the way home.

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This figure has intentionally been removed for permission reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Fig. 1

“Are you challenging me?” from Finding Forrester.

Works Cited Abrahams, Roger D. “Christmas Mummings on Nevis.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 21 (1973): 120–31. Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. Trans. James E. Maraniss. Repeating Island: The Carribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi. Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Trade, 1999. Brewster, Doug. Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Bristol, Michael D. Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare. New York: Routledge,1990. Brody, Alan. The English Mummers and Their Plays. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. Brown, Matthew P. “The Thick Style: Steady Sellers, Textual Aesthetics, and Early Modern Devotional Reading.” PMLA 121:1 (January 2006): 67–86. Carr, Andrew T. “Pierott Grenade.” Caribbean Quarterly 4.3 (1956): 281–314. Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. New York: Routledge, 1999. David, Christine. Folklore of Carriacou. Wildey, St. Michael, Barbados: Cole Printery Limited, 1985. Dionne, Craig. “The Shatnerfication of Shakespeare: Star Trek and the Commonplace Tradition.” In Burt, Richard, ed. Shakespeare After Mass Media. New York: Palgrave, 2002, 173–94. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks. Ed. William H. Gilman. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. Finding Forrester. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Perfs. Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham. Sony Pictures, 2000.

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Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge, 1996. Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare Among the Moderns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Koningsbruggen, Petrus Hendrikus van. Trinidad Carnival: a Question of National Identity. London: Caribbean, 1997. Mason, Peter. Bacchanal! The Carnival Culture of Trinidad. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. McDaniel, Lorna. The Big Drum Ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. McMurray, Joan F., and Joan Mayer. “The Carriacou Mas as ‘Syncertic Artifact.’” Journal of American Folklore 112 (1999): 58–73. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. New York: Verso, 1997. Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Nowak, Helge. “‘Classical and Creole’: Shakespeare’s Legacy in the Carribean Theatre.” In Schaffeld. Payne, Nellie. “Grenada Mas: 1928–1988.” Caribbean Quarterly 36 (1990): 3–4. Pennycook, Alastair. English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. Pierpont, John. American First Class Book: or Excercises in Reading and Recitation Selected Principally From Modern Authors of Great Britain and America: and Designed for the Use of the Highest Class in Publick and Private Schools. Boston: T.P. and J.S. Fowle, 1824. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Schaffeld, Norbert, ed. Shakespeare’s Legacy: The Appropriation of the Plays in Post-Colonial Drama. Trier (Germany): Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005. Simon, Henry W. The Reading of Shakespeare in American Schools and Colleges: An Historical Survey. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932. Smith, Michael G. Kinship and Community in Carriacou. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Sponsler, Claire. Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Stone, Judy S.J. Theater. Studies in West Indian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1994. Sturgess, Kim C. Shakespeare and the American Nation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Van Sant, Gus. Dir. Finding Forrester. Columbia Pictures, 2000. Wynter, Sylvia. “Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Toward an Interpretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process.” Jamaica Journal 4.2 (1970): 34–48.

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Chapter 3

“The Forms of Things Unknown”: Richard Wright and Stephen Henderson’s Quiet Appropriation John Carpenter

I never may believe These antique fables, nor these Fairy toys, Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination That if it would but apprehend some joy It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear! Theseus, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: 5.1.3–221 Black people are moving toward the Forms of Things Unknown, which is to say, toward Liberation. Stephen Henderson, “The Forms of Things Unknown,” 69

1 All citations of Shakespeare’s plays are from Stephen Greenblatt, The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition (New York: Norton, 1997).

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Richard Wright, African-American author of Native Son (1940), 12 Million Black Voices (1941), and Black Boy (1945), was inspired by trips to Asia and what is now Ghana to publish four essays, collectively titled White Man, Listen (1957). “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” one of these essays, altered the face of African-American literary criticism with the inclusion of a section describing “folk utterances, spirituals, blues, works songs, and folklore” as “The Forms of Things Unknown” (83). Stephen Henderson helped cement the phrase as standard usage for critics of African-American literature by making it the title of his introduction to Understanding The New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music As Poetic References (1972). From there, “The Forms of Things Unknown” became a key phrase in critical discussions of African American literature and culture, going on to achieve a full-blown life of its own as a heading for courses in African-American literature, a title for essays in the genre, and an appellation for what became a controversial subtopic relating to African-American cultural practices as represented or embodied in literature. Apparently, Wright took the phrase from Theseus’ famous “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” speech in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.15). But Wright does not credit Shakespeare, nor does Henderson; this task was left to later scholars of African-American literature. The uncredited use of Shakespeare’s phrase in this capacity raises a number of compelling questions: In particular, what are the ramifications of Shakespeare, England’s “national poet,” having authored a phrase appropriated by African-American literary critics to represent “native” aspects of African-American culture? This is an ironic case of Shakespeare having been “coopted and rearticulated as ‘native’” by scholars constructing a legitimizing critical heritage for postcolonial literature “outside the humanizing sphere of the colonial project.” Such a case raises several important and intriguing questions that I would like to address. How did this ironic rearticulation come into being, and what implications does it hold? What culturally imbedded preconceptions led to Wright’s selection of a Shakespearean phrase for his specific purposes, and how might this choice have related to his African sojourn? Why choose this particular play and speech? Might African-American critical appropriation of this phrase “negotiate and reimagine ... notions of colonial and post-colonial identity and culture?” I will consider these questions in exploring the irony of the origination of this phrase in a speech that also frames a “brow of Egypt” negatively within an early modern cultural paradigm of beauty. In doing so, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of such a study. Of course, the use of one line from Shakespeare cannot provide a complete window into the complex history of African American literary criticism, but it can shed light on relationships between some influential figures in the evolution of that field and a conceptual monolithic literary or colonial Shakespeare in areas beyond specific fictional, poetic, or dramatic appropriations. Elsewhere in this collection, in his discussion of the Shakespeare Mas carnival, Craig Dionne expresses concern with the potential reproduction of “a subtle and ambiguous humanism” to be found within Anglo-American textual practices (3). In part, my concern is with the reproduction of this ambiguous humanism within some variants of those textual approaches themselves. It bears mention from the outset that

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Wright’s Shakespearean appropriation takes place within critical discourse. Wright’s use of Shakespeare within this specific milieu and form sets it apart from James Joyce’s appropriation of Hamlet in Ulysses and from Salman Rushdie’s approach to that same play in “Yorick.” It also differentiates Wright’s approach from the fascinating cultural reinscription that Dionne describes, but in a sense my argument is similar to Dionne’s in its foregrounding of a concern with the staging of “literary practice itself” (20), and both of us write about the removal of Shakespearean language from its original dramatic context. While Cartelli and Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan and Ana Sáez Hidalgo focus on specific works of fiction rather than on critical scholarly texts, our approaches to what Cartelli calls “bardolatric reverence” involve varying degrees of Dollimore’s “creative vandalism.”2 We all discuss rewriting what Guerrero-Strachan and Hidalgo call “official history” (4); but, unlike my cocontributors, I engage with specific instances of uncredited phraseological poaching: Neither Wright nor Henderson attributes the hijacked phrase to Shakespeare. Instead, they juxtapose their arguments with its original context and its potential evocation of “bardolatric reverence” and leave the reader to draw her or his own conclusions. Their having done so created a loud silence that remained unbroken for decades—an elephant lounging in the living room for a generation. The fact that Wright and Henderson appropriate Shakespeare within critical discussions necessitates my own exploration of additional discussions within that milieu. Some subsequent theoretical approaches to the bard by scholars of African-American literature and, on the other hand, of scholars of Shakespeare to aspects of African-American literature, come from markedly different perspectives. Ultimately, it is crucial to observe ways in which “Shakespeare” becomes a cultural tool for well-meaning scholars with opposing approaches to issues of difference, power, and inclusion. The original Shakespearean context of the appropriated phrase is quite relevant to the points that both Wright and Henderson set out to make. Theseus, who “embodies the sophistication of the court in his description of art as a frenzy of seething brains,” demonstrates the experiential limitations underlying his skepticism3; he exhibits “misplaced confidence in his own sense of waking reality, a reality that does not include fairies” while the seething brain of a poet has given “the fantasy called ‘Theseus’ ... “a local habitation and a name.’”4 If the appropriation is part synecdoche, the phrase standing for all of Shakespeare and reflecting the relationship between Shakespearean Literature and Criticism and the academic placement of a nascent African-American analog, the chosen passage also demonstrates an example of Thomas Cartelli’s “transpositional appropriation”: it “identifies and isolates a specific theme, plot or argument in its appropriative objective and brings it into its own, arguably analogous, interpretive field to underwrite or enrich a presumably 2 See Cartelli’s essay in this volume. 3 This perspective is borrowed from David Bevington’s reading of Theseus’ position as demonstrated in 5.1. David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Updated 4th edition. 4 Stephen Greenblatt, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition (New York and London: Norton, 1997) 811.

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related thesis or argument” (Cartelli 17). In this instance, Shakespeare is evoked by the commandeering of a textual moment that arguably demonstrates the experiential gap between a wielder of power and those upon whom that power is exercised as well as that wielder’s inability to acknowledge the limitations of his own realityendorsing sight vis-à-vis other creative forces. Cartelli, in his seminal approach to Shakespeare’s reframing in terms of “national formations” and “postcolonial appropriations,” seeks “to explore how Shakespeare is repositioned, as emerging or residually postcolonial cultures seek either to respond critically to the depredations and misrepresentations of colonialism” and to consider this repositioning as a “renegotiate[ion] of Shakespeare’s standing as a privileged site of authority within their own national formations” (Cartelli 1). Wright’s statement that his own text is both “admittedly explosive” and “blatantly unacademic” engages with Cartelli’s approach: Wright’s critical response “to the depredations and misrepresentations of colonialism” and the persisting effects of institutionalized slavery is indeed as “explosive” as it is articulate. Wright does not overtly address Shakespearean appropriation, yet in his “blatantly unacademic” renegotiation of “white-colored, East–West relations,” he finds it expedient to appropriate Shakespearean language. Perhaps for Wright the very explosiveness of his text is the primary source of its unacademic nature, but Shakespearean language becomes part of the discursive mode in which Wright addresses “white men of the West”: Shakespeare’s words are part of his generalized world of Western white men. Considering the appropriation of Shakespeare in Wright—and Henderson—calls for a look back to the 1950s and 1970s, when they were composing their seminal texts, and when what Richard Burt calls “now-obsolete strategies of black legitimation (knowledge of Shakespeare equals enfranchisement in a multicultural society) or black critique (Shakespeare enlisted in the name of the marginal or resisted as leftover from an elite, colonial, dominant, white culture)” were far from obsolete (206).5 Not only were they alive, well, and current, but they engage in dialectic within each of these specific texts. The phrase’s original appropriation occurs within a forceful and direct statement of “black legitimation.” Wright uses Shakespeare’s terminology in a book cautioning, “You white men of the West” against “be[ing] too proud of how easily you conquered and plundered ... Asians and Africans” (1). The book’s first section, “The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People,” frames his discussion with an awareness of what was then the “new genre of academic literature dealing with colonial and post-colonial facts.” Wright traces the “personality distortions” characteristic of this new literature to an “agony” of the “native heart”: An agony was induced into the native heart, rotting and pulverizing it as it tried to live under a white domination with which it could not identify in any real sense, a white domination that mocked it. The more Westernized that native heart became, the more 5 Richard Burt, “Slammin’ Shakespeare In Acc(id)ents Yet Unknown: Liveness, Cinem(edi)a, and Racial Dis-integration,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2 (2002). It is worth noting that Burt titles his article about the relationship between Shakespeare and racial blackness in film with a play on Wright’s appropriated phrase, demonstrating its ongoing currency.

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anti-Western it had to be, for that heart was now weighing itself in terms of white Western values that made it feel degraded. Vainly attempting to embrace the world of white faces that rejected it, it recoiled and sought refuge in the ruins of moldering tradition. But it was too late; it was trapped; it found haven in neither. (5)

Wright discusses the impact of this postcolonial liminality for African Americans in terms of a white–Negro racial binary. This is the ideological milieu in which Wright causes or allows Shakespearean language to surface. Wright’s use of the term “The Forms of Things Unknown” occurs in his book’s third section, “The Literature of the Negro in the United States.” Here Wright characterizes two “main streams of Negro expression” early in the twentieth century (83). The first, what he calls the “Narcissistic Level of expression,” prevails among “middle-class Negro writers” in the first quarter of the twentieth century (84). These writers exhibit the effects of “constant rejection” accruing “in a land where even insane white people were counted above them”; they are left “impacted of feeling, choked of emotion” (84). Significantly, Wright paraphrases Shylock (Merchant of Venice 3.1.45–61) in describing these writers as “narcissistically preoccupied with their feelings, saying, ‘If you prick me, I bleed; if you put fire to me, I burn; I am like you who exclude me’” (92). The second level of expression belongs to “the migrant Negro” who, “bereft of family life, poverty-stricken, bewildered ... moved restlessly amidst the highest industrial civilization the world has ever known, in it but not of it, unable to respond to the vivid symbols of power of an alien culture ... .” (85). To this disenfranchised segment of society belonged the “Forms of Things Unknown” (Wright does not place the phrase within quotation marks; the capitalization is his), a “formless folk utterance” that “accounts for the great majority of the Negro people in the United States” and that became “the subject matter of future novels and poems” (85–6). Wright’s formless Forms include “spirituals, blues, works songs, and folklore” (83). What are we to make of Wright’s use of Shakespearean quotation and paraphrase given the time period and context? Does he ironically draw on the then-current view of Shakespeare’s plays as expressive of ‘the human condition’ in explaining to the “White Man” his place in the disenfranchisement of the “Negro people in the United States?” Is the Shakespearean allusion for the sake of the white audience? Perhaps so. The reference to The Merchant of Venice lends itself more readily to this reading than does that to Theseus’ speech; Shylock can be seen to say, in Wright’s words, “I am like you who exclude me.” But why use the language of the white imperialist poet to classify forms expressive of a unified black American identity? While it is possible that he simply appropriates the words indiscriminately from their original context, on inspection that context becomes vigorously relevant. Theseus speaks easily of the socially inscribed difference between Helen’s “fair” beauty and the unnamed “brow of Egypt,” and he is the play’s voice of authority, capriciously determining when and whether to enforce the patriarchal laws of Athens. The exchange of dialogue from which the phrase is taken occurs after the lovers’ experiences in a world removed from that in which Theseus exercises power— experiences he finds “more strange than true.” Hippolyta, the Amazonian queen whom Theseus has subdued and captured in war and has just married, points to the

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lovers’ mutual corroboration as proof of their honesty: “All their minds transfigured so together, / More witnesseth than fancy’s images / And grows to something of great constancy” (5.1.23–5). But just then the lovers enter, and Theseus never responds to Hippolyta—who in her difference and subjection bears a striking resemblance to the oppressed peoples of whom Wright writes. Wright borrows language from a speech in which Theseus rejects the agreedupon reality of his subjects despite the objection of his captured wife—the defeated leader of a people differing in appearance from their oppressors and now a subject of imperialist power. Wright appropriates the language of an imperialist character, written by the literary figurehead of imperialism, and uses it to represent the expression of the oppressed in his attempt to make the White Man listen. In Theseus’ formulation, the poet is able to concretize the forms of things unknown, which he takes in with wide vision, encompassing heaven and earth. The lover and madman, with whom the poet is “compact” in terms of “imagination” (with its power to “bod[y] forth the forms of things unknown”), share that vision, and the lover is consequently able to transcend what we today would identify as racially biased cultural strictures of beauty.6 Theseus rejects outright a way of seeing shared by a number of his subjects, including his captured spouse—a way of seeing counter to a constructed world over which he holds authority; Theseus has much to lose should a bush become a bear. Wright steps into the role of a poet who, in order to “apprehend some joy,” “comprehends some bringer of that joy.” In fact, Wright comprehends two bringers, Shakespeare and Theseus himself. Wright chooses to appropriate language resounding with the imperial power he would subvert—and possessing credibility in the eyes of the audience he would convince. We might group Shakespeare and Wright as poets aligned against Theseus, as opposed to grouping Shakespeare with Theseus in the context described above—especially given Thomas Elyot’s pointing out in The Boke Named the Governour (1531), “the paynes of Duke Theseus, Prometheus, Sisiphus and such othere tourmented for their dissolute and vicious lyvying.” However, it seems more appropriate to consider that, as Jonathan Bate proposes, “The history of appropriation may suggest that ‘Shakespeare’ is not a man who lived from 1564 to 1616 but a body of work that is refashioned by each subsequent age in the image of itself” (Cartelli 2).7 That is, while we might read Shakespeare the man as unsympathetic with Theseus the character, a more relevant reading of Wright and Henderson refigures “Shakespeare” as a culturally representative body of work. 6 For an investigation of early modern constructions of “fairness” in terms of female beauty see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 62–122. For a study that ties Shakespeare’s Dark Lady to Imiri Baraka and African-American music, see Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 102–22. 7 Elyot, 1:65, in J.P. Conlan, “The Fey Beauty of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Shakespearean Comedy in Its Courtly Context,” Shakespeare Studies 32 (Jan 1, 2004) 0582–9399: “Sir Thomas Elyot offered the example of Theseus tormented in hell as a powerful memorial to train students to abhor tyranny and the dissolute life.” Jonathon Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 3; in Cartelli, p. 2.

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What is most remarkable about Wright’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s phrase is that it takes on a life of its own within African-American literary criticism, and the next step in that process occurs with the publication of Stephen Henderson’s Understanding The New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Music As Poetic References (1973). Henderson, writing at the peak of the Black Arts Movement, calls his introduction “The Forms of Things Unknown,” citing Wright’s use of the phrase to describe “the kind of writing derived from the inner life of the folk” (5). Henderson, without mentioning Shakespeare, writes that “this evocative, almost prophetic phrase suggests an interior dynamism which underlies much of the best of contemporary Black poetry” and claims that “although others, before and after Wright, were aware of the potential of building upon Black folk roots, no one had named it so explicitly” (5). What is so explicit about the name—not the definition—that Wright provides, Henderson does not say. Perhaps he refers to the appropriateness of using the phrase “things unknown” to refer to the vestiges of African-ness that remained despite the best efforts of practitioners of chattel slavery to remove them. But we might also find the words explicit if we read them as gesturing toward the ironic justice of describing these vestiges of a culture that was systematically stripped away in the language of an author who had become the literary figurehead of the hegemonic Western entity— Wright’s white man—responsible for attempted cultural extermination. Henderson does assume that his reader knows something of Shakespeare: in demonstrating that “a Black poet may develop a theme which stems directly out of his experience, colored, so to speak, by his Blackness,” he reproduces Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” in its entirety. Before asking whether the poem’s “thematic meaning” would change “if we discovered one day that it had been composed by an African at Elizabeth’s court,” he identifies it: “This, of course, is Shakespeare’s sonnet No. 130” (12). If he expects a reader to recognize a Shakespearean sonnet, as the phrase “of course” indicates, might he also expect the reader to identify the original author of his title as not Wright, but Shakespeare? Like Wright’s, Henderson’s theoretical world is one of binary whiteness or blackness. He objects to the tendency of Kerlin and “others both white and Black” to “emphasize the essentially American, i.e., white cultural values and norms to be followed by ... ‘potential Negro poets’” (Kerlin 18, Henderson 6). In doing so he emphasizes the extent to which he finds the black/white binary to be embedded in an American culture that excludes the “blackness” identified by “The Form of Things Unknown.” For Henderson, Shakespeare’s words represent the expression of identity at the core of a group constructed as the binary opposite of the colonial imperialist culture that Shakespeare has in some cases come to represent. In emphasizing the importance of improvisation and performance in the New Black Poetry, Henderson raises the possibility that “there is a Black poetic mechanism, much like the musical ones, that can transform even a Shakespearean sonnet into a jazz poem, the basic conceptual model of contemporary Black poetry” (61). In an essay titled with an uncredited Shakespearean phrase, which he uses exclusively in the context Wright created for it, Henderson suggests that “even a Shakespearean sonnet” might be “transformed,” becoming “Black.” His use of the word “even” suggests the non-blackness—which in the teleological system Henderson applies can only be whiteness—of the Shakespearean sonnet. What about the Shakespearean

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sonnet opposes blackness? Is it “Shakespeare” as cultural artifact—or sonnet as cultural artifact? Is it Shakespeare’s repeated use, in his sonnets, of a paradigm of beauty based on skin color? Is it something inscribed in the prosody of the Shakespearean sonnet? What seems primary for Henderson is that there can be a form of poetry identifiable as black and that “even” the whitest poem imaginable— written by the poet from whom he takes his title—might be appropriated for, or “transformed” into, that form. It is important to remember that the Black Arts movement was staged by writers with an agenda and that much of the writing within the movement was in this sense self-conscious. In many cases it was less expressive of “the forms of things unknown,” as Wright and Henderson framed them, than reflective of the belief that they existed despite being “unknown” and that their having become “unknown” resulted from one culture’s endorsement of the enslavement of people from another culture. The existence of these identifiable “forms” underlined the urgency of “black” unification. But much writing of the Black Arts movement was less concerned with recapturing those “things” themselves than with discussing the significance of an artistic and cultural divide. Hoyt Fuller writes in “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” “The break between the revolutionary black writers and the ‘literary mainstream’ is, perhaps of necessity, cleaner and more decisive than the noisier and more dramatic break between the black militants and traditional political and institutional structures” (1810). Yet it is within a form associated with the “literary mainstream” that he communicates this stress on an artistic “break” between literary camps as demonstrative of a “decisive” cultural split. That is, evaluative critical essays became a key form in which to address black unity and cultural difference, and anthologies of Black Arts literature include essays by Fuller, Addison Gayle Jr., Malcolm X., Eldridge Cleaver, Etheridge Knight, Larry Neal, and others. When Neal advocates for “the radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic,” he does so not in an artistic form evocative of “things unknown,” but in a scholarly essay. Wright’s and Henderson’s appropriations of Shakespeare’s words for a viewpoint opposed to the “literary mainstream” take place in “mainstream” forms. Thus it becomes important to note that with Houston Baker’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984), “The Forms of Things Unknown” gains quotation marks, which appear not to mark the words as Shakespeare’s but to identify them separately as Henderson’s title (in quotation marks and with capitalization, pp. 74, 77, 79), as Wright’s concept (in quotation marks and with capitalization, pp. 68, 69), and as the concept itself (in quotation marks without capitalization, pp. 81, 173). Through context and mechanics, Baker differentiates between three usages of the term, and the final one liberates it from the texts of both Wright and Henderson while retaining Wright’s assignment of meaning.8 Perhaps Baker’s quotation marks, in the final usage above, denote the words as Shakespeare’s, but if so he never explicitly identifies them with Shakespeare, and they function contextually to signify “black” forms. In fact, Baker employs the third presentation of the phrase—within quotation marks but without capitalization—in explaining 8 Henderson puts the phrase within quotation marks when citing Wright but uses none elsewhere (p. 69 and in his own title).

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that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man “reflexively and nimbly negotiates ... the break held to obtain between “the forms of things unknown” and the “evolved” forms of English and American literatures” (173). That is, Baker, in mapping a dichotomy between “forms of things unknown” and “evolved” cultural forms of expression, employs without credit a phrase coined by an author who has been reconstructed to represent the pinnacle of the “evolved” literary culture of colonialist England. And he does so in describing the “unevolved” cultural vestiges of the descendants of colonially enslaved peoples. Baker’s reflection on Henderson’s essay also identifies “The Forms of Things Unknown” as a specific essay that “offers one of the most suggestive illustrations of the Black Aesthetic discovery process at work” and transforms Henderson into “the spokesman par excellence for an entirely new object of literary–critical and literary– theoretical investigation” (74).9 Baker locates part of the essay’s significance in its title: In what place and by what means does “blackness” achieve form and substance? ... The title of Henderson’s essay suggests his answer. Blackness must be defined, at a structural level of expressive objects and events, as an “interior dynamism” that derives force from the “inner life” of the Afro-American folk. (Baker 77; Wright 5–6).

Baker’s contextual reference to Henderson’s title associates Shakespeare’s phrase exclusively with Wright’s appropriation for formal representation of the “‘inner life’ of the Afro-American folk.” Today’s students of African-American literature might view the historical role of “The Forms of Things Unknown” as follows. Wright, along with Arthur P. Davis and Sterling Brown, has been categorized as a “segregationist” based on his argument that the United States Government would successfully champion equal rights and that the resultant racial equality would allow for an inclusive literature. Such a literature would, in Wright’s eyes, allow for the disappearance of the Forms of Things Unknown. Of course, a culture without race or class failed to develop, and Black Arts Movement writers like LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Henderson responded to a political milieu that included Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s concept of “Black Power”: “a call for black people to 9 The Black Aesthetic is another key phrase in the history of African-American literary criticism. Addison Gayle, Jr., uses it as the title of his well-known collection of essays exploring the relationship between blackness and American writing, in which Gayle’s articulated position corroborates Henderson’s attitude toward literary blackness and whiteness: The question for the black critic today is not how beautiful is a melody, a play, a poem, or a novel, but how much more beautiful has the poem, melody, play, or novel made the life of a single black man? How far has the work gone in transforming an American Negro into an African-American or black man? The Black Aesthetic, then, as conceived by this writer, is a corrective—a means of helping black people out of the polluted mainstream of Americanism, and offering logical, reasoned arguments as to why he should not desire to join the ranks of a Norman Mailer or a William Styron. To be an American writer is to be an American, and, for black people, there should no longer be honor attached to either position. (xxii) Addison Gayle, Jr., “Introduction,” The Black Aesthetic (New York: Doubleday, 1971).

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begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations.”10 Henderson’s “The Form of Things Unknown” became central to the literary embodiment of this idea with his claim that, with the exception of music, black poetry is the form most expressive of the “blackness” that should be expressed and could be evaluated only by black people. This movement, too, had faded by the mid 1970s, and black writers, including Cornel West and Ralph Ellison, argued against the separatism that proponents of the Black Arts Movement had advocated. More recently, Edward W. Said has cited a need for “the reintegration of all those people and cultures, once confined and reduced to peripheral status, with the rest of the human race.”11 This brief and simplistic overview is meant only to demonstrate how it was that the appropriated phrase became central to the study of AfricanAmerican literature: Wright’s concept and Henderson’s essay became key points of reference, and “The Forms of Things Unknown” took on its own life separate from Shakespeare. It did so in becoming a tool with which to facilitate a debate in African-American literary criticism. This debate displays some striking similarities to a postcolonial critical argument concerning “hybridity” as it is framed by Loomba and Orkin: Colonial masters imposed their value system through Shakespeare, and in response colonized peoples often answered back in Shakespearean accents. The study of Shakespeare made them ‘hybrid’ subjects, to use a term that has become central to postcolonial criticism and which is increasingly used to characterize the range of psychological as well as physiological mixings generated by colonial encounters. (8)

If scholars of African-American literature have approached the relative merits of cultural separateness or incorporation from various positions, so have postcolonialists, for whom hybridity might be “radical” and “subversive,” as Loomba and Orkin argue of Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s seminal approach to Caliban, or to “a condition that marks the alienation of subordinated people from their own cultures” (8). “The Form of Things Unknown” was, generally speaking, incorporated to describe vestiges of such a culture. But more importantly, Wright and Henderson approach hybridity from a perspective similar to “anti-colonial feminists and other activists” who “are involved not only in questioning totalizing frameworks but also in the possibility of social change” (Loomba and Orkin 3). That is, writers viewing critical discourse as an instrument of social change inscribed Shakespeare’s phrase within the body of African-American literary criticism. In a sense, the crowning achievement of the appropriation of “The Forms of Things Unknown” is the phrase’s function in critical literary discourse without consideration of its origin in Shakespeare, which reinforces the function of appropriation “as a selectively predatory act”; “appropriation, unlike adaptation, does not seek to reproduce in any faithful or sustained way what it ‘abducts’ from its objective” (Cartelli 17). After Henderson, the phrase functions as a term in 10 Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967) 44. 11 Edward W. Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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scholarly debates on “critical framework(s)” and “organizing principles” of black poetry.12 However, more recently, scholar–writer Kwame Dawes acknowledges the lines as Shakespeare’s in his discussion of Nikky Finney’s Rice, although he uses them to evoke Wright and Henderson, never discussing Shakespeare in detail.13 More significantly, Harryette Mullen, in considering the question, “What’s African American about African American poetry,” looks back to Wright and Henderson as she argues that “it is no longer accurate, if it ever was, to speak of a singular black experience” and that “our failure to respect the differences among us as African Americans has often been destructive.” She claims that Wright “borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare” and speculates that “Shakespeare’s references to the beauty of Africans and the proliferation of devils might have seemed particularly relevant to the poetry of the Black Arts movement surveyed by Henderson, in which poets and critics alike—aware of the successes and failures of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s—struggled to redefine a black aesthetic by giving names to things yet uncreated.”14 Mullen importantly ties the phrase to Shakespeare as she takes a step toward hybridity but does not elaborate on the relevance of the phrase’s original context. Dawes and Mullen inscribe “Shakespeare” within critical discourse on the role of “blackness” in African-American literature, simultaneously drawing on and adding to Shakespeare’s currency. Jerry W. Ward, Jr., in equating Wright’s relevance to Shakespeare’s, approaches the relationship between Shakespeare and Wright from a different angle. In a 2005 lecture, “Richard Wright and Our Contemporary Situation,” Ward, an African-American poet and critic, testifies to Wright’s ongoing relevance, and he does so in terms of Shakespeare, recounting the questioning of current academic interest in Wright. Writes Ward, “Imagine substituting another writer’s name in the question ‘Are you still interested in [not Wright but] William Shakespeare?’ Anyone who asked that question might be considered odd. So too do I regard the unnamed person who posed the question.” Ward draws on Shakespeare’s currency in asserting Wright’s importance. Wright originally drew on Shakespeare without naming him; again, his reference could be categorized as an example of both of Burt’s types of obsolete appropriation. Wright aims his Shakespeare at those “white men” who might judge him on his academic knowledge but “enlist[s ‘him’] in the name of the marginal.” Ward asks indirectly why Wright’s accomplishments are not valued as Shakespeare’s are. Ward never mentions “Forms of Things Unknown”; instead, he presents Wright’s texts as windows into aspects of human relations, for the most part downplaying the role of such relations reduced to the black/white binary. But he makes a case for Wright’s relevance, particularly regarding Western Imperialism, the Patriot Act, and the New Orleans hurricane debacle. Wright, he insists, “assists us to deal with the lack of metaphysical absolutes to secure our sense that life has meaning; 12 Henderson, cited in Hazel Arnett Ervin, ed., African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000 (New York: Twayne, 1999) 141. 13 Kwame Dawes, “Reading Rice: A Local Habitation and a Name—A Collection of Poems,” African American Review Summer (1997). 14 Elizabeth Alexander et al., “What’s African American about African American Poetry,” Fence 4.1 (2001).

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it is the whole body of his work that serves as a question-generating machine.” Yet in framing Wright in terms of Shakespeare, Ward continues the awkward critical dance with Shakespeare’s cultural relevance that Wright began. Ward’s marks one approach to the question of whether, how, or for whom Shakespeare could or can be successfully appropriated by or for the marginalized, a question that critics have answered in numerous ways, as Michael Dobson points out.15 In doing so, he observes that “Shakespeare’s texts appropriate their readers—as in [Marjorie] Garber’s work, where Freud, Nietzsche, Delia Bacon, and others prove to be dutifully playing out the unconscious of the First Folio.” In displaying this approach, Garber recounts an instance in which Lynne V. Cheney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, asserts that “[t]he humanities ... are about more than politics, about more than social power.16 What gives them their abiding worth,” claims Cheney, “are truths that pass beyond time and circumstances; truths that, transcending accidents of class, race, and gender, speak to us all.” Garber details Cheney’s reference to a speech in which Maya Angelou discusses her relationship to Shakespeare. In Garber’s retelling, Cheney uses a quotation from Angelou’s 1985 address, “Journey to the Heartland,” as “an apparent preemptive strike at the raceclass-and-gender crowd”: Angelou told her audience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that when she was growing up in Stamps, Arkansas ... her grandmother admonished her not to read the works of a white author, but rather one from her own tradition, like Langston Hughes ... But years afterward, Angelou recalled, “I found myself and still find myself, whenever I like, stepping back into Shakespeare ... He wrote it for me. ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state ...’ Of course he wrote it for me: that is a condition of the black woman. Of course, he was a black woman. I understand that. Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman. That is the role of art in life.” (249)

In concentrating on Cheney’s use of “Angelou’s humanistic claim ... as a validation of her [own] claim that ‘the humanities are about more than politics,’” Garber suggests that we “pass over the ironic fact that Angelou’s original choice of presentation piece, ‘Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice,’ is spoken by one of the few Shakespearean characters openly to disparage a black man for his race and color, in ways that even sympathetic editors have not been able to explain away”17: Garber concludes that Angelou’s approach reinforces a type of hegemony: If Maya Angelou can be convinced that Shakespeare speaks for her, at the cost of acknowledging vestiges of racism, sexism, and classism in his own works (that is, if 15 Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 11–12; in Cartelli 17, emendations Cartelli’s. 16 Marjorie Garber, “Shakespeare as Fetish,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41:2 (summer 1990) 242–50. 17 “Let all of his complexion choose me so,” Portia remarks with satisfaction when the Prince of Morocco chooses the wrong casket and fails to win her hand [2.7.79]. Garber’s note, 249.

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she can be persuaded to believe that he speaks for her even—or precisely—when he is speaking against her), then the ideological danger of fetishizing Shakespeare becomes clear and present. (250)

Garber’s point regarding Cheney’s use of Angelou is well taken, but what happens if we do not pass over Angelou’s ironic choice of Shakespearean speakers? If we view Morocco—and Theseus—as characters whose politics run counter to the social positions of those who evoke them, their appropriation becomes all the more dramatic. Angelou discovers a way to appropriate Shakespeare’s language for herself despite its origin in a speech by a character who “openly disparage[es] a black man for his race and color” just as critics of African American literature have appropriated Shakespeare’s language despite its origin in the essentialist speech of an imperialist character who openly disparages relative darkness of complexion. One reading of Angelou’s claim is that it is more appropriative than humanistic; possibly part of what “nobody else understands” is that for Angelou the public nature of ‘art’ enables the reader to appropriate its power of authority. While Cheney would appropriate Angelou’s appropriation for her own purposes, for Angelou, Shakespeare is about politics and social power. If Angelou willfully ‘misreads’ Shakespeare in claiming for herself words, he originally wrote to be spoken by the disparager of a black man, is she ‘wrong?’ In claiming that “that is the role of art in life,” she makes Shakespearean authority available to all; other readers may do with Shakespeare’s words what they will, but for her Shakespeare was a black woman. When she says that Shakespeare wrote the words for her, she declares her own power of appropriation, not the consistent and magnanimous nature of Shakespeare or humanism. The power of Angelou’s appropriation becomes manifest in her belief that Shakespeare “speaks for her even—or precisely—when he is speaking against her.” It stems from her affirmation that Shakespeare was a black woman despite Garber’s argument—which poses an answer to Henderson’s question—that “if it were in fact discovered that Shakespeare was a black woman ... what would happen would be a massive campaign of disavowal.” One way of approaching Garber’s suggestion that Shakespeare continues to speak against those who would appropriate his words is through arguments asserting a critical temporal shift. Ania Loomba suggests that “if we once had sharply polarized versions of the Bard that contested each other—an imperialist Shakespeare versus a revolutionary Third World-ist one—in our postcolonial/or neo-colonial world, where both colonialism and revolution have become unfashionable terms, it sometimes seems that a neo-imperial Shakespeare and a postcolonial one can be collapsed into a single highly marketable Shakespeare who simultaneously represents both once-colonized and once-colonizing cultures.”18 Loomba’s point resembles Burt’s assertion about obsolete critical practices, but it also suggests the complications of attributing Shakespeare with a specific social voice given his ubiquitous reproduction.

18 Ania Loomba, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Performance, A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, eds. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).

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But another way of approaching Garber’s suggestions is through Sonia Massai’s revisiting of Bourdieu in considering Paul Yachnin’s argument that “those who rework Shakespeare ‘are bound within a literary field that is neither of their own creation, nor within their own power to alter’” (Yachnin 37, 49; in Massai 7). Massai notes that “unlike Foucault, Bourdieu believes that the subject can take up different positions within the cultural (or other) fields, and that the field, which is not only a ‘field of forces’ but also a ‘field of struggles,’ changes as a result of local contributions within that field” (Bourdieu 58; in Massai 7). While such a perspective does not accommodate Angelou’s immediate personal appropriation, it allows for the possibility that over time writers like Wright and Henderson may alter the cultural field. Somewhere amid Wright’s and Henderson’s use of Shakespeare’s phrase, Garber’s caveat, Angelou’s appropriation, and Loomba’s and Burt’s points about critical obsolescence lingers a question about Shakespeare and cultural inscription. Angelou expresses her appropriation of Shakespeare in personal terms; Wright and Henderson appropriate Shakespeare’s words for their own purposes, in a time and place where colonialism and revolution were not yet unfashionable terms, and the phrase eventually becomes inscribed in an academic discourse in its appropriated form. Adapting Angelou’s method of Shakespearean appropriation demands that the reader simultaneously understand and ignore Shakespeare’s presentation of inequalities. But the case of Wright and Henderson is somewhat more complex: Their appropriation transcends the personal. Their use of Shakespeare’s language resulted in its cultural reinscription in a way that shifts the focus of the phrase to the enslavement of Africans and the consequent loss of their overt systems of cultural perpetuation. The ongoing use of “The Forms of Things Unknown” in discussions of AfricanAmerican literature, despite the evolution of criticism, claims Shakespeare’s words as a reminder of a larger cultural appropriation. If Loomba’s “highly marketable Shakespeare” reinforces the obsolescence of polarized readings of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary Shakespeare, perhaps Wright’s and Henderson’s appropriation lingers, not as an anachronistic marker of specific moments in a long-running critical dispute, but of the inextricable link between politics and literature, perpetuating if not a vestigial protest against cultural hegemony, then at least a reminder of the type of ongoing social complications to which Ward gestures in comparing Wright to Shakespeare. As Loomba and Orkin point out, “Any act of reading and performing Shakespeare in the later twentieth century generates multiple levels of hybridity” (8). Ward argues that reading Wright will help us contextualize the type of ongoing inequalities of class and race that surfaced in post-hurricane New Orleans. One might make a similar claim for the appropriation of “The Forms of Things Unknown” for African-American literary criticism. If the marketplace has reclaimed and multiplied the “Shakespeare” of Shakespearean studies into many “Shakespeares,” perhaps “his” appropriated reflection in African-American literary studies might still emerge periodically in the lines of those critics contemplating the possibility of social change and contribute to an alteration of the cultural field.

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Works Cited Alexander, Elizabeth, et al. “What’s African American about African American Poetry.” Fence 4.1 (2001). Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. R. Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Burt, Richard. “Slammin’ Shakespeare In Acc(id)ents Yet Unknown: Liveness, Cinem(edi)a, and Racial Dis-integration.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2 (2002): 201–26. Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage, 1967. Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Conlan, J.P. “The Fey Beauty of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Shakespearean Comedy in Its Courtly Context.” Shakespeare Studies 32 (2004). Dawes, Kwame. “Reading Rice: A Local Habitation and a Name—A Collection of Poems.” African American Review (summer 1997). Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Elyot, Sir Thomas. The Book Named the Governor. 1531. Ed. John M. Major. New York: Teachers College, 1969. Ervin, Hazel Arnett Ervin, ed. African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New York: Twayne, 1999. Garber, Marjorie. “Shakespeare as Fetish.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41:2 (summer 1990), pp. 242–50 Gayle, Addison Jr. “Introduction.” The Black Aesthetic (New York: Doubleday, 1971). Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition. New York: Norton, 1997. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Henderson, Stephen. “The Forms of Things Unknown.” Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1973. Hodgdon, Barbara, and W.B. Worthen. A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Loomba, Ania. “Shakespeare and Postcolonial Performance.” A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Eds. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. ——— and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Massai, Sonia. “Defining Local Shakespeares.” World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Ed. Sonia Massai. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Moten, Fred. “The Dark Lady and the Sexual Cut.” In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 102–22

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Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Ward, Jerry W., Jr. “Richard Wright and Our Contemporary Situation.” ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes, 30 October 2005. Wright, Richard. White Man Listen. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Yachnin, Paul. “‘To Kill a King’: The Modern Politics of Bardicide.” Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity. Eds. Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 36–54.

Chapter 4

The Fooler Fooled: Salman Rushdie’s Hybrid Revision of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Through “Yorick” Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan and Ana Sáez Hidalgo

Rewriting history has been one of the most recurrent features of postcolonial culture— if not the most recurrent. If we move toward literature, then, we can observe that rewriting literary myths, symbols, motifs, and even plots has a pervasive presence in postcolonial literatures (Neri 424–32). It should not come as a surprise that William Shakespeare would not be left aside in this postcolonial interest. As Ania Loomba’s and Martin Orkin’s Post-Colonial Shakespeares demonstrates, the English playwright has been the object of diverse literary appropriations and rewritings (Joughlin, Massai, Desmet-Sawyer). It is precisely one of these new versions of a Shakespearean play, Hamlet, that we intend to study, a short story by Salman Rushdie, entitled “Yorick,” published in East, West (1994), although a shorter version had been already published in 1982. Our aim is to analyze the motives and purposes that led Rushdie to rewrite that tragedy into a narrative and to study how he has made use of the Bard’s material and to what effect as well as the theoretical stance underlying it. We have wondered what aim leads an author as important as Rushdie to rewrite already known literary works instead of writing new plots or to alter history instead of analyze what actually happened. Salman Rushdie has made of rewriting a central concern in his works, as Jaina Sanga argues in Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors. Among others, she analyzes the issues of translation and hybridity that become central in Rushdie’s rewriting of literature and history. Romanticism saw the rise of the historical novel, whereas Postmodernity has seen the advent of a new form of historicity, what Linda Hutcheon has called historiographic metafiction in The Politics of Postmodernism. In the end, what postmodern authors are concerned is with providing contested versions of history. However, postcolonial writers move a step beyond. Not only are they interested in offering alternative views to imperialist histories, that is, Western histories; rather, their aim is to create a new culture that shares aspects of both colonizer and colonized cultures. In order to achieve this objective, they have to make use of some theoretical issues such as hybridity or

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translation, in a wide sense, that may help contest the notion of fixity of identity, as Sanga argues (75). Rushdie’s aim is that of breaking the boundaries of the traditional approach to history as a teleological account of events played by the leading classes of society. From a postmodern, and a postcolonial, point of view, history is no longer that account but is a series of discontinuous narratives told or played by secondary characters. Rushdie attempts to rewrite the history of Hamlet from that stance. This is an implicit attack on the traditional narrative of kings, aristocrats, and high— almost superhuman—aims as well as a subtle reversal of the tenets of traditional poetics, in which the main action is led by central characters.1 Before proceeding, we would like to state what a hybrid text is. There has been much theory on the issue, as Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, Robert Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination attest. It is our view that in “Yorick,” Rushdie’s main concern is closer to Bakhtin than to any other theorist, although Bhabha’s theorization stands as central as well. Bakhtin is concerned with analysis of the Carnival. Among other interpretations, this is a cultural expression of how classes that were not leading society overtook power, consequently subverting temporarily the normal functioning of society. On the other hand, Bhabha theorizes a Third Space, in which cultural expressions are neither metropolitan nor colonial but a product of the translation of dominant elements by the colonized subject (36–9). Rushdie is concerned with this approach in the collection East, West, in which “Yorick” is included. As he points out, “The hybrid strategy or discourse opens up a space of negotiation [...]. It makes possible the emergence of an ‘interstitial’ agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies find their voice in a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory” (58). More important yet, that hybridization implies a reordering that results in a mixture of

1 It is interesting to compare how two authors adapt and destabilize the same text depending on their own poetics. See Cartelli’s chapter on Joyce’s “appropriation” of Hamlet. One might wonder whether the difference is rooted in the Modernist / Postmodernist different concept of literary text or whether the personal outlooks on literature account for the different appropriations. Antoher aspect is that of the carnivalesque. Cartelli’s analysis of Joyce’s Ulysses points to the fact, though he does not mention it explicitly, of Joyce’s carnivalesque parody in Ulysses. Dionne’s article explicitly acknowledges the comic tradition of the Mas. On another level, it seems interesting to see the differences between two marginal groups: African-Americans and postcolonial Indians. It does not seem a mere consequence of the social–historical context. If one compares Joyce’s, Wright’s and Henderson’s, and Rushdie’s readings, one can see that there are more points of contact between Joyce and Rushdie than between Wright and Henderson and Rushdie. Discourses of liminality or marginalization do not account per se for the differences. Instead, aesthetic and literary discourses (in a quite traditional sense) may answer for some of the historical continuities and discontinuities that seem to be at the basis of Shakespearean negotiations.

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heterogeneous memories and interrupted innovations that makes it impossible to distinguish between the modern and the traditional (Dietz 209). “Yorick,” in its second and longer version, is placed in the “West” section of East, West. This might lead to thinking that, since it is a story based on a Western literary text, its inclusion in this part of the book could not entail a hybridization such as the one found in the section “East, West,” where the two worlds and cultures are placed side by side. However, we would argue that hybridization does not always mean the blending of Eastern and Western elements. It may be, as Bakhtin pointed out, simply a “double-voice”; that is, one voice unmasks the other, and there is not any fixed certainty on which essentialism can be sustained (304–305), or, as Bhabha argues, the Third Space ensures “that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity” (37).2 Thus, Rushdie would be interested in a reordering of historical memories that take into account both central and marginal characters. These memories are not only literary; what is more important is that they are historical as well to a certain extent. The adaptations of Shakespeare’s works both in English and foreign literatures have been one of the most evident marks of the Bard’s success. Among them, Hamlet is the one that has been more frequently rewritten,3 as John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2002) can attest. Although Updike’s novel is based on changing the point of view of the story—in a similar manner to what Tom Stoppard had done in his Rosencrantz and Guildestern are Dead (1967)4—even if Rushdie uses this same device, his attempt however differs from the rest in that “Yorick” is not an adaptation of the original plot; rather, it is an alternative explanation of the story, and the narrator is well aware of it: It’s true that my history differs from Master CHACKPAW’s and ruins at least one great soliloquy. I offer no defence but this: that these matters are shrouded in antiquity, and there’s no certainty in them; so let the versions of the story coexist, for there’s no need to choose. (81)

There is no unique version of historical facts. These can be retold from different points of view and by different characters, depending on the aim of the writer. As the title of his story indicates, Rushdie’s Hamlet is told from the point of view of a secondary character, Yorick, the buffoon whose skull is found by the gravediggers (Hamlet, 5.1 181–92); this means that it is not the official history, that inscribed 2 Another feature of postcolonialism is mimicry, discussed by Dionne in his article. Mimicry, no doubt, complements the Third Space and helps appropriate cultural products at a surface level that may become subconscious in the end. 3 A huge research project has been set off a few years ago, Shakespeare in Europe (Sh: in:E), which aims at giving a comprehensive view of the reception of Shakespeare’s works throughout Europe. One of the Internet tools that has been developed as a result of the project is a “HyperHamlet,” in which echoes and references to Hamlet are being collected. http:// www.hyperhamlet.unibas.ch (last accessed May 2007). The reference to “Yorick” has only been included quite recently. 4 Another example of change in the point of view in “appropriating” Hamlet is, as Cartelli points out in his article, the nationalistic reading of the story in Ulysses.

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in the collective memory and repeated through centuries, that concerns Rushdie. On the contrary, he is interested in the alternative or hidden accounts of historical events. This leads to Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History and to Rushdie’s essay “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist.” Rushdie rejects a Commonwealth Literature that in the event may be a ghetto for authors, although he traces some similarities between the diverse commonwealth literatures. Among the common points, he mentions the “second tradition”: “Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group” (20). The term had been coined by Walter Benjamin, as Radnóti argues (132– 5). For Benjamin, the term refers to cultural and philosophical trends that were left behind and did not play any role in the development of civilization. As he well knew and argued, history is written by winners, which means that losers’ cultures are buried and forgotten. Benjamin saw the huge potentiality that this second tradition had for Revolution. Rushdie does not attempt the messianic political revolution that Benjamin theorized in his brief life, but he is well aware of the possibilities that the second tradition opens up for a writer. First of all, it can act as a site of contest and challenge, but beyond that, it can serve as a renewal of literary forms that may have become exhausted. This would suggest the idea that forgotten or unknown traditions may be as important and as useful as official or canonical cultural trends. There is not an explicit, fixed order or levelling, since they have been the products of political struggles (as Benjamin points out and Rushdie accepts). It is precisely a forgotten or unknown tradition in connection with Hamlet that Rushdie chooses as the guideline of his story, a story found in an unknown parchment that has been preserved by a family, the Yoricks, as we will analyze later. Accordingly, the narrative will be developed around two axes: “the tale of a vellum and the tale inscribed thereupon” (64). The “tale of the vellum” is in fact the tale of the Yorick saga and how the manuscript has been bequeathed by the buffoon to his descendants; the tale inscribed on it is the events that took place in the kingdom of Denmark in Hamlet’s time, which give way to a new interpretation, alternative to Shakespeare’s. This responds to one of the goals identified by Beck in the collection East, West: the questioning of the sacred (Beck 365). In this case, that questioning is directly related to textual elements. It is not by chance that “Yorick” begins with a lengthy thanking interjection for the duration of vellum: “Thank the heavens! —or the diligence of ancient-time papersmiths—for the existence upon our earth of the material known as strong vellum ...” (63). Bookishness or, as Rushdie puts it, a “velluminous” (64), character pervades “Yorick,”5 not only from the material point of view already observed —the concern with the survival of texts and stories—but also in the deliberate usage and reinterpretation of the elements of Shakespare’s Hamlet together with notions from the critical tradition and metaliterary reflections. Thus, one of the pillars of “Yorick” 5 Surprisingly enough, bookishness is also an essential feature of Joyce’s revision of Hamlet (see Cartelli’s chapter above). However, while in Ulysses books keep on being a source of authority, Rushdie uses them as demystification of that concept.

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is the awareness of the authority traditionally conferred on extant old texts, mainly when they are the only witnesses to our past; of course, the problem arises when two conflicting versions of the same events are kept in diverse old texts. The “tale inscribed upon the vellum” not only gives a new point of view on the story of Hamlet, but it brings awareness of the fact that it has been constantly rewritten—usually as a result of historical, political, social, or literary interests or situations. Since the twelfth-century author Saxo Grammaticus wrote about Amleth, prince of Jutland in his History of the Danes, the story has been revised, sometimes with a typically Elizabethan moral tone tinged with misogyny (as François de Belleforest did in his 1576 text), others in the form of a play, as “Master Chackpaw” did. Yorick’s is another version to sum up to the list; and though initially it is presented as the “full exposition of why, in the Hamlet of William Shakespeare, the morbid prince seems unaware of his own father’s real name” (64), implying the possibility of discovering the truth; however, the trustworthiness of the text will be undermined, “it may be that the vellum is not wholly to be relied upon” (67). It is made even more evident in the last words: His [Yorick’s] weakness is for the telling of a particular species of Tale, which learned men have termed chanticleric, and also taurean. —And just such a COCK-AND-BULL story is by this last confession brought quite to its conclusion. (83)

As commented above, this relativity of the truthfulness is clearly in tune with the proposals of postmodern historiography, as illustrated in Hutcheon’s book, which Rushdie himself has expressed in one of his essays asserting that “events in history must always be subject to questioning, deconstruction, even to declarations of their obsolescence” (1991c:416). Apart from the material, textual element, there is a clear interest in the act of telling and the verbal conveying of stories. In fact, the retelling of the story of Hamlet can be said to have originated in Shakespeare’s play itself, in the hero’s concern for the afterlife of his own story: O good Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story. (Hamlet 5.2.338–43)

At the end of the drama, Horatio, as a result of his friend’s requirement, lists several crimes typical of the revenge tragedy, but presented as if in a prologue rather than as a conclusion (Hamlet 5.2.374–80). In “Yorick”, the narrator takes up Horatio’s commitment and presents a similar list in an introductory manner, in what is the first example of clear intertextuality: “Here, dusty-faced and inky-fingered, lurk beautiful young wives, old fools, cuckoldry, jealousy, murder, juice of cursed hebona, executions, skulls” (64).

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Thus, it is through language that Rushdie is following the pace marked by Shakespeare; furthermore, speech is given an essential role in the story: It is the hebona that, poured into the ear, will trigger the tragedy. This witty and symbolic usage of language illustrates its central position in Rushdie’s story, where it is one of the key devices, as we shall see later. Before getting further in the discussion of the story’s bookishness, it would be useful to make a brief reference to the new plot in Rushdie’s version of Hamlet. “Yorick” begins almost ab ovo; it develops almost from the beginning, from prince Hamlet’s childhood, when he was seven years old, and the jester Yorick and Hamlet’s father were still alive, that is, the “pre-history” or prequel of what Shakespeare tells in his play. Hamlet, who is a lonely child as a result of his parents’ political duties, looks for parental love in the buffoon Yorick and his wife Ophelia (for whom a certain attraction seems to exist). One day, the young prince, hidden behind an arras in his mother’s chamber, misinterprets the King’s lovemaking to the Queen and assumes his father is trying to kill her, so he decides to take revenge using Yorick as his instrument. Hamlet deceives him, saying that his wife Ophelia and the King are having an affair (thus “hebona” becomes venomous speech through these lies); then the jealous jester kills the King (now with real hebona, which is then duplicated), and, when the murder is discovered, Yorick is put to death. Therefore, several elements in the Shakespearean text are given an alternative explanation. The ghost is tripled into several here: Hamlet’s father in a nightmare after the prince beheld the love scene behind the arras, Hamlet’s living father disturbing Yorick with jealousy, and the executed Yorick; Ophelia’s madness is the result of the false accusation. Many other constituents of Shakespeare’s play are analyzed as the result of these early events in the hero’s life. His mad behavior is due to the fact that past events haunt him; because of this behavior, he treats badly his “girlfriend” Ophelia, namesake of Yorick’s wife—a duplication of the name that must not be disregarded. Thus, Shakespeare’s main themes—revenge, madness, and suicide—are rewritten. One of the most important devices in “Yorick” is Rushdie’s somewhat ironic use of a large amount of elements from the original play6 so that his reader will recognize them and see them in their new reinterpreted form or from his particular relativistic point of view—playing, in a certain way, with the horizon of expectations as in other short stories in East, West (Beck 365–70)—as when the narrator echoes Horatio’s final words in order to begin this new story. It is precisely the mirroring of the Shakespearean verbal features, together with that of the best-known events in the plot, that is most remarkable in this short story. Rushdie’s linguistic mastery is clearer than ever in his imitation of the Elizabethan style in the lexical, syntactic, and semantic level of the tendency of the period to linguistic experiments and of the 6 There is also an open reference to another Shakespearean tragedy, Othello, when young Hamlet’s plot is explained: As he persuades Yorick that his wife is having an affair with the King, the parallel with the story of the Moor of Venice is evident; the narrator himself wonders about the possible substitution of the handkerchief for another similar proof in this case (78–9). (See note 12.)

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rhetorical devices used at that moment (Kermode, Lass), all of them expressed in a playful exercise of ironical witticism. Rushdie is so successful in making the characters’ dialogues resemble the Elizabethan speech as Charles Lamb was, not in his Tales from Shakespeare, but in his emulation of Robert Burton’s style in some of his “curious fragments.”7 Rushdie’s Ophelia uses forms such as the participial adjective “a-tearing” (68), where the prefix “a-”, which was about to disappear in Shakespeare’s time, is retained; Hamlet says he “would have a song” (68), with a full-meaning “would”—“wanted”—rather than its contemporary modal usage. Furthermore, some expressions from the original are either copied or altered but clearly identifiable: Ophelia greets young prince Hamlet saying, “Good morrow, sweet my prince,” a clear echo of Horatio’s final words at his friend’s death (5.2.338), with an inversion in tune with that of the plot. Obviously, this gives a clear “period taste” to the whole story. But besides these Modern English terms and expressions, Rushdie also imitates the means by which the English language was improved and embellished in the Renaissance, for instance, resorting to the etymology of words in order to stretch their meaning: “Age, Hamlet, is a setting sun, and in my occidental years ... ” (68), where occidental combines its usage related to the mentioned sunset with the Latin etymological occido, to die, which makes it suitable to refer to the late years in a person’s life. Metaphors also seem to be made in the same manner as Renaissance figures of speech: Hamlet is “practising his swimming in this textile sea” (74) when he is sleeplessly tossing to and fro in his bed as a result of beholding his parents’ love scene; here, the marine image can be connected with the classical story—so widely rewritten in the Renaissance—of Hero and Leander, their lovemaking and its fatal consequence. But, in the same way as Shakespeare mocks at certain types of expression, mostly the affected learnedness (Grazia 55), Rushdie also parodies these several sixteenthcentury forms of pedantry. One was the abuse of classical allusion, here found in Yorick himself: Yor. (awakes) O, a! What whoreson Pelion’s this, that, tumbling down from Ossa so interrupts my spine?... I interrupt myself, for there occurs to me a discordant Note: would any man, awakened from deepest slumber by the arrival on his back of a seven-year-old princeling, truly retain such a command of metaphor and classical allusion as is indicated by the text? (67)

The references to mounts Pelion and Ossa, both also in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are commented on by the narrator as an example of ridicule finesse and learnedness lacking decorum; that is, they are not appropriate to the situation, or that is not the kind of exclamation one would expect from a person whose sleep has been suddenly interrupted—and even less if the person is a buffoon.8 7 This recreation of Elizabethan language contrasts with The Shakespeare Mas analyzed by Dionne, inasmuch as the latter was intended to present the colonized with a stylistic model of discourse, while Rushdie, in his playfulness, is rather giving an ironic version of it. 8 This lack of decorum, in the classical sense of the term, is recurrent in Rushdie. Dave Weich, interviewing Rushdie, pointed out: “There’s been perhaps an evolution toward this

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But maybe it was the Latinate diction and its resulting obscurity that Shakespeare disliked most, and this will also be one of the objects of the mockery Rushdie’s narrator, when he imitates Elizabethan Latinate syntax, with its recurring subordination and the large amount of phrases and clauses that can separate two parts of the main clause: which [strong vellum], like the earth upon which I have supposed it to exist (although in point of fact its contacts with terra firma are most rare, its natural habitations being shelves, wooden or not wooden, some dusty, others maintained in excellent order; or letter-boxes, desk drawers, old trunks, the most sacred pockets of courting lovers, shops, files, attics, cellars, museums, deed-boxes, safes, lawyers’ offices, doctors’ walls, your favourite great-aunt’s seaside home, theatrical property departments, fairy tales, summit conferences, tourist traps), ... like the earth, I say again in case you have forgot my purpose, this noble stuff endures [...] (63)

and when he makes an excessive use of Latinisms: Truly, a velluminous history!—which it’s my present intent not merely to abbreviate, but in addition, to explicate, annotate, hyphenate, palatinate & permanganate—for it’s a narrative that richly rewards the scholar who is competent to apply such sensitive technologies. (64)

While this description of the narrator’s task begins with one of the most common Renaissance rhetorical exercises, to abbreviate, the list follows with other verbs that are remarkable for their suffix “–ate” and that range from unusual terms in English (explicate instead of explain) to odder words, such as a case of malapropism (palatinate) or an invented verb (permanganate). This enumeration is no doubt reminiscent of the famous “inkhorn letter” published by Thomas Wilson in his Arte of Rhetorique (1553), in which he condemns the contemporary abuse of “inkhorn terms,” Greek and Latin loan words used as a way of pretending learnedness, one of the most frequent methods to make words sound Latin in the period was by adding the suffix “–ate” (Nevalainen 406–7). In the feigned letter, Wilson includes terms like celebrate, adiuuate, adnichilate, obtestate, contiguate, contemplate, impetrate, inuigilate, fatigate, and climates. Although all these terms are now found in the Oxford English Dictionary—even if marked as obsolete—some of them are, according to the dictionary, the first records of the word (obtestate and inuigilate). Thus, Rushdie is not only drawing on Wilson’s parody of “inkhornism,” but he is, like the rhetoriqueur, inventing new terms to make the mockery even more hilarious. This responds to another tendency for linguistic innovation and experimentalism in style over the course of your career. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is very much rooted in Greek mythology and, concurrently, pop culture. In Fury, the high and the low are so tightly wound together, line by line, as to be inseparable.” To which Rushdie replied: “If I look at the language project of my writing, that’s the direction it’s been trying to go for a long time. I’d started with a slightly different project, which was not to find these fast slides between, as you say, high and low culture. Trying to suggest that Homer and Homer Simpson are the same kind of thing ... there are still people who really resist that stuff, but for me it just seems natural. If I like The Simpsons and I like The Iliad, why should I not talk about them in the same sentence?” (25/09/2002; published in http://www.powells.com/authors/rushdie.html; last accessed May 2007).

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the sixteenth century: the coinage of new words —not only from classical etymons; in “Yorick”, the hapax frequently involves a certain humorous purpose, as in the abovementioned chanticleric and taurean (83), which are, according to the narrator, the way in which “learned men” call what is in the following paragraph, “a cockand-bull story” (83); that is to say, the cock is identified with Chauntecleer, the main character in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and the derivative adjective for bull is made out of the Latin etymon taurus. No doubt, the result is no less farfetched and pedantic than to “permanganate.” One of the areas in which linguistic experimentalism was more fruitful in the Renaissance was wordplays, puns, so widely used by Shakespeare in his comic plays and characters (Mahood). They are also one of the most recurrent figures in “Yorick,” in which different purposes are achieved: either for humorous goals or in order to play with the readers’ knowledge of phrases and idioms from the Shakespearean text or as a mere verbal witticism. When young prince Hamlet searches for his mother’s kiss, and the Queen is too busy to take care of her son, we read that what he wants is “a Lethe-kiss from Mother; and then he’ll sleep. (As it turned out, this proved a lethal scheme)” (74); he takes advantage of the apparent coincidence in the root of the word to turn the Queen’s forgetfulness of her son into the main cause of the tragic and deadly outcome of the story.9 This type of wordplay resembles that in “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate their Relationship (Santa Fé, AD 1492),” another West story: The noun consummation is obsessively repeated, exploiting its multiple meanings and the misunderstandings arisen from them and the way it is understood by a foreigner (in contrast with the sense given to it by native speakers). Rushdie, whose concern with language is evident throughout all his literary production, does not merely echo Shakespeare in his use of puns; he is exploring the power of words inasmuch as they have the possibility of connecting different worlds and linking past and present.10 But it is not only the elements from the Shakespearean Hamlet storyline and its linguistic and rhetorical character that are used, imitated, and reinterpreted in “Yorick”; Rushdie has also included critical reflections, which seem to be addressed to those readers who are acquainted with the diverse interpretations of the play as well as with literary theory11—maybe the already mentioned “scholar who is competent to apply such sensitive technologies” (64) who is mocked at some points of the short story? The most remarkable critical item that has become part of this new Hamlet is the description of Ophelia, Yorick’s wife, as having a rank breath, a point that was debated by some of the earliest critics of the play, Jeremy Collier and James Drake, in the late seventeenth century (Vickers 94); thus, an anecdotal—and maybe covertly moral—commentary on a character has become somewhat of a leitmotif in Rushdie’s text.12 9 In fact, Lethe comes from Greek and lethal is a mistaken spelling for letal, from Lat. letum [death]. 10 This approach to language would be further explored in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. See Sen 1995: 655–6. 11 See also Cartelli’s remark on similar devices in Joyce’s Ulysses, namely Greene’s commentary on Shakespeare. 12 It is even used to propose an alternative love token in the subliminal reference to Othello: instead of the handkerchief, “a pair of golden nose-plugs” would be found. (See note 6.)

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It is usually in narratorial remarks that commentaries on critical aspects are found; passing statements like “for what ended in Tragedy began in Politics” (72) have a long history of the theory of tragedy behind, according to which the subject matter of tragedy can only be public affairs, that is to say, political affairs, those appropriate to kings, the characters suitable to the high style of the genre. Again, a covert reference to a critical subject lies behind the description of the banquet at Elsinore, where, after giving a detailed account of all the animals served for dinner, the narrator adds, “Were its several dishes assembled into a single edible beast, a stranger monster would lie here than any hippogriff or ichthyocentaur!” (73), in a clear allusion to the beginning of Horace’s Art of Poetry (ll.1–5). However, it is the narrator’s consideration of his own role and techniques that is most remarkable from a critical point of view. We have already seen that at the beginning of the story, the narrator compares himself not to a mere teller but to a scholar who makes use of what Rushdie calls “technologies” in order to make the story new (64). The first was a common rhetorical device during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: abbreviation. Rushdie’s narrator justifies its usage: “Let me say the text begins to ramble [...]; in brief, a most lamentable lack of brevity, which we shall rectify here without delay” (71). Curiously enough, this statement in favor of abbreviation contrasts with the countless enumerations throughout the story—a consequence of another Renaissance rhetorical device, amplification, which is not, however, mentioned among the “technologies.” Other scholarly procedures follow: those of exegetic character—explication and annotation—and the newly coined terms—pallatinate and permanganate—which, as already pointed out, are a parody of pedantry, in this case, that of scholars. That criticism is also evident in the usage of the noun technologies to refer to the labor of scholars, possibly hinting at their discredit as intended scientists. He seems to indicate that contemporary literature does not go along the path with the academia as it had traditionally. However, this is another ironical device since what Rushdie himself is doing is quite close to an exercise in rhetoric. “Yorick” cannot be read, and understood, without its aid. Apart from making use of “technologies,” the narrator serves Rushdie for the purpose of reflecting on the act of writing. This can be seen when he mentions the tale of the vellum and the other tale written on it. It is present as well in his use of the narrative voice, as analysis of this device makes clear. The narrator, a first-person narrator, controls the story from its very beginning to the end. He is a heterodiegetic narrator who intrudes from time to time in the main story with comments that emphasize certain elements, while at the same time he violates the rules of verisimilitude. As we have already pointed out, there is not one single unified story as the narrator has a double narrative object: the story of the vellum and the tale of Yorick (64). After that very brief introduction, a single paragraph, though in fact a bit long, the narrator tells the history of the tale. It must be noted that the narrator proceeds backwards. First, he says that it was in the power of parson Yorick, one of Sterne’s characters in his Tristram Shandy.13 This adds a new dimension to the story since it is 13 One should bear in mind the line that goes from Sterne to Joyce to Rushdie. See the interesting article on fragmentation in Shakespeare, Sterne, and Joyce by Rademacher (1996: 81–6).

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linked to a fictional character who recreates a fiction. It even goes beyond the idea of literature about literature and becomes literature out of literature in a new sense. It is a fictional biography that a fictive character will write about a historically literary one. The reference to Tristram does not stop at Sterne’s character. The narrator alludes to the medieval roman about Tristam, when he mentions Isolde (or Yseut). This new Tristram, who is only 235 years away from the narrator, does not have Isolde as his partner. Only at the end of the paragraph does he mention William Shakespeare as the author of Hamlet and later, in the following paragraph, Saxo-Grammaticus’s History of the Danes, the earliest written record on the history of Hamlet. Why does he act in that manner if it is more common and definitely more appropriate to begin by citing the earliest sources first and then proceed temporally? It is our view that by going from the most recent to the latest, Rushdie disrupts the temporal sequence in order to disrupt the discourse of traditional intertextuality. It should be accepted at least as a hypothesis that literary works temporally closer may influence the author much more than others that are more distant in time. We are referring not only to a knowledge of sources, symbols, motifs, and other literary elements, but to the underlying aesthetics of the literary work mainly. In this case, the ironical reflection on the story plays a much more important role than the story itself, as has been traditionally known. In so self-conscious authors such as Rushdie, rewriting implies an adaptation of the original text and its underlying aesthetics to his own poetics. By doing so, he is not merely writing another version of the same story, not even the dark or hidden version; rather, he is creating a new work of art and is renewing the possibilities that tradition offers when cast under the light of a different aesthetics. Postmodernity has been theorized as the fusion of the past and the present (Calinescu 276). Postmodernity is a new, rather we should say contemporary, view on the works of the past. As with hybridization, postmodernity blurs the temporal distance and, with it, the difference in meanings. This new gaze at the past is effected via a selection of already known events but also via a fragmentation of the narrator’s point of view as well as the use of different speeches and literary modes. All are postmodern devices that serve Rushdie in his attempt to offer not a single unified point of view. By making use of all of them, he achieves a fragmented, or stereoscopic, vision as he defines it in “Imaginary Homelands” (19). As he argues, postcolonial authors cannot, he could even say must not, offer a “whole sight”; instead, they must present a fragmented vision that conveys not a whole picture of reality but a picture in which all the complexity of reality may be present. One must wonder, then, whether the author, and the reader must choose one of the many versions that exist or, rather, all versions are acceptable and consequently can be accepted. Rushdie offers an ironical interpretation when he says in “Yorick”: “In this it’s true my history differs from Master CHACKPAW’s [...]. These matters are shrouded in antiquity, and there’s no certainty in them; so let the versions of the story coexist, for there’s no need to choose” (81). Obviously, it is not the case of antiquity and lack of objective historical certainty that lead Rushdie to rewrite the story. We argue that it is a problem of choice and interpretation—in fact, the problem of choice and interpretation—that has undermined historiography since the advent of postmodernism. The problem is the absence of a single unified historical narrative. The coexistence of different, and sometimes opposing, traditions

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makes the choice of a single narrative impossible. It is within this conceptual context that Rushdie’s rewriting must be placed. Another device that is prominent in the story is irony. In fact, it is one of the most important literary strategies in modern literature (Garber 1998a, 1998b). Roughly beginning with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the ironical tradition comprises a large number of the best works in English.14 The ironical voice or view creates a representational gap between reality and the text that allows for subtle or radical criticism. Although most often irony is associated with the reflection on the act of writing, in “Yorick” Rushdie “ironizes” on some of the material elements of literature, namely, the sheets of paper and their endurance (Rushdie 63). A long traditional motif, the immortality of writing can be seen in a different light after the events of the second half of the twentieth century. If, as Walter Benjamin said, all documents are documents of barbarism (1986), why should they survive the passing of time? What is the sense of their immortality if they simply reflect the colonizers’ view of and attitude toward the colonized—or that same view and attitude of the dominant toward the subaltern? What is the use of keeping memory and a record of what have been ignominious acts of barbarism? Or, to quote Theodore Adorno, but in other words, what is the use of literature after all this? Here the narrator’s name is not innocent. “Yorick” refers to one of the characters in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and of Sterne’s sermons. The reason is that Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is accepted as the origin of a narrative type that has become the postmodern novel while at the same time he pointed out toward the direction of irony in the history of literature. Rushdie is highlighting a tradition in which irony is at the forefront and goes from Shakespeare to Sterne to himself. The ironic devices are present in the sense of humor that informs the text in the gap between the historical facts, the Shakespearean version known by the readership, and his own version. Moreover, the narrator’s comments are a source of irony as well since they point to facts that do not offer a univocal correspondence between the text and the readers’ expectations. Both the (ironical) use of the narrator’s name and the use of irony in its widest sense in the text serve Rushdie the purpose of placing himself within that Sternean tradition in which things are not really as they are in themselves, but rather they are as perceived by the observer, in this case the narrator, and the reader through the narrator’s ahistorical account. This serves Rushdie as an appropriative strategy because he decontextualizes the historical narrative and places it in a realm that is neither historical nor unhistorical but ahistorical and that resembles Bhabha’s Third Space. Rushdie’s use of irony makes possible both his and Shakespeare’s versions and might even point to a virtually unknown Sternean version. By means of irony, the text ceases to be rooted in history, and so the narrative may be appropriated by any writer who is interested in it and in its multiple layers of significance. The “technologies” that we have analyzed previously are all literary devices that Rushdie employs for his ironical purpose. Irony is thus the main Sternean connection used by the author of Midnight’s Children. By “ironizing” the text, Rushdie is linking his postmodern, postcolonial stereoscopic vision of history with Sterne’s ironical 14 For a more detailed discussion of the use that Rushdie makes of Sternean irony, see Göbel and Grant 1996: 81–98.

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purpose. The result is that history can be subverted, or rewritten, by recurring to historical approaches, Sternean in this case, so that a new perspective can arise from the ruins of the traditional stable historical narratives. The question that comes next is, What is then the difference between history and literature if none is based in factuality but depend on the point of view and imagination? In conclusion, we have made clear that the postcolonial element in Rushdie’s “Yorick” is not effected via “local color” or nativism but through the concept of hybridization. It is a conceptual issue rather than a matter of particular elements that give the text a precise native texture, which is coherent with his essay “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist.” Rushdie makes use of a set of postmodern techniques that serve him for his rewriting, among which the most important is fragmentation of the narrative point of view. This means a parallel fragmentation of the historical story and the emergence of a number of narratives that need not be opposing but need not have the same standpoint. This fragmentation of Hamlet is verbalized by a narrator with a high degree of critical and academic awareness, both of which are evident in the view of Shakespeare conveyed in the short story: It does not seem to be a coincidence that this rewriting of Hamlet happened when the Victorian notion of “disintegration”—as applied to Shakespearean studies—was revised according to the postmodern concept of decentering, which implies a questioning of the organic unity of his works and a belief in the idea of the author as historical and contingent (Grady 121). Irony is another device he uses in the fragmentation of the story as well as to distance himself and the reader from the accepted historical truth. As a way to remark on the ironical point of view and the existence of different versions that need not be generally accepted, he favors a marginal character as the narrator of the story. Not only is he the protagonist, he is the teller of a story that took place in the past and reached him in a manuscript. His standpoint challenges traditional narratives of history since he may be assimilated to Gayatri Spivak’s subaltern. There are two more points that work in Rushdie’s tale. The creation of a horizon of expectations that falls short at a given moment in the story or is simply reversed reinforces the ironical device. The linguistic and stylistic mastery, which sometimes makes him imitate sixteenth-century English language, brings the past into the present. Thus, he has two historical periods placed contiguously. Time, or historical distance, disappears in linguistic as well as in temporal terms. Past is as important as present and vice versa, and as such a narrator’s voice is as important as another, or “Yorick’s” implied author as important as Hamlet’s. Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Beck, Rudolf. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Salman Rushdie’s Short Story Cycle East, West.” Anglia 116 (1998): 355–380. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Critical Theory Since 1965. Eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1986, 680–85.

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Bhabha, Homi K. “Culture’s In-Between.” Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2002, 53–60. ———. The Location of Culture. London-New York: Routledge, 1994. Calinescu, Matei. Cinco caras de la modernidad ad. Madrid: Alianza, 2003. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer. Shakespeare and Appropriation. London-New York: Routledge, 1999. Dietz, Gunther. “Cultura, etnicidad e interculturalidad: Una visión desde la antropología social.” El discurso intercultural. Prologómenos a una filosofía intercultural. Eds. Graciano González R. Arnáiz, et al. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2002, 189–236. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977. Garber, Frederick, Ed. Romantic Irony. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1998a. ———. “Sterne: Arabesques and Fictionality.” Romantic Irony. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1998b, 33–40. Göbel, Walter, and Damian Grant. “Salman Rushdie’s Silver Medal.” Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism. Eds. David Pierce and Peter de Voogd. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 87–98. Gracia, Margreta. “Shakespeare and the Craft of Language.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Eds. M. de Grazia and S. Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 49–64. Grady, Hugh. “Disintegration and its Reverberations.” The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstruction of the Works and the Myth. Ed. Jean I. Marsden. New York-London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991, 111–27. Hall, Stuart, and Paul Du Gay, eds. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1996. Horace. Ars Poetica. Artes poéticas. Ed. Aníbal González. Madrid: Visor, 2003. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988. Joughlin, John, ed. Shakespeare and National Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2000. Lass, Roger, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. III, 1476– 1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Loomba, Ania & Martin Orkin, eds. Postcolonial Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 1998. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Mahood, M.M. Shakespeare’s Wordplay. London-New York: Methuen, 1957. Massai, Sonia. World-Wide Shakespeares. Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. London-New York: Routledge, 2005. Neri, Francesca. “Multiculturalismo, estudios poscoloniales y descolonización”. Introducción a la literatura comparada. Ed. Armando Gnisci. Barcelona: Crítica, 2002, 391–439.

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Nevalainen, Terttu. “Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics.” The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. III: 1476–1776. Ed. Roger Lass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 332–458. Rademacher, Jörg W. “Totalized (Auto-)Biography as Fragmented Intertextuality: Shakespeare, Sterne, Joyce.” Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism. Eds. David Pierce and Peter de Voogd. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 81–6. Radnóti, Sandór. “Benjamin’s Dialectic of Art and Society.” Benjamin. Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. Ed. Gary Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, 126–57. Rushdie, Salman. East, West. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. ———. “Yorick.” Encounter 59 (1982): 3–8. ———. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books in association with Penguin, 1991a, 9–21. ———. “Commonwealth Literature Does not Exist.” Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books in association with Penguin, 1991b, 61–70. ———. “Is Nothing Sacred?” Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books in association with Penguin, 1991c, 415–29. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Sanga, Jaina C. Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Sen, Suchismita. “Memory, Language and Society in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories.’” Contemporary Literature 36 (1995): 654–75. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. T.J.B. Spencer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1979. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. LondonNew York: Routledge, 1995.

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PART 2 Local Productions: Nationalism and Hegemony From the Third Space

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Chapter 5

Jatra Shakespeare: Indigenous Indian Theater and the Postcolonial Stage Parmita Kapadia

“The songs, tales, histories, in fact everything connected with Asiatic amusements and literature, are, with few exceptions, more or less licentious.” “Dramatic Amusements,” 28 “The title [Shakespeare Came to India] is not so fanciful as it appears when we remember that of the many things that came to India from England, few in the long run are really as important as Shakespeare. For the England of trade, commerce, imperialism and the penal code has not endured but the imperishable Empire of Shakespeare will always be with us.” Narasimhaiah, 5

The preceding statements, although separated by more than a century, nevertheless reflect remarkably similar attitudes toward indigenous Asian art forms. The comments also serve to emphasize a contemporary development within theater and productions studies: cross-cultural productions that deliberately and consciously negotiate between different cultures. Written in 1837, the first statement appeared in the Asiatic Journal, a publication of the Royal Asiatic Society, an organization that provided explicit support for the colonial policies that systematically denigrated the indigenous arts, languages, and cultures of India. More than a century later, in 1964, C.D. Narasimhaiah, an influential member of the Indian academy, points to the “imperishable Empire of Shakespeare” that still persists in what was, since 1947, a postcolonial nation. Shakespeare’s function as a signifier of colonial oppression has been well documented; the work of Ania Loomba, Jyotsna Singh, and Rustom Bharucha contextualizes Shakespeare in an Indian discourse.1 Scholars such as Thomas

1 For more on Shakespeare in India, see: Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford University Press, 2002; Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Routledge: 1998; Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Oxford University Press: 1992; Singh, Jyotsna. “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India.” Theatre Journal 41.4 (1989): 445–58; Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal. University of Hawaii Press, 1983.

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Cartelli, Christy Desmet, and Pascale Aebischer have approached the appropriation of Shakespeare more broadly.2 Postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare are often viewed as expressions of resistance to colonial authority; however, the material conditions governing the production and reception of appropriations in contemporary India challenge this traditional model of counterdiscursivity. In this essay, I seek “to reverse the gaze” and discuss how some appropriations of Shakespeare move beyond the colonial/postcolonial binary and operate as counterhegemonic, counterdiscursive sites that challenge regionalist and nationalist discourse. Thomas Cartelli offers a corrective against the potency of the traditional counterdiscourse model, noting that reimagining Shakespeare “may be expressly oppositional in orientation, [...] contestatory of Shakespearean drama’s underwriting of class-based or imperialist agendas; or merely critically or creatively responsive to the force or authority exerted by [the] texts ...” (1). Cartelli’s critique of unproblematically categorizing appropriations as necessarily “oppositional” opens a space for a more nuanced study of such productions. Through their emphasis on the postcolonial, interculturalist, and intraculturalist Indian identity, contemporary Shakespeare appropriations simultaneously reify and subvert the East–West, colonizer–colonized binary in much the same way as their predecessors did3; however, their stress on the intraculturalism of Indian identity complicates the binaryism of conventional counterdiscourse. Moving away from binary rigidity and toward what Niels Herold labels “performed hybridity,” in his essay “Movers and Losers: Shakespeare in Charge and Shakespeare Behind Bars” foregrounds “the fragmentary nature of all identities” (p. 148). In these appropriations, the boundaries between the “authentic” and the “hybrid” are persistently redrawn to engender new meanings in local, regional, national, and global contexts. This essay closely examines two productions from the subcontinent: the first a colonial production that cast a Bengali actor in the

2 For more on Shakespeare and appropriation, see: Aebischer, Pascale, ed. Remaking Shakespeare: Performances Across Media, Genres, Cultures. Palgrave, 2003; Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. Routledge, 1999; Desmet, Christy, ed. Shakespeare and Appropriation. Routledge, 1999. 3 Shakespeare’s long history in India has been well documented. For information on production and translation, see: Awasthi, Suresh. “Shakespeare in Hindi.” Indian,Journal 7.1 (1964): 51–64; “Bartholomeusz, Dennis. “Shakespeare Imagines the Orient: The Orient Imagines Shakespeare.” Shakespeare and Cultural Tradition The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991. Eds. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells. University of Delaware Press, 1994, 188–204; Iyengar, Srinivasa., K.R. “Shakespeare in India.” Indian Journal 7.1 (1964): 1–11; Kendal, Geoffrey. The Shakespeare Wallah. Sidgewick and Jackson, 1986; Marshall, Norman. “Shakespeare Abroad.” Talking of Shakespeare. Books for Libraries Press, 1971, 98–110; Nadkarni, Bnyaneshwar. “Shakespeare in Maharashtra.” Shakespeare in India. PS Press Services Pvt. Ltd., 1989, 16–21. For criticism and pedagogy, see: Biswas, D.C. Shakespeare in His Own Time. The Macmillan Co. of India Ltd., 1979; Bose, Amalendu. “The Teaching of Shakespeare.” Indian Literature 9.2 (1966): 77–84; Chopra, Vikram. “Some Indian Perspectives of Shakespeare.” The Literary Criterion 25.4 (1990): 43–7; Muliyil, G. “Why Shakespeare for Us?” Shakespeare Came to India. Ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah. Popular Prakashan, 1964, 5–11.

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role of Othello, and the second a contemporary production of Hamlet that integrated the conventions of the indigenous jatra theater. Originally a colonial import, Shakespeare took on an iconic, transcendental status in India that was cemented through the passage of the Indian Education Act of 1835 that mandated an English language curriculum. English literature became a key component of the colonial project. As Gauri Viswanathan amply illustrates in Masks of Conquest, “The humanistic functions traditionally associated with literature— for example, the shaping of character or the development of the aesthetic sense or the disciplines of ethical thinking—were considered essential to the processes of sociopolitical control” (34).4 Initially, Shakespeare was simply transported to India and imposed on the colony. Introduced through the English-style theaters popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare has flourished in public theater in India since the 1750s, when the “Old Playhouse” was established in Calcutta. In 1775 a new theater called the “Calcutta Theater” was built in accordance with British theater design. The founders of the Calcutta Theater approached the famed eighteenth-century actor, David Garrick, for guidance to make the theater more “English.” Garrick sent a fellow actor, Bernard Messink, to India for “the purpose of regulating the theater at its outset” (Mitra 17). The Subscription Theater (1820) and the Sans Souci (1841) soon followed. All of these theaters were designed according to Western standards. As R.K. Yajnik states in Indian Theater, “The new theater came full-fledged. There was no question of the model to be followed. India simply adopted the midVictorian stage with all its accessories of painted scenery, costume, and makeup” (103). Originally, these performances were reserved exclusively for British patrons; Indians were not permitted in the theaters. Therefore, when in 1848 the Sans Souci theater staged Othello with Bengali actor Baishnav Charan Adhaya in the title role and a white English actress playing Desdemona, racial difference and colonial resistance were finally foregrounded on the Calcutta stage.5 Adhaya’s racially marked presence allowed him to disrupt the carefully maintained separation between the British and their colonized subjects; playing Othello for exclusively white colonial audiences positioned him as successfully challenging colonial authority through his mimicry of Shakespearean— British—actors. As Jyotsna Singh has articulated in “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India,” Adhaya’s stage presence “complicated and displaced the stark ‘Manichean’ dichotomy of ‘black and white’ which, according to Franz Fanon, governed the relations between European colonizers and their nonEuropean subjects” (446). Adhaya’s mimicry of Shakespearean theatrical custom both colluded with and subverted the categories dictating racial difference. Adhaya 4 For more on how humanistic studies were co-opted by the colonial project see: Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. University of Chicago Press, 1992. Rajan, Sunder Rajeswari, Ed. The Lie of the Land. Oxford University Press, 1992. 5 As Maureen McDonnell writes in “An “AnAboriginal Aboriginal As You Like It: Staging Reconciliation in a Drama of Desire,” director Neil Armfield’s casting of Aboriginal actors “invited audience members to reexamine the familiar Shakespearean plot through the lenses of Australian race relations and the ongoing reconciliation process with Aborigines” (p. 124).

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was no longer simply the inferior native excluded from theater, but through his role as the black Othello, he was still marginalized from the white audience. The review in The Calcutta Star exploited Adhaya’s racial difference by describing the production as a chance for exclusively white British audiences to see “a real unpainted nigger” on stage (Bharucha 8). The reviewer judged Adhaya’s performance through his mastery of pronunciation and elocution: “His delivery was somewhat cramped, but under all circumstances, his pronounciation for a native was remarkably good” (Bengal Harkaru). In addition to the obviously racist undertones present in the reviewer’s language, this incident reveals the complexity and conflicted nature of racial discourse in nineteenth-century India through its silence regarding Adhaya’s ethnic, caste, and communal identity. By describing Adhaya as “a native,” the reviewer articulates Adhaya’s difference exclusively through the colonizer (British)/colonized (Indian) binary. Through the construction of the all-encompassing category of “native,” the reviewer exposes his limited Western perspective and thus circumscribes the potential for the multiple ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic differences extant in colonial India. On the colonial Calcutta stage, the figure of the Other embodies a much more complex identity than he would on a Western stage; in the Sans Souci, Adhaya as Othello is not proscribed by the principal black/white binary dominant in the West. On the colonial and the postcolonial stage, the racial Other disrupts this binary construction. An Indian actor playing the role of a Shakespearean Other such as Adhaya as Othello destabilizes the colonizer/colonized structure through his mimicry and resistance and actualizes Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “Third Space.” As Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture, “The enunciation of cultural difference problematizes the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address” (35). Furthermore, he states, “The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a third space [...]. The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the other” (36). Applying the “third space” paradigm to theatrical discourse allows an investigation into the function and impact of the Other figure in colonial, postcolonial, and indigenous contexts. In The Semiotics of Theater and Drama Kier Elam argues, “The stage radically transforms all objects and bodies defined within it, bestowing upon them an overriding signifying power which they lack—or which at least is less evident— in their normal social function” (7). He continues, “The theatrical sign inevitably acquires secondary meanings for the audience, relating it to the social, moral, and ideological values operative in the community which performers and spectators are part” (10). Because of its unique properties, the colonial and postcolonial theaters offer ideal sites for actualizing the “third space”: The stage “makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, [it] destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code” (Bhabha 37). The presence of a “native” actor on the colonial stage embodies the ambivalence and ambiguity contained within the third space. Adhaya’s turn as Shakespearean actor challenges the construction of identity based solely on the binary of either

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black/white racial difference or the East/West polarity. Othello is a marginalized, transgressive outsider within the context of the play, and the racially marked Adhaya as this Other figure also functions as a dramatic and visual reminder of the multiple indigenous culturally oppressed communities being colonized by the British. From the perspective of his white audience, Adhaya as Othello would be seen as a black man and thus racially removed from them and marginalized, his transgressions of marrying and murdering a white woman resolved through his death. However, from the perspective of indigenous peoples, Adhaya’s identification with Othello—and by extension their identification with Othello’s blackness—would be limited and complicated by issues of caste, communalism, and class. Rather than color, native, that is, Bengali, perception might link Adhaya’s portrayal of Othello to more “localized” discourses. The performance dramatizes the “linguistic difference” that Bhabha argues is the “disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (enonce) and the subject of the enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and specific space” (36). The complexities governing the conflicting and competing racial discourses within colonial India render Adhaya’s colonial portrayal of Othello neither an exclusive mimicry of whiteness nor a clear-cut portrayal of blackness. Adhaya as a “neither/nor” Othello is indicative of the difficulties entailed in the work of theorizing performances that cross boundaries, in Adhaya’s case, racial, ethnic, and colonial. The presence of the “native” actor subverted colonial authority and suggested a strategy of transgression toward it. Adhaya’s performance in the 1848 Othello implies a resistance to colonial supremacy and is a forerunner of contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare on the subcontinent that also seek to disrupt power structures. As such, it could be considered an early example of intercultural theater. Following the seminal work of Patrice Pavis, whose Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture developed an early model for theorizing the intercultural theater, the scholarship on this topic has grown considerably. The increasing terminology categorizing hybrid productions points to the growth of this type of theater and the burgeoning interest in the field by both theater practitioners and scholars. Postcolonial, intercultural, intracultural, cross-cultural, syncretic, multicultural, and transcultural are all terms that have been used to describe theater that deliberately negotiates between distinct cultural boundaries. In “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert posit that “the increasing significance of cross-cultural theatre both within the academy and the performing arts industries in the West demands that this practice be critically situated within a historicized and politicized configuration” (31). The growth of this type of theater necessitates a critical theorization; however, limiting the investigation to the “performing arts industries of the West” marginalizes the production and reception of the work of postcolonial theaters within their own, local cultural contexts. Lo and Gilbert state, “Most postcolonial theatre is driven by a political imperative to interrogate the cultural hegemony that underlies imperial systems of governance, education, social and economic organization, and representation. Its discourses of resistance speak primarily to the colonizing projects of Western imperial centers and/or to

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the neocolonial pressures of local/regional postindependence regimes” (35). Much of the work being done in the postcolonial theater involves negotiating between multiple indigenous discourses while simultaneously mediating between the colonial and neocolonial. In postcolonial India, directors are drawing on diverse, indigenous theatrical traditions such as Kathakali, Bharat Natyam, Yakshagana, and Jatra in order to reimagine Shakespeare.6 As Kathryn Hansen argues, there has been renewed interest in regional theaters since Independence. She writes, “Considered decadent and largely forgotten during colonial days, these regional theaters have recently received attention and a certain amount of governmental support from the national and state Sangeet Natak Akademis” (77); and, in 1977, playwright Habib Tanvir declared, “It is in its villages that the dramatic tradition of India in all its pristine glory and vitality remains preserved even to this day,” and only when “city youth is fully exposed to the influence of folk traditions in theater that a truly Indian theater, modern and universal in appeal and indigenous in form, can really be evolved” (6). Tanvir’s affirmation that the folk theaters “preserve” India’s dramatic tradition “in all its pristine glory and vitality” has been echoed by contemporary Western directors like Peter Brook, Ong Keng Sen, and Ariane Mnouchkine and scholars like Richard Schechner and John Russell Brown, who all maintain that indigenous Asian theatrical traditions offer powerful strategies through which contemporary Shakespeare productions could recover the performance techniques and theatrical experiences of the “authentic” Elizabethan stage.7 Rustom Bharucha’s criticisms against the exploitive mining of Asian traditions to revitalize the Western theater are well known. He sees “the fascination for ‘other’ cultures” by such practitioners and scholars as Brook and Schechner as “emerging from a fundamental dissatisfaction with their own cultural resources [... and] the subsequent search for new sources of energy, vitality, and sensuality [...]” (207). This essay considers cultural appropriation that signals a reversal from the traditional intercultural approach of Brook and colleagues7 through the work of Salim Ghouse, one of Bombay’s most creative and provocative directors. Director and manager of the Phoenix Players, Ghouse consciously aims to destabilize and challenge rigid categories of religious, ethnic, and linguistic identity through his productions. Ghouse’s work exemplifies a more sophisticated reimagining of Shakespeare, one that moves beyond unproblematically using traditional theater forms or merely resituating the text within an indigenous context. Throughout his 6 Using indigenous aesthetic forms to stage Shakespeare has a long history in India. See: Bharucha, Rustom. Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal. University of Hawaii Press, 1983, for a discussion of Utpal Dutt’s jatra Macbeth and Zarrilli, Phillip. “For Whom is the King a King? Issues of Intercultural Production, Perception, and Reception in Kathakali King Lear.” Critical Theory and Performance. Eds. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach. University of Michigan Press, 1992, for a discussion of King Lear through kathakali. 7 Peter Brook’s Mahabharata (1985), Ong Keng Sen’s LEAR (1997) and Desdemona (1999), and Ariane Mnouchkine’s L’Indiade (1987) are a few examples of such productions. For more on the connections between Elizabethan stage practice and Asian theater, see: Brown, John Russell. New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia. Routledge, 1999; and Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. Routledge, 1993.

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career, Ghouse has drawn on diverse folk theater forms as well as on the classical Sanskrit theater. More aptly described as radical interventions than appropriations, Ghouse’s productions combine indigenous theater forms and performance techniques with the English-language Shakespeare text to comment on the tensions and contradictions inherent within modern-day India.8 Ghouse deliberately chooses to work with particular aesthetic forms because of their unfamiliarity to Bombay theatergoers. Indigenous techniques are not incorporated into the productions to localize Shakespeare, to make the play relevant to India, to signify the universality of either aesthetic, or to recover an Elizabethan theater experience but to destabilize existing cultural and textual codes and to create a theatrical experience that is at once familiar and alien. For his 1992 production of Hamlet, Ghouse turned to the jatra theater. A folk theater form native to Bengal, jatra is indigenous to India but alien to most Indians, whereas Shakespeare is foreign but familiar. Although not by equal measure, India’s manifold languages, religions, ethnicities, and artistic conventions remain contained within their “home” regions while the English language, a consequence of colonialism, serves as lingua franca across the subcontinent’s vast terrain. The British colonial government’s attempts to impose the English language and culture in India have resulted in a familiarity and recognition of Shakespeare across local and regional borders. Through this combination of the alien indigenous and the familiar English-language Shakespeare, Ghouse aimed to make a statement on pan-Indian nationhood. Such a pairing challenged the alien/indigenous binary and foregrounded the complexities surrounding cultural interaction and national identity in India. What precisely constitutes Indian nationhood is a highly contested issue. What shared cultural identity reflects the nationalism implied by the category of “Indianness”? It has, particularly since Independence, become routine to espouse India’s multilingual, multiethnic, multicultural character; the mantra of “unity in diversity” is echoed ceaselessly by the nation–state. But “Indianness” as a national identity remains subordinate to regionalism. Ghouse asserts that the “problem with India—it’s such a great country—is that we are all the time talking in terms of Gujarati, Rajasthani, Maharashtran, Punjabi, Marvadi, Bengali, whatever. Very few people ever say they are ‘Indian’” (Interview). Rejecting any single regional, communal, religious, and linguistic identity, Ghouse points to his own and his family’s mixed heritage as an example of “Indianness.” Born of a Muslim father and Christian mother, with a Brahmin brother-in-law and a Punjabi wife, Ghouse maintains that in terms of ethnic and religious identity, “I am nothing [and] I am all India and very proud of that” (Interview). Thus, Ghouse’s production purposely created rifts between the “colonial” but quite familiar language of the play–text and the indigenous but unfamiliar visual language of jatra articulated through dance, gesture, costume, makeup, and color. Each element—language, gesture, costume, the playing arena, and so on—functioned as a cultural code that operates to point the audience toward an alternative understanding 8 Salim Ghouse’s engagement with English-language Shakespeare production illustrates a reversal from the Quebecois appropriations that Jennifer Drouin examines in “Nationalizing the Bard: Québécois Adaptations of Shakesepeare Since the Quiet Revolution.” (pp. 103–20).

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of the Shakespearean text and an acknowledgement of the discrete local and regional realities pressing against one another in postcolonial nationhood. Pairing the English text with Bengali jatra for a Bombay audience highlights the cultural mishmash that underpins expressions of Indian nationhood. Through his merging of various indigenous traditions, Ghouse can be described as a practitioner of the “intracultural theater.” Intracultural is a term coined by Bharucha to signify cultural interactions between local and regional groups from within the borders of the nation–state. Negotiating the subcontinent’s immense diversity, “The task of any intracultural initiative in India is ... to create new possibilities of interaction and exchange within and across a wealth of ‘living’ traditions from vastly different time frames and cultural contexts” (Politics 63). Elsewhere, Bharucha writes, “We do not have one Mahabharata in India but several Mahabharatas—in different languages, performance traditions, oral histories, and deeply conflictual sectarian histories and discourses, embedded in the cultures of everyday life. For that matter, we have several traditions of doing Shakespeare in India, in multiple languages and performative modes”(“Foreign Asia” 6). Given Shakespeare’s long history on the subcontinent and Bombay audiences’ unfamiliarity with the jatra form, Ghouse’s jatra Hamlet challenged traditional designations of what is “Indian,” what is foreign, and what is Shakespeare. Ghouse’s staging of Hamlet integrated jatra theater conventions to disrupt established codes of meaning by privileging the visual and the physical over the spoken and the oral. Moving away from Hamlet’s intellectual cogitations, the jatra forms highlighted the visceral mistrust between various characters and the intense violence with which they react. Ghouse reworked the text to situate it more closely within the framework of jatra acting techniques, narrative style, playing area, and blocking. A jatra play begins with suddenness and shock. Balwant Gargi, an authority on India’s folk theaters writes, “The Jatra playwright knows that the people must be dazzled, struck, shocked by a big event in the opening and not slowly taken from a low pitch to a high”(20). Ghouse’s appropriation altered the beginning of the Hamlet narrative so that it conformed more closely to this jatra convention. Instead of starting with Barnardo’s question, “Who’s there?” and the dialogue between the sentinels, Ghouse inserted an extratextual scene: a rehearsal for “The Murder of Gonzago.” Appearing almost as silhouettes, the Player King and Queen mimed the play within the play as Hamlet, also using mime gestures, directs their actions. The Player King poisons old King Hamlet and then woos the queen. At this point, the silence and the darkness are broken as Hamlet calls for lights. As the stage lights brighten, it becomes evident that the scene being played was a rehearsal of the play within a play. Readers familiar with the play know that Hamlet does not try to “catch the conscience of the king” until act 3, scene 2—almost the midway mark of the text. Instead of following the text’s measured introduction of the elements that eventually lead to Hamlet’s suspicions of Claudius, the production began with the jatra device of the dramatic jolt. But the jatra-motivated beginning also added a layer of critical significance, altering how we see and interpret the overall narrative. Through Ghouse’s opening sequence, the audience sees King Hamlet being poisoned and the poisoner courting the widowed queen; this firmly established Claudius’ guilt in the audience’s mind

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from the production’s start. Additionally, Ghouse chose to have all the cast members present on the stage throughout this silent opening scene. The effect of this staging implicated all the members of the Danish court in the murder of King Hamlet. Thus, when the production continued with Shakespeare’s first scene, the audience is aware that the sentinels and Horatio have already witnessed a murder—albeit as theater. With the performance fresh in their eyes, Barnardo’s and Marcellus’s anxieties regarding the ghost, that “dreaded sight twice seen” by them, and their firm conviction that the ghost resembles the old king takes on greater resonance. Within the first 110 lines of the play, there are eight references to the ghost’s resemblance to the dead king; all three of the characters remark on the likeness. When, in scene 4, Hamlet sees the ghost for the first time, his uncertainty regarding the apparition’s origins: “Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d, / Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, / Be thy intents wicked, or charitable” underscores his later reluctance to accept the ghost’s directive (1.4.40–43). Later, at the end of act 2 Hamlet again expresses his doubts concerning the ghost, expressing his distrust: The spirit that I have seen May be a [dev’l], and the [dev’l] hath power T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me (2.2.579–84).

Because Shakespeare’s text leaves out the initial murder, the mystery surrounding the ghost’s appearance and Hamlet’s skepticism toward it become more believable, his struggle with himself and the ghost’s charge more earnest. However, given Ghouse’s staging of the old king’s murder, Hamlet’s unwillingness to accept the ghost of his father’s spirit alters the audience’s perception of him: They see him as being less ethically conflicted and more emotionally empty. The emotional punch delivered by the jatra style opening scene highlights Hamlet’s subsequent emotional disengagement. Against this backdrop, Hamlet’s exceptional facility with language functions more as a mechanism for self-defense and delay. Having seen the murder of King Hamlet, the audience sees Hamlet as being unfeeling and distant because of his reservations regarding the ghost’s mandate. Like the emotionally charged first scene, other jatra conventions were also incorporated in the production. In jatra, the performance space is neutral, with little embellishment. Actors enter and exit this space using pathways or ramps. The audience sits on all sides, and the pathways and ramps run directly through the spectators. The aisles are in full view of the audience and serve narrative and aesthetic functions as well as practical ones. At key moments, these corridors become extensions of the performance space as when one character hides from another. At other times, actors sit along the pathway to rest and observe the ongoing play action until it is time for them to perform again. In the latter case, the aisle functions as an additional seating area. Ghouse adapted these conventions of the jatra stage to emphasize the metatheatrical qualities present within Hamlet. The jatra practice of using the open exit/entrance ramps as extensions of the playing space significantly altered key scenes of the play,

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adding visual and narrative complexity. The set consisted only of rough benches laid in a pentagonal shape; the inner space of the pentagon represented the primary playing area. Spaces between the benches created openings, virtual pathways, for the actors to use to enter and exit the stage space. In act 3, scene 1, when Claudius and Polonius try, with Ophelia’s help, to discern what troubles Hamlet, their spying on his reactions to Ophelia’s rejection of him is recontextualized within the jatra framework. Claudius tells the Queen that he and Polonius “have closely sent for Hamlet hither, / That he, as ’twere by accident, may here / Affront Ophelia” (3.1.29–31). He admits that he and Polonius will “so bestow ourselves that, seeing unseen, / We may of their encounter frankly judge, / And gather by him, as he is behav’d” (32–4). Following the jatra convention, the actors playing Claudius and Polonius moved offstage and onto one of the pathways, still fully visible to the audience. Hamlet entered the performance space using the same pathway that Claudius and Polonius already occupied. Hamlet and the eavesdroppers’ brief sharing of the same space affects the narrative and the interpretive issue of whether or not the Prince suspects their trap. In Ghouse’s production, the question of whether or not Hamlet is aware of Claudius’ and Polonius’ presence is made unambiguous. In this case the exchange between Hamlet and Ophelia is affected by Hamlet’s knowledge of the two men’s presence. In the context of jatra staging, Hamlet’s questions to Ophelia, “Are you honest?” and “Where’s your father?” can be interpreted as Hamlet’s tests of Ophelia’s loyalty to him. Although honest is frequently glossed as meaning chaste, to modern ears, the line “Are you honest?” implies more a questioning of Ophelia’s integrity and truthfulness and less of her virginity. Jatra staging particularly draws attention to her deception when she replies to “Where’s your father?” with the dishonest “At home, my lord” (3.1.28–9). Ophelia’s lie grows in magnitude because of the visual evidence to the contrary afforded by the jatra staging conventions—audience members not only hear her lie but see her deception for themselves. The production further used jatra stage practices to amplify specific elements of the play, particularly the trope of the play within the play. As noted, Ghouse began his production with a “rehearsal” of “The Murder of Gonzago,” and he developed this trope of a play within the play throughout the production. With the exception of Hamlet, all the actors remained on stage—visible to the audience—throughout the production. Like in traditional jatra, the actors, when not directly involved with the scene at hand, observed the action unfold along with the audience. Actors would rejoin the action at relevant moments and then move back to the outer edges of the pentagon to watch the play’s progress while they waited for their next cue. In effect, the actors functioned like a second audience. Blurring the lines between actors and spectators, performance space and seating area fractured the Western theatrical aesthetic of the fourth wall and depicted the entire narrative of Hamlet as a play within a play. The production’s jatra conventions heightened the effect the play within the play exerts. In Shakespeare’s text, the play within the play functions primarily as a device through which Hamlet secures proof of Claudius’ guilt and as a scene that further complicates Hamlet’s character, particularly his relationship with Ophelia. However, through the integration of the jatra theater practices, the play within the play took on added resonance. From the beginning, audience members were made

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aware of their “role” in the production; the jatra conventions invited the spectators to see themselves as extensions of the cast, and as such they were implicated in the narrative. Coupling jatra staging customs with Shakespeare’s play within the play eliminated the possibility of such a thing as the neutral spectator or pure bystander. Ghouse’s production pushed audience members to confront their own positions in a multicultural, postcolonial Bombay; all people were participants. Through his Hamlet, Ghouse emphasized that every community, every individual participates in the process of constructing a postcolonial Indian identity. For the audience, there was no escape from the spying, mistrust, isolation, and violence dramatized in Ghouse’s production because the playing space—literally and metaphorically—extended into the auditorium and into the streets of Bombay and a nation struggling to balance itself between a colonial past and a global future. The deliberate combination of the two culturally distinct theatrical traditions of jatra and the play within the play formed a metatheatrical experience at the production’s conclusion as performative and nonperformative discourses merged into one another. In the final scene after Horatio bids farewell to the dead Hamlet, there was a measured pause, a moment of silence with the actors motionless in their positions—a seemingly conventional ending. However, Ghouse subverted convention, denying the audience a clear sense of closure. In an extratextual scene, suggestive of a jatra’s slow, deliberate ending, Horatio walks across the stage tapping each of the characters; at his touch, the actor playing the part abandoned the pretense of performance and came forward to sit facing the audience. After all the characters regained “life,” and the actors discarded their roles, the entire cast sat together facing the spectators. Hamlet, now plain Salim Ghouse, tells the audience, “And, the rest is silence.” Ghouse’s staging muddied the clear distinctions between cast and audience while consigning both groups into a relationship with one another. According to Ghouse, the finish represented the various ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities within the Bombay metropolis forced to acknowledge the inevitability of their coexistence. He explains that the community “becomes introspective, it realizes its mistakes. The community must look within itself for understanding, for acceptance” (Interview). The ambiguity within the production’s ending further eroded the fourth wall aesthetic and mitigated the division between theatrical performance and the realities of everyday life. Ghouse’s Hamlet reflects a postcolonialist, postmodernist reinvention of India and “Indianness” through his appropriation of Shakespeare. Cultural exchange is inevitably deeply entwined with issues of authority, hierarchy, control, and identity; situating Hamlet on the cultural borders among the colonial, the postcolonial, the intercultural, and the intracultural actualized the abstractions inherent within postcolonial, Indian identity. How this identity mediates among the multiple and conflicting traditions and conditions of contemporary India—the enduring effects of colonialism, competing regionalisms, postcolonial nationalism, and, most recently, nascent globalization—speaks to the complexities of an evolving hybridity. The persistent evolution of the hybrid identity that marks the postcolonial condition demands a broadening of the conventional binary apparatus that privileges a hegemonic nationalism through the marginalization of intracultural differences.

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Works Cited Aebischer, Pascale, ed. Remaking Shakespeare: Performances Across Media, Genres, Cultures. Palgrave, 2003. Awasthi, Suresh. “Shakespeare in Hindi.” Indian Journal 7.1 (1964): 51–69. Bartholomeusz, Dennis. “Shakespeare Imagines the Orient: The Orient Imagines Shakespeare.” Shakespeare and Cultural Tradition, The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991. Eds. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells. University of Delaware Press, 1994. 188–204. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Bharucha, Rustom. Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983. ———. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. ———. “Foreign Asian/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization.” Theatre Journal 56.1 (2004) 1–28. ———. “Somebody’s Other Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of our Times.” The Intercultural Performance Reader. Ed. Patrice Pavis. New York: Routledge, 1996. 196–212. Biswas, D.C. Shakespeare in His Own Time. The Macmillan Co. of India Ltd., 1979. Bose, Amalendu. “The Teaching of Shakespeare.” Indian Literature 9.2 (1966): 77–84. Brown, John Russell. New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia. New York: Routledge, 1999. Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare; National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. New York: Routledge, 1999. Chopra, Vikram. “Some Indian Perspectives of Shakespeare.” The Literary Criterion 25.4 (1990): 43–7. Desmet, Christy, ed. Shakespeare and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 1999. “Dramatic Amusements of the Natives of India,” Asiatic Journal, January-April 1837. Elam, Kier. The Semiotics of Theater and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980. Gargi, Balwant. Theater in India. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1962. Ghouse, Salim. Personal Interview. July 28, 1994. Hansen, Kathryn. “Indian Folk Traditions and the Modern Theatre.” Asian Folklore Studies 42 (1983): 77–89. Iyengar, Srinivasa, K.R. “Shakespeare in India.” Indian Journal 7.1 (1964): 1–11. Kendal, Geoffrey. The Shakespeare Wallah. Sidgewick and Jackson: London, 1986. Lo, Jacqueline and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis.” The Drama Review 46.3 (2002): 31–53. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge: 1998.

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———. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Marshall, Norman. “Shakespeare Abroad.” Talking of Shakespeare. Books for Libraries Press, 1971. 98–110. Mitra, Amal. The English Stage in Calcutta. Calcutta: Prakash Bhavan, 1967. Muliyil, G. “Why Shakespeare for Us?” Shakespeare Came to India. Ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah. Popular Prakashan, 1964. 5–11. Nadkarni, Bnyaneshwar. “Shakespeare in Maharashtra.” Shakespeare in India. PS Press Services Pvt. Ltd., 1989. 16–21. Narasimhaiah, C.D. Shakespeare Came to India. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1964. Pavis, Patrice. Theater at the Crossroads of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Rajan, Sunder Rajeswari, ed. The Lie of the Land. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. New York: Routledge: 1993. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Singh, Jyotsna., “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India.” Theatre Journal 41.4 (1989): 445–58. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Tanvir, Habib. “The Indian Experiment.” Theatre India (1977): 5–10. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Yajnik, R.K. The Indian Theatre. New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1970. Zarrilli, Phillip. “For Whom is the King a King? Issues of Intercultural Production, Perception, and Reception in Kathakali King Lear.” Critical Theory and Performance. Eds. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

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Chapter 6

Nationalizing the Bard: Québécois Adaptations of Shakespeare Since the Quiet Revolution Jennifer Drouin

It is common practice in Québec to contrast “la langue de Molière” and “la langue de Shakespeare.”1 Yet, in a Québec that prides itself on still speaking Molière’s tongue, it is especially puzzling to find a remarkably rich history of adaptations of Shakespeare since the Quiet Revolution—a period of massive social reform that began in 1960 shortly after the death of Maurice Duplessis, whose reign was labelled la grande noirceur [the great darkness] and the arrival to power of Jean Lesage’s Liberal party, whose slogan was maîtres chez nous [masters in our own homes]. Since then, more than 30 such French-language adaptations of Shakespeare have been written in Québec—and an impressive number of translations and innovative stage productions have been performed as well.2 By uniting the Québécois language and Shakespeare’s texts, Québécois adapters embrace cultural hybridity in order to appropriate the canonical authority of Shakespeare’s texts and to legitimize their local struggle for national liberation. However, this appropriation requires that the 1 This essay previously appeared in an earlier form as “Nationalizing Shakespeare in Québec: Theorizing Post-/Neo-/Colonial Adaptation.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3.1 (spring 2007): 24 pp. The use of French accents on Québec and Québécois, although not always the standard procedure of translators in English usage, is a deliberate choice on my part in order to highlight the cultural specificity of Québec. Leanore Lieblein, Ric Knowles, and Daniel Fischlin all adopt the same practice. 2 I define adaptations as additions (although not reductions for the purpose of playing time), transpositions, or translations, which alter significantly the content or meaning of the source text, as well as blatant rewritings. In drawing an admittedly fine line between certain translations and adaptations, I rely in part on Fischlin’s and Fortier’s theoretical discussion of adaptation in their introduction to Adaptations of Shakespeare. Contrary to Linda Hutcheon, I also limit the use of “adaptation” to dramatic play–texts whose trajectory from page to stage mirrors that of their Shakespearean counterparts because cross-generic adaptations, such as plays to novels, and cross-medium adaptations, such as plays to films, necessarily involve a double process of adaptation to account for differences between genres and mediums. Hutcheon’s broad use of “adaptation” across genres and media makes it an umbrella term that loses its theoretically usefulness.

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adapters negotiate a fine line between the enrichment of Québécois culture and its possible contamination, assimilation, or effacement by Shakespeare’s often overwhelming influence. The paradoxical existence of Québécois Shakespeare, especially in the face of such cultural risks, raises therefore an important question: Why adapt Shakespeare and why not Molière? More so than Molière, Shakespeare may be appropriated by Québécois playwrights in support of the nationalist cause for three reasons. First, the indeterminacy of his texts makes them easily malleable to their political purposes, just as his plays have often been manipulated in service of various political agendas transhistorically and transculturally. Without succumbing to notions of Shakespeare’s timelessness, one can nonetheless argue that Shakespeare’s texts are less locally and historically situated than those of other early modern writers and are therefore more suitable to adaptation in other cultural and historical contexts—as they have been in India and Africa, for instance.3 Although colonial importation is unquestionably an important reason for the endurance of Shakespeare’s works in these locales, their colonial dissemination does not diminish the fact that their indeterminacy makes them more adaptable and subject to reinterpretations in different contexts than those of Molière, as indeed they are in Québec. Second, Shakespeare has made what Michael Bristol calls “the big time”; that is, Shakespeare is a pop celebrity. As Bristol observes, “Other literary figures may achieve canonical status within the academic community based on claims to artistic distinction, but Shakespeare is unusual in that he has also achieved contemporary celebrity” (3). Shakespeare’s dual authority within both the academic and the pop culture communities therefore lends credibility within the popular imaginary to the political agenda of authors who cite or rewrite his texts. Canonical difference provides a third possible reason why Québécois adapt Shakespeare instead of Molière. The lack of investment in, and indoctrination by, the British literary canon, coupled with Shakespeare’s big-time status, makes his texts both worthy of adaptation and sufficiently culturally distant to become objects of play. Francophone audiences tend to be less familiar than anglophone audiences with the exact details of Shakespeare’s text, so Québécois adapters expose 3 Québec’s colonial experience is not, of course, comparable to India’s. After the British conquest of New France in 1759, the French were allowed to continue to speak their language and Shakespeare was never used pedagogically as a tool of cultural imperialism, as Parmita Kapadia notes in chapter 5, was the case in India. Unlike in the rest of North America even, Shakespeare was not a staple of the francophone literary curriculum. English, however, did become the language of commerce, and francophones were largely denied access on the basis of language to the higher levels of business and social power until the adoption by the Parti Québécois government in 1977 of the Loi 101, which made French the official language of work and business in Québec and gradually enabled francophones to achieve social and economic power comparable to that of their anglophone counterparts who had heretofore been the ruling class. Thus, unlike India, where Kapadia claims Shakespeare could be appropriated to challenge “the construction of identity based solely on the binary of either black/white racial difference or the East/West polarity” (pp. 94–5), in Québec identity is not drawn along racial lines but rather along linguistic ones, and these differences are not recognized visually by the audience but rather aurally and textually.

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themselves less to virulent attacks from critics concerned with fidelity to the source text. While in English-speaking nations Shakespeare might be more difficult to adapt without drawing the criticism of desecrating a classic, in Québec Molière is the more sacrosanct of the two and the more risky author for a playwright to tackle.4 Moreover, the adaptation of Shakespeare in Québec has the added bonus of constituting a subversive attack on English Canada—where bardolotry reigns more strongly and the British canon carries more cultural authority—by transgressing the norms of the proper representation of an important cultural icon. In effect, Québécois adapters can use Shakespeare to “stick it” to the English (Canadians), so to speak. In Audre Lorde’s terms, they are using the master’s tools to deconstruct the master’s house as they simultaneously profit from and repudiate Shakespeare’s canonicity. This is not to imply that some English Canadian adaptations might not also constitute a subversive attack on the British canon, but English Canada does not have the same multiple relationships to both Britain and another nation that Québec has with regard to both Britain, English Canada, and even France. Thus, while the appropriation of Shakespeare would normally carry with it cultural risks, as is the case in English Canadian and other anglophone postcolonial adaptations,5 in Québec the adapters’ cultural distance and indifference to British hegemony adds a playful irreverence to their texts, which diminishes the risk of assimilation. This irreverent, and hence liberating, attitude of Québécois toward Shakespeare can be summed up in their nickname for him: “le grand Will.” In Québec, Shakespeare is grand, a big-time author to revere, yet Québécois playwrights are not afraid to bring him down to size, to make him their own, and to develop an affectionate relationship with him on a first-name basis (Lieblein 178–9).6 In Québec, the colonial relationship to Shakespeare is multiple and unique. As a former 4 Daniel Paquette, writer of Mon royaume pour un cheval, provided this reason for adapting Shakespeare in a telephone interview with the author on January 17, 2007. 5 Is Canada postcolonial? Is Québec? The postcoloniality of settler colonies has long been contested and continues to be debated by critics today. In the collection Is Canada Postcolonial? (2003), edited by Laura Moss, several critics, notably Moss, George Elliot Clarke, Neil Besner, Diana Brydon, Terry Goldie, and Stephen Slemon, theorize all sides of the question without arriving at a consensus, or, as Moss sums it up, they arrive at a “typical Canadian response”: “an unequivocal ‘yes ... and no ... and maybe’” or “‘it depends’” (7). In Québec, and in French literary studies in general, the debate has lagged significantly behind for reasons explored seriously for the first time in a special issue of the journal Québec Studies in 2003 in which the response is much more categorical. Critics such as Robert Schwartzwald, Marvin Richards, Vincent Desroches, Amaryll Chanady, and Obed Nkunzimana, among others, all argue convincingly that Québec is postcolonial and that Québécois literary studies would be greatly enhanced by the application of postcolonial theory to Québécois texts. More specifically in terms of Québécois adaptations of Shakespeare, all the critical work on the subject by Denis Salter is heavily inflected by postcolonial theory. 6 “Le grand Will” (sometimes also “grand William” [Ronfard, Lear 46-8] or “Willie” [Garneau, La tempête back cover]) functions similarly to the terms “Willybaba” and “Willyum” which Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia cite in the introduction of this volume. Since “baba” means “father” and is used to address an elderly male figure, Willybaba is a term which both elevates Shakespeare to the status of a fatherly, authoritarian figure, while simultaneously undercutting his status with the affectionate diminutive “Willy.”

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settler colony of France (with a lingering colonial inferiority complex regarding the use of “standard” French versus joual)7 and as a nation that was then conquered by the British only to be subsumed shortly thereafter into the Canadian confederation, which many Québécois consider to be a form of neocolonial tutelage,8 Québec has been both a colonizer of the Native peoples and has been colonized itself. Québec’s ambivalent and overlapping identities as a colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial nation inform its Shakespearean adaptations. Québécois playwrights reinscribe the Bard’s canonical authority when they appropriate it in order to highlight Québec’s distinct cultural identity and to legitimize the nation’s struggle for political independence; however, they are also able to play with his texts more freely since they do not belong to the Québécois canon. Québec’s overlapping colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial identities make its relationship to Shakespeare unique from that of English Canada. In English Canada, Shakespeare has often been an important link between a settler colony and a distant yet omnipresent homeland. “Often employed as a bulwark against other ‘undesirable traditions or cultures,” Irena Makaryk argues, in English Canada, “Shakespeare has also served in many other capacities: as protector and symbol of high art, as morally edifying theatre, as an ally of solid British values, and as a tool of Anglicization, among others” (5). Makaryk’s claim meshes well with Ric 7 Joual is Québécois working class slang. The term joual is believed to come from the pronunciation of the word cheval [horse] in this dialect. While the term has been mistakenly attributed to the journalist André Laurendeau, its usage dates back much earlier, to at least the 1930s. Although previously stigmatized because it was spoken by the working class, joual began to be valorized after the Quiet Revolution, most notably by Michel Tremblay’s play Les Belles Soeurs (1968), the first play to be written in joual, as well as in popular music, such as Robert Charlebois’s songs, and even by some nationalists who saw it as a pride-worthy part of Québec’s cultural heritage. In fact, some words considered joual, such as moé [moi; me] and toé [toi; you], are actually the pronunciations used by royalty prior to the French Revolution. Since Québec was cut off geographically from the rest of France, the Ancien Régime pronunciation remained in use in Québec despite evolving into its current form in France. 8 The application of the term neocolonial to Québec would be contested by most Canadian federalists, but its use is relatively common in Québec. Most sovereignists argue that the Canadian government does indeed control Québec through indirect economic and political means, most notably through le déséquilibre fiscal [fiscal inequality], which restricts the Québec government’s ability to enact policies in areas over which it has jurisdiction, such as health care and education. Other antidemocratic techniques include spying on Québec politicians and ordinary citizens, stealing Parti Québécois membership lists, and interference in the 1995 referendum through illegal spending and the facilitation of illegal voting. See Enquête sur les services secrets, Le livre noir sur le Canada anglais (3 vols), and Les Secrets d’Option Canada by former Radio-Canada investigative journalist Normand Lester for further details on these and other events. Ostensibly, such approaches to Québec date to Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America, published in London in February 1839, which claims that the French of Lower Canada were “a people with no history, and no literature” who ought to be assimilated by means of English immigration as well as a union of Upper and Lower Canada, which would make the French a minority and appropriate Lower Canada’s finances to pay Upper Canada’s debt.

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Knowles’s “autobiographical narrative” in Shakespeare and Canada, in which he reveals his subject position as critic as a “white, male, settler/invader [... who] stands as postcolonial subject” (14). Knowles recounts his subjective experience of feeling like Miranda when she expresses amazement at this “brave new world / That has such people in’t” (5.1.183–4). He points out that she is an “(almost) secondgeneration settler/invader [speaking], not about the new world, but the old one—or, more accurately, speaking about debased representatives of old world culture on a temporary sojourn in the colonies” (17), and as a teenager he, too, was awestruck by the old world colonial project, by the costumes, language and accents of the actors in a production of Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario. Knowles goes on to describe, “while working on [his] PhD,” his “first pilgrimage to England” “in search of authenticity, authority, cultural identity” on his “purchased-in-Canada Brit-Rail pass through train stations named after characters in Shakespeare’s history plays … and … the real, authentic towns, cities and rivers after which the colonial imitations and the parks of southwestern Ontario were named” (19). Having made the same pilgrimage myself, I would argue that this colonial relationship to Shakespeare and the mother country remains largely true for Canadian scholars today. For English Canadians, the “post” in postcolonial is never fully actualized when it comes to our relationship to Shakespeare; the mythos of the mother country haunts our cultural imaginary since Shakespeare and Dickens continue to occupy the Canadian big-time more than Margaret Atwood or Margaret Laurence—especially in our formative years as we watch Mickey Mouse in Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” every year on CBC and hear countless tales of Romeo and Juliet long before the educational system can attempt to Canadianize our own personal literary canons. For anglo-Canadian critics, such as Knowles and myself, engaging critically with Québécois adaptations of Shakespeare is risky business because the texts and the authors are so tied up politically and psychologically in the colonizer–colonized binary and the struggle for national independence from the cultural power from which the Canadian critic cannot disassociate him or herself. The bardolotry underlying the Stratfordian pilgrimages of young Shakespearean scholars testifies to its thorough grasp on the English Canadian cultural imaginary so that even conscious attempts by critics to valorize an adaptation’s alternative reading of its sources cannot help but situate the Shakespearean source text as the primary point of reference to which all else must measure up, even when the critic is aware that not measuring up is the strategic goal of the adapted text. The Canadian adaptation Harlem Duet, for example, writes back to Shakespeare’s Othello, not Cinthio’s source text, because even when the adaptation proposes an alternative reading so radically different as to be incomparable to the source text, the source text that stands as the point of reference for the adaptation is always Shakespeare’s rather than the sources that he himself adapted. The complicated colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial relationships at work in the context of Québécois adaptations become more apparent in comparison with the thematic emphasis of Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare. Knowles claims that Shakespeare’s authority “haunts different collectivities within Canada differently and has frequently been used not only in the service of shoring up but also of destabilizing unitary concepts of Canadian nationhood, even as “Canada’ has been

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used both to reinforce and destabilize unitary concepts of Shakespeare as universal (English) bard” (22). While it is true that different collectivities use Shakespeare to destabilize various unitary concepts within Canadian public discourse, such as race (as in Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet) or gender (in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet), no other regions or provinces of Canada do so in order to destabilize national identity itself. Unlike Québec, there is no theatrical history, let alone long-standing tradition, of adaptations of Shakespeare in Nova Scotia, for instance, much less for the purpose of nationalist identitary affirmation because, unlike Québec, other regions of Canada are not seeking liberation from federal, neocolonial tutelage. Canadian nationhood is destabilized only by collectivities within Canada who consider themselves distinct nations separate from the Canadian national identity, that is, Québec and the First Nations. Daniel Fischlin cites in “Nation and/as Adaptation,” for example, Warren Graves’ 1974 play Chief Shaking Spear Rides Again (or the Taming of the Sioux), but even as the play criticizes Canada’s neocolonial dominance of its Native Peoples, it does so within the framework of a clash of nations within the a mari usque ad mare Canadian political structure without positing succession as the solution to neocolonialism (328–30). Only Québécois adaptations employ Shakespeare for the primary purpose (above class, race, or gender issues) of reconstructing Québécois—and consequently Canadian—national identity. The following is a list of 31 play–texts to which I refer as “Québécois adaptations of Shakespeare”: Robert Gurik’s Hamlet, prince du Québec (1968); Jean-Claude Germain’s Rodéo et Juliette (1970–71); Serge Mercier’s Elle (1974); Jacques Girard and Reynald Robinson’s Roméo et Julien (1982); Jean-Pierre Ronfard’s Lear (1977), Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux (1981), and Falstaff (1990); Michel Garneau’s trilogy Macbeth de William Shakespeare: Traduit en québécois (1978), La tempête (1989), and Coriolan (1989) as well as his Shakespeare: un monde qu’on peut apprendre par coeur (1991); René-Daniel Dubois’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, by William Shakespeare (1986); Pierre-Yves Lemieux’s À propos de Roméo et Juliette (1989); Normand Chaurette’s Les Reines (1991); Antonine Maillet’s William S (1991); Reynald Bouchard’s Touchez pas à ma paroisse (1994); Marco Micone’s La mégère de Padova (1995); Michel Ouellette’s Songe d’une nuit (1995); the 38 monologues event (1996); Jean-Frédéric Messier’s Le making of de Macbeth (1996); Lük Fleury’s Richard moins III (1998); Daphné Thompson’s Sauvée des eaux : Texte dramatique sur Ophélie (2000); Larry Tremblay’s Roller (2000) and Guitare Tatou (2004); Alexis Martin’s Dave veut jouer Richard III (2001); Kadar Mansour’s Sous l’empire de Iago (2002); Nancy Thomas’s Richard III ou la chute du corbeau (2002); Madd Harold’s and Anthony Kokx’s Henry.Octobre.1970. (2002); Yves Sioui Durand’s and Jean-Frédéric Messier’s Hamlet-le-Malécite (2004); Michel Nadeau’s Les mots fantômes (2006); and Katy Veilleux’s Elsemeur (2007). Detailing how most of these adaptations work to shore up nationalist identification would be too exhaustive for this chapter,9 but a snapshot of several major plays 9 A notable exclusion from this list is the work of Robert Lepage, perhaps the most famous director in Québec and certainly the most successful on the international stage. As a director, however, he does not adapt Shakespeare’s text so much as he stages the source text innovatively in performance. His two most original Shakespeare performances—Romeo & Juliette (1989), a bilingual production in collaboration with Gordon McCall, and Elseneur

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reveals the thematic evolution of these adaptations as a whole in relation to the changing discourses of the nationalist movement over the last four decades. From the Quiet Revolution until the present day, these adaptations reveal the progression in nationalist discourse from the rejection of defeatism in the 1960s to the issue of language in the 1970s, the postreferendum disillusionment in the 1980s, and the need for cultural and gender diversity in the 1990s in attempts to imagine the nation less monolithically. Soon after the Quiet Revolution, adaptations such as Robert Gurik’s Hamlet, prince du Québec (1968) and Jean-Claude Germain’s Rodéo et Juliette (1970–71) raised the question “To be or not to be free” in order to situate Québec’s quest for sovereignty in terms of Hamlet’s problem of ceaseless thought versus the need to take immediate action. In Québec in the late 1960s and early 1970s, nationalism was expressed largely in terms of taking action, passer à l’action,10 and throwing off the defeatism of a né-pour-un-petit-pain attitude of self-deprecation.11 This type of (1996), a one-man show—do not adapt the Shakespearean source text. Romeo & Juliette is a combination of the Signet edition in English and a literal translation in French by Governor General award-winning playwright Jean-Marc Dalpé. Elseneur is a literal translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that is innovative insomuch as Lepage performed all the roles himself with the aid of elaborate technology. Other exclusions are Oleg Kisseliov’s Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (1998), which is also a literal translation derived from François-Victor Hugo, as well as Tibor Egervari’s Le marchand de Venise de Shakespeare à Auschwitz (1993) and Michel Philip’s L’Ère des tempêtes ou Chacun pour soi! (1996), neither of which are “Québécois” as I define it here (based on the author’s birth, residence during the play’s composition, or the site of the play’s first production), although Egervari’s play, first performed in Ottawa, could be considered “French Canadian.” The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) database search results (http:// www. canadianshakespeares.ca/Production_Shakespeare/SearchPublicKeywordAction.cfm? keyword=franco&Boolean=OR) lists 177 entries as “French Canadian” adaptations, but this result is inflated since it lists all 38 monologues from the 38 event as separate entries, it does not always make a distinction between translation and adaptation, and it includes some stage productions as adaptations. 10 Passer à l’action, literally “to proceed to action,” could be translated as “to take action,” but it is a notably Québécois expression which loses in translation its underlying emotional force and its double insistence on action with the verb passer, “to proceed,” which indicates a forward progression that is absent from the English expression “to take.” 11 In “Entre Entre deux joints” [“Between two joints”] (1973), co-written with RIN leader Pierre Bourgault, Robert Charlebois sings, “Ta sœur est aux États, ton frère est au Mexique / Y font d’l’argent là-bas pendant qu’tu chômes icitte / T’es né pour un petit pain, c’est ce que ton père t’a dit / Chez les Américains, c’pas ça qu’t’aurais appris.” [Your sister’s in the States, your brother’s in Mexico / They make money there while you’re unemployed here / You were born for a [little] roll [of bread, as opposed to a loaf], that’s what your father said / With the Americans that’s not what you’d have learned.] The rejection of the né pour un petit pain attitude thus embodies the generational divide between youth of the Quiet Revolution and their parents (who grew up accepting that they should settle for less (a roll being less than a loaf of bread), as well as the new generation’s growing internationalism. The song’s chorus also states poignantly the need to passer à l’action: “Ent’ deux joints, tu pourrais faire qu’qu’chose / Ent’ deux joints, tu pourrais t’grouiller l’cul” [Between two joints, you could do something / Between two joints, you could move your ass].

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nationalism was manifested through anti-ecclesiasticism, neo-Marxism, and parallels with African decolonization in order to develop a more internationalist perspective in counterbalance to traditional nationalist discourses derived from Ultramontanism,12 and this nationalism came to be articulated in terms of Québec’s sociopolitical, linguistic, and economic inequality within the framework of Canadian federalism. The use, quality, and even the existence of the Québécois language was a key debate in Québec during the 1970s, a debate to which Michel Garneau contributed significantly with his “tradaptations” (to employ his own neologism) of Shakespeare. In 1977, the same year that the Loi 101 language laws took effect and just four years after Québécois poet Michèle Lalonde wrote “La deffence et illustration de la langue quebecquoyse,” a manifesto for the defense and promotion of the Québécois language,13 Garneau wrote Macbeth, de William Shakespeare: Traduit en québécois, the first and most radical of these tradaptations. In Macbeth and later La tempête, without changing Shakespeare’s plot or characters (as do most contemporary Québécois adaptations), Garneau exposes the semiotic richness of the Québécois language by translating the text into an approximation of a seventeenth-century dialect (not unlike contemporary joual) spoken prior to the Conquest of New France by England in 1759. At the same time, he subtly adapts several geographical and historical details in order to conflate the action within the world of the plays with the Conquest as well as within the 1970s political context of neocolonialism believed to have resulted from it. The overlapping spatiotemporal markers produce a triple layer of signification, simultaneously locating the play in either medieval Scotland or on Caliban’s island, in seventeenth-century New France, and in contemporary Québec. Distinctions between the layers of this palimpsest are blurred since the three spatiotemporal contexts are all linked by a single nationalist discourse centered on the country’s usurpation by a tyrant and its desperate need for liberation.14 12 From Latin, meaning “beyond the mountains,” that is, the Alps, Ultramontanism, equally known as Ultramontanisme in French, was the point of view of Roman Catholics who supported the pope as supreme head of the church, as opposed to Gallicanism and other tendencies that opposed papal jurisdiction. Ultramontanism began in Québec in 1840 following the failure of the 1837–38 Patriot Rebellions, and it peaked between 1867 and 1896. Ultramontane priests were strong advocates of the né-pour-un-petit-pain attitude. For an indepth analysis, see Denis Monière’s Le Développement des idéologies au Québec des origines à nos jours, especially Chapters 4 and 5. 13 Lalonde’s manifesto is closely modelled after Joachim Du Bellay’s 1549 Deffence effence et illustration de la langue françoyse. Du Bellay pleads for the aesthetic beauty of vernacular French and the use of French, rather than Greek or Latin, in the composition of poetry. Lalonde picks up key elements of du Bellay’s text and expands the argument, first by situating the notion of language as a living tree in the specific historical context of Québec’s linguistic isolation from France in the aftermath of the Conquest and then how Québécois is not only as rich as français de France but also how it is less corrupted by anglicisms. She then identifies the two most common attitudes toward the Québécois language: one that ensconces the virtues of français de France while maligning joual and another, vice versa, that extols joual to the detriment of all grammar. 14 This is, of course, a reductive reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Tempest; however, like most adaptations, summary readings of the source text are precisely the interpretation against which the adaptation works, and this broad reading of the plot does, in fact, describe well the adaptation’s use of the text.

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L’Officier du Rhin-Pierre Bourgault (leader of the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale [RIN]), Horatio-René Lévesque (founder of the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association [MSA] and later the Parti Québécois [PQ]), and Hamlet-Québec, the principal nationalist figures in Robert Gurik’s Hamlet, prince du Québec.

Jean-Pierre Ronfard’s plays Lear (1977) and Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux [Life and Death of the Limping King] (1981), adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear and of Richard III, respectively, employ carnival and magic realism to parody the bastardized state of the nation whose corruption and decay can be eliminated only by the rise to power of strong-willed women. Rabelaisian carnival dominates every aspect of these two adaptations; food, drinking, rampant sexuality, and references to the grotesque lower body abound in every scene. Ronfard carnivalizes the nation, rendering it grotesque through his focus on bastardy, a pertinent theme for a Québec nation still considered illegitimate as a full political entity, at best Canada’s limping,

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During the storm scene, the two Shakespeares huddle under “a typically British umbrella” and then “jump into, with eloquence and historical attention, […] the long narration of Clarence’s dream (authentically excerpted from the great William’s RICHARD III),” oblivious that they are being drowned, like Clarence, by “cat pee” that the Fool rains down on them. (Ronfard, Lear 46–8, 50; my translation, italics in original).

bastard cousin. Of all Québécois adaptations, Ronfard’s plays best illustrate the irreverence of the Québécois approach to Shakespeare.15 Ronfard’s two Shakespearean 15 One example of this irreverent play is Ronfard’s Lear, in which two Shakespeare figures, huddled together under “un parapluie typiquement ‘british se lancent, avec verve et conscience historique […] dans la grande narration du rêve de Clarence (authentiquement tirée de Richard III du grand William)” while the Fool figure drowns them, like Clarence, with a rain of “pipi de chat” [a typically British umbrella; jump into, with eloquence and historical

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adaptations straddle a crucial turning point in Québec’s history, the 1980 referendum on sovereignty–association in which the “No” side won 59.6% to 40.4% over the “Yes” side. The Québécois population’s struggle for political independence (the momentum for which was at a high point on the heels of the surprisingly strong, and first ever, Parti Québécois electoral victory in 1976), followed by their subsequent rejection of it, marks both these plays. Whereas in the pre-referendum Lear the declining state of the nation and the need to rescue it figure prominently, in the post-referendum Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux the obvious degeneration of the nation is relegated to the background in favor of a focus on gender relations and sexuality until the nation finally acquires a new ruler at the play’s end. The later play’s inquiry into women’s independence in marriage and their political role in society corresponds to the historical rise of the feminist movement in Québec in the 1970s and the increased social presence of women’s issues following the temporary decline of the national question after the referendum. Ronfard’s adaptations figure daughters as the survivors, inheritors, and sources of regeneration for fictional, bastard nations that pass through the disorder of carnival and then hover on the precipice of a new social order that will be more inclusive of women and, to some extent, immigrants, that is, of the “others” to whom carnival gives lease to rule.16 Since the 1990s, Québec has seen an explosion of no fewer than 22 adaptations of Shakespeare by a range of playwrights from various sociocultural backgrounds, including the first adaptations written by women, homosexuals, and immigrants, all of which share one important trait: an exposure of the need to redefine the nation more inclusively through greater cultural and gender diversity. (As we shall see, it is significant that this emergence of other voices only begins to appear in Québécois adaptations in the 1990s, especially following the second referendum.) No production better exemplifies the redefinition of the nation less monolithically than the 38 event (1996), a series of 38 monologues about each of Shakespeare’s plays written by 38 different playwrights under 38 years of age. Each monologue is a personal interpretation of a play with little to no intertextual or thematic exchange among the 38 texts. To a certain extent, the pluralist approach of the 1990s could be seen as a temporary turn away from the use of Shakespeare as a medium for nationalist discourses since the bard is appropriated in service of new sociopolitical agendas. For instance, in Pierre-Yves Lemieux’s À propos de Roméo et Juliette (1989), a gay Mercutio blatantly asserts his homoerotic desire for Roméo; in Daphné Thompson’s Sauvée des eaux: texte dramatique sur Ophélie (2000), a fictional female adapter tries to save Ophelia from her fate; and in Yves Sioui Durand’s and Jean-Frédéric attention, […] the long narration of Clarence’s dream (authentically excerpted from the great William’s Richard III); cat pee] (46–8, 50). This carnivalesque association of Shakespeare with the grotesque lower body also takes place when the Lear figure “contemple une boule de merde qu’il tient dans sa main, dans une posture qui rappelle Michel-Ange, Rodin, l’Hamlet traditionnel” [contemplates a ball of shit that he holds in his hand in a posture that invokes Michelangelo, Rodin, the traditional Hamlet] (21; italics in original stage directions). 16 For an in-depth discussion of Ronfard’s two plays, see my article, “Daughters of the Carnivalized Nation in Jean-Pierre Ronfard’s Shakespearean Adaptations Lear and Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux.” Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théâtrales au Canada 27.1 (spring 2007): 32 pp.

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Messier’s Hamlet-le-Malécite (2004), an aboriginal man seeks to play Hamlet while living the plot in his own life. While the cultural and gender diversity exhibited in these adaptations is laudable, the paradigm of the monolithic nation remains inescapable, as we see in a play such as Madd Harold’s and Anthony Kokx’s Henry. Octobre. 1970. (2002), which presents the English–French bitterness of the battle of Agincourt as ongoing in the modern era by situating the Hundred Years’ War in the context of the 1970 October Crisis and portraying the French more favorably than the English.17 By using Shakespeare to work through various stages of national(ist) identity in what sovereignists call la longue marche vers le pays [the long walk toward the achievement of the country], Québécois adapters challenge a fundamental principle underlying modern Canadian nationhood: the belief in one multicultural nation a mari usque ad mare united in all of its diversity. In articulating a nationalist, and arguably sovereignist, discourse through the British bard who has played such a pivotal role in the evolution of British North America into modern Canada, Québécois adapters undercut the success of that particular colonial project and expose its present-day composition as a false construct, a case of wishful thinking in which unity in diversity has not been achieved and the age-old divide of “two founding nations” that was so prominent at confederation remains prevalent today. Fischlin confirms that Canadian national identity may be nothing more than a false construct when he writes that “[n]ational identity is an imaginary entity, an ideality based on the simultaneous production and eradication of difference through the filter of communal values, in this case, putatively embedded in Shakespeare and the Shakespeare effect” (327). For Fischlin, Canadians have no essential national identity other than that which they socially construct through cultural production, of which Shakespearean adaptation is an important part. This adaptation tradition “links the iconicity of Shakespeare with the symbolic destiny, however illusory, of nation” (321). However, I would argue that national identity is not imaginary, even if the community constituting the nation is imagined. Fischlin agrees with Benedict Anderson that nations are imagined communities, but I would contend that the imaginary composition of that community does not invalidate or render illusory the subjective experience of a national identity by the community’s individual citizens. While, as Fischlin observes, the very definition of “communal” values obviously depends on the eradication of difference within the imagined community, in Québec these communal values are not embedded in Shakespeare as they are in English Canada because Québec does not have the same colonial relationship to the Bard, and its citizens possess a collective, subjective, settler/invader experience very different 17 The 1970 October Crisis began when the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross, followed by Pierre Laporte, Québec’s Minister of Manpower and Labour. Laporte was strangled to death by his kidnappers (Francis Simard, Bernard Lortie, Jacques Rose, and Paul Rose, collectively known as the Chénier cell of the FLQ) after he cut himself on broken glass while trying to escape and began bleeding profusely. Refusing to negotiate with the FLQ, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, which suspended civil liberties and resulted in the arrest of almost 500 people without warrant. See Comeau, Cooper, and Vallières (eds.) for further details.

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from that of English Canadians. Not being as closely entangled with Shakespeare as English Canadian settler/invader subjects, Québécois playwrights are freer to manipulate the effect produced by Shakespeare’s authority in their call for national freedom. Fischlin pursues this notion of the nation as a false construct in his claim that “[n]ation assumes assimilation into the authentic bosom of an originary identity, however spurious or illusory such an idea may be” (326). This assertion holds true in that Québécois nationalism claims an originary identity (be it derived from France, l’Île d’Orléans, or the Conquest), but I would claim that the rest of his argument does not apply to Québec when he adds: The authentic, because it is always predicated on a belatedly assimilative effect, signifies an identity crisis by way of a dialectic that presumes and requires the inauthentic (that which is assimilated) in order to give it meaning. Shakespeare’s assimilation by state (read ‘authentic’) culture is used as a bulwark against incursions in state culture by its ‘inauthentic,’ nomadic margins. (326)

In Québec, the “inauthentic” (or the bastard in Ronfard’s terms) is precisely what characterizes Shakespearean adaptation—the “inauthentic” nation that is not yet a state, and especially the inauthentic class, since the use of joual inscribes the adapted Shakespearean characters as working class. Inauthentic Québécois adaptations reverse Fischlin’s Canadian paradigm and make that which is Québécois a marginal incursion into “authentic” Shakespearean culture. Unlike Canada, whose history of “Shakespearean adaptation is coincident with its emergence as a nation–state” (Fischlin 321), Québec is a stateless nation whose history of Shakespearean adaptation precedes this political emergence. Shakespearean adaptation in Québec does not coincide with the ascension to full political statehood, although it does coincide with the emergence of renewed and more fervent nationalism, because nationalist playwrights may find in Shakespeare’s authority validation for their cause, provided they negotiate carefully the power relations inherent in their collaboration with him and avoid drowning out their own voices by the clamour with which Shakespearean authority resounds. Garneau’s Macbeth typifies this search for balance between manipulating the power of Shakespearean authority and succumbing to it—as the long title of his play suggests, beginning with “de William Shakespeare” but ending pointedly and forcefully with “traduit en québécois.” In this case, Fischlin’s claims about the nature of adaptation hold true: “Adaptations work both sides of this coin, whether confirming a myth of authenticity and origin or interrogating such a position through alternative and revisionary definitions of authenticity” (326). Québécois adaptations confirm the authenticity of Shakespeare’s authority by relying on his cultural power, but they interrogate the English colonialism that his canon of works helped promulgate. Fischlin sums up his argument with the assertion that “adaptation questions the essentialist qualities associated with Shakespearean authority, canonicity, and cultural value. In short, adaptations serve multiple positionings with regard to national selfidentity as mediated by a cultural icon like Shakespeare” (328). While it is true that Québécois adaptations question authority and canonicity (to the extent that a national group can question a literary canon that is not its own and in which it does

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not have the invested stakes of those who helped form it), Québécois adaptations do not serve multiple positions within Québécois national self-identity. There are no federalist adaptations of Shakespeare in Québec to construct a unified Canadian identity by anglo-Québécois, and certainly not by franco-Québécois.18 Instead, Québécois adaptations are all oriented in the same direction, toward the creation and solidification of one national identity, of a sovereign people, which includes women and aboriginals and immigrants, but who are expected in these plays to assimilate to a mostly monolithic identity as part of one large, multiethnic, sovereign nation. Gender and ethnoreligious difference are acknowledged and respected, but are not foregrounded in the collective body of texts because Québécois adapters are almost all men (with the exception of Maillet,19 de Vasconcelos, Thompson, Thomas, and Veilleux) and their approach to nationalism is inherently masculinist. Women play crucial roles in the formation of the nation, but the collective survival of the nation takes precedence over the concerns of individual women characters, of which these plays have very few, with Maillet’s Shrew being the notable exception of a resolutely feminist character. In respect to this monolithic nation constructed both textually and socially, Mark Fortier’s astute observation about Canadian identity, which I would agree holds true in that case, does not, however, apply to Québec: 18 As such, Québécois adaptations do not constitute “intracultural theatre” in the sense that Kapadia describes in chapter 5. These plays do not participate in “cultural interactions between local and regional groups from within the borders of the [Canadian] nation–state” (p. 98). Rather than creating a dialogue with other groups within the Canadian nation–state, they are focused instead on the ascension of the Québec nation to full statehood. 19 Antonine Maillet might, at first, appear somewhat out of place in the category of Québécois authors. Fischlin consistently situates William S in an “Acadian cultural context” because of Maillet’s famous origins in Acadie (333). Yet, this claim overlooks the fact that the play was written and first performed in Montréal, and, in fact, the play is not nearly as “Acadian” as her other plays, since it is written in so-called “standard” French rather than the Acadian language employed in many of her other texts, such as her novel Pélagie-la-Charette. In addition, despite her ethnic origins, Maillet is not only a descendent of deported Acadians but an example of the necessity for most Acadians and French Canadian artists to “immigrate” to Québec. Québec remains the only francophone region of Canada to receive adequate funding for literature and the arts, in large part because it has the demographic base to be self-sustaining and has thus developed many funding agencies in parallel to the “Canadian” organisms, which are supposed to promote bilingualism and multiculturalism but inevitably fall far short of the demand necessary to sustain and promote French culture outside of Québec. It is precisely because of this cultural and economic reality that I have included Maillet’s work among “Québécois” adaptations. She represents an important part of the Québécois population: French Canadian immigrants from other provinces. (The music industry best illustrates this cultural and economic reality; we need only think of Edith Butler from Acadie, Zachary Richard from Louisiana, and, more recently, Wilfred Le Bouthillier, the winner of Star Académie, also from Acadie.) Finally, the argument that Québec is the only francophone region of Canada with adequate cultural and economic resources for francophones outside of Québec to follow a career in the arts also extends to academia. Notably, Maillet completed her doctoral dissertation on Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie at Université Laval in Québec City in 1970 and was a professor at the Université de Montréal in 1975–76.

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there is always something un-Canadian about being Canadian, that the from-elsewhere is part of being here. Shakespeare, therefore, is one manifestation of from elsewhere at work in Canada. As such, Canadians confront Shakespeare as the cultural undead, neither dead nor living, not a person but an other forming part of living personalities, if only as part of the sublime personality, the otherness of the past the remains of which reside here. Canadians too, in their specific ways, are the undead, although as noir subjects they may not always realize this. (342)

Fortier’s underlying premise does not hold true in Québec, where the notion of “fromelsewhere” did not truly appear until after the 1995 referendum campaign, at which point it entered nationalist discourse as damage control after Jacques Parizeau’s famous statement on “l’argent et le vote ethnique” [money and the ethnic vote] that was based on a definition of nous [us] as pure laine.20 After the referendum, the notion that Québec was le pays de tous les Québécois [the country of all Québécois] (to borrow the title of a collection by Michel Sarra-Bournet) began to enter academic discourse, but a general mistrust of sovereignists’ claims of openness to the inclusion of people of multiple ethnic origins within the national project prevailed. Only very recently has the concept of “from-elsewhere” entered public discourse with great popularity,21 but the celebration of foreign origins was not in circulation at the time the majority of these Shakespearean adaptations were written to the same extent that it was in the rest of Canada. The reason that “from-elsewhere” was not current in Québec public discourses is nationalism: Canadian nationalism (that is, federalism) is disguised by the celebration of “multiculturalism” as a replacement to the discourse of “bilingualism and biculturalism,” based on the notion of “two founding nations” (which ignores, of course, all the First Nations) that was in circulation during the early reign of Trudeau.22 After the 1980 referendum, it became apparent that one way to diminish Québec’s claim as a founding nation, on which its claims for greater political autonomy were based, would be to multiply the number of founding national identities that compose Canada (and indeed many do outside of Québec, although the phenomenon is hardly as widespread as official discourse would have one believe 20 Pure laine is generally translated in English as “dyed in the wool.” The term refers to Québécois who are born and raised in Québec, speak with a Québécois accent, and show no traces of any particular immigrant origin. 21 For example, on the cultural front, the most popular male artist at the 2004 Gala de l’ADISQ was Rwandan-born Corneille, who is well-known for his song about immigration, “Parce qu’on vient de loin” [“Because we come from afar”]. On the political front, the Bloc Québécois’s election in January 2006 of four members of parliament (MPs) from cultural communities (of 51 elected) testifies to a concerted effort of the sovereignist movement to build bridges with voters “from-elsewhere.” 22 On an anecdotal side note, and to acknowledge fully the reinscription in this paper of the binary of English Canada and Québec as two founding nations, I could not help but be struck by the irony that I completed this paper on the eve of what I used to call, when I lived in English Canada, Victoria Day, but which has been officially decreed by the Québec government “La La journée nationale des Patriotes” in recognition and celebration of the rebels who took up arms against the rule of Queen Victoria. I do not think, therefore, that an analysis of Canadian and Québécois adaptations within this binary is entirely unjustified today, 170 years after the Patriot rebellions of 1837–38.

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and tends to be confined to the immigration of specific ethnic groups to specific geopolitical locations). Despite attempts to divert the idea of “two founding nations” to “multiculturalism,” the binary approach pervades popular thought in Québec and until recently has overshadowed references to “from-elsewhere.”23 Québec’s relationship to Shakespeare as “undead,” then, is different from that of Canada’s because the lack of “from-elsewhere” testifies in general to a lack of alterity or otherness in Québec.24 The “national question” has a totalizing effect that permeates the collective consciousness, so forms of alterity, such as ethnicity and gender, are eclipsed—without, however, being erased. Racial, gender, and class otherness is not given its full place in Québec compared with other Western societies in which national independence has long been settled, such as Canada and the United States, because the national question remains to be settled first. The preponderance of the national question over other social issues can be seen in the sheer number of nationalist adaptations of Shakespeare versus those that deal primarily with other topics.25 Québécois Shakespeare, therefore, is not the same thing as Shakespeare in Québec. Québécois adaptations of Shakespeare highlight Québec’s cultural difference in a way that mere stage productions of Shakespeare in Québec cannot. The moment of departure from the Shakespearean source text by the adapter imposes a cultural 23 As Maureen McDonnell discusses in chapter seven of this volume, Joanne Tompkins proposes one solution to the problem of “multiculturalism”—a conceptual shift to “polynationalism.” Tompkin’s neologism “polynationalism” would “highlight the intersection of the competing forces of nationality, nationalism, ethnicity, identity and subjectivity more accurately addressing the interdependent relationship of theories such as post-colonialism and feminism with multiculturalism. This would also rectify the frequent placement of multiculturalism in isolation or in opposition to a mainstream national paradigm. Polynationalism would not pretend to unite disparate groups that have hitherto resisted nationalist stereotypes; instead it would reconsider relationships in contested space” (131n7). In the context of Canada and Québec, polynationalism would require a return by English Canada to the concept of “two founding nations,” which is still prevalent in Québec and which was the underlying principle of the Confederation at the time of its inception. 24 This lack of alterity, or conflation of various forms of otherness under one banner, can be seen in the terms used to describe one’s linguistic origin. In Québec, one is either a francophone, an anglophone, or an allophone. Allophone literally means “other speaker” and is the category into which all immigrants are lumped together. Hyphenated identifications (such as Irish-American, for instance) are not used in Québec. 25 Gender does not truly become a central concern of Québécois adaptations until the 1990s, particularly in Pierre Yves Lemieux’s À propos de Roméo et Juliette (1989), which features an openly gay Mercutio in love with Roméo, and Normand Chaurette’s Les Reines (1991), which gives voice to the queens of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. As McDonnell observes in Chapter 7, in the context of polynationalism, “an individual’s particular constellation of identities (such as linguistic preference, class, gender, and sexual orientation) can be obscured or overshadowed by collective ‘national’ or ‘racial’ concerns” (p. 131). None of these adaptations deals primarily with race, and class issues are always subsumed into nationalist issues since class divides tended to fall along linguistic lines until the effects of Loi 101 began to change the workplace, and even today the percentage of anglophones in Québec who hold a postsecondary degree (and presumably a higher paying job upon graduation) is noticeably higher than that of francophones.

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specificity on the text that is also not to be found in performances of Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario, or England. While Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare struggle to wrest authority from an undead author, Québécois adaptations, because they run differently the risks of contamination by that authority and have a neocolonial relationship to Canada in addition to a postcolonial relationship to Europe, appropriate it much more freely in service of the decolonization of the nation. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bienvenue, Yvan et al. 38: A. E. I. O. U. 5 vols. Montréal: Dramaturges Éditeurs, 1996. Bristol, Michael. Big-time Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1996. Comeau, Robert, Daniel Cooper, and Pierre Vallières, eds. FLQ: un projet révolutionnaire: Lettres et écrits felquistes (1963–1988). Outremont: VLB, 1990. Desroches, Vincent, ed. “Présentation: Présentation: en quoi la littérature québécoise est-elle postcoloniale?” Quebec and Postcolonialism. Spec. issue of Quebec Studies 35 spring–summer (2003): 9 pp. Fischlin, Daniel. “Nation and/as Adaptation: Shakespeare, Canada, and Authenticity.” Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? Eds. Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 313–38. ———, ed. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP). http://www. canadianshakespeares.ca. ——— and Mark Fortier, eds. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Fortier, Mark. “Undead and Unsafe: Adapting Shakespeare (in Canada).” Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? Eds. Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 339–52. Garneau, Michel. Macbeth de William Shakespeare. Montréal: VLB, 1978. ———. La tempête. Montréal: VLB, 1989. Germain, Jean-Claude. Rodéo et Juliette. ms. 1970. Gurik, Robert. Hamlet, prince du Québec. Montréal: Éditions de l’homme, 1968. Harold, Madd, and Anthony Kokx. Henry. Octobre 1970. ms. 2002. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Knowles, Ric. Shakespeare and Canada: Essays on Production, Translation, and Adaptation. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004. Lalonde, Michèle. “La deffence et illustration de la langue quebecquoyse.” Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise suive de prose et poèmes. Paris: Change / L’Hexagone/ Laffont, 1980. 9–34. Lemieux, Pierre-Yves. À propos de Roméo et Juliette. ms. 1989. Lieblein, Leanore. “‘Le Re-making’ of le Grand Will: Shakespeare in Francophone Quebec.” Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? Eds. Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, 174–91.

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Lester, Normand. Enquêtes sur les services secrets. Montréal: Editions de l’homme, 1998. ———. Le livre noir du Canada anglais. 3 vols. Montréal: Éditions des Intouchables, 2001, 2002, 2003. ———. and Robin Philpot. Les secrets d’Option Canada. Montréal: Éditions des Intouchables, 2006. Lucas, C.P., ed. Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America. [1839] 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. Rpt. Claude Bélanger. Quebec History. http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/docs/durham/. Maillet, Antonine. William S. Montréal: Leméac, 1991. Makaryk, Irena R. “Introduction.” Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? Eds. Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, 3–41. Monière, Denis. Le Développement des idéologies au Québec des origines à nos jours. Montréal: Québec/Amérique, 1977. Moss, Laura, ed. Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2003. Ronfard, Jean-Pierre. Lear. Montréal: TRAC, 1977. ———. Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux. 2 vols. Montréal: Leméac, 1981. Sarra-Bournet, Michel, ed. Le pays de tous les Québécois: Diversité culturelle et souveraineté. Montréal: VLB, 1998. Salter, Denis. “Introduction: The End(s) of Shakespeare?” Essays in Theatre: Shakespeare and Postcolonial Conditions 15.1 (November 1996): 3–14. Sioui Durand, Yves, and Jean-Frédéric Messier. Hamlet-le-Malécite. ms. 2004. Thompson, Daphné. Sauvée des eaux : Texte dramatique sur Ophélie. ms. 2000. Tompkins, Joanne. “Inter-referentiality: Interrogating Multicultural Drama in Australia.” Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s. Ed. Veronica Kelly. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, 117–31.

Chapter 7

An Aboriginal As You Like It: Staging Reconciliation in a Drama of Desire Maureen McDonnell

In the ad for the Company B production of As You Like It, Aboriginal actor Deborah Mailman grins at her viewers, her cheerful expression showing through the layer of white makeup and the melodramatic mustache drawn on her face (Figure 4). The charm of this Rosalind is apparent in spite (or because) of her doubled drag of gender and race, the appeal of the image confirming the expectations of wouldbe spectators accustomed to consuming cross-dressed adventures along with their Shakespeare. Yet Mailman’s twinned alterations indicate the production’s abundant modes of transformation, which surpass her romantic heroine’s Shakespearean drag by featuring actors who offer cross-racial, cross-dressed, and sexually amorphous performances. Mailman’s inviting face suggests the pleasure to be had in this production in which categories of gender, race, and erotic affiliations continually shift. In the image, Mailman is both feminine and masculine, Aboriginal and white. Performance scholars begin their work with a single premise: the conviction that dramatic texts need to be considered not as inert relics of a written oeuvre but as “a collection of playscripts, each of which is a blueprint for production,” ephemeral performances that often leave material traces like this publicity shot.1 By examining the alchemy of such performances, catalyzed by the bodies of actors like Mailman, performance scholars frequently examine how productions influence and alter our received understandings of the text.2 Performance scholars, who frequently bridge disciplinary divides, often rely both on written historical archives and oral transmissions (including storytelling, song, dance, gossip, and rituals) to investigate how groups sustain and revise their cultures.3 In the case of Shakespearean 1 Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 3. 2 Niels Herold explores the range of motives groups have in considering Shakespeare (whether capitalistic, psychological, or as part of a docudrama) in his essay, “Movers and Losers: Shakespeare in Charge and Shakespeare Behind Bars.” 3 Christopher B. Balme, “Cultural Anthropology and Theatre Historiography: Notes on a Methodological Rapprochement.” Theatre Survey 35 (1994): 33–52; Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

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Publicity photograph of Deborah Mailman in Company B’s As You Like It.

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performance criticism, scholars also inherit a considerable literary tradition, along with some historical problems: the colonial deployment of Shakespeare’s texts, the chasm between theatrical and literary approaches, the linguistic legacies of the Shakespearean canon, and the ideological challenges of theatrical performance. Early modern scholars have substantially contributed to our understanding of how the incipient mercantilism and imperialism of the early modern era not only influenced the themes of foreignness and cultural exchange within the play–texts4 but also helped consolidate the global prominence of Shakespearean drama today.5 Admittedly, these plays often function as colonial combat zones. More important, for my purposes, the plays act as scripts that offer theatre practitioners and audiences opportunities to negotiate identity. As theatre practitioners perform categories of gender, sexuality, race, language, and nation, they navigate the interface between the Renaissance text and local understandings of identity. Specifically, I argue that attentiveness to the collaboration, and dissent, within the performance process and to the theatrical apparatus6 reveals the ideological framing of key identities within the larger culture. I investigate these productions not only as staging a litany of antitheses—such as the tension between the local and the universal, or the historical and the contemporary—but also because they suggest the complex ways in which these competing, occasionally complementary, factors influence each other. Such an approach considers production as staging a “braided history,” in Natalie Davis’s terminology, in which different narratives (that of colonial influence and indigenous culture, for instance) intertwine to create a new entity dependent on the incorporation—and distinctness—of its respective

4 Given the variability of printed early modern texts and the range of ways those texts can be interpreted in contemporary performance, Barbara Hodgdon proposes defining early modern print material as “play–texts” and to subsequent productions as “performance texts,” a deliberately ambiguous set of terms intended to “convey some sense of their indeterminancy and to differentiate them from other, more determinate, textual categories.” See Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 19. 5 John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theatre in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985); G.K. Hunter, “Elizabethans and Foreigners.” Shakespeare and Race, eds. Catherine M.S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 37–63; Jonathan Burton, “‘A Most Wily Bird’: Leo Africanus, Othello and the trafficking in difference.” Post-Colonial Shakespeares, 43–63; Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello, and bringing to light.” Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 84–100; Ania Loomba, “Local-Manufacture Made-in-India Othello Fellows’: Issues of Race, Hybridity and Location in Post-colonial Shakespeares.” Post-Colonial Shakespeares, 143–63. 6 The theatrical apparatus includes casting, physical props, acting styles, and design elements. Elaboration of the theatrical apparatus and its critical application can be found in Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989) and in Sue-Ellen Case’s edited volume, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990).

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strands.7 This project attempts to animate a “transversal poetics” that is aware of the collaborative authorship of performance, the sociopolitical aspects of theatre, and historical criticism and that is also attuned to the possibilities that such projects can create cultural change.8 In proceeding transversally, I ask: How does national identity (or indigenousness) occupy Shakespeare’s texts in performance so that they become readable through Shakespeare? How are these productions’ stagings complicated by representing racialization, gender, and sexuality? How do these identities play on stage? Mailman’s face sets the scene for Armfield’s production concept, one that emphasizes this racially diverse cast and their collective role in staging an Australian Shakespeare. Company B’s marketing of Mailman’s sexual and racial ambiguity represents a shift in Sydney theatre practice away from the predominantly segregated and heteronormative productions of its past. Tellingly, Neil Armfield, who directs this As You Like It, chose to use strategic racially aware casting so that the Aboriginal actors could reference their cultural heritage in performance and thereby help to generate the production’s meaning. Because director Neil Armfield cast Aboriginal actors as Rosalind, the exiled Duke Senior, Phebe, and Silvius, audience members are invited to reexamine the familiar Shakespearean plot through the lenses of Australian race relations and the ongoing reconciliation process with Aborigines. This racialized frame of reference creates particular demands on Aboriginal actors, as Mailman reveals in an interview: My choices have to be quite smart in the respect that it’s not just me on stage but it’s the rest of my people, too. At the moment, when we walk on the stage it’s political because of where we are as a country in terms of race relations and reconciliation ... It places a lot of weight on us as indigenous artists.9

Because of As You Like It’s plot trajectory, which begins with the tyranny of the usurping Duke Frederick (white actor Geoff Kelso), the production implicitly supports the dispossessed characters (all Aboriginal actors) and thereby facilitates a political critique of the systematic seizure of Aboriginal land throughout Australian history. Arden, which becomes (in this production) explicitly suburban by the play’s ending, indicates the degree to which Australian settlers have invaded “natural” Australia; the cast’s fervent celebration at the play’s end suggests that such a space can be recast as a territory of reconciliation (Figure 5) rather than antagonism. Armfield’s casting and staging decisions emphasize the centrality of racial relations and land rights in Australian self-conceptions and advocate an inclusive attitude of celebration toward the plurality of its citizens. Audience members surround the actors’ territory by sitting in bleachers that border three fourths of the circular 7 Anthony B. Dawson uses Davis’s term, delivered as part of a lecture series in early 2001, in his essay, “International Shakespeare.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, eds. Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174–93. 8 Brian Reynolds, Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 9 Jane Hampton, “The People’s Choice.” The Sun-Herald, May 2, 1999.

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Fig. 5

Celebration scene of Company B’s As You Like It.

Fig. 6

Kristine Hutton and Deborah Mailman in Company B’s As You Like It.

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performance area from which they are prompted to participate: Some spectators eat apples as Duke Senior philosophizes about the beauty of nature, and others offer verbal advice when Rosalind wonders aloud whether to shed her Ganymede disguise as her wooing grows more convoluted. The walls of the Company B’s small black box theatre are dark and haphazardly painted, suggesting the dismal atmosphere of the characters’ urban home. All actors within the court scenes wear whiteface, suggesting the rigid maintenance of artifice required by white communities for its members and for interlopers like Rosalind (Figure 6). Aboriginal actors in black militaristic costumes and storm-trooper boots patrol the dukedom and block the paths between the bleachers; their eventual pursuit of Rosalind and Celia, interspersed with flashlight searches of audience members, continues well into the third act and suggests the Duke’s regular practice of policing. After the first act, actors use rope rigging to lift the plain, bulky tarp that covers the floor of the stage, transforming the darkness of the kingdom into a circus-like arena. The tarp’s underbelly, painted a brilliant blue, is pierced by cutout areas that let “starlight” peer through. Living grass covers Arden’s floor, peeking between the actors’ bare toes as if to hint at Arden’s visceral pleasures. The actors’ collaborative, effortless conversion of the stage space to rural Arden makes it seem as though some magic was afoot. The raising of the tent roof recalls Australia’s ongoing history of circus theatre, a tradition indebted to the participation of Aboriginal performers.10 As the production continues, the soundscape and prop choices transform Arden so that its seemingly infinite territory becomes an inhabitable suburb. The design choices of the production play up Arden’s viability as an apt substitute for Australia, a reading that reinforced Arden–Australia’s hospitality toward its diverse residents. Audiences would meet the production’s concept of diversity and inclusion with a largely positive response; theatre critics widely described the production as Shakespeare translated into an Aussie vernacular, defined as “easygoing, freewheeling, and genial.”11 Rather than focusing on the actors’ dialects as primary markers of identity, reviewers would center instead on the casting of Aboriginal actors within the play and its impact on this “Australian interpretation of the classic love story.”12 Despite theatre companies increasingly featuring Aboriginal-influenced productions (including Armfield’s recent Cloudstreet) and Aboriginal actors in canonical texts, 10 Not all the Aboriginal circus performers chose their professions, as some circus companies appropriated Aboriginal children to perform some of the more physically dangerous acts during the Stolen Generations period. See Wendy Holland, “Reemerging Aboriginality in the Circus Space.” Journal of Popular Culture 33.1 (summer 1999): 91–104. 11 Colin Rose, “As You Love It.” The Sun-Herald. Sunday, May 30, 1999. 12 Critics did not comment on Mailman’s Queensland accent or mannerisms, nor on the Polish accent of Jacek Koman (who played Jaques and Charles). Multilingual productions of Shakespeare preceded Company B’s staging. Deborah Mailman and Matthew Whittet (Touchstone) performed together the previous year in a multilingual King Lear directed by Barri Kosky (she as a pregnant Cordelia, he as the Fool). The Japanese actor playing Oswald, Kazuhiro Muroyama, spoke sections of the text in his native language, as did Russian actor Rostislav Orel, who played Kent. Further information about this production can be found in Adrian Kiernander, “The Unclassic Body,” 124–34. Emily McCosker. “As You Like It: Company B Belvoir.” Honi Suit 12 (Tuesday, June 1, 1999).

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interracial casts remain a relatively novel development.13 The summer of 1999, when As You Like It debuted, marks the first time in Australia’s history that “not one but two productions of Romeo and Juliet have black and white feuding families.”14 The burgeoning number of Aboriginal-authored plays and the proliferation of Aboriginal actors performing in canonical texts speak to the vitality and the financial viability of Aboriginal and Aboriginal–Australian theatre in the late 1990s. The decade also ushered in a significant reversal in Australian common law: The Mabo decision in 1992 recognized the existence of Native Title, a judgment that required significant upheaval of government policies, legislation, and public administration procedures.15 In this moment of intense national transformation, and with the upcoming centenary of the Australian Federation (2001), many Australians began questioning the identity of their nation and its colonial legacies.16 Given the recent displacement and genocide that Aborigines faced at the hands of white settlers, many saw the reconciliation debates as the most significant threat to the glossy image of Australia that many wanted to project as the Olympic campaign shifted into high gear.17 Company B’s self-promotions, in which Mailman’s ambiguous identity is key, underscore the various tensions embedded in these disparate projects. Amalgamated in the presence of this female Aboriginal actor, Mailman demonstrates the variety— and permeability—of identity positions that Rosalind inhabits. This production challenges reductive understandings of cross-cultural and intercultural contacts by highlighting the characters’ multiple identities and by framing Arden as an open 13 The all-Aboriginal production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream in the 1997 Festival of the Dreaming was seen as an important landmark in imagining canonical texts as acceptable dramatic vehicles for Aboriginal actors, as Julietta Jameson notes. See Jameson, “As You Like It, Have a Go.” The Daily Telegraph Friday, May 21, 1999. The increasing number of financially successful Aboriginal productions, including notable interventions like Leah Purcell’s one-woman play Box the Pony, also contributed to the rising profile of Aboriginal theatre. Leah Purcell’s work (scripted by Scott Rankin and based on Purcell’s life) also premiered at the 1997 Festival of the Dreaming and enjoyed box office success in London. A written version of this play has been printed by Sceptre. See Scott Rankin and Leah Purcell, Box the Pony (Sydney: Sceptre, 1997). 14 Jameson, “As You Like It.” A production of Othello staged in June of this year featured a young actor of color in the title role. 15 Native Title acknowledged the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to the land they had inhabited prior to the white settlement in 1788. This legislature reversed the legal myth of terra nullius [empty land] and corrected the fiction that Captain Cook took “possession” of Australia “with the consent of the Natives.” See Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 87. 16 The disjuncture between the two events that marked the bicentennial anniversary of European settlement (or Australia/Invasion Day) in 1988, in which more than 20,000 indigenous marchers and their supporters staged a counterprotest to the government’s celebration of British sovereignty, also prompted re-evaluations of English influence. 17 For discussions about the political and social struggles surrounding the Olympic games, see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, The Olympics at the Millennium: Power, Politics, and the Game (Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

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place of welcome. As a spectator at several of these performance events, I must confess that I found this permeable model of identity to be theatrically compelling and immensely pleasurable. The actors’ performance of diverse identities and their insistence on Arden as a space of integration work to alter established notions of homeland, Australian history, and the practice of racial segregation within those traditions. By positioning an indigenous presence as central to these goals, the production defies Australian multicultural discourse that is frequently predicated on Aboriginal absence. Yet this underscoring of Aboriginal centrality becomes less efficacious as a mode of intervention when it relies on essentialized and ahistorical depictions of Aboriginal experience. Finding the Fault Lines: Multiculturalism in Australian Politics The fault lines of Australian multiculturalism, fissures created by the country’s settlement and racial histories, offer an important backdrop to the Company B production and the significance of its privileging an Aboriginal presence.18 The rhetoric of assimilation has long accompanied the myth of an Anglo-Celtic Australian identity, a myth that privileges a settlement history just over 200 years old rather than an Aboriginal history that stretches back over sixty thousand years.19 After a period of Aboriginals being able to claim limited rights as “honorary white persons,” the inclusiveness of Australian identity began to expand when Australians voted in a 1967 referendum to allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be included in the nation’s census; prior to the referendum, these groups literally did

18 Public discussion of genocide, including cultural genocide, has gained prominence in the last 20 years. Australia did ratify the United Nation Convention on Genocide in 1949, with many politicians at the time professing Australia’s “clean record” on the genocide question. Recent exposure about the degree of governmental aggression toward Aborigines has made many reexamine claims of this sort. For one of many intelligent contributions to the genocide debate, see Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Victoria: Viking Books (Penguin), 2001). 19 According to Jennifer Sabbioni, archaeologists date the earliest inhabitation of the continent at between 60,000 and 120,000 years ago. Recent discoveries may push back the dates of indigenous presence an additional 55,000 years. Josephine Flood states that Australian Aboriginal culture is the longest continuous cultural history in the world even as she acknowledges Aboriginal rejection of the scientific impetus behind such dates. See Sabbioni, Indigenous Australian Voices: A Reader eds. Jennifer Sabbioni, Kay Schaffer, and Sidonie Smith (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998), xx; Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime rev. ed. (Sydney: Collins, 1989). It should be noted that the historical tensions between Australians of English and of Irish backgrounds seem to have subsided, in part because of the influx of newer immigrant groups. People of English and Irish background are now assumed to be relatively congenial and to be the major contributors to the “mainstream” of Australian culture. For further details, see Minorities: Cultural Diversity in Sydney, Eds. Shirley Fitzgerald and Garry Wotherspoon, (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1995).

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not count.20 Even after the referendum, the Australian government maintained its infamous “White Australia” immigration policy that insisted on strict and limited quotas of non-European immigrants.21 Immigrant—not Aboriginal—concerns prompted advocacy for a version of cultural pluralism called multiculturalism.22 Advocacy for Aboriginal people, however, remained largely absent from Australian conceptions of multiculturalism. This exclusion became even more striking during the official period of reconciliation between indigenous and settler peoples (1991– 2000),23 a time when two key debates informed the development and practice of reconciliation: Native Title,24 focused on Aboriginal land rights debates and the repercussions of the Mabo decision and the experience of the Stolen Generations.25 20 Being defined as an “honorary white person” was dependent on one’s standing within the white community and granted Aboriginals an exception from the Aborigine’s Act of 1944. The legislative act is representative of legal reform during an era (1944–67) that many indigenous people compare with South African apartheid. See Smith and Schaeffer, Indigenous Australian Voices, eds. Sabbioni, Schaffer, and Smith, pp. xlvi–xlvii. For information on the 1967 referendum, see “The Meaning of Reconciliation.” Keynote address by Evelyn Scott, Chairperson for the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation at the conference Remedies to Racial and Ethnic Economic Inequality. Adelaide, September 22, 1998. Speech available at the Indigenous Law Resources, Reconciliation and Social Justice Library. For other speeches by Scott, see http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/rsjproject/rsjlibrary/index.html. 21 During the 1980s, the immigration of non–English-speaking populations steadily increased, making the diversity of Australia’s population even more apparent. 22 Part of this retreat may be due to the concern that Australia was having difficulty retaining immigrants, as about 25% emigrated from Australia despite their prior intensions to settle in the country permanently. See Gerard Sullivan and Peter A. Jackson. “Introduction: Ethnic Minorities and the Lesbian and Gay Community.” Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives. Journal of Homosexuality, 36.3–4 (1999):1–28, 25. It should also be noted that the emerging multicultural policy promoted the prescriptive and limiting notion that each of the non-Anglo and non-Celtic Australian ethnic groups would express and experience their culture in a homogeneous fashion. 23 I am grateful to Ravi DeCosta for providing me with these dates. 24 The following are useful resources for a discussion of the differences between customary native title and legal arguments about land ownership; History and Native Title, eds. Christine Choo and Shawn Hollbach (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, Centre for Western Australian History, 2003); Richard H. Bartlett, Native Title in Australia (Sydney: Butterworths, 2000); Edward George Wensing, Comparing Native Title and Anglo-Australian Land Law: Two Different Timelines, Two Different Cultures and Two Different Laws (Lyneham, ACT: Australia Institute, 1999). 25 While government policy interested in maintaining a “White Australia” constitutes a dramatic instance of Aboriginal displacement, there were other informal and individually motivated instances as well; for instance, some Aboriginal groups were forced to evacuate their land to serve the interests of differing settlement groups. Some settlers viewed the kidnapping of young Aboriginal children as a laudable way to secure a captive workforce. Recent films based on testimonies from survivors of this experience have recently gained international attention, including Rabbit-proof Fence (2002) based on the narrative of Doris Pilkington Gamara. Deborah Mailman plays a supporting role in this film as a maid subjected to the sexual exploitation of her white “employer.” Despite some politicians referring to official reconciliation as having been “accomplished” during the 1990s, the Stolen Generations’

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The term Stolen Generations refers to those who survived a campaign that lasted over a century (from the 1860s to the 1970s) and removed Aboriginal children from their families and their homelands.26 Political efforts to consider Aboriginal experience as central to multicultural debates remain largely unsuccessful because multiculturalism continues to be thought of as a truce between “settler” desires for a socially harmonious society and immigrant desires to retain aspects of their non-Australian heritage rather than as transformative model of social justice. This compromised model of multiculturalism—formulated as immigrants’ retention of a diluted, singular version of their cultural background and, as such, unconcerned with Aboriginal causes—still faces formidable political opponents who see attempts at inclusion as necessarily divisive. What remained to be seen at the century’s end is whether such diversity would be applauded or whether assimilation would again be touted as the best means of preserving “Australian” culture. While some condemn a homogeneous multiculturalism as being against the AngloCeltic majority, what is ignored is often the ways in which such multiculturalism is also against Aboriginality. The public model of multiculturalism is capable accommodating an essentialized Aboriginal presence (in which “Aboriginal” often substitutes for the “natural”)—an essentialism that offers limited political efficacy within land-rights debates but that obscures the dispossession and discrimination that Aborigines experienced at the hands of settler culture as well as that history’s contemporary impact on Aboriginal life.27 Australian multiculturalism thus far is ill equipped to allow for sustained considerations of how power might press on Aboriginal, settler, and immigrant bodies in different ways. One of the chief drawbacks of this multicultural model is that it values plurality but does not allow for a diachronic model of experience. For Aborigines, the historical experience of being dispossessed from their homeland remains a source of bereavement with palpable material and cultural costs, as Rosalind’s estrangement in the dukedom (as performed by Mailman) made evident.

experiences suggest that the concept of reconciliation held rhetorical currency but resulted in little tangible change. 26 I am using Robert Tickner’s dates here from, Taking a Stand: Land Rights to Reconciliation. (Crow’s Nest, N.S.W.: Allen and Unwin, 2001), p. 2. Regional dates vary slightly; Henry Reynolds provides geographically specific data (see Indelible Stain, pp. 162–3). Tickner focuses on the government removal of children; individual advocates of separating Aboriginal children from their home publicly agitated for this cause as early as 1810, as Henry Reynolds deftly demonstrates (see Indelible Stain, p. 159). There are abundant similarities between these policies and North American policies toward Native Americans and First Nations peoples, policies that frequently defined the eradication of indigenous culture as a supposedly civilizing gesture rather than as cultural genocide. See Emily Potter and Kay Schaeffer, “Rabbit-Proof Fence, Relational Ecologies, and the Commodification of Indigenous Experience.” Australian Humanities Review (31–2) (2004), accessible at http:// www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/current.html. In the last 40 years, those who underwent this displacement have attempted to make the emotional and cultural costs of this governmental policy known to fellow Australians and to the international community. 27 Stratton and Ang, 119, 155.

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Critic Joanne Tompkins offers a particularly efficacious suggestion for these limitations when she proposes replacing the term multiculturalism with polynationalism. Tompkins sees the term polynationalism, proffered within a footnote of her writing, as capable of highlighting the: intersection of the competing forces of nationality, nationalism, ethnicity, identity and subjectivity [and] more accurately addressing the interdependent relationship of theories such as post-colonialism and feminism with multiculturalism ... Poly-nationalism would not pretend to unite disparate groups ... instead it would reconsider the relationships in contested space. 28

Tompkins’s concept of polynationalism is especially salient for indigenous people faced with the legal myth of terra nullius. Given the semiotic register of Tompkins’s term, polynationalism underscores the role of geopolitical conflict in the communal agendas and identities. Polynationalism acknowledges the contestations between these groups and allows for sustained consideration of power and privilege. However, in its focus on national (and thus collective) identities, polynationalism risks obscuring intragroup differences so that an individual’s particular constellation of identities (such as linguistic preference, class, gender, and sexual orientation) can be obscured or overshadowed by collective “national” or “racial” concerns.29 What polynationalism risks is the elision of individual identities that do not correspond with a hegemonic national identity. If the nation is figured as masculine, white, and heterosexual, those whose bodies, experiences, or practices are not mirrored in that image are positioned as marginal to the national body and, by extension, to nationalistic concerns. Polynationalism privileges some of the forces that are especially salient for Aborigines (that is, colonialism), but it also minimizes the impact of gender and sexuality in one’s self-conception. Within theatrical performance, the potential and limits of polynationalism can be enacted and embodied rather than explored in abstract arguments. There are a variety of avenues through which the past can be imagined in performance, directly (through the subject matter of the play–text) or indirectly (through casting and production choices). The theatrical apparatus (including casting, physical props, and design elements) along the audience can create a polynationalistic framework from without, even when such a sensibility is not apparent within the play–text.30 Strategies from 28 Tompkins, “Inter-referentiality: Interrogating Multicultural Drama in Australia.” Our Australian Theatre of the 1990s, pp. 117–31. 29 At the moment, Australian records of ethnicity are based on two main indicators, namely, the individual’s country of birth and the language spoken within the home. Many argue that the data itself are quite reliable, although this construction of ethnicity is “limited in terms of providing an overall picture of racial and cultural diversity within contemporary Australia.” I would argue that this is particularly true of Aboriginal populations, given the Stolen Generations experience and the prohibition against Aboriginal languages in many state-run schools. Sullivan and Jackson, 9. 30 This distinction stems from my reading of Laurence Senelick’s “The Queer Root of Theater,” which focuses on the negotiations of sexuality rather than of race or ethnicity, as I do here. Senelick suggests that the status of the nonheterosexual playwright in relation to his/ her society is the “raw material” of queer theater. Senelick is not arguing that superimposing

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without the play–text can be quite useful in unraveling the ways that objects, icons, and performers’ bodies are imbricated in larger cultural ideologies. Critical responses to a production provide an additional resource, especially when these responses read some signifiers and bodies as significant and others as inconsequential. The historical context that informs the identities of performers may be read asymmetrically, even within a polynationalistic production. Armfield’s decision to cast Aboriginal actor Bob Maza as the usurped Duke was applauded by theatre critics as a political critique of land rights; none, however, saw any relationship between Rosalind’s upbringing in a hostile environment separate from her immediate family and the experiences of the Stolen Generations.31 This inability to see the parallels between Rosalind’s experience and that of the Stolen Generations is even more striking because Deborah Mailman had recently toured Australia and abroad with a performance piece, The 7 Stages of Grieving, that fused Aboriginal storytelling techniques and more “traditional” theatre methods to convey the experiences of the Stolen Generations.32 Mailman became publicly identified with this “theatre of remembering” and had just won an Australian Film Industry award for her role in the film Radiance, which staged the repercussions of the Stolen Generations among three Aboriginal sisters.33 The critics’ failure to recognize the oblique—and overt— references to the Stolen Generations and racial assimilation (such as the whiteface) within this production of As You Like It suggests the ghosting of Aboriginal experience even when Australian theatrical narratives directly reference this loss.34 The critics would identify and champion some issues central to Aboriginal identity (such as land rights) featured in the production but also ignore the profound costs biographical information about a playwright constitutes a queer play, or even that gay themes can be read as queer theater. Rather, he suggests that the sensibilities of the play’s collaborators can create a production that can be considered queer theater. His provisional definition of the term is as follows: “To speak in general terms, queer theater is grounded in and expressive of unorthodox sexuality or gender identity, antiestablishment and confrontational in tone, experimental and unconventional in format, with stronger links to performance art and what the Germans call Kleinkunst, that is, revue, cabaret, and variety, than to traditional forms of drama.” Senelick, “The Queer Root of Theater,” The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater. Eds. Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla. New York and London: New York University Press, 2002. 31 The environment of the court is clearly hostile toward all its inhabitants, as Celia discovers. However, Rosalind’s presence especially instigates Duke Frederick’s viciousness. 32 Theatre critics have widely discussed and praised Mailman’s performance in this piece. Veronica Kelly details how this specific production fits alongside efforts to export “Australian” theatre; Helena Frehan also offers an account of this performance. See Veronica Kelly, “The Globalized and the Local.” 33 The term theatre of remembering refers to a historically immediate theatrical piece that emphasizes the cultural specificity of the dramatic text and its relation to the central actor and the community (or communities) to which she or he belongs. See Kelly, 9. 34 The term ghosting stems from my reading of Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian, which focuses on how lesbians are “ghosted—or made to seem invisible—by culture itself,” so that they can later be “exorcised” from the “real” world in which they initially appear. See Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, esp. 4–8, 46–60.

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of Aboriginal assimilation, which this Rosalind also portrays. Certainly, Company B’s production offered the raw materials with which the audience might have begun a sustained consideration of the experiences of the Stolen Generations and its cultural repercussions. The critics’ inability to contextualize Rosalind’s alienation does not evacuate that historical experience of meaning; instead, the critics’ silence may indicate a need to restrategize the representation of such experience. Or if, as Herbert Blau asserts, “an audience without a history is not an audience,” the various histories of these Sydney audiences might prevent them from cocreating a theatre of remembering that acknowledges Aboriginal displacement.35 The responses of theatre critics suggest that, at the moment, the abridged histories of Aboriginals render their relationship with the land as nostalgic rather than consequential, a framing that speaks to larger absences and misreadings of Aboriginal oppression. Even with the rising number of spectators ready to pay for the experience of watching all-Aboriginal productions, the rarity of racially diverse casts may speak to the difficulty of considering Aboriginal and settler histories concurrently.36 Aboriginal actors have proven that they can function as a financial commodity for theatrical companies. Unfortunately, this achievement does not ensure that their presence amounts to an intervention. Mailman discloses in a newspaper interview that: As black actors, it’s a balance between social concern and personal development. Hopefully we are past the days where we do roles that are token blackfellas. The fact is, when we walk on to the stage it’s still a political statement, whether the intention is there or not. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for people to simply see us as actors.37

Mailman is attuned to the political ways in which the spectators’ gazes visited upon her and fellow Aboriginal actors is often racialized, interpreting Mailman as representative of all Aboriginals while constructing white actors as neutral and individual. Despite Mailman’s training and craft, she is not able to depoliticize the meanings that others might visit upon her body, nor is she able to fully direct their gazes (and ears and minds). Mailman implies that color-blind casting, expressed here as the utopian desire “for people to simply see us as actors,” is not yet a possibility. Mailman’s concerns seem especially salient given the amount of attention paid to her and her fellow actors’ Aboriginal background; although Mailman’s American Film Institute (AFI) award and Maza’s seniority helped ensure that their performances received print space in critical reviews, most reviewers seemed to view Irma Woods and Bradley Marquahar’s Aboriginality as the most significant aspect of 35 Herbert Blau, “Odd, Anonymous Needs: The Audience in a Dramatized Society,” Performing Arts Journal 10.1 (1989), pp. 34–42. Marvin Carlson talks about this process in productive ways; see Performance: A Critical Introduction, pp. 196–8 and his “Theatre Audiences and the Reading of Performance.” Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance. Eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), pp. 82–98. 36 Black Swan Theatre Company, established in 1991, has made a practice of casting Aboriginal actors in canonical plays as well as staging texts by and about Aborigines. 37 Jane Hampson, “The People’s Choice”; Julietta Jameson, “As You Like It.”

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their performances as Phebe and Silvius. In contrast, the critics ignored the ways in which Polish actor Jacek Koman adds to Australia’s diversity with his entrance upon Australian territory and his performance of his character’s egalitarian relationships with the other Arden–Australian inhabitants.38 Theatre critic Helen Gilbert notes the many ways in which the audience’s gaze poses particular hazards for Aboriginal actors. She contends that: contemporary Aboriginal performing arts have proliferated under the banner of theater consumed primarily by non-Aboriginal audiences. Moreover, as arts which put the Aboriginal body on display, they operate within a representational system which often fetishises visible signs of racial and sexual difference. Hence, the very conditions of reception for Aboriginal theater tend to facilitate readings which reflect the desires of mainstream society. And yet theatre can also provide an important space for multiple and specific expressions of Aboriginality, precisely because it is a social practice that usually involves complex negotiations at each stage of the production process.39

Theatrical performance can confront the social practice of insisting on the “naturalness” of Aboriginal identity by highlighting the precise political negotiations of identity. Company B’s own production featured Aboriginal actors in pastoral, fascist, and romantic roles, suggesting a range of possible Aboriginal political affiliations.40 Gilbert contends that such challenges to a singular version of Aboriginality are an “industrial and political issue as well as a representational choice.”41 By inhabiting a variety of theatrical positions, Aboriginal actors can maintain a “scrupulously visible political interest” in their resistance to mainstream codification of their experience.42 Given the variety of ways that the hierarchy of theatrical traditions is reified, it is not surprising that some Aboriginal actors consider playing canonical roles as a mark of their collective progress and individual mastery. The inverse is not true. Bob Maza, who played Duke Senior, speaks positively of his experience as an Aboriginal actor performing non-Aboriginal texts: I’ve always worked with Koori [Aborigines from New South Wales]43 drama students and I’ve always said: “Do Shakespeare. Our tool of trade is the English language so you might

38 Parmita Kapadia also insists on the plurality involved in national identity in her discussion of the diverse “Indianness” in Ghouse’s production of Hamlet. For her analysis of this production, see “Jatra Shakespeare: Indigenous Indian Theater and the Postcolonial Stage” in this volume. 39 Helen Gilbert, “Reconciliation? Aboriginality and Australian theatre in the 1990s.” Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s. Ed. Veronica Kelley (Sydney: Rodopi, 1998), 71–88, 75. 40 I do not refer to Armfield’s casting as “color-blind” because he, and theatre critics, consistently see the actors’ race as contributing to the production’s meaning. 41 Gilbert, “Reconciliation?,” p. 80. 42 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1988), 205. 43 Aboriginal populations often name themselves according to the part of Australia where they live. For a further delineation of the terms different Aboriginal populations use

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as well go to the master.” And it’s funny, because my words are coming back at me now in that what we’re doing here is amazing stuff.44

For Maza, the specificity of “our tool of trade” indicates Aboriginal entitlement and responsibilities to the “master” of the English language, a welcome step away from assuming indigenous incompetence (which settlement discourse historically took for granted).45 And there is a precedent, as Helen Gilbert notes, for “including ‘Aboriginalised’ productions of classical texts as important signs of intervention in the historical processes that have stereotyped representations of indigenous peoples or simply erased them from our stages.”46 In other words, such productions allow Aboriginal actors literally to perform their familiarity with and competency within white culture, a performance more important for its demonstration of the actors’ social respectability than their artistry. If Aboriginal actors repeatedly perform racially inflected parts, the intervention is limited—unless the performance prompts its viewers to reconsider the stereotypical and historical conflation between the actor’s marginalized off-stage identity and that of the character he or she animates, as Company B occasionally achieves. Maza’s invocation for Aboriginal mastery of colonial texts partially echoes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s narrative of indigenous and colonized peoples acquiring discursive power through their mastery of colonial texts.47 Certainly, Maza’s call for inclusion is an important first step, but it is also necessary to consider how Aboriginal actors and Australian audiences might challenge this “tool of trade” and the colonial inheritances such a tool represents in order to engage with colonial texts and their current culture in the way that Spivak encourages. This reconfiguration of canonical texts is especially significant because Aboriginal adaptation can assuage settler anxieties about their own position. Gilbert suggests that settlers deploy Aboriginality to legitimate their own presence in their country and secure a particular, ancient relationship with the land that they cannot obtain through their own historical experience: The indigenising functions of Aboriginality are equally important to a settler/invader society anxious to legitimize its presence in a country it has sequestered from its original inhabitants. In this formulation, Aboriginal culture, especially in its traditional guises, is now valorised as a conduit to the land and to a very ancient human history: thus the incorporation of Aboriginal elements into mainstream art forms functions to ensure the

to refer to themselves, look at Wendy Holland, “Reimagining Aboriginality in the Circus Space,” especially 92. 44 Julietta Jameson “As You Like It.” 45 Maza’s formulation here of Shakespeare’s value is one of many attitudes performers can have toward the text; his perspective is quite distinct, for instance, from some of the Quebecois performers’ ambivalent investment in the text, as Jennifer Drouin details in her essay “Nationalizing the Bard: Québécois Adaptations of Shakespeare Since the Quiet Revolution.” 46 Helen Gilbert, “Reconciliation,” 79. 47 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic. Ed. S. Harasym (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

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While the conflation of Aboriginal presence with land and nature remains a recurring theme in Australian theatre, the ways in which Aboriginal experience is seen as a conduit to authentic “Australianness” suggests a model of inclusion that retains little agency for Aboriginal actors. The settlers’ use of this “authentic” indigenous presence within theatre obscures the voices of the Aborigines themselves, who might wish to speak a separate story in an altogether different register. Staging Multiple Identities A short exchange in the Company B production reveals how actors’ bodies can unsettle easy conflations of rhetorical tropes and the actors’ social realities by foregrounding categories of racial difference. After Orlando, played by white actor Aaron Blabley, identifies himself and swears to the sincerity of his love “by the white hand of Rosalind,” the women pause and look at each other (III.ii.394). Rosalind takes a conspicuous glance at her own skin. Then she and Celia burst out laughing, while Orlando looks on in confusion. The moment initially seems merely to be a flip commentary on Rosalind’s darker complexion. Orlando’s inability to describe his beloved accurately suggests the blindness of love, the intensity of his infatuation, and also hints at the history of racism underpinned by Petrarchan aesthetics that conflate the beloved’s beauty and complexion in the valorization of fairness.49 Celia and Rosalind’s shared amusement allows them to explore theatrically “metaphors” like these that “mask the hierarchies that make racial domination frequently seems [sic] so ‘natural,’ so invisible, indeed so attractive” if one is to adequately engage with antiracist movements.50 This moment of performance exposes the consolidation of hierarchies of color and beauty, in which the national body is racially specific (as it is in Australia’s white, masculinized settler mythology) and emphatically so within this production’s court context. Yet the complexity of racial performance within this production invites further consideration of this exchange. Rosalind, now without makeup in the forest of Arden, did wear stylized white makeup when introduced to Orlando—as did the other members of Duke Frederick’s court, all of whom appeared unnaturally white. Because Aboriginal and white actors both perform such racial malleability, the makeup design allows them to unsettle easy notions of visibility and binarity. Once in Arden, the complexion of Kirstie Hutton, the Anglo-Australian actor playing Celia, 48 Helen Gilbert, “Reconciliation?” 73. 49 In her book, Things of Darkness, Kim F. Hall demonstrates the influential role that male approval plays in this process of conflating beauty with “fairness,” so that the absence of male favor can cause “blackness” and contributes to a language of beauty that allows for disparities among women without an interrogation of male power. Hall, Things of Darkness, 177–210. 50 Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 7.

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Kristine Hutton and Deborah Mailman in Company B’s As You Like It.

does not function as a foil for Mailman’s darker skin because Celia follows through with her spoken decision to “with a kind of umber smirch my face” and smears on a tawny bronzer. This pronouncement within the play–text is rarely literalized in this play’s performance history.51 By deciding to darken her own “white hand” and her face, Celia obscures the visible difference between herself and Rosalind and undertakes an act of bodily transformation, showing the range of identities the pair might adapt as their move to navigate racial, gender, and class identities. Rosalind’s arrival in Arden represents her first encounter with nature and away from the aristocratic court. Rosalind’s shift in complexion (to Mailman’s darker, actual shade) visually reinforces her emerging identification as Aboriginal in this natural space. This sequence first disrupts the conflation between Aborigines and nature and then 51 I was able to find only one photo from RSC productions within the last 50 years that literalized Celia’s decision; in it, Fiona Shaw as Celia (1985) has a few streaks of dirt smeared on her face in some of the Arden photos. Initially, I wondered whether the range of photos meant that this makeup choice to dirty Shaw’s face was executed during rehearsals and not in performance. Carol Chillington Rutter helpfully asked Fiona Shaw about this detail after reading my paper; Shaw confirmed that this makeup appeared at the beginning of the Arden scenes in performance. I appreciate their collective assistance in clarifying this detail.

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reconfirms it. The only characters in Arden with artificial complexions are Celia, whose white face is darkened, and the white actor playing Touchstone (Michael Whittet), whose face retains the eerie whiteface of the court.52 The malleability of race in the Company B production unsettles the “naturalness” of whiteness. Abby L. Ferber maintains that “in order to produce whiteness as a stable, natural, given identity, the boundaries of whiteness must be specified and secured ... This act of boundary maintenance was [historically] necessary to construct racial categories,” a difficulty that causes confusion (for Orlando) and scrupulous regulation (for Touchstone) once in Arden’s woods.53 Armfield’s casting of Mailman allows him not only to expose Renaissance conventions of beauty and their implicit racial ideologies but also to expose the gap between Mailman’s body and the play–text. The constructedness of her stage image thereby becomes evident, inviting the audience to question the visibility of racial identity. Mailman’s presence beside Celia’s darkened skin furthers what Helen Gilbert sees as the chief advantages of Brechtian theater, namely, “dismantling the fixity of represented racial categories” and the opportunity to “complicate notions of race based on a simple, stable and visible body-based sign system.”54 For her part, Celia’s altered physical appearance indicates her solidarity with her disenfranchised friend (a solidarity emphasized in this production) and logistically helps to facilitate their escape. But Hutton’s racial performance also suggests that race, like gender, can be considered a mutable identity and therefore adaptable for specific ends. Similarly, Rosalind’s court makeup highlights the pliability of visible racial markers and thereby reinforces the artificiality of whiteness. In Company B’s archives of the press releases and theatrical reviews of Armfield’s production, the most prevalent topic was that of so-called color-blind casting. Critics interrogated and considered the political implications of Armfield’s casting decisions, sometimes sensitively, sometimes not. Any critic who embarked on such a discussion (and there were few who did not remark on racial matters at all) seemed to understand the discussion as one involving emerging Australian identities, suggesting an emerging incorporation of Aboriginal experience within the imagined national identity, a progressive departure from an Australian teleology that imagines white, nonimmigrant Anglo-Celtic experience as normative. However, the reviews failed to recognize the ways that most actors performed “whiteness” as a profoundly artificial, if normative, identity in the repressive court of Duke Frederick. This exclusion is perhaps explicable within a modern context that often fails to see whiteness as a racialized category, as Lisa Young argues: “Part of the success of ‘Whiteness’ is that most of the time it does not appear to exist at all.”55 That theatre

52 Whittet’s profile grew after this production, in part because of his supporting role in Baz Luhrman’s film Moulin Rouge. 53 Abby L. Ferber. White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 23. 54 Gilbert, “Reconciliation?,” 81. 55 Lisa Young, “A Nasty Piece of Work: A Psychoanalytic Study of Sexual and Racial Difference in ‘Mona Lisa,’” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 188–206.

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critics fail to comment on the artificiality of the assumed “norm” of performed Australian identities indicates the degree to which whiteness as a category remains invisible in political debates and in the viewing practices of these theatre critics. Even though reviewers repeatedly term Armfield’s casting as “color-blind,” his casting of Aboriginal actor Bob Maza as Duke Senior is in fact a strategic choice that allows the production to participate in larger cultural debates. Specifically, Maza’s presence allows the production to underscore the ways in which AboriginalAustralian land claims render older versions of Australian history problematic; this critique unsettles the notion of right rule, thereby allowing the production to be read as socially progressive. Maza’s exile from the court also invites audience members to reflect on a tradition that associates Aborigines with a particularly close relationship to nature. Director Armfield is quoted as saying that: All casting is political. The fact of selection carries meaning. So, as well as being absolutely colour-blind in terms of my broad approach to casting Rosalind (AFI best actress Deborah Mailman, star of Radiance), I’m also conscious that ... our indigenous actors do bring a sense of being at peace with the land with them on stage. So, when Bob Maza’s Duke Senior talks of finding “books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,” there’s an appropriate resonance of Aboriginal relations with the land. But we’re not making a tract of it.56

Armfield wants to have it both ways: He recognizes the political import of Maza’s presence and yet disavows its political effect. Consequently, Maza becomes a figure that facilitates progressive political critique but is then evacuated of meaning. Armfield’s strategy is somewhat successful, as theatre critics write that Armfield’s casting “gives the play’s theme of reconciliation a contemporary focus.”57 Theatre critic Joyce Morgan states in her interview of Maza “that casting an indigenous actor as Duke Senior, the original custodian turfed off his land by political chicanery, gives Shakespeare’s comedy a different spin.”58 Morgan confirms Maza’s assessment, affirming that “it’s an interesting political statement casting a Koori in the role.”59 Curiously, Morgan and Maza refrain from articulating what the larger implications of this “different spin” and “political statement” might be—namely, a recasting of government authority so that Aboriginal agendas are pivotal rather than peripheral. Maza’s authority is presented as charismatic and appealing. Surrounded, as Maza is, by young white men apparently devoted to him and wearing similar batik clothing, such staging suggests the allure of Aboriginal knowledge even in the face of his immobilized governmental authority. Maza can be read as recasting the absolute authority that he could claim as a Duke; his response to Orlando’s initial aggression serves as a pedagogical corrective to Orlando’s assumption that “all things had been savage here” (2.7.107–109). Duke Senior’s jurisdiction in Arden is painstakingly benevolent; the intense engagement that his followers demonstrate during his 56 57 58 1999. 59

Jeremy Eccles, “Armfield’s Arden.” John McCallum, “Bard bent for a purpose.” Joyce Morgan. “Where there’s a Will ... .” Sydney Morning Herald Friday, May 21, Morgan. “Where there’s a Will ...

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speeches addressing nature suggest that part of his attraction stems from his ability to deftly interpret the natural world around him. Nonetheless, the simplest privileges of the patriarch—including giving Rosalind away in marriage—are still denied to him. Additionally, the apparent serenity of Duke Senior’s exile undermines the painfully real consequences of Aboriginal displacement in Australia. Further attention to how the Duke’s assumed power is compromised throughout the production would suggest the substantial symbolic and limited logistical power of Aboriginal influence. The casting of Maza, therefore, allows the theatrical production to be read as enlarging Aboriginals’ cultural influence, even though Australian reversals of land rights policies remain subject to the “conversion” of others, a process that is by no means guaranteed. Casting the Aboriginal actors in the roles linked with wilderness and exile establishes an initial Aboriginal presence in Arden/Australia. Their later presence in Arden, which appears increasingly suburban in the last acts of the play, challenges essentialized notions of Aboriginal identity as necessarily natural, and yet the danger of essentializing Aboriginality lingers, as we see in Armfield’s statement: I don’t think I know an indigenous actor who doesn’t bring with them [sic] a strong sense of connection with the land, for very obvious reasons ... but it is important [for] the actor who plays that part [the exiled Duke] carries with them a sense of peace.60

Armfield barely avoids making totalizing comments about Aboriginal actors by referencing the specific qualities that an actor needs to play the role of Duke Senior in the production. In attributing Maza’s peacefulness to him as an individual rather than as a member of an ethnic group, Armfield gives Maza some agency and control over his reception, albeit one that conforms to a continued association between Aboriginality and nature divorced from material claims for land rights. There is no singular way to be Aboriginal, yet theatres rarely stage diverse or complex versions of Aboriginal life. A key intervention of the Company B production is the inclusion of Aboriginal actors in roles that are not only “natural” or rustic, but also urban and suburban—and whose associations with the natural are not merely inherent qualities but a learned set of attributes threatened by the physical displacement of the Stolen Generations.61 Yet theatrical companies’ failure to produce varied images of Aboriginality suggests their lack of interest in staging authentic Aboriginal experiences. Often this apathy results in representing Aboriginality in a voyeuristic mode with faint gestures toward settler absolution. In the Company B production’s movement from the limitless space of Arden to one surrounded by—and then becomes—suburbia, the scenery change corresponds with Australia’s history of land tenure and Aboriginal displacement. A polynationalist perspective appreciates the plurality of this performance but would suggest that the characters 60 Morgan. “Where there’s a Will ... 61 It should also be noted that while there is a sense of shared indigenous culture, the cultures are not uniform and vary by region. Many prominent Aboriginals speak about their “learning” to be Aboriginal, especially in regard to indigenous languages and familiarity with central landmarks in Aboriginal civil rights. Deborah Mailman speaks of this process in Purcell, black chicks talking. Ed. Leah Purcell (Sydney: Hodder Press, 2002), 3–4, 19–20.

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inhabit suburbia because of the frontier’s transformation, a historical reality that resulted from infringement of Aboriginal land rights. The variety of Aboriginal experience staged within this production allowed its performed “Australianness” to resist partially any essentialized notions of Aboriginality. By allowing the concept of race as a primarily visual category to haunt the production—complicating those moments by staging Celia and Rosalind’s laughter about the latter’s “white hand,” an indicator of many alterations in appearance—this production offers an understanding of race that resists ocularity. This production accomplishes this assessment of ocular supremacy by the actors’ foregrounding their characters’ confusion when their visual strategies of knowledge fail them. These choices allow Company B to perform a theatre of remembering by expanding and illuminating the material and cultural concerns of both Aboriginal and settler population—as well as performing the joy from such connections. Staging Desire Desire in Arden is a mutable marvel. Celia chooses her romantic partner with a rapidity that astonishes her onstage onlookers. Phebe and Orlando apparently substitute their love objects with little protest (or even with eagerness) during the final scene.62 Rosalind repeatedly alters her gender and thereby proliferates the range of erotic expression within the play–text. An alternate press photo of the Company B production highlights the malleability of female desire within the play–text: a cabaret-style head shot of Mailman (Figure 8) who retains her doubled drag but with a decidedly different expression (more intimate, less benign) than the “official” portrait of Mailman in which her wide grin testifies to her congeniality.63 Here the more expansive camera angle allows greater exposure of Mailman’s bare shoulders as her raised eyebrows and pursed lips speak to a lively Rosalind; the placement of her signature in the bottom right-hand corner “authorizes” the photo. This alternate image of Mailman, whether read as startled or seductive, demonstrates the sexuality of her character, whose desire becomes the linchpin of the play. The ambiguous appeal of this image signals the force of desire within the play. Desire crosses all boundaries, it seems, connecting the rustic and the aristocratic, the naïve and the artificial, and, in this production, the Aboriginal and the white. Despite the range of ways this performance transverses these binary identities, reviewers dilute this complexity by focusing on a singular type of connection: interracial heterosexual romance.64 The interracial romance of the Orlando and Rosalind in this production would become the focus of reviewers, implying that this “celebrat[ion of] the passion between the black and the white” is most representative of a progressive 62 The romantic triangles propel much of the plot with Arden, especially that of Rosalind-Phebe-Silvius and Rosalind-Ganymede-Orlando. Occasionally, productions do show Orlando’s hesitation—such as that directed by Declan Donnellan. 63 Company B circulated this photo among the Sydney press rather than featuring it as the centerpiece for its ad campaign. Cec Busby, “As You Like It, Company B Belvoir,” Revolver. Monday, June 7, 1999. 64 Barbara Karpinski. “As You Like It.” Sydney Star Observer. Thursday, June 3, 1999.

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Cabaret-style head shot of Deborah Mailman in Company B’s As You Like It.

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Australian agenda. Those who valorize interracial heterosexuality as the most transgressive and culturally productive relationship within this production, however, risk collapsing the separate histories of race, gender, and settlement within Australia. More important, such valorization also risks overlooking the centrality of homoerotic desire and gender play in Company B’s production. Company B’s casting and costume decisions further complicate the triangulations of desire within the play–text catalyzed by Rosalind’s cross-dressing adventures. In this production, the cross-dressed Touchstone (played by Matthew Whittet) and the casting of male actor Geoff Kelso as Audrey introduce a new constellation of erotic possibilities in an already intricate web of ardor.65 Significantly, Whittet’s and Kelso’s modes of cross-dressing and their reception by onstage characters are dissimilar. Whittet’s Touchstone, dressed in the uniform of a young Nazi girl, retains his masculine privilege and physicality while seeming oblivious of his clothing, whereas Audrey, played by the older Kelso, who wears the garb of a melodramatic ingénue, employs a more caricature-driven presentation style that includes prissy, hyperfeminine mannerisms and is treated as female.66 There are many lenses through which the spectator can maneuver her interpretations of Whittet’s Touchstone and Kelso’s Audrey based on which gendered cues she decides to privilege at any given moment. She can read actors’ bodies or gendered presentations, their professed desire, or their disavowals. If she focuses on the costumes of Touchstone and Audrey, she discovers a female–female pairing. If she privileges their gender performance and follows the aural cues of the play– text (no pronouns are altered), they become a male–female heterosexual couple. If she insists on recognizing the actors’ bodies, she witnesses male–male desire. The characters’ cross-dressing functions as a prism, allowing the audience to see gender as performed, layered, and fluid rather than as a phenomenon immediately known once the “truth” of the actor’s sex is read. The Renaissance performance conditions of this play–text framed male bodies as the raw material for the embodiment of all desires, however mercurial.67 Whittet and Kelso offer audiences an opportunity to see cross-dressing anew. In this production, with so many characters invested in maintaining artificial appearances, Touchstone emerges as the most rigorous sustainer of artifice. This performed artifice is signified by retaining his whiteface makeup through the production and touching up his lipstick and rouge when necessary. He carries insecticide into the forest, controlling the natural there as well. He attempts to regulate the actions of Audrey, whose naïveté is expressed in her insistently immature 65 Geoff Kelso, a middle-aged actor, challenges the assumed appeal of the younger boy– actor. 66 This characterization of Whittet’s costume is indebted to the observations of Penny Gay. Private conversation, Menzie’s Hotel in Sydney, July 9, 1999. 67 For further consideration of the figure of the boy actor, see the following: Janet Adelman’s “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model,” Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage. Eds. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: the Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Susan Zimmerman, Erotic Politic: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

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femininity. Despite the hazards the female adventurers imagine in Arden, Touchstone is the character to whom the natural proves the biggest threat. By preserving the artificiality of the fascist court, Touchstone pledges loyalty to a regime in which his doom is overdetermined: his dress, his desires, and his physical disability (a performed limp throughout the production) are all capital offenses according to the Nazi regime whose female uniform he wears. Although the threat of the costume’s affiliation is never entirely neutralized, the contrast between the regime’s uniforms (including the police uniforms worn by Aboriginal actors) and their wearers indicates the regime’s dependence on the most vulnerable members of its society to enact its cruelty. The spectacular visibility of Touchstone and Audrey allows them to be seen in a way that the female couples within this production (Rosalind–Celia and Rosalind–Phebe) are not, a pattern of visibility that corresponds depressingly well with the ways in which female–female eroticism has been perceived as invisible,68 as invisibly present,69 or as abundantly visible but construed as insignificant.70 The dearth of historical interest in female–female desire stems not from the scarcity of such representations, as Valerie Traub, among others, has shown. Instead, this apathy results from reading and interpretive practices that fail to engage adequately with such desire—or, in some instances, that deliberately obscure or obliterate its representations.71 The theatre reviews of the Company B production mirror this tendency to render female homoeroticism “invisible” by scantly discussing the production’s staging of female desire or its highly problematic staging of female– female desire as a transitional “phase” rather than as sustainable choice. This tendency to overlook female relationships, in their particularity or at all, becomes especially untenable in productions like this, which highlight Celia’s proclamation of allegiance to Rosalind, addressed to the patriarch in front of her beloved friend, in registers that are strikingly similar to those of heteroerotic exchanges and

68 Elizabeth Wahl’s work, which analyzes female friendship texts within a context of medical and juridical texts—as well as emerging models of domesticity and “companionate marriage”—complicates this formulation in productive ways. See Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 69 This particular phrase is indebted to Jackie Stacey’s description of the fragmentation of lesbian experience within “lesbian cultures” and in heterosexual cultures; Stacey sees lesbians as being “ascribed the contradictory positions of the invisible presence” in the latter. See Jackie Stacey, “The Invisible Difference: Lesbianism and Sexual Difference Theory,” unpublished paper. Cited by Martha Vicinus, They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong’: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity.” Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 467–97. 70 For further elaboration on this phenomenon and consideration of instances when female–female eroticism is palpably visible, see Valerie Traub, “The (in)significance of lesbian desire.” In The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 158–87. 71 Lillian Faderman was one of the first scholars to investigate specifically, albeit quickly, Renaissance representations of female homoeroticism. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women, From the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981. For a discussion on the obliteration of such representations, see Wahl, Invisible Relations, 8.

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even marital rites (I.ii.69–76).72 In this production, Hutton, who played Celia, threw herself at her father’s feet midway through the delivery of this speech, breaking into loud sobs that continued even after her father pried her away from his body and began stomping around the stage. Hutton’s choice demonstrates the dramatic centrality of their bond, particularly in the space of the court. Upon entering the boundaries of Arden, Phebe’s spoken attraction toward Ganymede/Rosalind becomes the prime opportunity for voicing female homoerotic desire. But this is an unused opportunity in this production. Irma Woods, playing Phebe, reverts to a cartoonish persona when struck with desire for Rosalind. Given that the heterosexual pairings within the play were performed with sincerity and some vulnerability—as were the Ganymede– Orlando interactions—Woods’ acting trivializes the most fervent expression of female homoeroticism within the text. In the final scene, Woods performs Phebe’s relief at having been coerced into marrying Silvius instead of Rosalind-as-Ganymede; staging Phebe’s affection for Rosalind/Ganymede as transitory and easily relinquished further minimizes the impact of female–female desire. Such minimization is, of course, nothing new: C.L. Barber, for instance, characterizes Phebe’s longings as a “girlish crush” and “aberrant affection [that] is happily got over when Rosalind reveals her identity and makes it manifest that Phebe has been loving a woman.”73 Barber’s narrative also serves, unfortunately, as an apt characterization of Woods’s performance, which compromises the production’s self-professed agenda of inclusion. Silence remains a particularly resonant performance opportunity for female actors, who can stage (literally) unscripted interventions through “open silences,” a strategy that theatre practitioners can employ to conjure a “politics of articulations” that centers on desire. It initially appears limiting to depict silence as a prime opportunity for articulating desire, especially desire that has been silenced in the ways that female–female desire has been. But while vocality is a central way of producing meaning within a play, actors have other resources besides the script to make desire legible and to, in Jill Dolan’s words, “change the conditions of what can be seen.”74 Armfield’s strategies of staging male desire highlight the same-sex eroticism within the text, primarily through the costuming and design decisions surrounding Touchstone and Audrey—a pair who surpasses the male homoeroticism of Ganymede and Orlando in a hypervisible manner. However, the visibility of this staging does not guarantee the positive representation of such relationships; indeed, Touchstone’s sexual rapacity and resistance to the norms of the dukedom and suburbia remain troubling, even as his performance exposes the gaps between the actors and their performed genders. While Armfield’s privileging of male–male homosexual affiliations is commendable, it also overshadows the ways in which the female characters might be seen and the ways in which their sexuality might be considered noteworthy. This discrepancy may indicate polynationalism’s potential inability to account for all identities in an egalitarian manner; while racial difference 72 Traub notes these last two characteristics in her consideration of female friends’ mutual emotional and erotic investments; see especially these pages: Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 170–75. 73 C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 231. 74 Dolan, Presence and Desire, 23.

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was recognized and celebrated (as was contact across racial groups), consideration of sexual difference privileged male homoeroticism rather than female desire.75 This production’s staging of homosexuality does disrupt heteronormative ideology and institutions; however, it still reinforces a hierarchal understanding of gender— a tension that exposes the liabilities of polynationalism and that might prove a productive point of origin for other productions. But various resistances are possible. When turning again to the image of Mailman with which I began, her sexual and racial transformation hint at the polynationalist offerings (and limitations) of Company B’s production and its ideological contributions to Australian cultural debates. By coalescing the “whiteness” and the Aboriginality of mustachioed female Mailman, her image enacts the ways in which careful consideration of ethnicity and gender can be brought to bear on articulations of identity in a polynationalistic framework. Indeed, the production elaborates on the ad’s suggestion that multiple identities are integral to an Australian performance of Shakespeare. This welcome shift shows the multiple lives that challenge, recombine, and revise official versions of Shakespeare and Australian history through its representation (and celebration) of all Australian citizens. Through its representation of the conflicted inheritances of settlement, indigenousness, and desire, this production of As You Like It renewed critical attention to Aboriginal and Australian voices and their reception on the international—and theatrical—stage. Works Cited Adelman, Janet. “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model.” Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage. Eds. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Balme, Christopher B. “Cultural Anthropology and Theatre Historiography: Notes on Methodological Rapprochement.” Theatre Survey 35 (1994): 33–52. Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Bartlett, Richard H. Native Title in Australia. Sydney: Butterworths, 2000. Blau, Herbert. “Odd, Anonymous Needs: The Audience in a Dramatized Society.” Performing Arts Journal 10.1 (1989): 34–42. Burton, Jonathan. “‘A most wily bird’: Leo Africanus, Othello and the Trafficking in Difference.” Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Ed. Ania Loomba. New York: Routledge, 1998. 43–63. Busby, Cec. “As You Like It, Company B Belvoir,” Revolver. Monday, June 7, 1999. Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. “Theatre Audiences and the Reading of Performance.” Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance. Eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. 82–98. 75 This privileging also resumes, albeit in limited ways, English early modern performance conventions.

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Case, Sue-Ellen, ed. Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Choo, Christine and Shawn Hollbach, eds. History and Native Title. University of Western Australia Press, Centre for Western Australian History, 2003. Cohen, Walter. Drama of a Nation: Public Theatre in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Dawson, Anthony B. “International Shakespeare.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage. Eds. Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 174–93. Dolan, Jill. Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 1989. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women, from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981. Ferber, Abby L. White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998. Fitzgerald, Shirley and Garry Wotherspoon. Minorities: Cultural Diversity in Sydney. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1995. Flood, Josephine. Archaeology of the Dreamtime. Sydney: Collins, 1989. Gilbert, Helen. “Reconciliation? Aboriginality and Australian theatre in the 1990s.” Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s. Ed. Veronica Kelley. Sydney: Rodopi, 1998: 71–88. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1996. Hampton, Jane. “The People’s Choice.” The Sun-Herald. May 2, 1999. Hodgdon, Barbara. The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Holland, Wendy. “Reemerging Aboriginality in the Circus Space.” Journal of Popular Culture 33.1 (summer 1999): 91–104. Howard, Jean E. Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Hunter, G.K. “Elizabethans and foreigners.” Shakespeare and Race. Eds. Catherine M.S. Alexander and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 37–63. Jameson. Julietta “As You Like It, Have a Go.” The Daily Telegraph Friday, May 21, 1999. Karpinski, Barbara. “As You Like It.” Sydney Star Observer Thursday, June 3, 1999. Kelly, Veronica. “The Globalized and the Local: Theatre in Australia and Aotearoa/ New Zealand Enters the New Millennium.” Theatre Research International 26.1 (2001):1–14.

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Kiernander, Adrian. “The unclassic body.” The Unclassic Body in the Theatre of John Bell, in Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance. Ed. Peta Tait, Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2000. 124–35. Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Loomba, Ania. “‘Local-manufacture Made-in-India Othello Fellows’: Issues of Race, Hybridity and Location in Post-Colonial Shakespeares.” Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Ed. Ania Loomba. New York: Routledge, 1998. Luhrmann, Baz. Dir. Moulin Rouge! Fox Studios, 2001. McCosker, Emily. “As You Like It: Company B Belvoir.” Honi Suit Issue 12, Tues. June 1, 1999. Morgan, Joyce. “Where there’s a Will ...” Sydney Morning Herald Friday, May 21, 1999. Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: the Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Parker , Patricia, “Fantasies of “Race” and Gender”: Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light.” Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. New York: Routledge, 1994. 84–100. Pilkington-Nugi, Doris Garimara. Rabbit-proof Fence. New York: Miramax 2002. Potter, Emily and Kay Schaeffer. “Rabbit-Proof Fence, Relational Ecologies, and the Commodification of Indigenous Experience.” Australian Humanities Review 31–2 (spring 2004). Purcell, Leah, ed. black chicks talking. Sydney: Hodder Press, 2002. Rankin, Scott and Leah Purcell. Box the Pony. Sydney: Sceptre Press, 1997. Reynolds, Brian. Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Reynolds, Henry. An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History. Victoria: Viking Books, 2001. Rose, Colin. “As You Love It.” The Sun-Herald. Sunday, May 30, 1999. Sabbioni, Jennifer, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, eds. Indigenous Australian Voices: A Reader. London: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palmgrave Macmillan, 2004. Scott, Evelyn. Address to Remedies to Racial and Ethnic Economic Inequality. Adelaide, September 22, 1998. Speech available at the Indigenous Law Resources, Reconciliation and Social Justice Library. Senelick, Laurence. “The Queer Root of Theater.” The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater. Eds. Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla. New York and London: New York University Press, 2002. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. The Olympics at the Millennium: Power, Politics, and the Game. Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1988. ———. The Post-colonial Critic. Ed. S. Harasym. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.

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Sullivan, Gerard and Peter A. Jackson. “Introduction: Ethnic Minorities and the Lesbian and Gay Community.” Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives. Journal of Homosexuality 36.3-4 (1999): 1–28. Tickner, Robert. Taking a Stand: Land Rights to Reconciliation. Crow’s Nest, N.S.W.: Allen and Unwin, 2001. Tompkins, Joanne. “Inter-referentiality: Interrogating Multicultural Drama in Australia.” Our Australian Theatre of the 1990s. Ed. Veronica Kelly. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 117–31. Traub, Valerie. “The (in)significance of lesbian desire.” The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 158–87. Vicinus, Martha. ‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong’: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity.” Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 467–97. Wahl, Elizabeth. Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Wensing, Edward Georg. Comparing Native Title and Anglo-Australian Land Law: Two Different Timelines, Two Different Cultures and Two Different Laws. Lyneham, ACT: Australia Institute, 1999. Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Young, Lisa. “A Nasty Piece of Work: A Psychoanalytic Study of Sexual and Racial Difference in ‘Mona Lisa.’” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 188–206. Zimmerman, Susan. Erotic Politic: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. London: Routledge, 1993.

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Chapter 8

Movers and Losers: Shakespeare in Charge and Shakespeare Behind Bars Niels Herold I My title is meant to invoke some sense of the quintessentially American in the homegrown uses of Shakespeare I want to describe. But what sort of theoretical move legitimates the juxtaposition of corporate leaders, who pay big bucks to attend leadership seminars organized around Shakespearean heroes and themes, and prison inmates who are unpaid members of a Shakespeare repertory theater that performs in absentia from the rewards of American capitalism? By what specifically American logic can these movers and losers be contrasted, first to each other and then to the “foreign” agents of Shakespearean adaptation whose position in this collection of Native Shakespeares is exogenous to the culture that invented and owns Shakespeare? One answer is provided by Shakespeare’s plays themselves, which reveal a remarkable pattern of interest in ideas of free will and its opposite—the influence of an age when Christians, over such questions, burned each other at the stake. Corporate leaders and correctional inmates are flip sides of a tossed American coin—the heads committed to a motivational ideology of self-determination, the tails to a coercive life of self-surrender and erasure. Another answer is that at least one of these late versions of Shakespeare in America (a history almost as old the plays themselves) is no less a narrative of appropriation than postcolonialist adaptations. For if postcolonialist Shakespeare is about the complementary mechanisms of cultural inculcation and distancing, of imitation and resistance, then the institutionality of the “correctional facility” (as prison reform discourse prefers it) is a subaltern culture that relates to the dominant as the fringe on the margins does to the center. Regardless of the specific nature of their crimes, prison inmates are effectively failed and estranged “human subjectivities under capitalism” (of the subject under the regimes of capitalism), heretical elements of a culture that, depending on whether it is Texas or Tennessee, obliterates them strapped to a gurney or—as further mutations of Foudcauldian madness and discipline—occludes them from our view. This essay is about how these prisoners conquer and reverse their invisibility through Shakespeare. Watching Shakespeare Behind Bars, Hank Rogerson’s film about a theatrical company of inmates at Luther Luckett Correctional Center in Kentucky, redraws the boundaries between us and them, and through its artistry of documentary filmmaking,

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we witness the naturalizing of the very outer limits of irrational behavior. I want to ask what it means that Shakespeare is the agent of these disturbing transactions, that Shakespearean performance reveals what prison institutionality has condemned to obscurity. It will be argued—and nowhere more clearly than from the “selfdeterminator” side of the coin—that it is convicts who condemn themselves, but if we allow Shakespeare to have any say in this, as he does in Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar, in Hamlet or Coriolanus, the will to self-fashioning and determination is doomed by Shakespeare’s Reformation plots to a tragic fate. For the corporate movers, however (in what they themselves call “the great business of life”), a Shakespearean hero like Coriolanus acts “as if he were author of himself.”1 How would such an emphasis on the financial rituals of self-autonomy be heard by those who are compelled to enact their own version of Shakespeare’s “ancient wisdom” behind bars, stripped of their purses and in many cases their souls? Shakespeare in production at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex reveals an uncanny resemblance to the performance modes and discourses of postcolonialist drama. Hank Rogerson’s documentary of prison actors, for example, exhibits the aspect of a hybrid formation, the very sort of compositional hybridity that has been viewed as energizing the postcolonial form of musical expression called rai in the “Arab street” of Algiers. “Rai’s popular appeal,” as Robert Young writes in his primer on postcolonialism: lay in its recompositions of recognizable but destructured elements from the perspective of those at the margins ... In invoking a range of complex cultural codes in forms that allowed spontaneous invention and elaboration, rai singers were able to express their own relations of contradiction and ambivalence towards the society around them, which was at once rapidly changing in economic terms and caught within rigid social structures.2

Hybridity is not simply an effect of fusing high and low mimetic elements (or sacred and profane poetries), but the performed “process in which novel kinds of perceptions relating to cultural identity are staged, debated, and negotiated in challenging ways that were not previously possible.”3 Rather than propel quick political or psychological fixes to conflicts of “multicultural identity,” the improvisatory nature of performed hybridity serves a different ideological purpose, proposes a different, practical solution. Instead of constructing new fictions of integrated identity, it acknowledges the fragmentary nature of all identities, even those of the hegemonic culture that seeks to establish itself as unmade-up of the alien against which it defined itself as pure. As postcolonialist discourse contends, no identity is purely constructed. Cultural performance that shows us the fault lines of its compositional dynamic does not “arrive delivering its meaning already fully formed—rather, it enables new meanings to be created and projected in dialogic encounters”(emphasis mine).4 What better way than dialogic is there to describe the interaction between inmate players and the Shakespearean roles they play? The most famous rai singer, Cheikha 1 2 3 4

Augustine and Adelman (1999), p. 209. Young (2003), p. 73. Young (2003), p. 75. Young (2003), p. 74.

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Remitti, is quoted by Young as saying of her musical improvisation of hybridity that “it’s something very powerful that I can’t really explain. When I’m on stage, I don’t cheat. I give everything I have in my soul and my spirit (emphasis mine).”5 This view of performativity (of the multivocalic self and its cultural contradictions) as moral behavior (because faithful to the self and others) cuts to the heart of why we feel enlarged by watching inmates enacting themselves and their lacerated lives through Shakespeare. We are moved by performances that overcome our fears of their criminality not because their acting of Shakespeare certifies a return to some reformative reinvention of the human, but because their theatrical labor is an experience of generosity in the artistry of self-expression. Where they had previously groveled in a self-absorbed sociopathy, they become through their performances of Shakespeare instances of dramatized magnanimity, giving (as Remitti says) “everything in their soul and spirit.” When Curt Tofteland’s actors are before Hank Rogerson’s camera in confessional soliloquy or in the rehearsal of their Shakespearean parts, they are seen in just such an orgy of self-emancipation—emancipation not into morally coherent and purified human identities (from fragmentary and tormented criminalities) but into “dialogic encounters with otherness.” If their production of a Shakespeare play constitutes a unified and integrated theatrical performance, it does so in the sense that what is collaboratively produced is a radical version of what Carol Rutter has termed Maverick Shakespeare—Shakespeare in performance by itinerant “fringe” companies, un-nationalized and disassociated from The Culture Metropolis. After all, what more radical location for culture could we imagine than the concrete-block theater of cruelty and redemption that is the dystopia of prison life? How much more maverick could Shakespeare get? II According to a New York Times article entitled “Power Play: Friends, Generals and Captains of Industry, Lend Me Your Ears” (January 31, 2005), “during the last few years Shakespeare has assumed a prominent place in the management guru firmament, as business executives and trade-book writers looking for a novel way to advise corporate America have begun exploiting his wisdom for profitable ends.” As the article goes on to explain, this particular branding of Shakespeare for corporate uses then extends to another hierarchically structured organization, the US military, which has “signed up for Shakespeare’s advice as well”: For the last two years, the United States Air Force has contracted with Movers and Shakespeares, a company run by Kenneth L. Adelman, a Republican political consultant who is probably best know as having been President Ronald Reagan’s chief adviser on arms control. Mr. Adelman and his wife Carol, also a Reagan administration veteran, are amateur Shakespeare scholars and Shakespeare lovers, and they have marshaled their avocation and their high-level contacts into a management-training business. They have been peddling their services since 1995 and now conduct between 30 and

5

Young (2003), p. 70.

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40 seminars annually, focusing on half a dozen different plays, mostly for corporate clients, but also for government agencies. A scholarly visit to Ken and Carol Adelman’s commercial website for Movers and Shakespeares6 betrays the unintentional irony that this royal pair are mere peddlers. Surely The New York Times’ report is more on target when it characterizes their business accomplishment as “the marshaling of high-level contacts into a management-training business.” As their official biographies note,7 the Adelmans indeed move in rarefied circles close to American centers of government and power, and no small financial advantage to their Shakespeare business has been the sale of its educational product to the American military, with high-profile figures like General Colin Powell, Admirals Hank Chiles and J.R. Ryan, former Secretary of the Air Force, James G. Roche, and others, then conscripted for advertising campaigns. With all these political heavies on board, it may seem bizarre that what gives Shakespeare’s characters “edu-tainment value” for the Adelmans is exactly their not being viewed as historical constructions of human personality. Movers and Shakespeares is a commercial appropriation, in other words, that dehistoricizes the Shakespeare “product,” removing it from the historical conditions that made possible its artistic conception and commercial thriving.8 Thus Timon of Athens is not a 400-year-old play (nor one of its fictions), but a real-life character–consultant in the here and now. In Adelman’s Epilogue to Shakespeare in Charge, which “focuses on business lessons drawn from Shakespeare that extend beyond the world of commerce to the greatest business in the world—the business of life,” the author opines that “In what Timon of Athens calls ‘life’s uncertain voyage’, all of us are CEOs.” By deleting the embedded historical codes in Shakespeare’s text and by coercing a simplistic version of fictional characters as real and universal people, 6 http://www.moversandshakespeares.com. Carol (President) and Ken (her Vice) are corporate monarchs at the helm of a high-profit company. 7 http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/982. 8 While the historicist “re-writing of the Renaissance” has shown us Shakespeare as businessman, the corporate elitism of the Adelmans and their clientele is the fruit of a “presentist” impulse to make Shakespeare relevant through the denial of history. The Adelmans’ Shakespeare in Charge program, however, is not the only game of its kind in town. Several other books and seminars have grown up around the use of Shakespeare by business schools and management training programs. One of them that does not dumb-down its Shakespeare to suit political and financial objectives is John O. Whitney and Tina Packer’s Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management. Packer is the seasoned artistic director of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Whitney director of the W. Edwards Demin Center for Quality Management and a professor at Columbia Business School. Before he began his illustrious management career, Whitney was Shakespearean Franklin Ikenberry at Tulsa University. It was an intellectual experience that grew over a lifetime of reading and thinking about Shakespeare. His book, truly co-authored with Packer (occasionally they share out loud their differences of opinion to show Shakespeare’s complexity) is an articulate engagement with Shakespearean themes and problems, in touch with historical scholarship and criticism in its use of characters and situations in the plays. Its discussion of power is morally and intellectually sophisticated, and the approach to character is analytic rather than merely motivational. “As usual,” they write, “Shakespeare offers a complex perspective.” Throughout my essay, I consult in footnotes their own perspective as a counter to the Adelmans’ cartoon commonplacing of Shakespeare.

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Ken Adelman’s account of Shakespearean “movers” goes risibly awry. Iago, for example, is consulted as a spoken authority for modern-day corporate leaders who need to be valued for their steady competence, even when it is not allied to ingenuity: “As Iago says in Othello, ‘We cannot all be masters,’ and even the finest executive cannot master all of the complex demands of his position.”9 Much early modern scholarship over the past 25 years has labored to correct the view the Adelmans conveniently take, the view that legitimates their appropriation of Shakespeare by arguing (like the unchanging nature of Shakespeare’s plays themselves), “Business involves people, and people—fundamentally—don’t change.”10 In a world, fictional or otherwise, where people don’t, fundamentally or otherwise, change, there is no historical relationship between dramatic characters and theatrical audiences, and therefore “Shakespeare’s plays are full of characters that can be studied for useful corporate analogies.”11 Dehistoricizing in fact extends throughout the whole Movers and Shakespeares program, where if “all the worlds’ a stage,” according to one of its advertising tags, “It’s also where you do business.” The Adelmans see in Shakespeare’s historical plays about kingship a kinship to their own striving in the corporate world of monetary and political privilege, but they might also learn that Shakespeare’s company imitated the organization of the late medieval guild rather than that of the absolute monarchy that had come to dominate the Elizabethan world picture. At any rate, it is disingenuous to assert that Henry V, for instance, provides an “accessible ‘case study’ of leadership” or that Shakespeare’s breathtaking account—amplified by a few historical facts—is one worth not only recounting but scrutinizing for a very sound reason. Henry presents clear lessons for today’s corporate executive about the central question: “How can I, as an executive, excel as a leader?”12 9 Augustine and Adelman (1999), p. 30. Contrast this statement about Iago with Whitney and Packer (2000): “How will the person you beat out for a job respond? Othello’s Iago, one of the greatest villains in dramatic literature, could offer some clues that you ignore only at your peril. You’re in a new job and facing a building full of hostile employees” (p. 12). 10 Augustine and Adelman (1999), p. xii. Other classic errors occur in Adelman’s reading of Shakespeare, as in the quotation of Polonius “guiding” his son toward the lesson—“This above all: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Neglecting to lineate the lines as the verse Shakespeare gives us would be cause enough for pedgagocial reaction in any university Shakespeare course (there are other mistakes in basic Shakespeare literacy, like identifying Tranio, on p. 216, as a character in The Merchant of Venice). Years ago, Lionel Trilling exposed Polonius’ speech for its “lucid moral lyricism,” as we soon see its officious and hypocritical speaker hiring a spy to collect confirmatory evidence of his son’s dissolute behavior back in France. This is a classic sort of mistake in reading Shakespeare, one made by eighteenth-century “Shakespeare Dictionaries,” which categorizes all of Shakespeare’s works into a range of topics, usually moral, and then list the passages in which, ipse dixit, the “ancient wisdom” of the Bard can be consulted. The idea that we can hear Shakespeare himself speaking through any of his characters, like Shylock on bigotry in “Hath not a Jew eyes,” is one of the first interpretive fallacies serious students of Shakespeare in fact learn not to commit. 11 Augustine and Adelman (1999), p. xvi. 12 Augustine and Adelman (1999), p. 2.

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Central for whom? Amplified by what historical facts? A number of Shakespeare’s plays, it has long been sufficiently argued, deal in “central questions,” but those that concern the Adelmans rip Shakespeare’s characters from their complex and subtle contexts and deposit them in a moral tale that is bound to yield an entirely different sort of “interest.” Henry V, they crudely insist, is one of the Bard’s few kings who is good and does well. Other Shakespearean kings, like Richard III, Claudius, and Macbeth, exude leadership—but their flawed natures vastly overshadow their competence.13 If the Adelmans had really been interested in Shakespeare’s The Life of Henry V, they would have had to place its hero in revealing relation to other plays and other protagonists, just as they would have been chastened against glibly manufacturing a bardolotry that is blind to Shakespeare’s representation of “the equivocal nature of kingly glory.” As Katherine Eisamn Maus ironically puts it, “In Henry V, Shakespeare must cope with a knotty dramatic problem: how to interest an audience in a man who has, or wins, everything—whose life seems an unbroken series of successes.”14 That the Adelmans’ strategy of appropriation categorically gets rid of this problem is misprision of the highest degree. Henry V is the rare exception in Shakespeare’s otherwise comprehensive exploration of what happens when men do not control their fate in order to live happy, successful lives. For those who purchase the empowering promises of the Shakespeare in Charge motivational program, Henry’s St. Crispian Speech comes to serve as a moral allegory of how leaders can promise to do their rewarding part. As one shining graduate of the Adelmans’ Shakespeare seminar explains: “If they [the workers] do their part, I can assure them that my senior team will do theirs and together we’ll look back and share the glory of security and success after absorbing both growth and new processes on our way in one year from a 3.5 million plant to an 11 million dollar plant. Thanks for the tools!”15 Offered up as the crowning achievement of the lessons he learned in the Movers and Shakespeares program, this graduate’s testimonial occupies an important place on the Adelmans’ commercial website: “I gave an inspired ‘band of brothers’ speech to my entire Lancaster plant (40 persons), quoting Shakespeare re: reputation, as well as suggesting that, although it’s easier to always look to management for your solutions, we each have it within ourselves to control our destinies.”16 What would a rag-tag company of prison inmates, who bring Shakespeare to an altogether different sort of life (within the concrete confines of their star-crossed fates under capitalism) think of Ken and Carol’s get-control, star-struck program? 13 Augustine and Adelman (1999), p. 2. Any undergraduate literature major learns early on that such simplistic ideas are not the stuff of literature, especially that of Shakespeare. But why should the Adelmans get away with such uneducated representations of Shakespeare to the public, especially a public that agreed to be governed by their policy? Is it because their higher university degrees are not in literature but in public policy? Or is it because the only thing that really matters in America is the generation of wealth, and the Shakespeare the Adelmans have commandeered legitimates and lubricates the structure and purpose of the modern business corporation? 14 Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 15 http://www.moversandshakespeares.com/quotes.html. 16 http://www.moversandshakespeares.com/quotes.html.

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What links both worlds, after all, of moneyed leaders and disenfranchised losers, is precisely some ameliorative notion of self-actualization, that is, for the specific purposes of the particular community in which Shakespeare is the valorized text for performance. As James G. Roche, former Secretary of the Air Force, puts it, “People can talk about some things more easily when they do it in the context of a play.” Roche is referring to the “honing” of leadership skills through acting out plays as case histories and “individual scenes as specific lessons.” He remembers the “seminar moment” this way: “In Julius Caesar, for example, Cassius’ sly provocation of Brutus to take up arms against Caesar was the basis for a discussion of methods of team-building and grass-roots organizing. The dueling funeral orations provided grist for a debate about the relative merits of logic and passion in pervasive speechifying.”17 Clearly, other Shakespeare plays would not service such educational objectives. We can only imagine, for example, the incongruity—in such a profit-saturated setting—of CEOs acting out blind Gloucester’s communistic vision of social justice in King Lear18: Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he does not feel, feel your pow’r quickly; So distribution should undo excess, And every man have enough. (4.1.61–5)19

An obvious truth, then, that underwrites the hypothesis of analogous appropriation is that each of these performance communities seeks its own very different sort of legitimacy through Shakespeare. Whichever plays and characters furnish the opportunity for appropriation—those by prisoners for rehabilitative purposes or those by major American corporations for the purpose of managerial training and “leadership studies”—some kind of emancipatory experience is a by-product of the educational encounter: Remember Roche: “People can talk about some things more easily when they do it in the context of a play.” Prisons and corporations thus form a powerful cultural binary in ways that both subvert and replicate the academic Shakespeare industry, for here, too, Shakespeare has been used to examine and to cultivate. For both military generals and captains of industry, models and allegories 17 Webber, Bruce. “Power Play: Friends, Generals and Captains of Industry, Lend Me Your Ears.” The New York Times. 31 Jan. 2005: Arts. 18 By the same token, Julius Caesar is an allegorical drama for successful capitalists and military officers who are persuaded by the Adelmans to see in its political figures a mirror of instructive leadership. Using the “executive we,” corporate executives pop-psychologize wherever it is convenient to see a patriarchal lesson in obedience and authority. “Caesar’s arrogance,” for instance, “which led to his murder, and Brutus’ mistakes in leading the conspirators after the assassination,” are deemed worthy of raising “crucial questions for anyone serving in a hierarchy: When and how do you resist the boss?” (Webber, Bruce. “Power Play: Friends, Generals and Captains of Industry, Lend Me Your Ears.” The New York Times. 31 Jan. 2005: Arts). 19 This citation is to The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen, in The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997.

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of leadership in Shakespeare are a preposterous if ironic anachronism (Shakespeare’s own profit motive being a relevant source of the irony). For prison actors, however, emancipation is at least momentary freedom from the awfulness of institutionalized lives. As Jillann Spitzmiller of Shakespeare Behind Bars put it in the director’s DVD commentary, “Shakespeare helps the guys get through what happened in the past and also live in the present moment. It gives them some freedom in a lot of ways.”20 Permitted by a courageous prison warden to bring their cameras into Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in Kentucky, prize-winning writer–director Hank Rogerson and his producer, Jillann Spitzmiller, filmed the prison’s theatrical company of inmates in rehearsal for a production of The Tempest and in their dormitory cells, where they became the prime subjects of searching interviews, later edited together by the filmmakers into confessional soliloquies. In front of the camera, heinous crimes are graphically narrated, owned, and repented: “This thing of darkness / I acknowledge mine.” Throughout the film we observe a Shakespeare play in rehearsal and finally in performance, yet we also witness a core group of its actors brought to autobiographically confessional “epiphanies” (one of the Artistic Director’s favorite words, according to the filmmakers). The material that dramatically structures the relation between these two plots is provided by The Tempest—a dramatic irony of which the filmmakers become intensely aware and have much to say. Each year the Shakespeare Behind Bars program (SBB) produces one Shakespeare play, and the year their film was shot, Macbeth was supposed to have been the play in production. At first the filmmakers were disappointed that Artistic Director Tofteland at the last minute decided to substitute The Tempest for Macbeth.21 In its rigorous revelation of the criminal mind, Macbeth had seemed to Rogerson and Spitzmiller the perfect subtext to a docudrama about prisoners who had committed violent crimes, while most of The Tempest’s characters remain flat and undeveloped as human subjectivities. And while Macbeth would ask of its prison actors that they re-enact their crimes and punishment, The Tempest is a relatively plotless play in which all the action has already happened and is subject only to recollection. But as director and producer admit in their voice-over commentary to the DVD, Tofteland’s choice of The Tempest, a play so replete with the thematics of suffering, redemption, and forgiveness, had come by the year’s end to seem like a special gift. At an early point during their year inside the walls, Rogerson and Spitzmiller discovered that their documentary would unfold as two different but profoundly related stories—an Elizabethan double plot of sorts. One of the remarkable achievements of the finished film is the way it turns out to be mimetic of the doubleplay of tenses in The Tempest, a play in which the important action has already occurred and what fills the present is the intensive remembrance of crimes past. In other words, the self-revelatory soliloquies of the inmates about their previous lives operate on the production scenes for their staging of The Tempest just the way The Tempest’s poetics of time past does on Prospero’s special designs in Shakespeare’s 20 Shakespeare Behind Bars (2006), Dirs. Hank Rogerson and Jillann Spitzmiller, 93 min, Philomath Films. 21 For another account of how the company settled on The Tempest instead of Macbeth, see Scott-Douglass (2007), p. 27.

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play. This invocation of the past in both film and play creates in turn an experience of sudden intimacy with people with whom you could not have imagined talking. I will return to The Tempest’s part in the unfolding drama of the movie, but I first want to describe some of the inmate interviews, for most viewers the most compelling part of Shakespeare Behind Bars. These scenes occupy important places in the film’s representation of quotidian prison life. The routinized existence of inmates in an institutional setting (arranged so that nothing ever really happens) is juxtaposed to discovery scenes of the most intense self-revelation.22 According to Rogerson and Spitzmiller in their director’s voice-over commentary to the DVD, it became apparent soon after they started filming that the personalities of a core group of inmates in the company (the warden put a restraint on the filmmakers talking to anyone outside the SBB program) proved especially vivid on camera and useful to the development of a storyline thematically related to the action of The Tempest. The text of Shakespeare’s play becomes then a subtext on the actors who realize it as individual characters—an inciting pressure as important in its effects as the camera’s solicitation of the inmates to record and repent their crimes. Just as characters within The Tempest are individuated by the sufferings Prospero causes them, so this core group of actors is driven through theatrical playing enactively to acknowledge the tragedy that put them behind bars. This process, however, does not always run as smoothly as Prospero’s artful design does in Shakespeare’s play. Interaction with the camera can produce in the inmates self-deluding feelings of celebrification and narcissistic display, as they do for the prisoner known as Leonard, but Tofteland’s theatrical program of mandatory honesty even here has its triumph; toward the end of the movie narrative, Leonard helps to create one of the film’s most moving and memorable recognition scenes. This idea the documentary comes to have—that it is not only the camera but the theater of Shakespeare that produces self-recognition, acceptance, and repentance— gives the camera its transparency and the filmmakers access to the interior life of their subjects. The interviews thus become mimetic of the confessional action of Shakespeare’s play, and they suggest that the “process” of theatrical role playing— especially of the roles in this particular play—has a liberating effect, becomes the agency of self-awareness and ultimately of a certain kind of freedom. By acknowledging the past, in other words, one can deal with its strangling hold on the present. Through acting out the role-playing in Shakespeare, inmates are empowered to accept their own lives. The psychology of this process is delineated with clarity and purpose by Gilbert and Tompkins in their book Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics: “Locked in prison (or, in some cases, an asylum), the colonized subject often appears to have a very limited scope for movement, self-expression, and liberation: however, as suggested by a number of post-colonial plays which dramatise prison life, performance offers one means by which some kind of agency might be recovered.”23 Gilbert and Tompkins are focused on the “colonized subject,” whose body has been “derogated” by another sort of performance, for prisons can 22 For the final cut, these scenes of self-discovery were editorially pieced together from a series of interviews to emphasize a feeling of climatic recognition. 23 Gilbert and Tompkins (1996), p. 227.

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themselves perform a situation of colonization in miniature; the warden rules the prison just as the ultimate authority of the state manages the imperial enterprise. By replaying and reworking the disciplinary regimes upon which the penal system is based, prison theatre stages the possibility of liberation, if only metaphorically, even while it illustrates the physical capture and containment of the colonized body. Gilbert and Tompkins are concerned with how the hierarchy of role-playing in prison theater replicates—in order to parody—the disciplinary regimes of colonized indigenous life. But where in postcolonial prison drama, “a well-defined set of prisoners (usually a cell group) characteristically becomes identified as a corporate body aligned with nationalist/post-colonial discourses,”24 the prison players in Shakespeare Behind Bars can be viewed only as colonized subjects from an admittedly radical political perspective, one that would insist on interpreting their confinement as a counterdiscourse of resistance. It might then occur as a double irony that the documentary—whose makers seem unaware of the political conservatism in Shakespeare’s early seventeenth-century allegory of royal usurpation and the restoration of right rule—does not approach The Tempest as the controversial site of virulent colonialist critique (of Shakespeare’s emergent English empire and of the historical place of the stage in the formation of English empire). Shakespeare Behind Bars instead portrays individual inmate players, like Hal as Prospero, Sammie as Trinculo, or Red as Miranda, as seeking their redemption in the cathartic performance of roles that allows them to act out aspects of their personalities repressed by guilt and shame. Each instance of role-playing then combines in a collective vision of rehabilitative theatre, endorsing the authority of the “imperial enterprise” that dominates them rather than constitutes political resistance to it. Like The Tempest, what they enact is not revolutionary but allegorical, as if the purpose of playing in this particular set of contingencies were—with the warden’s permission—to achieve model citizenship. Through acting out a canonical discourse, subversive lives are contained (like Prospero’s magically confined subjects) by the valorized forms of an art whose poetry they appropriate for their own reformative purposes: Shakespeare as Prospero, Prospero as the warden, each creates a homeopathic performance of rehabilitation through the magic bullet of theatrical illusion. The film’s recording of confessional repentance mitigates any mere political sense in which inmates are portrayed as victimized by an unjust penal system. Prisoners are represented as owning up to their crimes, even as they become more and more humane (like Ariel to Prospero), more capable of compassion (for the victims of their crimes), and thereby more capably the recipients of our own. We are aggrieved, for example, to discover by the end of the film that Sammie is not paroled but remanded to six more years of incarceration (which came to include removal from the SBB program), and this sadness, which extends over and beyond the film’s closure, continues to haunt showings of the film. Hank Rogerson comments, for instance, that: People always gasp at Sammie getting six more years, it hits them real hard—I can remember I gasped too when I found out. Throughout the editing, Jilann and I tried to stay true to how we felt and what we experienced as we made the film, and to bring that

24 Gilbert and Tompkins (1996), p. 227.

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through in the film. For example, it was a part of our experience to believe that Sammie would get out—you guys seemed to all believe it, a number of officers seemed to think it also. OK maybe our hopes got the better of us some of the time, but those beliefs were a part of our experience, and a part of your experience, so we tried to make it in the story. Then when Sammie did not get out, we gasped and now I hear audiences gasp too.25

It so happens that the episode, only 8 minutes into the film, which brings us close to Inmate no. 081450 is a rehearsal moment in which we see Tofteland using the St. Crispian Day speech to drive his actors toward “giving everything they have in their soul and spirit.” We witness Sammie at first emotionally uncommitted in his performance of Henry’s stirring speech. His audience of fellow actors is bored until Tofteland begins giving Sammie directions that relate the fictional moment in Shakespeare to the real-enough one in the film where Sammie is trying to rally his brothers. The challenge to “drop into” the part, as Tofteland puts it, works, and the rehearsal episode ends with Sammie and his band of brothers collectively transfixed by a part “to tear a cat in.” Especially moving is his embrace of a fellow prisoner sitting in the first row. Sammie is a huge man, and obviously his body is the result of a lifetime of weight training. One of the prisoners in the commentaries tells us that when Sammie “first got into Shakespeare,” he had a high and thin voice, a child’s voice that did not “connect with his adult body.”26 What helps give his performance of the St. Crispian Day speech gravitas is the dormitory interview with him, which the film splices across the rehearsal episode, so that we get to know the actor behind the role. Sammie is one of the first prisoners in the film to tell us about his crime; he’s ready to do that, while it will take Leonard, for instance, nearly the whole film to disclose and repent. Unlike some of the others, Sammie seems unafraid to share his crime, and we learn that he was sexually abused for the first time in first grade and that his father humiliated and demanded that Sammie’s victimization remain unspoken. Sammie’s physical armature acquired through weight lifting seems to be a reaction formation against this abuse and its silent repression. Serving a life sentence at Luther Luckett for strangulating a former girlfriend, Sammie has seen himself as Othello: “The death scene in Othello (when Othello kills Desdemona) was similar to the crime I committed. I couldn’t think of my victim as a person then. I do now.” Jillann Spitzmiller understands Curt Tofteland’s interesting strategy for casting a play by letting the inmates choose their own roles. “As someone is able to deal with their past,” she says in the director’s DVD commentary, “they’ll step up to play that character.” The “anniversary” of Sammie Byron’s crime, as he himself eerily calls it, is the occasion for bouts of self-forgiveness that have become harder and harder as the years pass. “I really have to fight to see the good in me,” we hear him say. His over-the-top rendition of Henry’s speech about honor invokes this struggle for self-acceptance. The voice Sammie finally summons for the St. Crispian Day speech—the one that drops everybody into the theatrical moment—connects 25 Rogerson, Hank, “A Festival Diary” (seminar paper for “Big-House Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Association of America, Philadelphia, April 15, 2006), p. 7/14. 26 See Scott-Douglass (2007), pp. 22–4 for a biographical sketch of Sammie Byron, his crime, and time.

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everybody in the room to the adult inside him. Sammie’s huge physicality is filled with this “adult” voice not because he has achieved the embodiment of Henry V, as Ken Adelman might allow (as if Sammie were being groomed for a leadership role within his prison population), but because he has become more vivid as Sammie Byron. The consequence in feeling and connection, with himself and his band of brothers, at least as far as the film portrays it, is a sudden influx of affect—mastery, freedom, release. Having watched the film both alone and in the company other Shakespeareans (for the first time at SAA in Philadelphia, 2006), I am sure that the moment I have just been describing, and others like it, is a manufactured effect of the movie’s rhetorical strategy. I do not mean to demean that intentionality, but critical discourse about Shakespeare in performance ought to be able to “academicize”—as Fish has somewhat awkwardly put it—and not only advocate. True enough, as Fish’s critics are quick to point out, the objective of an advocacy-free scholarly agenda may be as much a fiction as the representationality we write about (the focus of scholarship always already an overdetermined enterprise), but that does not absolve this particular essay, which has placed Ken Adelman and Curt Tofteland in some sort of contest over their appropriations of Shakespeare. Thankfully, I have discovered that the company this essay keeps helps clarify the logic of my having subjected the “losers” in Shakespeare Behind Bars to comparison with the “movers” of Shakespeare in Charge. The politics of the editors of Native Shakespeares (in which “Shakespeare is ‘native’—the place to which one returns—when rethinking the possibility of resistant forms of self and culture the postcolonial context”27) are committed to vocalizing the indigenous life of “native” productions of Shakespeare. In my transposing terms, the postcolonial is the counterculture of “correctional complex” life, while resistance to victimization and defeat takes the form of Shakespeare appropriation and production. In their introduction to Native Shakespeares, the editors potently invoke Caliban’s warning to his cohorts in political crime, Stephano and Trinculo (homegrown victims of the social order they reject) to make sure they steal Prospero’s books: Get a hold of the discourse and then you are in a position to take charge, as the Adelmans instinctively understand. But what are Tofteland’s inmates accomplishing by “stealing” Shakespeare performance for their “reformative” uses? Second, is it important to see the SBB movie as advocating for and testifying to the efficacy of this reform? In other words—from the Adelmans’ neoconservative tough-on-crime point of view—are the confessions foregrounded in Rogerson’s film lent an aura of credibility by association with Shakespeare—as contextualizing background (rehearsal scenes of the play in production) and as dramatic climax (scenes of the final performance)? Inasmuch as membership in the SBB program is a behaviorally earned privilege, and therefore adducible evidence at parole hearings, would it not be fair to describe these prison performances of Shakespeare as, at least in part, petitionary of parole, of rejoining a world in which political resistance and normalized social existence do not necessarily go hand in hand? In her essay on regional theater in India, Parmita Kapadia observes that Shakespeare was institutionalized by law through the Indian 27 Native Shakespeares (Introduction), p. 2.

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Education Act of 1835. A sentence she quotes from Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest helps frame the discussion here, too, about using Shakespeare to rehabilitate and reform society’s outcasts: “The humanistic functions traditionally associated with literature—for example, the shaping of character or the development of the aesthetic sense or the disciplines of ethical thinking—were considered essential to the processes of sociopolitical control.”28 Viewed in this light, Tofteland’s SBB program contributes to a time-honored tradition of exploiting Shakespeare for the ethical self-fashioning of national identities that have been mobilized by the Bard only to be put into their economic or bureaucratic place, a place in Shakespeare’s time believed to have been “providentially bestowed,” and by Victorian times, and ours as well, largely determined by market forces and economic utility. The unacknowledged cynicism of the Adelmans’ Shakespeare in Charge program is that it profits from the same character shaping that Shakespeare’s performance makes available to “the lower social orders.” Many wonderful things can be said about the SBB program (and this essay tries to say a few of them) that distinguish it from books like Shakespeare in Charge, which Stephen Greenblatt must have in mind when he wryly observes in a recent essay on Shakespeare and the uses of power that “there are books now that profess to derive principles of governance from Shakespeare’s works.”29 In putting on a Shakespeare play, the inmates at Luther Luckett learn to belong to something larger than themselves, something that now has a national reputation and a sort of institutional life all its own to maintain and to grow. Graduate members of the company have an astounding recidivism rate to protect, and they have learned to “negotiate”—again to transpose the postcolonialist terms of Parmita Kapadia’s argument—“between multiple indigenous discourses, while simultaneously mediating between colonial and neocolonial.” No one will know for sure whether what the film tells us is true until people like Sammie are released into the Big Gen-Pop. Until then, the only thing we can say with certainty is that he has inhabited with remarkable passion and intelligence Shakespearean roles as diverse as General Othello and Trinculo the Clown. III One of the popular conventions of drama in Shakespeare is the mingling of kings and clowns—a tradition that extends into our own time when American popular culture is regnant and its appropriations of Shakespeare timely and lucrative. Ours is also a performance culture, in which academic scholarship has been obsessed with the performativity of our identities, our genders, our sexual orientations, our vocations. SBB has special resonance for this recent scholarly focus on performance practice and its history—and on what theorists have articulated as the performed nature of theatrical speech. The trend toward theorizing performance has effectively claimed 28 Kapadia, Native Shakespeares, p. 93. 29 Greenblatt, 2007. “There are books now that profess to derive principles of governance from Shakespeare’s works, but sleeplessness, tormenting, constant sleeplessness, is one of the only principles that he consistently depicts.” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 54, No. 6.

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a larger critical voice for “theater people,” who have traditionally been opposed to “literary critics” in the same way in which the regimes of the theater have been held to be less intellectually substantive than the texts of Shakespeare plays. Performance theory proposes that the surviving texts of any of Shakespeare’s plays are not to be confused with any transformative performance of them. W.W. Worthen writes that “the text appears in performance only as it is transformed into something else ... .” The performed nature of theatrical speech and gesture, moreover, cannot properly be understood by literary practices associated with a print culture because, as Worthen argues: The theater’s habits of reading and interpretation often depart from ... practices that are “proper” not because they are determined by the essential “logic” of print but because the appropriate use of print has been determined by legitimating social institutions ... There are a variety of reasons to see the modern contestation between print and performance as part of a longer history, in which the relationship between writing and enactment—two dimensions of Western Drama—has been framed within different institutions, different practices, even different practices of literacy from the outset. 30

Prison acting companies arguably operate as one such institution that dramatizes this contestation between print and performance. Surely nowhere else is the text of a Shakespeare play subjected to such a remarkable transformation into something strange than in productions of Shakespeare by prison actors. Certain theoretical constructs from language philosophy and speech act theory (recently applied to studies of theatrical performance) may be helpful in describing the aesthetic and political effects of theater within a penal setting. For instance, prisons are textually saturated environments in which prisoners are actors in a dramatic conflict that opposes the textuality that sentenced them and now regulates every aspect of their behavior. On one side are those who implement this textuality and on the other are the inmate performances, according or not to the text of the law and its application. This paradigm of correctional institutionality confers on the prison acting company a special significance for the academic study of dramatic performance. Big-house Shakespeare productions provide concretely describable answers to the theoretical question studies like Worthen’s have recently been asking—“What is the relationship between dramatic texts and the meanings of performance?”—for the following reason: The creative dynamic of producing plays through oral transmission (some of the inmate actors cannot read) reproduces in intensified shape this historical contestation between print and oral culture. For Ken Adelman’s Shakespearean “movers,” on the other hand, their escape into a sort of hysterical presentism is facilitated by a virtual denial of history and of historicism: Shakespeare’s text has been beamed up into an ether of performativity where it floats free of any historical signifiers. Where inmate actors role-play in order to gain access to their personal histories—access that is achieved only through the fearless acceptance and examination of tragic suffering and loss—Adelman’s management colleagues blatantly use Shakespeare in denial of both personal histories and of the history of Shakespeare performance. Where Tofteland’s prisoners achieve 30 Worthen (2005), p. 55.

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self-discovery and acceptance through mastering their lines and parts, Adelman’s conference participants buy the privilege of “self-actualizing” through Shakespeare, a process that involves vocationalizing the self in leadership and management opportunities that confirm one’s financial and social position in the world. Recall that Shakespeare’s great study of rugged individual elitism, Coriolanus, is celebrated by corporate managers for acting “‘as if a man were author of himself.’ Indeed he is,” they clamor, “and we are.” Such a blatant misreading by Adelman of this particular character and play could only occur in a culture single-mindedly devoted to profit, where everything, including but maybe especially Shakespeare, is up for self-determining grabs. In the “crisp and timely” executive decision-making that is Adelman’s personal and prose style, the idea of historical time itself has been efficiently “terminated.” Prison actors, on the other hand, constitute a theatrical company that resonates with certain originating conditions of Shakespeare’s historical theater: through the mnemonic practice of oral transmission, through a transvestite theatricality,31 and through social and political marginalization.32 When prisoners leave Tofteland’s SBB program, either through release, reassignment, or punishment, they nevertheless go with a privileged understanding of theatrical process and collaboration, of their parts in a greater whole that has placed them first in and then beyond themselves. Through “dialogic encounters” in Shakespeare, they discover and acknowledge selves that their theatrical performance allows them to transcend. Having mingled together these movers and losers—American kings and clowns—I am reminded that the vocation of the lowly fool is always in Shakespeare a resource for the sage critiquing of other professions, especially that of kingship, “the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king.” Ken Adelman’s graduates of Shakespeare in Charge have seen only want they want to, have encountered only what they have been told to, and they leave their experience of his leadership program more firmly convinced than ever that they are the rightful (financial) rulers of the earth. For them, Shakespeare is expeditiously about Henry’s “annexation” of a sizeable patch of real estate in France, and certainly not about the de-structured landscape of searing social injustice in King Lear.33 31 Tofteland’s all male company has performed for other convict populations besides their own, including an all female audience of prisoners. 32 Situated as an internally marginalized community of social outcasts who have lost their right to vote, prison actors come together to form laboratories for innovative performances of “raced Shakespeare” productions. 33 For the record: “In the business of life,” Ken Adelman has been characterized as “a consummate Washington insider.” He is a current member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and is identified by Elizabeth Drew in her Fear and Loathing in George Bush’s Washington (2004, 22) as one of a core group of activist neocons, which includes Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby: the band of brothers that brought us the Iraq War. Adelman is an influential contributor to print and broadcast news, and here are a few of his published pronouncements about the run-up to the war and the subsequent catastrophe, as reported by the International Relations Center website (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/982): “I believe that demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk ... This President Bush does not need to amass

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[Postscript: While Ken Adelman has been recently appearing in the media to stage his dissociation from the catastrophic decisions that led to the invasion of Iraq, he remains utterly unrepentant—the trademark managerial style of the Bushies, from unbowed top to bleeding toe. (It was the right decision about the wrong information.) On the other hand, the inmates at Luther Luckett appear to be acting on what remains for them the right information. I have just seen Curt Tofteland’s SBB players—now in their 12th year of Shakespeare production—delve the subject of repentance in a new and powerfully realized performance study of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s great play about retributive and restorative justice—a play about which they may be said to know something.]

Works Cited Augustine, Norman, and Kenneth Adelman. Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage. New York: Hyperion c/o ABC, 1999. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Bates, Laura Raidonis, “Shakespeare in Prison,” Shakespeare, 3.1 (winter 1999). Bevington, David, Anne Marie Welsh, and Michael L. Greenwald, eds. Shakespeare: Scipt, Stage, Screen. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Bristol, Michael. Big-Time Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1996. ———, and Kathleen McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes, eds. Shakespeare and Modern Theater: The Performance of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2001. Buruma, Ian, “Uncaptive Minds,” The New York Times, February 20, 2005.

rinky-dink nations as ‘coalition partners’ to convince the Washington establishment that we’re right” (Washington Post, February 2002). “I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction” (Washington Post, March 23, 2003). “Before criticizing us, Arabs should read the UN’s ‘Arab Human Development Report’ and realize they have no grounds to criticize successful societies. With a collective population roughly that of the United States, the 22 Arab states have: a total gross domestic product less than Spain’s, with exports (without oil) less than Norway’s, and per capita income less than one sixth that of Western democracies; ... no visible presence in the main arenas of human excellence today—Nobel Prize winners, World Cup finalists, Olympic medal-winners, breakthrough scientists, leading historians, international business tycoons; no civil or political rights of a democracy or decent society. These are the hallmarks of a declining civilization ... Arab leaders lack standing to criticize America as no. 1” (FoxNews.com, July 10, 2002). In lesson one of Shakespeare in Charge, Adelman valorizes Henry V (one can almost hear the word Shakespeare whispered in his great president’s ear) for “true grit and determination,” for never letting “uncertainty, or circumstances, or obstacles deter him. Nor does he wait for all possible information on the topic to present itself and be duly evaluated before he acts” (p. 18). Curt Tofteland is the Producing Artistic Director for the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, and he volunteers his services as Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Behind Bars program at Luther Luckett Correctional in Kentucky. Since he founded the program 12 years ago, 30 convict players have earned their release. One has committed suicide; the rest have achieved a zero recidivism rate. As a national average, more than 60% of American convicts who leave prison are returned or die in renewed criminal activity.

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Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Davies, Anthony, and Stanley Wells. Shakespeare and the Moving Image. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Dessen, Alan C. Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Drew, Elizabeth. Fear and Loathing in George Bush’s Washington. New York: New York Review Books, 2004. Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge, 1996. Grady, Hugh, “Renewing Modernity: Changing Contexts and Contents of a Nearly Invisible Concept,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 268–84. Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. ———, “The Uses of Power,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 54, no. 6 (April 12, 2007). Hodgdon, Barbara. The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. ———, and W.B. Worthen, eds. A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Empire and Poetic Voice: Cognitive and Cultural Studies of Literary Tradition and Colonialism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004. Holland, Peter, “Reading to the Company,” in Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception. Eds. Peter Holland and Hasnna Scolnicov. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Jameson, Frederick, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in Jameson and Miyoshi, Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Jones, Maria. Shakespeare’s Culture in Modern Performance. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Moller, Lorraine, “A Day in the Life of a Prison Theater Program,” The Drama Review 47.1 (spring 2003): 49–73. Morton, Giles. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Rabkin, Norman. Shakespeare and the Common Understanding. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Rogerson, Hank, and Jillann Spitzmiller, dir. Shakespeare Behind Bars, 93 min. Philomath Films, DVD, 2006. Scott-Douglass, Amy. Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars. New York: Continuum, 2007. Shaughnessy, Robert. The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth Century Performance. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Trounstine, Jean. Shakespeare Behind Bars: the Power of Drama in a Woman’s Prison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Webber, Bruce. “Power Play: Friends, Generals and Captains of Industry, Lend Me Your Ears.” The New York Times. 31 Jan. 2005: Arts. Whitney, John O., and Tina Packer. Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.

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Worthen, W.B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ——. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

PART 3 Translating Across: Between the National and the Cultural

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Chapter 9

Shakespeare and Transculturation: Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest Pier Paolo Frassinelli I Aimé Césaire’s play Une tempête, subtitled d’après “la Tempête” de Shakespeare— Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre [A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest—Adaptation for a Negro Theatre],1 is the last installment of a dramatic trilogy produced by the Martiniquais poet in collaboration with the French theatre director Jean-Michel Serreau.2 It was originally written for an international cultural festival in Hammameth, Tunisia, in 1969. In the same year, two other West Indian writers, the Barbadian Edward Brathwaite and the Cuban Roberto Fernández Retamar, would respectively publish a book of poems, Islands, among which there is one dedicated to Caliban, and an essay, “Cuba hasta Fidel” [“Cuba until Fidel”], in which the origin of the name Caliban is associated with the Caribbean. Along with George Lamming’s collection of essays The Pleasures of Exile and Retamar’s widely acclaimed article “Calibán,” these are among the radical rereadings and rewritings of The Tempest that, around the 1960s, by refashioning Shakespeare’s character, the “savage and deformed slave” Caliban, as the symbol of non-European identity and desire, marked a turning point in the history of the reception of the play.3 Not only did these writings offer a radically revisionist approach to The Tempest that brushed against the grain of the then dominant, or “Prosperian,” interpretation of the text (Bate 241), thus remaking the play into something altogether new, but they also represent a complex and still challenging model of transcultural work: the 1 An earlier version of this essay appeared in English Studies in Africa 47.2 (2004): 57–76. Although I have consulted and often rely on Richard Miller’s original English translation (see Césaire, A Tempest), I have altered those passages where I find it unsatisfactory. In his version, for instance, Miller translates nègre as “black,” thus editing out the reference to Césaire’s concept of négritude. 2 The first two parts are La tragédie du roi Christophe [The Tragedy of King Christophe], a dramatization of the political career of Henri Christophe, the Haitian anticolonial leader turned into tyrant, and Une saison au Congo [A Season in the Congo], which portrays the rise and fall of the Congolese and Pan-Africanist politician Patrick Lumumba. 3 These were not, to be sure, the first readings that connected The Tempest to colonial questions. As Barbara Bowen has reminded us, “The earliest work in the tradition is by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, whose “El Triunfo de Caliban,” an indictment of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, appeared in 1898” (95). But it is in the decade of the 1960s that, at least in Caribbean anticolonialist intellectual circles, “the new reading of The Tempest established its hegemony” (Retamar, “Caliban” 13).

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work of writers and intellectuals from colonial regions who, to adapt Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of transculturation, created new cultural products and phenomena by selecting and inventing “from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (6).4 Within the embattled field of Shakespearean criticism and pedagogy, in particular, the challenge presented by this body of work lies in its demand that we return to the Shakespeare text (Pratt’s “materials”) not as a fetished aesthetic artefact, but as a cultural object caught up in complex processes of intercultural and transnational exchange, adaptation, and transformation.5 Indeed, one is reminded here of Edward Said’s suggestion, in Culture and Imperialism, that we reread the Western cultural archive “not univocally but contrapuntally,” so as to articulate on the one hand the interconnectedness between metropolitan history and “those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominant discourse acts” (59) and on the other “how writers and scholars from the formerly colonized world have imposed their diverse histories on, have mapped their local geographies in, the great canonical texts of the European centre” (62). Césaire’s account of the genesis of his “adaptation” of The Tempest is especially interesting in this respect. By his own admission, Césaire originally intended simply to translate Shakespeare’s play into French, but, he notes, “When the work was done, I realized there was not much Shakespeare left” (“Un poète politique” 31; my translation). This is no doubt a playful statement—are we to believe that he became aware that he had come up with a flagrantly irreverent, radical rewriting of the play only after the fact? Nevertheless, the proposition that A Tempest originated as a translation of Shakespeare’s text raises a number of important questions regarding the status of Césaire’s vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s play. As recent translation theories suggest, translation is a mode of textual intervention and displacement, a recoding and rewriting of the text akin to literary criticism and interpretation, which, crucially, involves much more than language: Translation, contemporary scholarship in the field never tires of reminding us, “is always embedded in cultural and political systems, and in history” (Bassnett and Trivedi 6). As such, it “involves questions of power relations, and of forms of domination,” the “power 4 Pratt speaks specifically of “subordinated or marginal groups” (6). Whether these finely educated, mostly middle-class intellectuals can be identified with, or even be said, in an unproblematic way, to “speak for” any such group is, of course, debatable. But I still find the term transculturation helpful in this context, for it conveys the idea of a dynamic model of cultural exchange that resists homogenization through the absorption of one agent of the exchange into the other. The term was originally coined, in 1940, by the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortíz, who, in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, chose it to “express the varied phenomena that come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here” (98). 5 Peter Hulme has remarked that the institution of Shakespeare studies has for many years ignored or marginalized this body of work, thus missing the radical opportunities that it affords (233). I support Hulme’s observation and shall return to it in my conclusion. Even now, although in discussions of postcolonial approaches to The Tempest Césaire’s play is regularly acknowledged, only a few readings, as opposed to passing references, have appeared in English. For a valuable analysis of Césaire’s “rewriting” of The Tempest by a professional Shakespearean, see Goldberg (91–100).

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structure of acts of appropriation,” and the subject–object relation on which they are predicated: “Someone is translating something or someone. Someone or something is being translated, transformed from a subject to an object” (Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction 140–41). In André Lefevere’s words, translation has traditionally functioned, in the construction and development of literary systems and cultural canons, as a form of “acculturation” used “to adapt what is ‘foreign’” (in time or geographical location) to the norms of the receiving culture” (88). If Césaire had intended his translation in this sense, as a mode of cultural appropriation and refamiliarization, then the suggestion that the end result was ousting Shakespeare from the text, getting rid of most of what was Shakespearean about it, would seem to indicate that he came to the conclusion that The Tempest had become untranslatable or, to be more precise, that the process of cultural translation required abandoning Shakespeare’s text altogether. But in fact A Tempest performs a more complex mode of cultural negotiation than the one delineated by terms such as acculturation or appropriation, one that strives to do away with or at least complicate the binary division between “foreign” and “receiving” cultures, even as the political content of the play makes clear that, under colonialism and neocolonialism, this division is produced by and replicates the violent asymmetries of the existing power relations and forms of domination.6 In an interview released before the opening night of A Tempest, Césaire stated: “I believe in the mixing of all cultures. A great work of art such as Shakespeare’s play belongs to all humanity—and, as such, it can undergo as many reinterpretations as do the myths of classical antiquity” (quoted in Belhassen 176). Césaire understood his “reinterpretation” of Shakespeare’s text not merely as an individual, subjective act but also as the product of a cultural encounter. Accordingly, he drew attention to the complex cultural transactions and transformations at work in his engagement with Shakespeare by producing a multifaceted, self-reflexive literary artefact that constantly foregrounds the intertextual relations with The Tempest while it undermines the latter’s status as the ultimate or master text (so that, for instance, when in 1998 A Tempest was first performed in England at the Gate theatre in London’s Notting Hill, amid wide critical acclaim, it was described as “not simply a new reading of Shakespeare but an original play of astonishing power”; quoted in Crispin 149). Still in the same interview, Césaire remarks: I continually broke away from the original. I was trying to “de-mythify” the tale. To me Prospero is the complete totalitarian. I am always surprised when others consider him the wise man who “forgives.” What is most obvious, even in Shakespeare’s version, is the man’s absolute will to power. Prospero is the man of cold reason, the man of methodical conquest—in other words, a portrait of the “enlightened” European. And I see the whole play in such terms: the “civilized” European world coming face to face for the first time 6 I shall return to what I see as the problems raised by the use of the term appropriation to describe the kind of reworking of the Shakespeare text produced by Césaire at the end of this chapter. In their Introduction, on the other hand, Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia make the important point that the canonical construction of the signifier “Shakespeare” as the icon of high culture and Englishness “is itself the product of a long process of cultural appropriation” (p. 2).

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Césaire not only reconfigures “the tale” as a dramatization of the colonial encounter, but, importantly, in doing so he disentangles it from any specific temporal and locational context—about which, to be sure, Shakespeare’s “original” is also notoriously elusive—to reread the play through the lens of a telescoped historical vision spanning the history of modernity all the way to the present: Demystified, the play [is] essentially about the master–slave relation, a relation that is still alive and which, in my opinion, explains a good deal of contemporary history: in particular colonial history, the history of the United States. Wherever there are multiracial societies, the same drama can be found, I think. (quoted in Livingston 192)

The first performance of A Tempest was set in the United States, using the visual climate of the Western and also recalling, through the opposition between Caliban’s and Ariel’s attitudes to Prospero, the contemporary debate in the American black liberation movement emblematized by the figures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.7 But, as other commentators have noted, the play, although “purportedly representative of black America, exhibits elements of all three major theatres of the Africa homeland and diaspora”—Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States—so that “the central paradigm of the colonizer/colonized relation, as it is constructed in A Tempest, embraces the totality of the black experience in the new world” (Davis, Aimé Césaire 156–7). It follows that the play demands that we put it simultaneously onto two intertextual axes: one that connects it to the Shakespeare text and the history of its reception and another that relates it to contemporary international debates and struggles over race and colonialism. By the time Césaire wrote his adaptation, these axes had in fact already crossed: most significantly in Octave Mannoni’s controversial study Psychologie de la colonisation, published in 1950 and subsequently translated in English as Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, which Césaire’s former pupil, Frantz Fanon, trenchantly criticizes in Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks] (83–108), and to which Césaire himself devotes some of the most pungent polemical passages of his Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on Colonialism]—where he dismisses Mannoni’s theory that colonialism can be explained in terms of neurotic tendencies, “Prospero’s complex” and “Caliban’s complex,” that lock colonizer and colonized in a relation of reciprocal dependence and that lead the colonized to accept and even require the “paternal authority” of the colonizer, as a recycling and embellishing, with the new vocabulary of psychoanalysis and existentialism, of the most “down-at-heel clichés” and “absurd prejudices” (40). However, if both Fanon and Césaire unequivocally reject Mannoni’s use of ethnopsychological categories to explain away colonialism’s racism and economic exploitation, they share with 7 “The dominated can adopt several attitudes. One is Caliban’s revolt. Another is Ariel’s, whose path is more complicated—but is not necessarily one of submission, that would be too simple ... If you want me to specify ... I’d say that there is Malcolm X’s attitude, and then there is Martin Luther King’s” (Césaire, quoted in Livingston 192).

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him a concern with the psychosocial bond between colonized and colonizer, which throughout Césaire’s career would remain one of the central objects of his poetic, as well as his political, activity. II It is in effect not possible to discuss Césaire’s poetic or dramatic work without considering the concept of négritude, the term he first used in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Return to My Native Land],8 whose first draft was published in 1939, and which would subsequently become associated with the eponymous cultural and political movement. As A Tempest helps to illustrate, there are a number of tensions inherent in négritude, which has been often criticized because of its alleged essentialism, antiracist racism, romantic nativism, and political ambiguity. The term antiracist racism, in particular, comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, who, on the other hand, tried to rescue négritude by describing it “as the minor term of a dialectical progress” in which it represents the moment of negativity, the negation of white supremacy, thus postulating its transitory, instrumental character, its being “the root of its own destruction” (quoted in Fanon 132–3). This in fact seems to be the logic and historical movement poetically prefigured in Return to My Native Land, where the initial indictment of Western civilization and celebration of non-European cultures are followed by Césaire’s hopeful vision of a postcolonial future in which “aucune race ne possède le monopole de la beauté, de l’intelligence, de la force / et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” [“no race has a monopoly of beauty, intelligence, strength / and there is a room for all at the rendez-vous of conquest”] (138–40) and where, moreover, the perception of the new possibilities for liberation and empowerment that constitutes the climax of the poem is accompanied by the exclamation, repeated twice, “Je dis hurrah! la vieille négritude progressivement se cadavérise” [“I say hurrah! / the old Negritude progressively decomposes”] (142; translation altered). Sartre is thus correct when he speaks of a dialectical progress in that Césaire’s construction is distinctively Hegelian, striving, through the labor of the negative, the negation of the negation, toward the universal of nonracialism, or what Robert Young suggestively describes as “a third space in which the antithetical values of racism and anti-racism produce a society without racism and a new humanism in which the human would be at last universally defined” (Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction 266). In Césaire’s own words, “If négritude involves taking root in a particular soil [un enracinement particulier], négritude is also transcendence and expansion into the universal” (quoted in Davis, Aimé Césaire 53). The soil is the rediscovery of the history and heritage of African and Negro civilizations, a rediscovery that corresponds to “a concrete rather than abstract coming to consciousness” (Césaire, “An Interview” 77), a historically situated, self-consciously construed cultural lineage 8 The title of the poem has been translated in various ways: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Statement of a Return to the Country Where I Was Born and Journal of a Homecoming. I use the title adopted in the authoritative bilingual edition published by Éditions Présence Africaine.

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and identity which, as Benita Parry notes, “is not a recovery of a pre-existent state, but a textually invented history, an identity effected through figurative operations, and a tropological construction of blackness as a sign of the colonized condition and its refusal” (45). In other words, this construction, as Césaire would often be at pains to explain, did not involve nostalgia for precolonial lost origins or a metaphysics of identity manifesting itself as ethnic essentialism. Rather, at least for Césaire, négritude, through the positive reaffirmation of a distinctive identity that is denied dignity even as it is reified through racism and erased by assimilation, prefigures the possibility of a new, culturally inclusive, and socially advanced synthesis: For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong, the most putrid carrion ever rotten under the sun. It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days. (Discourse on Colonialism 31)

Yet Césaire’s understanding of negritude, as a historical and cultural concept—as opposed to Léopold Senghor’s more essentialist, biologically determined version— coexists in a complex way with the affirmation of a more existential and emotional side to this term that resists theorization and political rationalization. As Césaire put it, recalling his early affinities with Senghor, “You either felt black or did not feel black” (“An Interview” 78). Furthermore, although strategically deployed to counteract the Eurocentric claims used to justify the civilizing mission of the West that Césaire excoriates in his Discourse—“They talk to me about civilization, I talk about proletarianization and mystification” (22)—his conception of distinctive African and Negro civilizations claims to be historically rooted in their salient and unique traits, such as “the rejection of abstraction” and the consequent “very African affirmation of the feeling of the primacy of life” (quoted in Davis, Non-Vicious Circle 19) or the notion that these civilizations were intrinsically anticapitalist, democratic, cooperative, and fraternal (Discourse on Colonialism 23). The same political tensions and theoretical impurities that inform Césaire’s earlier articulations of négritude also resurface in A Tempest, where the list of dramatis personae designates Caliban as an “esclave nègre” [“negro slave”], while Ariel is identified as an “esclave, ethniquement un mulâtre” [“slave, ethnically mulatto”] and also includes an addition to Shakespeare’s play, “Eshu, dieu-diable nègre” [“Eshu, a negro devil–god”]. As mentioned, Césaire said that for him “the tale” enacts the encounter of Western civilization with the world of primitivism and magic represented by Caliban, “the man who is still close to his beginnings, whose link with the natural world has not yet been broken,” and who “can still participate in a world of marvels, whereas his master can merely ‘create’ them through his acquired knowledge” (quoted in Belhassen 176). The play thus revisits what is perhaps the defining topos of Césaire’s poetics, the one most famously elaborated in the much anthologized lines from Return to My Native Land, where, after the long journey of self-discovery narrated in the earlier sections of the poem, the speaker is finally able poetically to apprehend a positive conception of négritude, which is first introduced in negative terms, as the other of “le monde blanc / horriblement las de son effort

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immense” [“the white world / horribly fatigued by its immense efforts”] (118–19), and then dialectically turned into (self-)affirmation: Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté mais ils s’abandonment, saisis, à l’essence de toute chose ignorants des surfaces mais saisis par le mouvement de toute chose insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde véritablement les fils aînés du monde poureux à tous les souffles du monde aire fraternelle de tous les souffles du monde lit sans drain de toutes les eaux du monde étincelle du feu sacré du monde chair de la chair du monde palpitant du mouvement même du monde! Tiède petit matin de vertus ancestrales [Eia for those who invented nothing for those who have never discovered for those who have never conquered but, struck, deliver themselves to the essence of all things, ignorant of surfaces, but taken by the very movement of things not caring to conquer, but playing the game of the world truly the elder sons of the world porous to all the breath of the world fraternal space of all the breath of the world bed without drain9 in all the waters of the world spark of the sacred fire of the world panting with the very movement of the world Tepid dawn of ancestral virtues] (117–19)

In A Tempest the basic antithetical dualism that produces the thesis–antithesis sequence of this dialectical movement is represented through Caliban’s insurrection, here portrayed as the revolt of the forces of nature against a Prospero who, in Caliban’s own phrase, has become “anti-Nature”: Arrière, vipères, scorpions et hérissons! Toutes bêtes piquantes, mordantes et perforantes! A dard! A fièvre! A venin! Arrière! Ou si vous y tenez, pour me lécher, découvrez-vouz une langue favorable, tel le crapaud dont la pure bave sait me bercer, propice, des songes charmants du futur. Car c’est pour nous tous, que j’affronte aujourd’hui l’ennemi commun. Oui, héréditaire et commun ... Tiens, un hérisson! Mon doux petit ... Qu’un animal, si je puis dire, naturel, s’en prenne à moi le jour ou je pars à l’assaut de Prospero, plus

9 I take this curious phrase to mean something like “undrained river bed,” but I have not altered Snyder’s translation because the original French also sounds rather strange and uncommon.

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Native Shakespeares/Frassinelli souvent! Prospero, c’est l’anti-Nature. Moi je dis: A bas l’anti-Nature! Voyez, à ces mots, notre hérisson se hérisse? Non, il rentre ses piquants! C’est ça, la Nature! C’est gentil, en somme! Suffit de savoir lui parler! Allons, la voie est degage: En route! (74–5) [Away, vipers, scorpions and porcupines! All stinging, biting, sticking beasts! Sting, fever, venom, away! Or if you really want to lick me, do it with a gentle tongue, like the toad whose pure drool soothes me with the sweet songs of the future. For it is for you, for all of us, that I go forth today to face the common enemy. Yes, hereditary and common ... Look, a porcupine! Sweet little thing ... How can any animal, any natural animal, if I may put it that way, go against me on the day I’m setting forth to conquer Prospero, unimaginable! Prospero is anti-Nature. And I say: down with anti-Nature! And does the porcupine bristle his spines at that? No, he smoothes them down! That’s nature! It’s gentle, in a word! You just need to know how to talk to it! So come on, the way is clear: off we go!]

Caliban, the supposedly quasi-animalistic slave, in A Tempest embodies the synthesis of culture and nature, or better a culture that can still harmoniously coexist with nature and that is rooted in the repressed African animistic religious mythologies and traditions that return to haunt the island in the form of the Yoruba god Eshu, who, singing obscene, priapic songs—“Eshu est un joyeux luron, / de son pénis il frappe / Il frappe / Il frappe ...” [Eshu is a feisty lad, / and with his penis he smites / He smites / He smites ...] (70)—disrupts the masque organized by Prospero to celebrate Miranda and Ferdinand’s wedding. But at the same time the assumption that these qualities represent the attributes of a particular race or civilization is undercut by the play’s depiction of racial identity as performance. This is foregrounded at the outset, in the prelude, where le meneur de jeu [the master of ceremonies] invites the actors to choose a character and the corresponding mask: Allons, Messieurs, servez-vous ... A chacun son personage et à chaque personage son masque. Toi, Prospero? Pourquoi pas? Il y a des volontés de puissance qui s’ignorent! Toi, Caliban? Tiens, tiens, c’est révélateur! Toi, Ariel! Je n’y vois aucun inconvenient. Et Stéphano? Et Trinculo? Pas d’amateurs? Oui! A la bonne heure! Il faut de tout pour faire un monde. (9) [Come gentlemen, help yourselves. To each his character and to each character its mask. You, Prospero? Why not? Sometimes the will to power is unconscious.10 You, Caliban? Well, that’s revealing. You, Ariel? Fine with me. And what about Stephano, Trinculo? Nobody? Ah, just in time! It takes all kinds to make a world.]

Even though it prescribes an all-black cast and specifies Caliban’s and Ariel’s racial identities, through the use of masks the play denaturalizes the construction of race by drawing attention to the nonidentity between performers and characters, and therefore 10 Cf. the reference to Nietzsche in Discourse on Colonialism: “Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies—loftily, lucidly, consistently—not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, checklicking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academicians, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche” (33).

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to the artificial mechanisms through which identity is constructed onstage—that is to say, to the play’s performance of (racial) identity. The political implications of this staging maneuver, in the context of Césaire’s rewriting of The Tempest as an allegory of the colonial encounter and the master–slave dialectic,11 are clear: By highlighting the constructedness of racial identity, the masks, as Timothy Scheie notes, “serve to reveal race as a historical regime of power relations, and to alienate the characters’ assumption that the status quo of race relations on the island is somehow ‘natural’” (Scheie 22–3). The masked performance is therefore fully part of Césaire’s attempt to “de-mythify the tale,” which crucially involves the demystification of Prospero’s white magic, the ostensible source of his power in Shakespeare’s version, that in A Tempest is turned into a technologically advanced repressive apparatus—Son arsenal anti-èmeteus [his antiriot arsenal] (77). Having been stripped of his mage’s aura and capacity to control nature through his purportedly benevolent art, Césaire’s Prospero becomes the embodiment of the materialistic side to Western civilization, of a post-enlightenment world of cold, instrumental reason that, as Césaire remarks in the statement quoted above, “has inevitably led to various kinds of totalitarianism” (quoted in Belhassen 176). The salient traits of this characterization are brought immediately to the fore, during Prospero’s first exchange with Miranda, when he rehearses for her the story of his usurpation. The rapture in “secret studies” that in The Tempest had led to Prospero’s deposition (1.2.74–7) in A Tempest is dissociated from the high humanist ideals of the “liberal arts” and pursuit of knowledge and reinscribed instead in a narrative of naked power struggle and imperial conquest: Quand ils surent que par mes calculs, j’avais situé avec précision ces terres qui depuis des siècles sont promises à la quête de l’homme, et que je commençais mes préparatifs pour en prendre possession, ils ourdirent un complot pour me voler cet empire à naître. (20) [When they learned that through my studies and experiments I had managed to discover the exact location of these lands many had sought for centuries, and that I was making preparations to set forth to take possession of them, they hatched a scheme to steal my as-yet-unborn empire from me.]

As in Caliban’s case, however, Césaire’s deceptively simple portrayal of Prospero as a callous, self-righteous colonial oppressor driven by will to power and his own sense of displaced entitlement opens up a number of interpretative possibilities: Is this version of Prospero one that has always been latent in the play?12 Or is it a product of colonial history, the representation of a later, more aggressive phase of colonialism and imperialism than the one documented by the early modern colonial 11 “Caliban is also a rebel—the positive hero, in a Hegelian sense. The slave is always more important than his master—for it is the slave who makes history” (Césaire, quoted in Belhassen 176). 12 See, for instance, Paul Brown’s influential essay “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” where Prospero’s magic is interpreted as a discursive mediation that serves to reinscribe his story in a colonialist narrative: “Prospero first tells of his loss of civil power and then of its renewal, in magic, upon the marginal space of the island. This reinvestiture in civil power through the medium of the noncivil is an essentially colonialist discourse” (59).

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narratives that, as much recent criticism of the play insists, “provide The Tempest’s dominant con-texts” (Barker and Hulme 198)? Moreover, Prospero is performed by a black actor presumably donning a white mask (although Prospero’s race is not specified, this is the obvious assumption; see Rix 242); so is this Prospero as perceived and reinterpreted by his racial and civilizational other? I would argue that one of Césaire’s main achievements is that he resists foreclosing the interpretative possibilities that these questions generate: Prospero is, of course, Shakespeare’s character as well as the subject of a colonialist discourse that has been dissociated from whatever legitimating narrative it could have produced at its inception as journey of discovery or civilizing mission; and he is seen through, produced by, the gaze of the other—Césaire, a black actor, Caliban—turned into a stereotyped characterization so as to show “how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word” (Discourse on Colonialism 13). But the latter does not represent a simple reversal or negation of Shakespeare’s version. Rather, Césaire’s adaptation, as it revisits The Tempest from the oppositional perspective of the colonized, constantly re-enacts and complicates its relation to the Shakespeare text, refusing “easy dichotomy” (Dayan 129) and asking instead that the two versions of “the tale” are read in conjunction so that the possibilities for their mutual articulation of meaning, interpretation, and history are kept open.13 III A Tempest’s most critical deviation from Shakespeare is probably the ending of the play, where the “psychodrama” announced in the opening stage direction comes to a head. Challenged by Caliban—“Je suis sûr que tu ne partiras pas! / Ça me fait rigoler t‘mission / Ta ‘vocation’! Ta vocation est de m’emmerder!” [I am sure you won’t leave! / You make me laugh with your “mission” / your “vocation”! / Your vocation is to give me shit!] (89)—in the final scene Prospero is unable to abandon the island and return to his dukedom with Miranda and the other Italian nobles. “Mon destin est ici” [My fate is here], he declares, “Je ne le fuirai pas” [“I shall not run from it”] (90). And as he is left alone with Caliban, he threatens, “Et maintenant, Caliban, à nous deux! / ... je forcerai ma nature indulgente et désormais à ta violence / je répondrai par la violence!” [“And now Caliban, it’s you and me! / ... I shall set aside my indulgent nature / and henceforth will answer your violence with violence”] (91). But his defiant mood rapidly turns into despair. The stage directions read: Du temps s’écoule, symbolisé par le rideau qui descend à demi et remonte. Dans une pénombre, Prospero, l’air veilli et las. Ses gestes sont automatiques et étriqués, son langage appauvri et stéréotypé. (91) 13 The multiple levels of transculturation and displacement taking place between the two texts raise a number of questions regarding historical and geographical contexts that are beyond the scope of this chapter. Some of these, however, must be kept in mind: Shakespeare’s play, often read as an allegory of early English colonialism, involves not English lords but Italian aristocrats and is set on an unspecified and remote island; moreover, Césaire’s adaptation of The Tempest translates the play not merely from metropole to colonial periphery and not merely from English to French, but also from the British empire to the French colonial system, which are marked by significant historical and strategic differences.

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[Time passes, symbolized by the curtain being lowered halfway and reraised. In semidarkness, Prospero, aged and weary. His gestures are jerky and automatic, his language impoverished and stereotyped.]

In the last few lines, Prospero repeats to himself, in an increasingly desperate attempt to hold on to both his power and sense of self, “Mais je me défendrai ... Je ne laisserai pas périr mon oeuvre” [“I shall stand firm ... I shall not let my work perish”], and then, whilst “Il tire dans toutes les directions” [“He fires in all directions”], “Je défenderai la civilisation!” [“I shall defend civilization!”]. But he is aware that “le climat a change” [“the climate has changed”]. Meanwhile, On entend au loin parmi le bruit du ressac et des piaillements d’oiseaux les débris du chant de Caliban. LA LIBERTÉ OHÉ, LA LIBERTÉ! [“In the distance, above the sound of the surf and the chirping of birds, we hear snatches of Caliban’s song. FREEDOM HI-DAY, FREEDOM HI-DAY”] (92). This rewriting of The Tempest’s dénouement clearly points to the allegorical side to Césaire’s adaptation, “where the address is outwards, either historically or politically” (Hulme 224). This is in fact how the finale of A Tempest has been usually read: either as a didactic statement that celebrates colonialism’s imminent demise and the success of “Caliban’s uncompromising strategies” (Nixon 573); or, much more convincingly, as a pessimistic assessment of the legacy of colonialism and the pitfalls of decolonization and neocolonialism, a “painful reminder of what has not happened” (Dayan 138), that “for many peoples the era of ‘postcolonialism’ has not yet dawned” (Rix 249). But what is most interesting for my argument here is the link between the allegorical dimension of the dénouement and Césaire’s own engagement with Shakespeare’s play. Anticipating one of the major planks of later “political” criticism of The Tempest (see, for instance, Brown 689; Greenblatt 570–71), Césaire construes the relationship between colonizer and colonized in terms of a complex and conflicted but deep bond through which Prospero and Caliban’s identities become interstitial: “Eh bien, mon vieux Caliban, nous ne sommes plus que deux sur cette île, plus que toi et moi. Toi et moi! Toi-Moi! Moi-Toi!” [“Ah well, my old Caliban, there is just two of us on this island, just you and me. You and me! You-Me! Me-You!”] (92). As Joan Dayan has suggested, Césaire “recognises the force of mutuality, the knot of reciprocity between master and slave, between a prior ‘classic’ and his response to it. This labour of reciprocity accounts for the complexities of Césaire’s transformation: a labour that defies any simple opposition between black and white, master and slave, original and adaptation, authentic and fake” (Dayan 130). Indeed, the complexities of this transformation still challenge us to find an adequate critical and theoretical vocabulary and pedagogical practice—as is shown by the ongoing debate over the conceptual framework we should employ in reading the body of revisionary work to which Césaire’s play belongs. In his influential article “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” which first introduced these writings into Anglo-American Shakespeare studies, Rob Nixon spoke of “transgressive appropriations” (558) to emphasise that radical anticolonial intellectuals such as Lamming, Césaire, or Retamar reused The Tempest for indigenous political interests and cultural needs, to amplify their call for decolonization, thus integrating a Western canonical text into their struggle (see also

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Bowen). Peter Hulme, on the other hand, more recently pointed out that the category “appropriation” has been conveniently used by “the institution of Shakespeare studies ... to sidetrack ‘anticolonial’ readings of The Tempest ... (in effect saying ‘very interesting but not actually speaking to the real Shakespearean text’).” And I agree with Hulme that there are significant “pedagogical and political advantages” in maintaining that these readings speak to the “real” text—“intervening in a key area of the educational system and tackling mainstream literary criticism on that criticism’s chosen ground” (233). Appropriation, however, makes its presence felt in different ways: Jonathan Bate’s bestseller, The Genius of Shakespeare, for instance, includes a discussion of “the remarkable creative” work done around The Tempest in the 1950s and 1960s by “self-proclaimed West Indian Calibans like George Lamming, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, and Roberto Fernández Retamar” (241), where the key argument is that The Tempest has lent itself to be reinvented as the literary expression “of a recovered black identity” (250). In fact, Bate further suggests that this work is testimony “to Shakespeare’s continuing centrality to cultural understanding even as the dominant Eurocentric tradition comes under attack,” so that “[p]erhaps the most astonishing thing about Shakespeare’s achievement is that it contained enough for him to become ... a voice of what we now call multiculturalism” (248). Shakespeare’s universality triumphs again. But the interesting part is what happens to Shakespeare in the process: how, for instance, Césaire’s rereading of The Tempest through the lens of négritude reinserts the play in new cultural frames of reference and intertextual constellations. As I have tried to show, the suggestion that anticolonial and postcolonial appropriations of The Tempest bear witness to the play’s cross-cultural appeal needs to be supplemented with a more nuanced theory of transculturation: The point is not simply that Shakespeare’s play presents such a universal theme that it can absorb a whole range of new meanings and cultural references, nor that A Tempest represents a labor of destruction that disintegrates the original. Rather, in critical and pedagogical practice, Césaire’s play calls for a recognition of the multidirectional cultural exchange that this work performs, one in which Shakespeare’s text and cultural capital are not so much destroyed as refashioned, transculturated, turned into the agents of a transformative process in which the pre-existing oppositions—between the canonical text and its anticolonial adaptation, between Western and peripheral, colonizer and native cultures—are put under pressure. Césaire’s “labor,” then, invites us to revisit Shakespeare’s play itself, The Tempest, as a cultural object that belongs to, and has been transformed by, its encounter with a multiplicity of transnational cultural formations: not just as a Western canonical text that gets appropriated in noncanonical ways, but as something more complex and interesting, something we may call a transcultural text. Acknowledgments I wish to thank David Attwell and Shane Graham for their comments and Alexia Vassilatos for her help with the translations from French.

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Works Cited Barker, Francis, and Peter Hulme. “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest.” Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John Drakakis. London and New York: Routledge, 191–205. Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi. “Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars.” Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi. London and New York: Routledge, 1999, 1–18. Bate, Jonathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador, 1997. Belhassen, S. “Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest.” Radical Perspectives in the Arts. Ed. Lee Baxandall. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, 175–7. Bowen, Barbara. “Writing Caliban: Anticolonial Appropriations of The Tempest.” Current Writing 5.2 (1993): 80–99. Brathwaite, Edward. Islands. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Brown, Paul. “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, 48–71. Césaire, Aimé. “An Interview with Aimé Césaire.” Discourse on Colonialism, 65–79. ———. A Season in the Congo. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1985. ———. A Tempest. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Ubu Repertoire Theater Publications, 1986. ———. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. ———. Return to My Native Land / Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (bilingual edition). Trans. Émile Snyder. Paris: Éditions Présence Africaine, 1971. ———. The Tragedy of King Christophe: A Play by Aimé Césaire. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Gove Press, 1969. ———. Un poète politique: Aimé Césaire (Interview). Le magazine littéraire 34 (1969): 27–32. ———. Une tempête. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1969. Crispin, Philip. “Césaire’s Une Tempête at The Gate.” Hulme and Sherman, 149–56. Davis, Gregson. Aimé Césaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. “Introduction.” Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire. Ed. and trans. Gregson Davis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984, 3–28. Dayan, Joan. “Playing Caliban: Césaire’s Tempest.” Arizona Quarterly 48.4 (1992): 125–45. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Goldberg, Jonathan. Tempest in the Caribbean. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the 16th Century.” First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old. Ed. Fredi Chiappelli. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, 561–80. Hulme, Peter. “Reading from Elsewhere: George Lamming and the Paradox of Exile.” Hulme and Sherman, 220–35.

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Hulme, Peter, and William H. Sherman. Eds. “The Tempest” and Its Travels. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, 149–56. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Allison & Busby, 1984. Lefevere, André. “What Is Written Must Be Rewritten, Julius Caesar: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Wieland, Buckingham.” Second Hand: Papers on the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation. Ed. Theo Herman. Antwerp: ALW Cahier 3, 1985, 88–106. Livingston, Eric. “Decolonizing the Theatre: Césaire. Serreau and the Drama of Négritude.” Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance. Ed. J. Ellen Gainor. London: Routledge, 1995, 182–98. Mannoni, Octave. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. Trans. Pamela Powesland. London: Methuen, 1956. Nixon, Rob. “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest.” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 557–78. Ortíz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Parry, Benita. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Caliban and Other Essays. Trans. Edward Baker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———.. Cuba hasta Fidel y Para leer al Che. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1979. Rix, Lucy. “Maintaining the State of Emergence/y: Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête.” Hulme and Sherman, 236–49. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Scheie, Timothy. “Addicted to Race: Performativity, Agency, and Césaire’s A Tempest.” College Literature 25.2 (1998): 17–30. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson, 1999. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. ———.. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Chapter 10

Twin Obligations in Solomon Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho Ameer Sohrawardy

Since its publication in 1930, Solomon Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho1 has been the subject of ongoing critical discussion and debate. Attention has focused on the play’s relevance to Plaatje’s early struggles with English colonial control in South Africa. Plaatje’s towering status in twentieth-century South African political and literary history2 has affected and effected diverse responses to the play, which have, nonetheless, been unified in their reliance on the biographical details of Plaatje’s life for their critical grounding. Plaatje’s staunch supporters have lauded Diphoshophosho’s landmark status in South African literature and for Setswana orthography because of Plaatje’s successful retranslation of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors into Setswana. He has been praised for restoring Shakespeare’s “universal” appeal to Batswana audiences. These critics see Diphosho-phosho as championing the cause of the Batswana people in the wake of Plaatje’s unsuccessful attempts to urge the English to repeal the Natives’ Land Act of 1916 and to challenge the homogenization3 of

1 There is an irregularity in the spelling and pronunciation of Plaatje’s work. Some critics have referenced the work as Diphoshophosho without the hyphen and with a terminal h. Others have referred to it as Diphosho-Phoso, adding the hyphen, but leaving out the terminal h. For this chapter, I will adopt Plaatje’s own hyphenation and inclusion of the h in the 1958 publication. 2 Plaatje was one of the founding members of the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC). He was the first South African to have a novel published, Mhudi (written in 1919, published in 1930), and he was the first translator of Shakespeare into Setswana, one of the native tongues of South Africa and Botswana. 3 Since the arrival of the Europeans, the development of written forms of African languages and the introduction of phonetic writing systems where none had existed before had been left to the efforts of missionary-run educational projects. In the 1920s, however, this work was suddenly taken up by the government. In 1929, a proposal was made to take an area roughly the size of the European Union and apply a uniform spelling and pronunciation system to all the indigenous languages found there, erasing in the process any unassimilated differences in tribal customs, culture, or sensibility. See Seddon, Deborah, “Lost in Translation: Sol Plaatje, ‘William Shake-the-Sword’ and South African Culture.” African Review of Books. Online posting, December 2003. http://www.africanreviewofbooks.com.

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local Setswana dialect and orthography4 by the English Committee on Orthography.5 As part of his work for the South African ANC, Plaatje had traveled throughout South Africa in the winter of 1913, recording the dire consequences of the Act on the lives of black South Africans. When the English delegation returned home to England, Plaatje stayed in London for more than 2 years in order to see his account of these experiences put in print and to bring the plight of his people to the attention of the British public.6 Despite his exalted status in South Africa, a sizeable number of critics (both contemporary South African and postcolonial anglophones) have also challenged Plaatje’s political accomplishments through reference to Diphosho-phosho’s lack of originality. He has been called “a ‘petit bourgeois,’ interested in the African workers’ grievances, but not prepared to go beyond the exposure of labor conditions to a more direct representation of worker interests.”7 Because Plaatje was a missioneducation English civil servant and had the right to own certain property and to vote, the legitimacy of his own political representation is also often called into question. As Laura Chrisman observed, “[According to some,] he is not representative, therefore he cannot adequately represent.”8 Critics have also taken aim at what they deem Plaatje’s “mistranslations” of Shakespeare, and they have often questioned whether Plaatje’s Shakespearean adaptation is even worthy of mention among the great works of South African literature.9 These critics rhetorically ask: “How can a writer purport to be anticolonial while relying on the England’s most canonical playwright as a model for the legitimization of native Setswana culture?” Both South African and postcolonial anglophone scholars level this charge at Plaatje, arriving at the same rhetorical question through different approaches. Stephen Gray argues that “Plaatje accepts without question Shakespeare’s worldview as embodied in the plays available to him; he is not necessarily concerned with mutating it” (10). Gray contends that both Mhudi and Diphosho, far from being literary statements of discontent, are “act[s] of faith in true English culture” (11). Mazisi Kunene, on the other hand, questions Plaatje’s place in the canon of South African literature, although he claims that Plaatje’s indebtedness to Shakespeare sullies both the African and the “masculine purity” of Plaatje’s own tale with a generic promiscuity and a “romantic episode” that “to Africans seem infantile” (246). 4 See Plaatje, Solomon, Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings. Ed. Brian Willan. Johannesburg, South Africa: Witswatersrand University Press, 1997, 67. 5 Ibid, 308. 6 Ibid, 379. Plaatje is aware of binational affiliations, as both a South African native and an English subject. He is careful to make repeated references to London when recalling where many of his protests against colonial injustices were composed. 7 Limb, Peter. “Rethinking Sol Plaatje’s Attitudes to Class, Empire, and Gender.” Critical Arts 16.1 (2002): 29. 8 Chrisman, Laura. “Beyond Black Atlantic and Postcolonial Studies: The South African Differences of Sol Plaatje and Peter Abrahams.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzi, Antoinette Burton, Jed Esty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2005), 99. 9 Kunene, Mazisi. “Review of Stephen Gray.” Research in African Literatures 11.2 (1980): 244–7.

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Lost in the welter of these meaningful political and historical readings of Diphosho-phosho are some pressing literary and linguistic issues, issues that allow us salubriously to reimagine what is at stake if we treat Plaatje as one canonical writer referencing another. Why did Plaatje choose to translate The Comedy of Errors when he was familiar with a number of other Shakespearean works as well? What thematic elements of the Shakespeare comedy does Plaatje expand, emend, or excise that might help to answer the previous question? As a South African who had an influential English voice on two continents, what did Diphosho-phosho have to teach its English readers about the ways in which Shakespeare could be interpreted? And lastly, what more can we learn about Shakespeare and Plaatje if we contest the conditions under which they were made into canonical authors? As I hope to suggest through raising these questions, the importance of the literary choices Plaatje made in composing Diphosho-phosho can best be understood as a response to Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors—and not merely as its translation and adaptation. Critical oversight, which has been skewed by either accusation of, or apology on behalf of, Plaatje to retrench the historicist, political, and postcolonial implications of Diphosho-phosho has tended to neglect Plaatje’s refractory, linguistic commentary on The Comedy of Errors. Perhaps unwittingly, this approach of studying canonical literature for the purposes of understanding colonization has reinforced the conditions necessary for authors like Plaatje and Shakespeare to be “nativized” in the first place, before they can become canonized. It is my contention that Plaatje’s intertextual commentary on The Comedy of Errors serves to challenge Shakespeare’s canonical status in subtle ways. By paying attention to the linguistic, literary, and pedagogical choices Plaatje made, we may recognize a very different Shakespeare than the one that Plaatje’s English masters treated as their national poet. Such an interpretive approach may allow us to read Plaatje’s work without recourse to either simplified apology or accolade that obviates the need for sustained and probing critical inquiry. It is this lack of critical inquiry that has, in part, hastened the need for the formation of a canon to which authors can be added or from which they can be excluded. So why did The Comedy of Errors appeal to Plaatje when it did? Education seems to have been the primary motive. Deborah Seddon observes that Plaatje’s “sense of equivalences” allowed him “to put Shakespeare to work for the political and personal empowerment of his own language and people.”10 Her evaluation of the utility of Shakespeare for Plaatje is borne out by Plaatje’s own comments at the beginning of his introduction to Diphoso-Phosho, in which he justifies the need for a translation of Shakespeare into Setswana despite local apathy and bewilderment concerning such a translation. Plaatje writes of his labor in not only translating the Bard but also in responding to a need that many Batswana people did not even realize they had. In his recollections of his initial exposure to Shakespeare, Plaatje wrote, “Intelligence in Africa is still carried from mouth to mouth by means of conversations after working hours. And reading a number of Shakespeare’s works, I always had a fresh story to tell.”11 Shakespeare thus seems to have provided Plaatje with the narrative “material” he needed for combating native apathy. Although translating 10 Seddon, 3. 11 Willan, 284.

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Shakespeare into Setswana has been difficult, he writes, “We are driven forward by the demands of the Batswana—the incessant and shrill cries of people exclaiming, ‘Tau’s Setswana [the missionary language] will be of no use to us! It is becoming extinct because children are not taught Setswana! They are taught the missionary language! They will lose all trace of our language!’ That is why we undertook to tackle this task.”12 Plaatje reiterates the social relevance of his labor by noting that the Batswana must “try to be self-reliant and to compete with other nations in providing books for themselves.”13 Plaatje was very interested in preserving the oral integrity of the Setswana tongue through utilizing written language to preserve it. In a telling anecdote, he recalls how a missionary was able to reproduce the sounds of Setswana by writing on a blackboard in an English schoolhouse. Plaatje is startled to observe a white English schoolgirl read and pronounce his own native tongue with an indistinguishable accent. Plaatje sees the written word as a tool for the preservation of his own native tongue. But our analysis would be incomplete if we did not also note that he saw the new English orthography as a means to make Setswana culture available to his English masters. He did this by making the cultural differences between Diphosho-phosho and The Comedy of Errors accessible only through a translation of his Anglicized Setswana back into English. (In this respect, Plaatje’s work is akin to Tayeb Salih’s writing of Season of Migration to the North into the m’uaradah tradition that Atef Laouyene describes in his essay.) This is one of the ways in which Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho resisted those English missionaries who initially wanted to introduce the Batswana people to “their” Shakespeare. The educational impetus behind Plaatje’s translation was thus not unidirectional. His attention was not fixed solely on the Batswana people. Diphosho-phosho was Plaatje’s first literary work after he published Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents and A Sechuana Reader in International Phonetic Orthography.14 Ostensibly, Plaatje was transitioning from one type of translation project (which sought to educate the English about the richness of the Sechuana tongue) to another (which sought to educate the Batswana about the same subject). In grappling with the issue of getting funding for the orthographic typeface he wanted, Plaatje continued to insist that his version of Diphosho-phosho be printed using a typeface that could include Sechuana symbols because they were “more phonetically expressive of our mother tongues.”15 He writes that these symbols are “not unlike the Roman letters and so should not excite the ire of ultraconservative missionaries who object to any innovation, however useful.”16 This reference to an alternative reading audience, one that was never far from Plaatje’s mind during the composition of Diphosho-phosho, is very important. Plaatje knew that no literary effort that he undertook, whether in English or Setswana, would escape the colonial 12 Willan, 384. 13 Ibid. 14 In his preface to the Sechuana Reader, Plaatje advocates the use of phonetic script because of its facility to capture the complex tonality of Setswana, so often corrupted in pronunciation by missionary teachers charged with the education of Setswana children. 15 Willan, 379–80. 16 Ibid, 379.

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gaze. Rather than being encumbered by this colonial readership, Plaatje saw the opportunity to challenge his audience about their own interpretations of what Shakespeare meant. As a colonial servant, Plaatje could criticize English rule only to a limited extent before he began to jeopardize his own intermediary position as a cross-cultural emissary and interpreter. Plaatje was, I would suggest, aware that the Shakespeare that he was interested in translating could allow him to cope with his fraught position as both a colonial subject and a South African native. Plaatje was aware that Shakespeare had a cultural signification that extended beyond England but who was, nevertheless, promulgated as a representative of native Englishness by his colonial masters. So to refine my earlier question, What did Plaatje see in The Comedy of Errors that appealed to him? Shakespeare’s Elizabethan play is very much concerned with the issue of inexplicable wealth exchange. The two Antipholi characters’ fortunes and respective behaviors change as Ephesus’ material wealth is gradually parceled to Syracuse. By the play’s end, Ephesus is ready to divorce his wife and Syracuse is ready to fight his way out of the city of Ephesus because of the twin effects of financial instability on both individual identity and domestic life. I would argue that Plaatje recognized in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors a work whose breadth of poetic insights across languages served Diphosho-phosho’s designs on both its Setswana and English readership. It is insufficient to say that these emotional anxieties resulted from similarities between Shakespeare’s “pre-industrial”17 society and Plaatje’s. Such a reading is inattentive to the nonsynchronic, psychological manifestations of financial instability on individual identity. Plaatje recognized these psychological issues latent in The Comedy of Errors. The bond that he forged with Shakespeare was thus asynchronous and dependant on the allegorical power of literature to “disentangle from the specific temporal and locational contexts ... to examine the psychosocial bonds between colonized and colonizer,” as Pier Paolo Frassinelli succinctly writes in his essay. I think this is an important observation for Diphosho-phosho because Plaatje was not at liberty to make his work an explicit call to action against all subjugating authority figures. That is why it is not always possible to observe the appeal of Diphosho-phosho exclusively for a Setswana readership. Rather, it is more productive to anticipate the effects of an English translation of Plaatje’s Setswana for a sympathetic English readership that might recognize the psychosocial bonds that they shared with the oppressed subjects of the play (and, by consequence, its Batswana readership). Both Plaatje and Shakespeare are interested in the psychological repercussions of unjust (and inexplicable) wealth redistribution. Plaatje’s work draws inspiration from The Comedy of Errors in part because Shakespeare’s contemporary concerns were addressed by reference to a place (Ephesus) where the injustices of authority were similar to his own time and place. Plaatje felt that if Shakespeare’s cultural appeal could extend from England to South Africa, then a rewriting of the same play could also extend back to England to show the ways in which unfair exploitation of Batswana culture and capital were akin to the exploitation of the two Dromios 17 Brian Willan notes the similarities between preindustrial South Africa and Renaissance England, although he does not argue for a causal manifestation in Diphosho-phosho, 309.

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and the unfair stripping of Antipholus of Ephesus’ wealth. Plaatje’s Diphoshophoso was a response sent to his English reading audiences, indicating the ways in which the English themselves had rewritten the cultural import of The Comedy of Errors to mask Shakespeare’s concerns about inexplicable and unfair economic rapaciousness and repression. To Plaatje, these concerns about the economic exploitation that resulted from the English presence in South Africa were partially masked by reference to the civilizing effects of exporting The Comedy of Errors into South Africa. While Plaatje is often accused of reiterating these colonial excuses for the universality of Shakespeare, what is often overlooked is the ways in which he changed the relationship between the Antipholi and the Dromio characters in his play to reflect The Comedy of Errors’ inherent frustrations with economic repression under the guise of civil authority. Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho reinterprets the two Antipholi characters in a far more sympathetic light than his English readership might have expected. The Antipholi figures are caught within a confusion of identities that forces them to behave tyrannically toward their servants. This behavior makes their own plight opaque to their master’s attention (until the Duke miraculously reappears at the end to set things right). Plaatje reminds us (and his English readers) of the frustrations inherent in Shakespeare’s play. Authority is subverted from the very opening scene of The Comedy of Errors, when the Duke tells Egeon: It hath in solemn synods been decreed Both by the Syracusians and ourselves, To admit no traffic to our adverse towns Nay, more, If any born at Ephesus be seen At any Syracusian marts and fairs; Again: if any Syracusian born Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies, His goods confiscate to the duke’s dispose, Unless a thousand marks be levied, To quit the penalty and to ransom him. Thy substance, valued at the highest rate, Cannot amount unto a hundred marks; Therefore by law thou art condemned to die. (I.I.10–15, italics mine)18

The play begins with reference to a law—“If any born in Ephesus be seen ...” or “if any Syracusian born come to the bay of Ephesus”—that cannot possibly be upheld. How can it be known know whether someone is born in Ephesus or Syracuse? Shakespeare takes the matter of that which cannot be judged empirically and pushes it even further by eliminating all evidence of visible difference between the Syracusians and the Ephesians. By erasing all visible difference, the play asks us to pay attention to the only thing that what we, as audience members, can tell apart:

18 All references to The Comedy of Errors are taken from the The Riverside Shakespeare. G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

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the goods of one man being unfairly confiscated through the agents of another man. This is surely an issue that was close to Solomon Plaatje’s heart. Shakespeare’s play demonstrates what can be achieved by manipulating the relationship between classes (servants to masters) as well as races (Syracusians to Ephesans). The Comedy of Errors is very alive to the possibilities of how quickly such manipulations can turn disruptive, seditious, and even dangerous. In act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s play, Antipholus beats his own servant after Dromio claims not to have any knowledge of going to the Centaur and leaving Antipholus’s gold there. Plaatje, however, leaves out all the dialogue between Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse prior to the entry of Adriana. Plaatje may have had practical problems translating Shakespeare’s numerous puns on the word sconce into Setswana, as Shole points out.19 However, what I want to point out is that we cannot disregard the fact that for the first time in the play, the duped Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse are seen bickering. The fact that this confusion escalates to violence against Dromio may initially have seemed comical to Shakespeare’s audiences, but by the play’s end there is the indisputable realization that this initial violence eventually escalates to both Syracusians brandishing swords and seeking an escape from Ephesus. Plaatje’s excision recognizes that the roots of The Comedy of Error’s terminal threat of violence originates in this moment of slapstick comedy whereby a confused nobleman is duped into beating his faithful servant for the enjoyment of an audience that, like Duke Solinus, knows better. For Plaatje’s English readers, this editorial excision is a reminder of the troubling implications of how servants could be abused when wealth is unfairly appropriated, both in South Africa as well as in Ephesus. Like the bewitched Ephesus of The Comedy of Errors, Plaatje alerts us to the ways in which all citizens (Antipholi and Dromios) subject to the reign of the Duke are paralyzed in their relations to one another until the injustices of economic oppression, at the local level, can be lifted. Plaatje’s rewriting also alerts us to the important roles of the two Dromios in ways that have been overlooked. These servants were more than just the butt of the play’s physical humor. They were both the servant and the displaced working class. The Duke’s ultimate authority, like that of a colonialist audience that could derive pleasure from watching its powerless and confused servants bicker and beat each other, is based on the creation of an omnipotent knowledge that cannot or will not recognize its own sadistic inclinations. When Duke Solinus explains why he cannot take pity on Egeon at the beginning of the play, he says that such kind feelings have not been bestowed on Ephesans wandering into Syracuse: “[To] our well-dealing countrymen, / Who wanting guilders to redeem their lives / [The Syracusians] Have seal’d his rigorous statutes with their bloods,” (1.1.8–10). Plaatje takes this and translates it into: “E re ha ba tlhoka madi a go rekolola / matshelo a bona, ba kgwedise ka madi a / tshika tsa mebele ya bona.” Literally translated as, “If they cannot pay money for their lives, they pay with their own blood,”20 Plaatje’s translation’s restores the blood-for-money substitution that both Dromios must pay 19 Shole, S.J. “Shakespeare in Setswana: An Evaluation of Raditladi’s Macbeth and Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 4.1 (1990): 63. 20 Diphosho-phoso, 19.

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in The Comedy of Errors; each servant suffers either because Antipholus of Ephesus has been unfairly deprived of his wealth or because Antipholus of Syracuse has been unfairly rewarded with it. But, unlike an interpretation that sees the Dromios as the servants who must pay in their masters’ stead for the confusion in Ephesus, Plaatje’s rewriting reminds his English readers that both the Antipholi and the Dromios are in the same boat. Plaatje’s “they” includes both sets of Antipholi and Dromios, who must pay until they are comically redeemed by the Duke. Plaatje reminds his readers that this comical conclusion is predicated on both sets of Syracusans and Ephesans suffering to various degrees until the Duke intervenes at the end. Plaatje is reminding his English audience that the oppression of unfair labor affects both English loyalists as well as their Batswana servants. These servants and their South African representatives are tied together by a kinship not unlike Antipholus of Syracuse’s kinship to Dromio of Syracuse. The fact that the play’s resolution to its imminent violence occurs through the intervention of a Duke who has not been a participant in the play’s social relations between master and servant reaffirms the play’s challenge to any authority that “universalizes” England’s civilizing presence in South Africa or the use of Shakespeare’s work as evidence of this universal benevolence. Although the plot elements of Shakespeare’s comedy were an initial draw, Plaatje was also attracted to the play because of the ways in which he could adapt its language and cultural referents to appeal to Batswana audiences. Plaatje’s translation of The Comedy of Errors remains faithful to the original only as far as content is concerned. English names are phonologically adapted. Plaatje retained sound clusters like the dr in “Dromio” and “Adriana.” He translated “The First Merchant” as “Moefeso,” which is concise and easy to pronounce. For “courtesan” he gave Mmanoko. Typical Setswana expressions were used for forms of address, relationship terms, and salutations. At the beginning of act 3, scene 1,21 Plaatje has Dromio wa Efeso shout the comical, Batswana names of female servants, “Dikeledi, Madipodi, Mosadi-oamaope, Makomana, Kegomodicoe” in place of Dromio of Ephesus’ cries to “Maud, Bridget, Marian, Cicel, Gillian, Ginn” to open the door and let Antipholus enter his house. And Shakespearean imagery is also freely adapted and paraphrased.22 The twin Antipholi, who are described by Shakespeare as “the one so like the other” (1.1.51), are translated by Plaatje as “they were alike as two mice” (31). When Antipholus of Syracuse warns Dromio of Syracuse that he should choose the right time for jesting, he uses the image of gnats that play when the sun is bright but hide away as soon as it is gloomed by clouds (2.2.30–1). In Plaatje, the image is reversed and based on Plaatje’s own experience: “Kokobele di fofa go le longola; ha tlhaka di

21 All quotes at taken from S.T. Plaatje, Diphoshophoso. Lobatsi: Bechuanaland Book Centre, 1958. 22 The text is an instance of what the postcolonial translation theorist Harold De Campos calls a “transcreation” or “poetic reorchestration,” which “reimagines” the original text and diffuses the power relations between the source text and the translation. See Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira’s discussion of the poetics of translation as textual revitalization in “Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Harold De Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation,” in Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, eds Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi. London: Routledge, 1999, 95–113.

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phaphalala go nna sethukuthuku, di...ye go ingaralega” [“Gnats only fly when the air is humid; but as soon as the fiery sun bakes everything, they lie in hiding.”] If we scrutinize Plaatje’s reasons for not translating The Comedy of Errors verbatim, we may also make some valuable discoveries. The first change Plaatje made to his source text was to change the title of Shakespeare’s play. Instead of the literal translation of “comedy of errors,” something like “metlae/khomedi ya diphos,” Plaatje chose a genuine Setswana word meaning “a series of blunders/mistakes upon mistakes.” In typical style, throughout the play, Plaatje renders Shakespeare “in the authentic colloquial idiom.” 23 Translating The Comedy of Errors also gave Plaatje the chance to reacquaint his Batswana readers with the Setswana constant j. As he points out in his introduction, if Shakespeare’s language is translated without the sound of this constant j, then a line like U njetse tinare [You have partaken of my dinner] might be mistranslated as vulgar speech. By pointing out that the sounds of Setswana can make a canonical author like Shakespeare more comprehensible than if he were translated without the full capacity of the Setswana tongue, Plaatje is alerting his reader to why he or she need not be bewildered by the efficacy of reading a Renaissance English dramatist. And he is also challenging his English readers to consider how editorial emendations affect meaning. The irony that Plaatje recognized, which many of his contemporaries did not, was that Shakespeare’s English was nonnormative; that in reproducing The Comedy of Errors as Diphosho-phosho, Plaatje was questioning any definitive interpretations of Shakespeare that were based on editorial standardization. Plaatje gave his Setswana readers Shakespeare’s play in a regularized orthography not only as a way of placing England’s most canonical author under the purview of Batswana control but as a response to colonial efforts to present a regularized English Bard to Setswana readers as “the original.” Plaatje, instead, gestures his readers toward the slipperiness of Shakespeare’s English to resist such regularization. For Plaatje, the translation of Shakespeare into standardized Setswana orthography at once introduced The Comedy of Errors to its Batswana readership and restored the challenges of finding new meaning in Shakespeare’s words back to Plaatje’s English-speaking audience. Plaatje’s translation of Shakespeare’s verse drama into Setswana prose also merits our attention. Shole judges that “Plaatje’s prose is as poetic and as highly idiomatic as the original, if not better, because as Sandilands observed, the artificial poetic schemes of The Comedy are discarded in Diphosophoso and replaced with a more natural speech” (60). Leaving aside Shole’s vapid dismissal of The Comedy of Errors’ “artificial poetic schemes,” his observation about Plaatje’s shift in genre is meaningful. As Donna Woodford-Gormley astutely observes in her essay, the adaptation of Shakespeare from one genre into another requires the recognition of “the allegorical objects of the art that immortalized him” (p. 203). Plaatje introduces the concerns of Shakespeare’s play to his Batswana audiences in non-Anglicized, non-Romanized ways by retaining the allegorical power that Shakespeare found in Plautus’ comedies. Plaatje captures his Setswana readers by adding intimacy to all of the relationships in the plays, even between the Antipholi characters and 23 Sandilands, A. Introduction to Diphoshophoso. Lobatsi: Bechuanaland Book Centre, 1958, 5.

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their mistaken servants. Both Dromios call their mistaken masters Mungwaka [an expression that means “my boss” but in a much more familiar, fraternal way than just “employer”]. The Dromios call their masters’ respective wives Mmisis, which also implies a level of affectionate respect. Even Adriana and Luciana address each other as nnaka [younger sister] and nkgonne [elder sister] or ngwana’a mma [sister]). By making the community squabbles between the Syracusans and the Ephesans more fraternal, the study of how their interrelationships change when these characters are affected by unfair and inexplicable socioeconomic disruptions becomes more immediate. Plaatje also alerts his English readers to the ways in which Diphosho-phosho can be said to be Shakespearean precisely because it does not hew too closely to Shakespeare’s text. Just as Shakespeare had metamorphosed the literary traditions that he had inherited, by merging two Plautine comedies of mistaken identity (Menaechmi and Amphitryon) into one, to multiply the discord of interrelated Renaissance characters in socioeconomic crisis, Plaatje changes the relationships within those interrelated communities to show different implications of that crisis for twentieth-century South Africans. It was important for Plaatje to establish Shakespeare’s status as a playwright who did not share English colonial regard for tradition, literary or otherwise. This sense of textual resistance to conformity and interpretive control strengthened Plaatje’s sense of alliance with Shakespeare. Plaatje recognized that the motivations behind the textual emendations that threatened both his and Shakespeare’s writing partook of the same conservative, assimilationist aesthetics. Plaatje then went a step further in disassociating The Comedy of Errors as the work of a representative English playwright by reinventing William Shakespeare as Tsikinya-Chaka [literally translated Shake-the-Sword].24 With this name change, the details of the English playwright’s life were also transformed. Plaatje’s Shakespeare, like his author, became an outlaw of his own time who “fought for the rights that his village of Stratford had been denied.” In a sense, Plaatje gave Shakespeare what he imagined was a voice that he had been denied by both his (and Shakespeare’s) colonial commentators. What Plaatje revealed to his English readership is how these editorial voices often gave readers a ventriloquized Shakespeare. Ironically, he accomplishes this through a substitute act of ventriloquizing at a moment when his colonial masters might have expected a verbatim translation. This “risky reinforcement,” to borrow Dionne and Kapadia’s term, derives from the same logic that Atef Laouyene describes Tayeb Salih’s using when he draws [the stereotype

24 G.P. Lestrade, Chairman of the Committee on Orthography from which Plaatje had been excluded, wrote the introduction to a “correction” of Plaatje’s vernacular translation of Diphosho-Phosho. This new edition was commissioned by a Johannesburg publishing house that intended to “publish the translation in a form that would be a fitting commemoration [of Plaatje] (Shakespeare, 1937, v). The first change Lestrade made was to restore Shakespeare’s name to the cover, instead of the Tshikinya-Chaka (Shake-the-Sword) of Plaatje’s original. But that was just the beginning. As Lestrade provides reasons for converting Plaatje’s unorthodox vernacular choices into a normalized Setswana, the irony of his criticisms of Plaatje efface the commemorative effect of the text and make the entire project less about Plaatje’s Shakespeare than about an ideally Anglicized William Shakespeare.

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of the threatening Moor] “to its extreme conclusion, in order to shock Western audiences out of a perfunctory acceptance of the stereotype” (p. 222). Plaatje’s Shakespeare is a character newly presented to his Setswana readers and newly returned to his English readers, as a non-native English writer, critical of the tradition in which he writes rather than standing for it. In fact, Plaatje reminds the Setswana people that they have made Shakespeare their own by giving him the popular name of Tsikinya-Chaka and that “none of the Englishmen we know can match his fame and achievements.”25 Plaatje’s Tsikinya-Chaka is a reminder to his English readership that the Bard cannot stand up to the burdens of representing a nation, that by defamiliarizing him and replacing with the sphere of literacy—rather than literary—studies, Shakespeare is unburdened of a responsibility that he cannot possibly serve. In her discussion of Alicia Alonso’s Shakespeare Y Sus Máscaras, Donna Woodford describes the creation of a similarly allegorical Shakespeare, one who distributes the masks that his characters will wear but who nonetheless remains incapable of controlling how his audience will react once the play has begun. Woodford’s observation of Alonso and her Shakespeare facing each other in the theater, as two cultural icons reflecting the other’s concerns, reminds us that Plaatje’s Tsikinya-Chaka is also cultural reflection of his creator. However, Plaatje recognized that the work that his text had to accomplish rested in its ability to shape audience action (if not anticipate their reaction). The presence of Tsikinya-Chaka had to become more than just a matter of authorial and cultural reflection if Diphosho-phosho was to challenge its audiences to see its Shakespearean resonances as a different kind of “native” work, one that Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia describe as “the place to which one returns—when rethinking the possibilities of resistant forms of self and culture in the postcolonial context” (p. 2). Plaatje challenges his readers (both English and Batswana) to see how this native Shakespeare used The Comedy of Errors as a call for social reform, a call that now emanated from Diphosho-phosho. We must read the relationship between Diphosho-phosho and The Comedy of Errors as “con-textual,” to use Professors Dionne and Kapadia’s term, if Shakespeare’s play is to be understood as little more than background. Plaatje’s adaptation raises the stakes of its own pedagogical value by alerting its English readers that any interpretation of The Comedy of Errors that does not understand its Setswana con-texts in Diphosho-phosho is glaringly deficient. Such inadequate readings are guilty in equal measure of not understanding the social and economic implications of the text and neglecting the text’s implicit call to action. Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho was quite different from The Comedy of Errors that was being taught by English missionary schools in that it brought together the utility of pedagogy with the retheorization of Shakespeare’s canonical status. That Shakespeare was retained in Plaatje’s educational goals was not a sign of his succumbing to the English colonizing effort but was instead a challenge to that very effort by dint of the fact that Shakespeare was wrested from the control of both the regularized English language and text. Plaatje was returning The Comedy of Errors back to its roots in civil disobedience—in its “native” challenges to the authority of the Duke. The fact that this is not made explicit in Diphosho-phosho 25 Willan, 276.

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is understandable given Plaatje’s dual loyalties to both crown and citizenry; but the challenge to the Duke’s authority in Diphosho-phosho was not obscured from the purview of English authorities, whose editorial emendations challenged Plaatje’s literary interpellations of Duke Solinus. Plaatje’s critics became keenly aware of his strategy of not remaining faithful to a standardized English version of The Comedy of Errors. Plaatje was alerting his Setswana readers to the homespun appeal of Tsinka-Chinya, but in the process he was alerting his colonist masters to the fact that “their” Shakespeare had been adulterated and denuded of the frisson of social critique that was latent within Shakespeare’s heterodox text. Plaatje can be seen as restoring Shakespeare to his non-nativized status by making him available, as if for the very first time, in both Setswana and its English retranslation. However, the English could see only the threats implicit to their own authority by reading Plaatje’s text on its own terms—in its own orthography and in Setswana. Because Diphosho-phosho was available only to the English in Plaatje’s own translation, his readers were challenged to consider any “mistranslation” on Plaatje’s part as an inherent critique of the parochialism that only allowed a “universal” Shakespeare to become comprehensive to a citizen educated in English. In translating Shakespeare to Setswana, it is not only the English that is held up to local standards but the colonial function of Shakespeare himself. By using a canonical figure like Shakespeare, Plaatje was simultaneously able to establish the legitimacy of Setswana as a politically potent language of dissent by forcing his English critics to read how Diphosho-phosho deviated from The Comedy of Errors. If we read Plaatje in terms of his ambivalence and his mimicry, then we lose sight of his “dehegemonizing engagement,” as Laura Chrisman calls it.26 Plaatje’s observations tell not only of the uses of Shakespeare, but of a method of reading that inherently theorizes the Bard’s literary formations into Setswana, not merely as a linguistic recapitulation but as a paradigmatic transformation—from William Shakespeare into Tsikinya-Chaka. In other words, what Plaatje was aiming for, whether he was making it clear to himself or to his readers, was not simply translation, but repossession. Elements of Shakespeare’s play that mattered to his Setswana readers (that is, the proverbial wisdom and abuse of working-class loyalty) could be retained. Elements that served no practical purpose (such as the allusions to Plautus and the alliterative homonyms in the play) could be excised. Plaatje, I would argue, did not take Shakespeare away from his “Englishness” through this type of Setswana transliteration. Rather, Diphosho-phosho allowed Plaatje to continue an allegorical comedy of injustice that spoke to the Batswana people across the centuries. At the same time, Diphosho-phosho allowed Plaatje to return Shakespeare to those of his English readers who read in him a voice for the oppressed that could not be drowned out despite the concluding and official pronouncement of Duke Solinus. Therefore, the choice to translate The Comedy of Errors into Diphosho-phosho might properly be interpreted as a comment on those portions of the play that Plaatje recognized as being instruments in the anglicizing colonial aims of his ANC critics. Plaajte’s attentiveness to those portions of the text that bespoke the economic depredations in South Africa was neither the political Plaatje writing back to his English masters nor the pedagogical Plaatje instructing his Setswana readers. Rather, I would argue that Plaatje was performing a literary event that had both social and political implications. 26 Chrisman, 58.

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Plaatje was reinterpreting Shakespeare in the language of political dissent in which The Comedy of Errors was originally written by taking the allusive implications of Shakespeare and making Setswana meaning of them. But by rewriting Shakespeare’s English in the “con-text” of a translated Setswana text, Plaatje was asking his critics to (re)interpret what they had originally left out in reading The Comedy of Errors and what Setswana readers might have overlooked when dismissing the Bard’s “foreign” presence in South Africa. So what can we do with this interpretation of Shakespeare as a non-nativized writer? Chisman accurately states the next set of challenges to reading Diphoshophosho in context when she observes that Shakespeare made possible (for Plaatje) a new subjectivity that includes aesthetic, ontological, and epistemological dimensions. “Yet (English authorities) paradoxically controlled the new subject they have helped to produce.”27 She suggests that rather than blaming anticolonial nationalism for the problems of contemporary globalization, postcolonial studies should look at the responsibility of multinational capitalism.28 I would not be so quick to shift interpretive registers, though. One of the most valuable contributions of Diphosho-phosho to the field of Shakespeare studies has been the ways that it has alerted us to what Shakespearean translations can reveal. By alerting us to the local challenges faced by a society transitioning from the spoken word to the printed text, and from community life to city life (of both Shakespeare’s and Plaatje’s times), we are challenged to reinterpret the role of “native” texts in helping readers cope with these transitions. In needing to capture the sound of Setswana, Plaatje is simultaneously alerting his English audiences to how Shakespeare, the oral poet, may be heard within his plays. Plaatje is known to have attended a performance of the Bard and as much as reading Shakespeare, the appeal of listening to him and watching him being performed must have struck young Sol Plaatje. If The Comedy of Errors communicated its messages most potently by being performed before English-speaking audiences, while Diphosho-phosho achieved the same impact by being read, we have much to learn from what happens when translations shift literary and pedagogical registers. Plaatje’s translation, by defamiliarizing the Bard, alerts his English-speaking readers to those members of Shakespeare’s original audience who might not have known what to do with The Comedy of Errors’ unruly critique of the Duke’s power. By taking the play “back” once again to a moment of authorial (and authoritarian) instability, Diphosho-phosho becomes productively unfamiliar for those in its English audiences who seek alternative meanings to the text. It is a moment of danger because the sounds of Shakespeare have reached his readers while bypassing the intervention of editors who sought to universalize his appeal. The critical challenges ahead lie in looking for these moments of interpolation within other translated versions of Shakespeare,29 which might, once again, restore his plays as challenges to normalization and canonization.

27 Ibid, 261. 28 Ibid, 268. 29 Unfortunately, the manuscripts of his translations of Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice have been lost.

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Works Cited Chrisman, Laura. “Beyond Black Atlantic and Postcolonial Studies: The South African Differences of Sol Plaatje and Peter Abrahams.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzi, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Kunene, Mazisi. “Review of Stephen Gray.” Research in African Literatures 11.2 (1980): 244–7. Limb, Peter. “Rethinking Sol Plaatje’s Attitudes to Class, Empire, and Gender.” Critical Arts 16.1 (2002): 29. Plaatje, Solomon Tshekisho. Diphoshophoso. Lobatsi: Bechuanaland Book Centre, 1958. ———. Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970. ———. Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings. Ed. Brian Willan. Johannesburg, South Africa: Witswatersrand University Press, 1997. ———. Diphoshophoso. Lobatsi: Bechuanaland Book Centre, 1958. Sandilands, A. Introduction to Diphoshophoso. Lobatsi: Bechuanaland Book Centre, 1958: 5. Seddon, Deborah. “Lost in Translation: Sol Plaatje, “William Shake-the-Sword” and South African Culture.” African Review of Books December 2003. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Shole, S.J. “Shakespeare in Setswana: An Evaluation of Raditladi’s Macbeth and Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 4 ( 1990/1): 51–64. Vieira , Else Ribeiro Pires. “Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Harold De Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation,” in Post-colonial Translations: Theory and Practice, eds Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi. London: Routledge, 1999.

Chapter 11

In Fair Havana, Where We Lay Our Scene: Romeo and Juliet in Cuba Donna Woodford-Gormley

“In fair Havana, where we lay our scene ... .” This is not, of course, the traditional opening line to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but Shakespeare’s works, and especially Romeo and Juliet, are well known and well respected in Cuba. Romeo and Juliet is read by all students in the tenth grade. It has been performed in Havana, both as a play and as a ballet. Cinematic versions of this and other Shakespeare plays are frequently shown on Cuban television, and Romeo y Julieta is even the brand name of a popular Cuban cigar. But the prevalence of Shakespeare’s works in Cuba does not make their position any less complex and contested. As Bernice Kliman recently noted, “In Latin America, as everywhere, Shakespeare can be a god to be worshipped or overcome” (327). Cuba as a postcolonial nation has an understandably complicated relationship to Shakespeare, though it is not necessarily complicated in the same ways as in other postcolonial nations. In “The Postcolonial/Postmodern Shakespeare,” Jyotsna Singh notes that in colonial India, for instance, “English Literary Education was ... made serviceable to British Political interests” (30). And she further observes that “the primary aim of staging plays by ... Shakespeare was to keep alive the myth of English cultural superiority, a myth that was crucial to British political interests in India and in which Shakespeare, undoubtedly, was a privileged signifier” (32). Even in postcolonial India, Singh notes, Shakespeare is often glorified as “universal,” a practice that “denies both colonial history and postcolonial class differences” (37). The situation of Shakespeare in Cuba, however, is somewhat different. While Cuba, like India, has a long and turbulent history of colonization and foreign influence, it was not predominately British influence or colonization. The British did control Havana for 11 months between 1762 and 1763, but it has been the long Spanish colonial control and the later threat of U.S. influence that have left a much greater mark on Cuban history. Its independence from colonial rule and its ability to resist the powerful influence of the United States are points of national pride in Cuba. Other points of national pride, however, are the excellent level of education and the impressive cultural literacy of most Cubans. In today’s Cuba, Shakespeare and his works are delicately balanced atop these two points of national pride: independence and education. While Shakespeare was never a tool of colonization in Cuba as he was in India and other British colonies, and while he is not a cultural relic of either Spain or the United States, he is European and could be

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seen as a symbol of that from which Cubans have struggled to liberate themselves. One might expect that Cuban writers adapting Shakespeare would find themselves in a situation similar to that of Solomon Plaatje in South Africa, who is criticized for “relying on England’s most canonical playwright as a model for the legitimization of native Setswana culture” (Sohrawardy, p. 188). Nevertheless, Shakespeare remains a cultural icon, and knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays carries cultural capital, which is valued highly in Cuba. This delicate balance is clearly evident in Cuban adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Jonathon Bate, in speaking of English adaptations of Shakespeare, notes that “the history of appropriation may suggest that ‘Shakespeare’ is not a man who lived from 1564 to 1616 but a body of work that is refashioned by each subsequent age in the image of itself” (quoted in Cartelli 2), and Thomas Cartelli, responding to Bate, observes that “this tendency becomes even more pronounced when ‘Shakespeare’ is ‘refashioned’ outside the national boundaries of British culture and society” (2). Similarly, Atef Laouyene has noted that Shakepeare is “a literary Classic whose contemporary appropriative invocation reveals not so much the endurance of his universal genius as the modern appropriator’s current concerns” (p. 213). The concerns of modern appropriators in Cuba, however, are complex and often involve both the desire to pay homage and the desire to appropriate Shakespeare and turn his works into something Cuban. Writing of Otra Tempestad, her and Flora Lauten’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Cuban director Raquel Carrió asked: What can we do on this side of the world which wouldn’t simply repeat the images of a playwright whose work has been staged thousands of times? How can we find a language which respects the beauty and profundity of the material but which does not simply translate the themes and forms of representation? (Carrió 160, trans. Hulme)

Cuban appropriations of Romeo and Juliet offer an answer to this question. They reflect the Cuban respect for and admiration of Shakespeare, but they also demonstrate that Cuban artists have made Shakespeare’s works their own. Romeo and Juliet is well known and often performed and adapted throughout Latin America. Indeed, Bernice Kliman’s recent collection, Latin American Shakespeares, contains more essays on Romeo and Juliet than on any other single play, with 6 of 15 essays focusing on the star-crossed lovers. According to Hernán Loyola, Pablo Neruda’s translation of the play, which is the version read by Cuban students, has made the play a part of Spanish language literature: “Antes de Pablo Neruda, todas las traducciones españoles de Romeo y Julieta no son sino sombras borrosas del original inglés; desde Neruda, Romeo y Julieta ha quedado incorporada también a la literatura en lengua española” [“Before Pablo Neruda, all the Spanish translations of Romeo and Juliet were pale shadows of the English original; since Neruda Romeo and Juliet has also become part of Spanish language literature”]1 (152). And Cuban scholars such as Beatriz Maggi and the writers of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura who penned Shakespeare, Un Contemporáneo Nuestro go farther and argue not 1

Except where otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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simply that the play is part of Spanish or Latin American literature but that it can be interpreted as a revolutionary text. Maggi, for instance, contrasts the ways that Paris and Romeo court Juliet, noting that Paris’ love is conventional while Romeo’s is revolutionary: “Mientres [Paris] enamora de forma feudal, convencional, con sentimiento igualmente puro subordinado al asentimiento de los padres, Romeo enamora de forma revolucionaria, moderna, atendiendo solo a que ama” [“While Paris falls in love in a manner that is feudal, conventional, with equally pure sentiment subordinated to the will of the parents, Romeo loves in a revolutionary, modern way, attending only to his love”] (90). The implication of Maggi’s argument is that Romeo attracts both Juliet and the audience because we, like Shakespeare, prefer the revolutionary. Likewise, the anonymous writers of Shakespeare, Nuestro Contemporáneo suggest repeatedly that Shakespeare himself was only nominally “bourgeois” and was in spirit a contemporary of the Cuban revolution. This tendency to appropriate Shakespeare as a native playwright while also taking advantage of the cultural capital Shakespeare’s works carry can be clearly seen in two Cuban adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó, written and performed by the Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas in 1981, and Shakespeare y sus máscaras, choreographed by Alicia Alonso and performed by the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in 2003. These two adaptations illustrate two very different Cuban approaches to Shakespeare. The first is a grassroots effort closely tied to revolutionary philosophy and propaganda, and the second demonstrates the heights of elite Cuban art and culture. Nevertheless, both manage to blend Cuban elements with Shakespearean materials. Just as the Romeo y Julieta cigars and cigarettes are, according to the packaging, made of “100% tabaco Cubano,” so Cuban adaptations and appropriations of the play Romeo and Juliet have become native Cuban products that bear the mark of a foreign import. The performance history of Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó is difficult, if not impossible, to trace. The Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas was founded in 1960 when a group of neighbors decided to “organizar un grupo teatral para colaborar revolucionariamente en la educación artística del pueblo” [“organize a theatrical group to collaborate revolutionarily in the artistic education of the people”] (Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas [GTCB] back cover). According to the published text of Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó, the group performed in schools, workplaces, and military sites as well as in theaters in Havana and elsewhere in Cuba. By 1987 the group had performed nearly 30 theatrical works and had helped to educate and train more than 800 actors, who then moved on to perform or study with other theatrical groups, art schools, or organizations. In 1982, Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó received the Premio David de Teatro, a national award for theater. The play’s clearly stated goal is to “reflejar la actitud revolucionaria de nuestro pueblo trabajado a través de las actividades de los CDR” (Comité de Defensa de la Revolución). Además de plantear la firmeza ideological de nuestra juventud” [“to reflect the revolutionary attitude of our working people through the activities of the CDR. Furthermore, to establish the firm ideology of our youth”] (GTCB back cover). The play is closely tied with the communist movement and is in every respect a revolutionary act. Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó is also, to put it mildly, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. The setting of the play is changed from Verona, Italy, to a

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neighborhood in postrevolutionary Havana, Cuba: Luyanó. The dialogue is written by the Grupo De Teatro Cheo Briñas, not by William Shakespeare; the lovers are separated not by an ancient feud but by one family who wishes to emigrate to Miami while another prefers to stay in Cuba, and the lead characters are not named Romeo and Julieta but rather Felipe and Odalys. The play does not even end tragically, unless it can be considered tragic that Felipe’s father abandons his wife and son to go to Miami in pursuit of the easy life and a younger wife. By the end of the play, however, Felipe and his mother, Amelia, have decided this is no tragedy. The play ends instead with the wedding of Felipe and Odalys, who plan to live with Felipe’s mother, who has decided to stay with her son rather than abandoning him and the revolution to go with her husband. This is a decidedly Cuban play, and it is really closer to Cuban propaganda than it is to Elizabethan literature. But even a very loose adaptation can enter into a dialogue with its source text. Pier Paolo Frasinelli has noted that adaptations “demand that we return to Shakespeare’s text ... not as a fetishized aesthetic artifact, but as a cultural object caught up in complex processes of intercultural and transnational exchange, adaptation and transformation” (p. 172). The adaptations refer back to the source, even as they change it. Likewise, Aimara da Cunha Resende has noted that this Bakhtinian dialogue allows the adaptation simultaneously to interrogate the source text and to continue its legacy: Adaptations and appropriations preserve the life of alien works, maintain their cultural value as they respect the fecundity characteristic of each text. They are responsible for a kind of permanence based on interchange, when the source text and the adaptation/ appropriation enter a dialogue, are confronted, agree, disagree ... (271)

With this in mind, it appears significant that the creators of this play chose to borrow Shakespeare’s title. The borrowing puts Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó in dialogue with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and it suggests that Romeo y Julieta in Cuba is more than just a cigar or even, as one of the cigarette’s slogans phrases it “an exquisite passion.” It is a symbol of star-crossed lovers, and even if those star-crossed lovers are in a situation very different from that of Shakespeare’s characters, the fact that they are facing an unjust situation that keeps them apart is enough to evoke the title of Shakespeare’s play. Indeed, more than the title of Shakespeare’s play is referenced. The play, though a very Cuban, very loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, is full of echoes and reversals of Shakespeare’s work. The dialogue between the two plays does thus create a “permanence based on interchange” (Resende 271). Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó gives Shakespeare an even stronger foothold in Cuba, but it does so by remaking his work into a Cuban work. Felipe and Odalys are indeed star-crossed lovers, or at least they are lovers temporarily separated by circumstances that seem to be beyond their control. But they are not Romeo and Juliet in Verona—they are Romeo and Juliet in Luyanó, that is, in Cuba, and so their circumstances have been changed accordingly. One of the most striking changes from or reversals of the Shakespeare play is the change in the references to fate. In Shakespeare’s play, fate is an unavoidable, unstoppable force. Shakespeare’s characters are star-crossed. They are not destined to be together. Although there is no logical reason for their separation, and although the division of the families because of some ancient feud, the source of which is never explained, may

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strike the audience as absurd, it is understood that Romeo and Juliet are mere pawns who cannot control the moves their parents and rulers make on this chessboard. The Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas, however, presents a very different story. In communist Cuba, the play suggests, there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle. Every problem can be overcome if the people work together. Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó takes place in a neighborhood of Havana, and the characters are not old rival families, nor even rival gangs, as in West Side Story. They are members of a CDR—Comité de Defensa de la Revolución—a neighborhood committee charged with watching for anticommunist behavior as well as with carrying out the domestic work of the revolution, such as fumigating the neighborhood for cockroaches and making sure that young revolutionaries in love are not separated because of their parents’ disagreements. Both these projects are under way when the play opens. While Carmen, one of the leaders of the CDR, and a much more effective problem solver than either Friar Lawrence or Escalus, prince of Verona, supervises the fumigation of the neighborhood, she also gets Odalys and Felipe to tell the story of how they fell in love and then broke up. As the story begins to unfold, Carmen declares that they cannot have such a drama on their block, so she instead stages a real drama. The play, it appears, is the thing, even in Luyanó. She enlists other members of the CDR to act out the parts of the parents of Felipe and Odalys. Her plan is for them to re-enact all the events of the romance and breakup so that they can look for a solution (13). The problem must have a solution because everything is possible for young people in revolutionary Cuba: “¿Pero es que puede haber algo imposible para unos jóvenes en la Cuba de hoy?” [“But can anything be impossible for young people in Cuba today?”] (10). In fact, Carmen vows that she will solve this problem or change her name, clearly making another allusion to Romeo and Juliet, in which so much attention is given to names, to Juliet’s request that Romeo change his name because “’tis but thy name that is my enemy” (Shakespeare 2.1.80), and to the idea that a “rose by any other word would smell as sweet” (Shakespeare 2.1.84– 5). Gradually we learn that Felipe and Odalys met and fell in love and thought to eventually marry, but problems arose when Felipe’s father (César) told his wife and son that he planned to go to Miami and wanted them to come with him. Although Felipe’s mother (Amelia) quietly protests the plan, and although Felipe very vocally objects and says he will not go, César continues with his plan to go to “el país de los dólares” [the land of dollars] (47). The rumor of César’s intention to emigrate spreads through the neighborhood, and everyone begins to look with suspicion not just at César but also at Felipe, who they feel may be a traitor like his father. Odalys’s parents do not want her to see Felipe any longer, as they are afraid that if he goes to Miami she will go with him. Odalys goes to Felipe to suggest that they marry right away so that nobody can separate them, but Felipe thinks she is about to break off their relationship, so he ends it first. Odalys resigns herself to the fact that they are star-crossed lovers: “Felipe y yo no nacimos para estar juntos y se acabó.” [“Felipe and I were not born to be together and it ended”] (41), but Carmen is not willing to accept any such fate. Indeed, she is not willing to accept the idea of fate: “¿Pero y esto qué es? Aqui nadie nace para nada. El que sabe luchar y buscar su lugar es el que se labra su propio destino.” [“But what is this? Here nobody is born for anything. The one who knows how to fight and look for his place is the one who creates his own destiny”] (41). Eventually her experiment in meta-theater brings the

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lovers back together, and she leaves them with one last piece of sage advice: “Yo lo único que quiero es decirle que de ustedes depende. En nuestra época nadie puede influir para quitarles una decisión. El futuro depende de ustedes mismos.” [“The only thing I want is to tell you that it depends on you. In our time no one can force you to change your minds. The future depends on you”] (79). In fair Havana, she assures us, Romeo and Juliet need not be “star-crossed lovers” doomed to live out a brief “death-marked love” (Shakespeare Prologue 6, 9). They can determine their own fate if they are willing to work for it. This emphasis on the young people’s responsibility for their future and on their ability to choose the fate they want is, of course, a dramatic change from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which whatever future remains for the bereaved parents depends on their abilities to stop feuding and to build a new society on the sacrifice their children have made. The children have no future, nor did they have the opportunity to control their own fate. But this is one way in which the Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas both changes the play, making it more Cuban, while also paying tribute to Shakespeare, and the change extends beyond the idea of fate versus self-determination. Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó also echoes and reverses the generational conflicts in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet frequently emphasizes the culpability of the older generation. Juliet’s father tries to force her into marriage; the nurse helps to arrange a secret marriage between Romeo and Juliet and then, when Romeo is banished, tries to convince Juliet to marry Paris since she probably will never see Romeo again anyway; and Friar Lawrence performs the secret marriage that he thinks will unite the two warring families, but then instead of revealing the marriage at a time when it might have at least brought about some reconciliation, he comes up with the bizarre plan to fake Juliet’s death, sneak Romeo back into Verona, and then send them both into exile. These are hardly the actions of responsible adults, and they are precisely the actions that serve to bring about the tragic ending. The play seems to suggest that the impetuous youth are in many ways more responsible than their parents, but they remain helpless victims since the older generation holds all the power. Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó also places a great deal of emphasis on the clash between the generations. Repeatedly, Carmen cites the fact that Felipe and Odalys are young revolutionaries as proof that they can overcome any problem. She asks, “¿Pero es que puede haber algo imposible para unos jovenes en la Cuba de hoy?” [“But can anything be impossible for young people in Cuba today?”] (10), and when Odalys suggests that the problem has no solution, Carmen is scandalized: “¿Cómo que no tiene solución? !Una mucacha joven diciendo eso! Todo tiene solución. [“How can it not have a solution? A young woman says this! Everything has a solution!”] (17). When Felipe tells Odalys that his mother does not want to go to Miami but is being pressured by his father, Odalys attributes the problem to her age: “Ese es el problema de las mujeres de esa edad ... Hacen las cosas no por convencimento sino por lo que diga el marido. Yo no quisiera, cuando sea mayor, pensar así.” [“That is the problem with women of that age ... they do things not because they are convinced but because their husband tells them to. I don’t want, when I’m older, to think like that”] (26). Both Odalys and Felipe accuse Odalys’s parents of not being good revolutionaries since they do not trust in the youth and in their daughter’s dedication to Cuba and to the revolution: “Ustedes están muy equivocados! Dicen

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que son revolucionarios per no confían en la juventud, cómo es posible eso?” [“You are very much mistaken. You say that you are revolutionaries, but you don’t trust the youth. How is that possible?”] (77). The younger generation is still portrayed as more idealistic, and their parents are still seen as somewhat irresponsible, though not as completely irredeemable. If their children are patient enough with them, they may be educated and may learn to see things the way their children do; but the power dynamic has changed. Here it is the youth who hold the power and have the chance to change their world if they will take it. The Cuban faith in the idealism and energy of youthful revolutionaries inverts the power dynamic of the generational conflict in Shakespeare’s play, placing the young people in control of their fate just as they control the fate of their country. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the adaptation, and the thing that makes it truly a Cuban version of Romeo and Juliet, is the reason for the separation of Felipe and Odalys. What threatens to separate them is not a long-standing feud between their families, but the decision of Felipe’s father to go to Miami. That would mean not just a temporary separation, but a permanent one, as all the characters in the play know. If Oscar and Amelia go to Miami without their son, they will not see him become an engineer and be “querido y respetado por todos” [“loved and respected by all”] as Amelia has always dreamed (66). If they could convince Felipe to go with them, he and Odalys would be separated. If, as her parents fear, Odalys went with Felipe and his parents to Miami, they would lose their daughter. This is the national tragedy of Cuba. Most Cubans can tell of some family member who went to the United States and now can visit only occasionally, if at all. Most can tell stories of families having to choose whether to come for a funeral or whether to wait and visit when a new child is born. Cuba is a nation filled with families who have been separated by 90 miles of ocean. For Shakespeare’s original audience, and for many contemporary audiences, the death of the young lovers at the end of the play may be what makes Romeo and Juliet “a story of more woe” than any other (Shakespeare 5.6.308), but for a Cuban audience, the threat of Romeo’s banishment from Verona is perhaps as great a tragedy. A Cuban audience, separated from their families, can feel with greater force Romeo’s insistence that “exile hath more terror in his look, / Much more than death” (3.3.12–3). And by making the threat of separation the central conflict in their version of Romeo and Juliet, the Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas pays homage to Shakespeare while creating a very Cuban play. In stark contrast to this overtly revolutionary use of Shakespeare’s work is the most recent Cuban ballet adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Premiering in 2003, Shakespeare y sus máscaras: o Romeo y Julieta was performed not in a school or a workplace, but first in La Nave de Sagunto in Barcelona, Spain, and then in the Gran Teatro de Havana, arguably one of the oldest theaters in the Western hemisphere. It was performed not by neighborhood workers but by the prestigious Ballet Nacional de Cuba, and it was directed and choreographed by Alicia Alonso, longtime Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the Ballet Nacional, and now its general director. This is particularly significant because Alicia Alonso and the Ballet Nacional are themselves cultural icons in Cuba. Alonso is now in her 80s; she has long been blind or at least partially blind, and the romantic story of her dancing herself blind because she would not follow the doctor’s orders and give up dancing has only increased her fame. She has not danced since the early 1990s, and at this point she moves with

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difficulty and is always accompanied by one or two people who can support and help her. Nevertheless, she still commands tremendous respect. Alonso is something of a Cuban Shakespeare. In June 2005, when Shakespeare y sus máscaras was being performed at the Gran Teatro de Havana, she would enter each night, just before the performance began, and she would be escorted to her seat in the center balcony. Each night she received a standing ovation. Her presence in the theater was as integral a part of the performance as the actual ballet. Shakespeare y sus máscaras differs greatly from Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó. It is much less overtly political than the work by the Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas, and it is much more faithful to Shakespeare’s play: The characters are still Romeo and Juliet, the scene is still Verona, and the ballet is a tragedy. The stage setting is even modeled on an Elizabethan stage, with a balcony, two doors for entrances and exits, and a central discovery space covered by a curtain. Even some of the changes made to the play are changes that have been made before and that seem less typically Cuban than particularly appropriate to a ballet. The ending, for instance, though still tragic, allows Juliet to awake in time to share one last dance with the dying Romeo. This is not to say, however, that there are no Cuban touches to the ballet. Though it lacks the revolutionary furor of Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó, it is not entirely apolitical. It follows in the Latin American tradition of interpreting Romeo and Juliet as a comment about the tragic futility of hate and war. In a recent essay on Neruda’s Spanish translation of Romeo and Juliet, “Strategies of Deletion in Pablo Neruda’s Romeo y Julieta,” Gregary Racz argued that while Neruda claimed to be deleting portions of the play only to create a Spanish version that was not so long as to be impossible to perform, he was in fact making strategic use of these deletions to emphasize “the abstract universals of the play” (82). And Neruda himself is quoted as saying, “Comprendí que detrás de la trama del amor infinito y de la muerte sobrecogedora había otro asunto, otro tema prinicipal. Romeo y Julieta es un gran alegato por la paz entre los hombres. Es la condenación del odio inútil. Es la denuncia de la bárbara guerra y la elevación solemne de la paz” [“I understood that another principal theme, another issue lay behind this plot of unending love and sudden death. Romeo and Juliet is a great argument for peace among men. It is the condemnation of fruitless hatred, the denunciation of barbarous war, and the solemn elevation of peace] (quoted. in Racz, trans. Racz 82). Racz argues that Neruda, by selectively deleting portions of the play, emphasizes “the helplessness of the starcrossed lovers as individuals caught between larger feuding powers (be they nations, clans, or families)” and observes that his translation “displays a marked tendency to downplay personal excess in favor of the force of collective agency” (Racz 85). Since Neruda’s version of Romeo y Julieta is well known and widely read in Cuba, it is perhaps not surprising that Alicia Alonso expressed similar sentiments in her program notes, which were then reprinted in the quarterly journal, Cuba en El Ballet: “Romeo y Julieta, como bien han señalado varios estudiosos, es un duro alegato en contra de la intolerancia y la incomprensión entre los hombres” [“Romeo and Juliet, as various studies have shown, is a strong argument against intolerance and the incomprehension between men”] (Alonso, “Shakespeare, la Máscara” 38). And since a ballet, even more than a Spanish translation of a play, requires deletion of much of the original in order to focus the storyline into something that can be

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expressed entirely through dance, it is also not surprising that Alonso has created a ballet that emphasizes the helplessness of the lovers and that once again, through dramatic choreography, focuses the audience’s attention on the agony associated with banishment. Lady Montague reacts to the news of Romeo’s banishment by raising her arms in horror and throwing herself down on the stage in despair. Her grief and agony seem even more devastating than that expressed by Lady Capulet at the sight of her dead kinsman. One of the most striking innovations in Alonso’s ballet is her inclusion of Shakespeare as a character. As Alonso is quick to point out, her Shakespeare is very different from that seen in Shakespeare in Love: En mi ballet, he incluido a William Shakespeare como personaje, en un sentido muy diferente al del reciente y exitoso filme ingés Shakespeare in Love, que nos narraba una historia de ficción con los peripecias amorosas del dramaturgo como eje, en torno al proceso de creación de Romeo y Julieta. En el ballet que ahora presentamos, Shakespeare aparece en la piel de un Vendedor de máscaras, objetos-alegorías del arte que lo inmortalizó. Son aquí las máscaras símbolos de los sentimientos que mueven a lost personajes de la obra, y más allá, expresión de los valores de diferentes épocas, principalmente la de Shakespeare y la nuestra, que no difieren esencialmente entre sí en lo que atañe a los afectos. [In my ballet, I have included William Shakespeare as a character, in a very different sense from the recent and successful English film, Shakespeare in Love, which tells us a fictional story of the love affair of the writer as he is the process of creating Romeo and Juliet. In the ballet that we now present, Shakespeare appears as a seller of masks, allegorical objects of the art that immortalized him. Here the masks are symbols of the sentiments that move the characters in the work, and also, an expression of the values of different ages, principally that of Shakespeare and our own, which don’t differ essentially when it comes to emotions.] (Alonso, “Shakespeare, la Máscara” 38–9)

While Shakespeare in Love portrays a Shakespeare who finds himself living out many of the experiences of his characters and who is himself drawn into a tragedy, Alonso has created a Shakespeare who is first of all an artist. The Shakespeare of Shakespeare y sus máscaras interacts with his characters by selling them masks appropriate to their fate (for example, the death’s head mask for a character who will die) and masks that, as Alonso says, symbolize the emotions that motivate them (such as matching golden masks for the lovers). But he does not become intimately involved in the plot, nor does he find himself in a situation similar to that of his characters. He is on stage in nearly every scene, but he remains more of a director than a character. He guides the other characters, motioning with his hands as though he is conducting their actions. He sometimes stands in the balcony above the stage, as though he is a puppeteer controlling the actors below, and he sometimes serves as a sort of prop or stage set, using his cloak as a barrier between Romeo and the messenger who should have carried him the news of Juliet’s false death. While he expresses great emotion, it is not the emotion of a star-crossed lover, but rather the emotion of an artist who knows what awaits his characters and knows that it cannot be avoided. He sympathizes with them and fears for them, but he still pushes them toward their doom, actually embodying the fate that they cannot escape.

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Alonso’s ballet may be a commentary on the futility of war and hate, but it is also a ballet about art and artistic influence. Alonso states that our time and Shakespeare’s are not that different when it comes to emotions. In both ages, she suggests, a senseless old feud can separate families or lovers, but she chose to choreograph her ballet in a way that places as much emphasis on her own common ground with Shakespeare as on our emotional common ground with the people of Shakespeare’s England. By making Shakespeare the artist the central figure of the ballet, Alonso suggests that the artistic process is as riveting, and potentially as tragic, as a doomed love affair. And Alonso also feels that artistic creation is as important a topic as any other. Speaking of Shakespeare y sus máscaras and the political events that occurred during its creation, she suggests that her art is anything but apolitical: Desde que commence a elaborar los primeros proyectos sobre Romeo y Julieta, o Shakespeare y sus máscaras, hasta su estreno, transcurrieron más de cuatro años ... Los momentos difíciles que vivía el mundo en los días del estreno de la obra, me hicieron sentir que mi trabajo era una manera humilde y honesta de contribuir al entendimiento entre los hombres. Si bien los artistas sabemos que hace falta mucho más que la creación de belleza para salvar al mundo, no dudamos de que el arte, como expresión de la voluntad humana y de su libertad de elección, ocupa un lugar destacado en los esfuerzos por alcanzar un mundo mejor ... [Between the time I first began to work on Romeo y Julieta, o Shakespeare y sus máscaras, and its premiere, four years had passed ... The difficult moments that the world was living through in the days of the premiere of the work, made me feel that my work was a humble and honest manner of contributing to the understanding between men. If artists know well that it will take much more than the creation of beauty to save the world, we don’t doubt that the art, as an expression of the human will and their freedom of choice, occupies a unique place in the efforts to achieve a better world ...] (Alonso, Program, 6)

Part of a culture that reveres art and cultural achievement, Alonso sees the artist as a sort of hero. She portrays Shakespeare the artist as the hero of her ballet, and she implicitly draws a connection between Shakespeare and herself. This point is made even clearer by Alonso’s presence in the theater at every performance, sitting center balcony, overlooking her creations as her Shakespeare guides his around the stage. With Alonso and her Shakespeare opposite each other, it is difficult to avoid the idea that these two cultural icons are reflections of each other. In this way, Alonso manages to put a bit of herself and a bit of Cuba into her adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. In Cuba, Shakespeare is known as an English playwright whose works are firmly fixed in the canon, but, delicately balanced as he is atop two key aspects of Cuban culture, independence, and education, he is also “a body of work that is refashioned” by Cuban playwrights into a Cuban image (Bate quoted in Cartelli 2). In that respect, as Cuban artists and critics have argued, Shakespeare is Cuban and a revolutionary. Works Cited Alonso, Alicia. Program Notes, Shakespeare y sus máscaras, o Romeo y Julieta. Premier in Valencia, Spain. July 23–27, 2003; Havana Cuba, December 6–14, 2003.

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———. “Shakespeare, la Máscara, y lo diverso.” Cuba en El Ballet 102-3 (MayDec., 2003): 87–9. Carrió, Raquel. “Raquel Carrió, on Otra Tempestad.” Trans. Peter Hulme. “The Tempest” and Its Travels, Ed. Peter Hulme and William Sherman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, 158–61. Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. New York: Routledge, 1999. Consejo Nacional de Cultura, Shakespeare, Un Contemporáneo Nuestro. La Habana [Havana]: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1964. Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas, Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó, Ed. José Rodriguez Feo. Ciudad de La Habana [Havana]: Ediciónes Unión, 1987. Kliman, Bernice, and Rick J. Santos, eds. Latin American Shakespeares. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2005. Kliman, Bernice. Afterword. Kliman and Santos. 327–8. Loyola, Hernan. “Neruda traduce a Shakespeare,” Unión: Revista de la Unión de Escritores Y Artistas de Cuba 4 (1966): 152–7. Maggi, Beatriz. “Abajo los Montesco! Abajo los Capuleto!” Panfleto Y Literatura. Ciudad de La Habana [Havana] Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982, 80–93. Racz, Gregary J. “Strategies of Deletion in Pablo Neruda’s Romeo y Julieta.” Kliman and Santos, 71–91. Resende. Aimara da Cunha. “Text, Context, and Audience: Two Versions of Romeo and Juliet in Brazilian Popular Culture.” Kliman and Santos, 270–89. Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: Norton, 1997, 872–941. Shakespeare y sus máscaras, o Romeo y Julieta, Chor. and Dir. Alicia Alonso. Libretto José Ramón Neyra. Perf. Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Gran Teatro de la Habana, Havana, Cuba. 4–12 June 2005. Singh, Jyostna. “The Postcolonial/Postmodern Shakespeare,” Shakespeare: World Views. Ed. Heather Kerr, Robin Eaden, and Madge Mitton. Newark, DE and London: University of Delaware Press, 1996, 29–43.

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Chapter 12

“I am no Othello. I am a lie”: Shakespeare’s Moor and the Post-Exotic in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North Atef Laouyene

Ever since the publication of the First Folio in 1623, Shakespeare has been an inexhaustible source for playwrights, novelists, poets, scholars, translators, theatre directors, and Hollywood producers. From the early laudatory Restoration adaptations of his plays to the most recent and “radical” appropriations of them, Shakespeare has been a literary classic whose contemporary appropriative invocation reveals not so much the endurance of his universal genius as the modern appropriator’s current concerns. Postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare, for instance, involve less an attempt to do away with what Harold Bloom describes as the paralyzing grip of a gigantic literary precursor than an attempt to investigate profitably the otherwise infelicitous hiatuses in the Bard’s works. Such appropriations are not emulations of the Shakespeare text; rather, they are definitional reinscriptions of it. Postcolonial writers are radical traders in Shakespeare, and his text is often read in metonymical relation to a colonial kinship with which they are constantly grappling. By virtue of their bicultural situatedness, or what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space of enunciation” (37), postcolonial writers attempt to revise, reconstruct, and negotiate images of ethnocultural alterity as represented in Western canonical texts. In this respect, postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare designate less derivative reproductions of the Western canon than revisionary, transformative articulations of its perceived fissures. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is an ArabAfrican novelistic appropriation of Othello that inquires into the dynamics of the Othello stereotype and its textual and sociocultural configuration in a colonizer– colonized paradigm. In Season of Migration, appropriating Shakespeare involves a twofold process: a deconstructive cultural resistance to the Renaissance master code of Moorishness and a constructive understanding of postcolonial history within a less antihumanistic perceptual mode.1 1 I use Moorishness here as shorthand for non-Western alterity, more particularly for the Afro-Arab figure whose representations in Western discourse is saturated with Orientalist clichés from the Renaissance onward.

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Although there were “early global exportations” of the Shakespeare text stretching back to the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries as well as scholarly attempts in the nineteenth century to professionalize and canonize it (Kennedy 2), Shakespeare as the center of the Western canon is by and large a twentieth-century literary notion. Harold Bloom’s breathtakingly polemical books The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) remain incontestable sources for establishing and enhancing that notion. In the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence (1997), Bloom unreservedly denounces the modern tendency in French and Anglo-American literary theory to undermine Shakespeare’s “uniqueness” by “reducing” it to the sociohistorical specificities of Renaissance England (xv). For Bloom, “Shakespeare invented us, and continues to contain us” (xvi), and his universal appeal as a “world canon” clearly testifies against the conception of a “culture-bound” Shakespeare. In addition to his unconcealed contempt for what he perceives as the French insensibility to Shakespeare’s originality (xv), Bloom takes to task the New Historicist AngloAmerican tradition in Shakespeare studies for making the Bard “foreign” or “not of one’s household” (xv): I cannot think, at this bad moment, of a better way to see Shakespeare, since the entire movement of our current School of Resentment is toward eradicating Shakespeare’s uniqueness. Neo-Marxists, New Feminists, New Historicists, French-influenced theorists all demonstrate their cultural materialism by giving us a reduced Shakespeare, a pure product of the “social energies” of English Renaissance. (xv)

While Bloom argues that an obsession with an overly historicized Shakespeare would undermine the poet’s uniqueness, David Kastan maintains that a full appreciation of the Shakespeare text cannot be attained without one’s awareness of its historical distance. Such an awareness, Kastan proceeds, prevents the reader from falling into the trap of reading his or her own projections onto Shakespeare’s text: “What value Shakespeare has for us must, then, at least begin with the recognition of his difference from us; only then can we be sure that what we hear are his concerns rather than the projections of our own” (16–7). Referring to Cultural Materialists and New Historicists, Kastan contends that “[t]heir historical readings seem to some too overtly self-interested to be compelling as historical accounts, significant more as records of our present needs and anxieties than as reconstructions of those of Shakespeare’s time” (17). While admitting that this kind of critique stems from a “historical naïveté,” Kastan suggests that it is also emblematic of an unwavering commitment to the “situatedness of the critic” whose “presentist” attitude determines his or her negotiation with the past. Whether Shakespeare’s work is the product of individual furor poeticus or of “social energies” remains an unhelpful argument. Dealing with Shakespeare today in the form of adaptations, translations, and appropriations—whether these are New Historicist, New Feminist or, more recently, Postcolonial—has little to do with the Bard’s genius, much less with his contemporary universality. I follow here Walter Benn Michaels’s lead when he argues that any reading is necessarily historical. In “The Victims of New Historicism,” Michaels aptly remarks, “There are no more or less historical readings; there are only differently historical readings.” Michaels

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takes to task critics who give precedence to what they consider “historical” (that is, faithful and true) readings over “nonhistorical” (that is, provisional and false) ones. However, by virtue of one’s historical situatedness, Michaels insists, any reading is ineluctably relative. And to be aware that one’s reading of a literary text is always historical by no means undermines the possibility “to appreciate the literary distinctiveness of [that] text” (Brown 189). Rather, such awareness allows for a plethora of enriching interpretive practices and diffuses the tension between those who want to preserve the text’s ostensible integrity and those who seek to deconstruct it. Reading Shakespeare historically, therefore, designates a commitment not simply to the circumstantial history of his texts and their production and circulation, but also, and more importantly, to the anxieties and impulses informing one’s reading of them in the present. Contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare suggest ways of reading oneself through him. To read the classic is as much a transformative operation of the past as a critical and inventive reconstruction of the present. In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau argues that the construction of the present is contingent on the active mediation of the past. Historiography as a scriptural practice, de Certeau asserts, depends on the recuperation of the past as a knowable body (5): On the one hand, writing plays the role of a burial rite, in the ethnological and quasireligious meaning of the term; it exorcises death by inserting it into discourse. On the other hand, it possesses a symbolizing function; it allows a society to situate itself by giving itself a past through language, and it thus opens to the present a space for its own. “To mark” a past is to make a place for the dead, but also to redistribute the space of possibility, [...] to use the narrativity that buries the dead as a way of establishing a place for the living. (100)

Writing (and reading) history designates the bringing together of self and other, past and present, within the framework of a symbiotic, and sometimes transgressive, mode of discursive practice. Similarly, rewriting Shakespeare in a postcolonial context marks a revisionary attitude toward the past, an attempt to give “the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge” (de Certeau 5). Postcolonial rewritings of Shakespeare are necessarily historical in the sense that they are inflected not so much by the historicity of Shakespeare’s text as by the current concerns of the postcolonial writer. The postcolonial subject takes it upon himself or herself to open up the Shakespeare canon to many interpretive possibilities by way of engaging with and exposing its complicity with colonial ideology. As Loomba and Orkin point out, “Colonial masters imposed their value system through Shakespeare, and in response colonized peoples often answered back in Shakespearean accent” (7). As I shall demonstrate, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North subverts the Renaissance trope of the exotic Moor in such a way as to refocalize Sudan’s colonial history and rearticulate its moments of enunciation. The transmission of an enabling transhistorical awareness is assigned neither to the self-destructive nationalism of Mustafa Sa’eed, the novel’s controversial Afro-Arab/Moor figure, nor to the less attractive die-hard traditionalism of the village people, but to the Marlowesque frame narrator, whose experience reflects the East–West rift in the identity of many European-educated Arab intellectuals. Salih’s Season, in this

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respect, like Césaire’s A Tempest, resituates its “indigenous” translational practice within what Frassinelli describes as a framework where “Shakespeare’s text and cultural capital are not so much destroyed as refashioned, transculturated, turned into the agents of a transformative process in which the pre-existing oppositions— between the canonical text and its anti-colonial adaptation, between Western and peripheral, colonizer and native cultures—are put under pressure” (p. 184). “All reading is translation,” says Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (14), and every translation is an appropriation. Postcolonial translation of the canon is not simply a matter of carrying over an original meaning to a target audience; rather, it is an interpretive process whereby the translator’s intentions gain precedence over those of the original author.2 Although the decoding–recoding process of translation is still a vague mental operation (Lindeman 213), the deliberate deviation from the source text remains a distinctive, if subversive, literary tactic in postcolonial translations of Shakespeare’s work. By an act of creative transgression, or what Bloom calls a deliberate “poetic misprison” (Anxiety 14), postcolonial translators of Shakespeare turn from being mere adaptors of his text to radical appropriators of it. In Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (1999), Thomas Cartelli makes a useful distinction between appropriation and adaptation: While the former is “primarily critical” and is informed by a certain political agenda, the latter is “primarily emulative” and is “interested merely in adjusting and accommodating the original work to the tastes and expectations of their own readership or audience” (15, emphasis in original). In this sense, it is less a question of how the original author’s mind merely grows into that of the translator than of how the translator’s mind works in opposition to that of the translated author. Postcolonial readings of Shakespeare are readings against and beyond Shakespeare, ones that deliberately intervene in and deviate from the source text. Postcolonial Shakespeare is the example par excellence where “the aim of translators to produce identical twins must always fail,” as Barnstone aptly puts it (16). Taking Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North as my case study of intercultural appropriation, I focus on how the novel’s deconstruction of the Orientalist exoticization of the Othello/Moor figure is in synch with a revisionary inscription of Arab nationalism. Published one year before the 1967 crisis (The Arab– Israeli War), Salih’s Season engages with Shakespeare’s Othello by reinscribing the “Othelloness/Moorishness” motif and its exoticist subtext within a colonizer– colonized paradigm.3 My discussion of the novel will proceed in two directions: First, I offer a theorization of what I call the “post-exotic” and its relation to the 2 For a more general discussion of translation and postcolonial theories, see Douglas Robinson’s Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (1997). For an analysis of the correlation between translation theory and literary theory, see Willis Barnstone’s insightful Introduction to his The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (1993). 3 The significance of Othello’s Moorishness in determining the play’s implication in colonialist ideology continues to be the object of scholarly investigation in the “postcolonial Shakespeare” debate. On the ontological alterity of the “Moor” in Shakespeare’s time in general and in Othello in particular, see Michael Neill’s “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49.4 (1998): 361–74. On Renaissance representations of the Moor, see also

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discourse of exoticism in contemporary cultural and postcolonial debates; second, I show how Salih’s enactment of the West’s cult of the eroticized Moor generates a post-exotic narrative dystopia that disrupts the Orientalist economy of desire and derision, Self and Other, colonizer and colonized, and so on. Salih’s Season, the chapter concludes, intervenes in postcolonial Arab discourse by simultaneously cutting through a narrowly conceived “Arabhood” and foregrounding a postcolonial Arab subjectivity still negotiating and grappling with the residual structures of coloniality and postcoloniality, of tradition and modernity, of (neo)Occidentalism and (neo)Orientalism. In a word, the narrative exoticization of the Othello figure in Salih’s Season is strategic in two ways: While it unsettles the Orientalist foundations of the exoticist discourse, it offers ways of salvaging Arab subjectivity, not by grounding it in a nationalist politics of pan-Arabic identitarianism, but rather by foregrounding its ineluctable hybridity and global floatability across indeterminate discursive and ideological terrains. Toward an Aesthetic of Post-exotic Moorishness Before one theorizes the post-exotic, one question is in order: How is exoticism related to translation or appropriation? The exotic can be defined by what Peter Mason describes as a process of “decontextualization and recontextualization.” This process is in a sense “an act of translation”: “The exotic is never at home: its very exoticism is derived from the fact that it has been detached from one context and inserted in another, to which it is to some degree refractory. This process of decontextualization and recontextualization is an act of translation” (148). Translation as a process of textual appropriation and exoticism as an alterity discourse derive their validity and effect from the defamiliarization of their respective subjects. To translate or to exoticize means to render “unhomely,” as it were. Both exoticism and translation create an effect of strange newness by transposing an original text/ artefact onto a new context. The translational process applies to the source text its defamiliarizing principle in the same way that the exoticist operation accentuates the strange familiarity of its exotically distant Others. Twentieth-century theorizations of the discourse of exoticism owe much of their insights to the work of Victor Segalen, especially his Essai sur L’Exotisme: Une Esthetique du Divers (1907). Poet-cum-traveler-cum-aesthetician, Segalen redefines exoticism by revising its persistent romantic (and Romanticist) association with an outside loci wherein the individual hopes to find an alternative to, or an escape from, anxieties at home. More significantly, however, Segalen’s essay offers a reconceptualization of exoticism anchored in the ontological autonomy of the Other. For Segalen, exoticism is the aesthetic experiencing of alterity as such, independently of the ethical system of the perceiving Subject. Because it is essentially a category of perception, aesthetics necessarily precedes valuation. Exoticism, then, is first and foremost an “aesthetics of diversity.” This implies that if difference is the

Emily C. Bartels’s “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioning of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.4 (1990): 433–54.

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fons et origo of the aesthetic, it is also the sine qua non of the exotic. This abstract rapprochement of the aesthetic and the exotic along the axis of an unfathomably autonomous alterity is important because it constitutes the blueprint for subsequent postcolonial theorizations of exoticism. Soon after decolonization and with the emergence of nationalism and liberation movements in several former colonies, exoticism’s connection to, and sometimes complicity with, (neo)imperialist ideologies has been emphasized in cultural and postcolonial studies. Tzvetan Todorov, for one, argues that exoticism (xenophilia) and nationalism (xenophobia) are two “diametrically opposed” forms of relativism. While the nationalist places universal ethical value in his or her own culture, the exoticist places the same value in that of the remote Other. If exoticism here may be said to provide an instance where the Other is preferred to the Self, it does not by any means say anything about the “essence” of the Other. In fact, it is more a case of “self-criticism” than a genuine “valorization” of the Other (264). For how can the Self bestow ethical value on that which is unfamiliar, strange, unknown? How can one praise what one cannot comprehend? Herein resides the ineluctable irony of exoticism: “Knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but lack of knowledge is in turn irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is precisely what exoticism aspires to be. This is the constitutive paradox of exoticism” (265). While Todorov asserts that exoticism, even in its relativistic mode, remains generally inextricable from the ethnocentric discourse of colonialism, Chris Bongie inscribes it within a modern aesthetics of loss and nostalgia. In Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (1991), Bongie refers to the ultimate “dissolution” of fin-de-siècle exoticism as the result of a momentous alliance between territorial colonialism and industrial modernity (18). Fin-de-siècle exoticism, according to Bongie, is essentially a trope of loss and nostalgia, that is, a “discursive practice intent on recovering ‘elsewhere’ values ‘lost’ with the modernization of European society” (5). The advent of what Zygmunt Bauman calls a “heavy modernity”—as opposed to today’s postindustrialized “light modernity” (Bauman 114)—put in the service of major imperial territorializations, has generated a vision of the world as a containable, thus controllable, space. The requisite condition of the exotic, namely, its geographical remoteness, is thus invalidated and lost. While fin-de-siècle fiction attempts to keep alive an already expiring exoticism, the postcolonial exotic, to use Graham Huggan’s phrase,4 registers a return, or a reworking, of a new, counterdiscursive one. Unlike its fin-de-siècle prototype, postcolonial exoticism is essentially a “transcultural” discourse (Pratt 6), designating the ways in which the exoticized periphery displays itself as such to metropolitan 4 In The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), Graham Huggan concedes that while postcolonialism sets out to critique late-capitalism, it also offers itself up as a consumable “exotic” commodity within it, thus inevitably compromising its own political agenda. In order to unbind themselves from the global “alterity industry,” Huggan argues, postcolonial writers often resort to what he calls “strategic exoticism” (i.32). Such writers as Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, and Hanif Kureishi stage their own marginality so as to effect a parodic subversion not only of Orientalist exoticization of things Indian but also of the undifferentiated Western consumerism that tends to promote and perpetuate the global commodification of cultural difference in general (xii).

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spectatorship. While I recognize the historical specificities and generic applications of Pratt’s concept of “transculturation” (travel writings and European imperialism in Africa and South-America since the mid-eighteenth century), I use it here as a theoretical springboard to effect a transition from the exoticism of fin-de-siècle New Imperialism to that of contemporary postcolonialism. More specifically, I avail myself of Pratt’s notion of transculturation not as an index for “hybridity” or “enculturation” but as a central conceptual signifier that describes the major paradigm shift that took place within the exoticist discourse from its turn-of-the-century perceived entropy to its postcolonial agentive reactivation. In fact, it describes the transformation of exoticism from a colonial discourse about an “authentic,” space-defined otherness to be experienced or reported home to a politically recoded discourse of subversion and resistance. On a discursive level, then, exoticism as a familiar aesthetics of escape gives way to postcolonial exoticism as a defamiliarizing representational/translational practice that utilizes the very exoticist rhetoric with which it engages. In a sense, the exoticist postcolonial text fulfills a function similar to that of Pratt’s eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury autoethnographic text. Pratt’s neologism, “autoethnography,” refers to textual instances where “the colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (7, emphasis in original). But autoethnography, Pratt goes on to argue, also “involves partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the conqueror” (7). Extending analogically Pratt’s conceptualization to today’s postcolonial exoticism, I argue that while appropriating metropolitan modes of representation, the peripheral/postcolonial writer creates Orientalist dystopias with a view to subverting the time-honored discourse of exoticism itself. Narrating the Afro-Arab Other through the elaboration of Orientalist dystopias disturbs what Roger Célestin identifies as the exoticist “triangular trade.” The phrase as Célestin uses it not only invokes an entire history of slave dealings and racial oppression but also redefines exoticism as a discursive traffic where the European Subject is constantly moving back and forth between the familiar space of Home and the unfamiliar space of the exotic Other, but always using the familiar language of Home as “a point of reference” (7). Postcolonial representations of the Arab, like Naipaul’s exoticist fiction, often challenge exoticism’s Center–Subject–Margin triangulation simply because the constitutive coordinates of that triangular space are revealed to be inadequate referential grounds to negotiate Subject positionality. In literary texts, exoticization indicates a deliberate narrative process whereby certain aesthetic effects are intended. However, because this process can operate in both colonial and postcolonial writings, I use instead the concept “post-exotic,” where the prefix “post” refers specifically to a subversive (anticolonial) strategy in postcolonial adaptations of Western exoticist texts. The distinction between exoticism and post-exoticism in this respect parallels Appiah’s distinction between postcolonialism and postmodernism where the “post” in postcolonialism, “like that of postmodernism,” is one “that challenges earlier legitimating narratives” (98–9). Similarly, I deploy the prefix “post” in post-exotic, not as an indicator of prepositional chronology, but as a marker of disruptive epistemology. And by the post-exotic Moor, I refer to a set of tropes expressive of a revised sense of Moorishness, a Moorishness that is repeatedly constructed and reconstructed out of deexoticized

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revisions of traditional Orientalist meta-narratives. While I conceive of the Arab/ Moor Other in Salih’s novel as both growing out of and ironically departing from the confining epistemes of Orientalism, I understand the post-exotic as a trope that partakes in what Prakash calls post-Orientalist histories that do not merely invert the Hegelian dialectic but transcend it in such a way as to articulate “constructed and contingent [postcolonial] identities” (Brydon 876). The post-exotic Moor in Season may be said to intervene in the traditional exoticist discourse in the same way that some eighteenth-century texts intervene in the Orientalist discourse at large. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1717–18), for instance, “explicitly challenge the received representations of Turkish society furnished by the seventeenth-century [male] travel writers who preceded her” (Lowe 31). The works of male travel writers such as Robert Withers, George Sandys, and Aaron Hill, to name but a few, show Oriental harem women as decadent, sexually submissive subjects. Montagu’s easy admittance to the secret and immured world of the Turkish harem—a world usually undisclosed to her male compatriots—not only legitimizes her epistolary accounts of it but also allows her to challenge the racialized, androcentric Orientalist discourse by crossing it with the equally disturbing discourses of class and gender. Although Montagu’s orientalism seems to be steeped in a poetics of exoticism and homoeroticism, the value of its disruptive potential stems essentially from the protofeminist subtext that cuts through it (Lowe 47–8). The Oriental Other in Montagu’s epistles, as well as in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), thus occasions an allegorized critique of patriarchal hegemony both within and without the contours of empire (51). Similarly, Salih’s novel employs post-exotic strategies in such a way as to occasion a simultaneous troping and putting under erasure of the Orientalist topos of the exotic/ erotic Moor as it figures in the Shakespeare text. Moorishness and Orientalist Dystopias In a chapter entitled “Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction after 1948” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2002), Edward Said asserts that the events of 1948 (the establishment of the State of Israel) and those of 1967 (the Israeli–Egyptian war) contributed to the emergence of what may be called a “modern Arabic novel” (45). The crisis of 1948 (known as nakba) not only took the Arabs by surprise, but it also inflicted a “rupture” in Arab national history, engendering a large-scale collective trauma in the Arab world at large (47). As a result, Arab intellectuals became earnestly engaged in a collective, restorative project the fundamental purpose of which was the suture of that rupture and the protection of Arab culture from the looming threats of dispersion and elimination posed by the growing hegemony of anti-Arab Zionism (48). The events of 1967, on the other hand, transformed the Arabic novel into an instrument of struggle and resistance (also known as mukawama novel) operating hand in hand with the political liberation movements of the 1950s and the 1960s in several Arab states. The 1967 war was such a momentous event in Arab history that it mobilized soldiers and intellectuals alike. As a matter of fact, it turned the novelistic space itself into an “arena of fairly immediate gladiatorial struggle” (56).

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It was during this period of rising Arab nationalism that Season of Migration to the North was written. Barbara Harlow is probably the first to provide a focused analysis of the correlation between Salih’s recuperation of the Othelloness motif in Orientalist discourse and the novel’s counterdiscursive practice. While confirming that “Season is, generically, a novel, a form imported by the Arabs from the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” Harlow also places Salih’s novel within a long-established tradition in classic Arabic literature known as “m’uaradah, literally opposition, contradiction, but here a formula whereby one person will write a poem, and another will retaliate by writing along the same lines, but reversing the meaning.” As a form of retaliatory narration, or “counter-narrativization,” Season, Harlow explains, “is a rereading of Shakespeare’s Othello, a restatement of the tragedy, a reshaping of the tragic figure of the Moor” (Amyuni 75). In part, Salih’s novel takes up the Orientalist image of the Moor as an exotic figure in Shakespeare’s Othello and investigates it in such a way as to lay bare its ambivalent implications in constructing postcolonial subjectivity. Reversing the narrative line of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Salih traces the journey of a Sudanese black intellectual, Mustafa Sa’eed, into the heart of England. After 30 years in the British metropole, during which he studied at Oxford, worked as a professor of economics at London University, seduced many women to his bed, and spent 7 years in prison for the murder of Jean Morris, his English wife, Sa’eed retreats to a small village in the vicinity of Khartoum, where he marries for a second time and then disappears, leaving behind him a widow and two sons in the care of the novel’s narrator. While a substantial part of the critical attention paid to Salih’s novel has focused on its structural and thematic reinscriptions of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 5 I discuss instead the ways in which the author deconstructs the Moor stereotype through a revisionary appropriation of what Michael Neill calls the “ur-narrative of Moorish otherness, Othello” (“Post-colonial Shakespeares?” 179). In his notorious critique of Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe addresses Conrad as follows: “Find your own river. Don’t appropriate our geography for your psychic journeys” (quoted. in Bissoondath 169). Reversely, in Mustapha Sa’eed, Salih claims back his own Othello.6 Indeed, Season abounds in textual references to Shakespeare’s text: Othello’s passion (32), his diasporic identity (67), miscegenation (55), and the handkerchief motif (162). But it is in the novel’s wooing scenes that Othello emerges as a major intertext. Just as Desdemona “with a “greedy ear / Devour[s] up [Othello’s] discourse” (I.iii.150–51), Isabella Seymour, one of Sa’eed’s many 5 Salih admits the influence of both Shakespeare and Conrad on his works. He states, “As far as from goes, I have been specially struck by Shakespeare in King Lear and Richard the Third, and by Conrad in Heart of Darkness and Nostromo” (quoted in Amyuni 15). For focused discussions of Joseph Conrad’s influence on Tayeb Salih, see Byron CamineroSantangelo’s “Legacies of Darkness: Neocolonialism, Joseph Conrad, and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” ARIEL 30.4 (1999): 7–33 and John E. Davidson’s “In Search of the Middle Point: The Origins of Oppression in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” Research in African Literature 20.3 (1989): 385–400. 6 As Cartelli suggests, the original Elizabethan Othello was “played almost exclusively by white actors in and out of blackface. Othello was, in fact, “Africanized” and “Orientalized” at his inception” (148, emphasis in original).

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female victims, listens to his stories with reddening cheeks and “Christian sympathy in her eyes” (38). When she inquires about his origins, Sa’eed cunningly claims his Moorish descent: “I’m like Othello—Arab-African,” I said to her. “Yes,” she said looking into my face. “Your nose is like the noses of Arabs in pictures, but your hair isn’t soft and jet black like that of Arabs.” “Yes, that’s me. My face is Arab like the desert of the Empty Quarter, while my head is African and teems with a mischievous childishness.” “You put things in such a funny way,” she said laughing. (38)

While Othello relates to Desdemona a life story teeming with “antres vast and deserts idle, / Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads / touch heaven” (I.iii.142–3), Sa’eed relates to Ms. Seymour “fabricated stories” about his native land, a land where “elephants and lions” wander the streets at liberty and “crocodiles crawl through it during siesta time” (38). As Othello “beguile[s] [Desdemona] of her tears” by recounting stories of “Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” or “of some distressful stroke / That my youth suffer’d” (I.iii.144–59), Sa’eed stirs Ms. Seymour’s ecstatic sympathy by invoking the woes of an exotically distant childhood: The conversation led us to my family, and I told her—without lying this time—that I had grown up without a father. Then, returning to my lies, I gave her such terrifying descriptions of how I had lost my parents that I saw the tears well up in her eyes. I told her I was six years old at the time when my parents were drowned with thirty other people in a boat taking them from one bank of the Nile to the other. Here something occurred which was better than expressions of pity; pity in such situations is an emotion with uncertain consequences. Her eyes brightened and she cried ecstatically: “‘The Nile.” “‘Yes, the Nile.” “‘Then you live on the banks of the Nile?” “‘Yes. Our house is right on the bank of the Nile, so that when I’m lying in my bed at night I put my hand out of the window and idly play with the Nile waters till sleep overtakes me. (38–9)

If anything, Sa’eed’s self-portrayal suggests an autoethnographic masquerade in which an exotic native is performing his native dance to the “hankering” eyes of a metropolitan audience (30). Drawing on what Said (the critic) calls “a prodigious cultural repertoire” of an imaginatively exoticized Orient made available to Western readership (Orientalism 63), Sa’eed (the protagonist) beguiles the Desdemonas of England and lures them to his harem-like bedroom, where he carries out his ritualized sexual conquests. Sa’eed’s London flat becomes not only a stage on which he displays a smorgasbord of Oriental exotica but also a reinvented Western seraglio in which he performs his erotic rituals of sexual revenge. The Orientalized seraglio and its European female inmates become the battlefields for Sa’eed’s sexualized political reconquest of the West:

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My bedroom was a graveyard that looked on to a garden; its curtains were pink and had been chosen with care, the carpeting was of a warm greenness, the bed spacious, with swansdown cushions. There were small electric lights, red, blue, and violet, placed in certain corners; on the walls were large mirrors, so that when I slept with a woman it was as if I slept with a whole harem simultaneously. The room was heavy with the smell of burning sandalwood and incense, and in the bathroom were pungent Eastern perfumes, lotions, unguents, powders, and pills. My bedroom was like an operating theatre in a hospital. There is a still pool in the depths of every woman that I knew how to stir. [...] My bedroom was a theatre of war; my bed a patch of hell. [...] By day I lived with the theories of Keynes and Tawney and at night I resumed the war with bow and sword and spear and arrows. (30–4)

That the erotics of colonial space and the politics of conquest oftentimes feed into each other is no longer an unfamiliar claim in contemporary postcolonial debates. Many cultural critics and postcolonial theorists have argued that the sexualized image of the Arab harem in particular all too often reflects an imbalanced (neo)colonial mapping of the world in which Self and Other are defined in terms of their respective sexual normality and abnormality. Using the case of Gustave Flaubert’s rather xenomaniac eroticization of the Egyptian courtesan in both Voyage en Orient and Correspondences, Said, for instance, demonstrates how the systematic sexualization of the Oriental/Arab Other is the by-product of unequal power relations and predetermined knowledge formations (Orientalism 6). In The Colonial Harem (1986), Malek Alloula displays and critiques the ways in which the Arab/Algerian harem is subjected to the scopophilic tawdriness of the French colonial photographers of the 1920s. “Artifacts of popular culture,” as Barbara Harlow calls them in her introduction to Alloula’s book (xiii), the colonial postcard betrays the economy of scopophilic desire underlying the unveiling gaze of the colonizer. “The harem has become a brothel,” writes Alloula. “It is the last avatar but also the historical truth of an Orientalism the presuppositions of which are no longer masked by the postcard [...]. Colonialism is indeed the final morality of Orientalism and exoticism. But it is the morality of a procurer and a bawd” (122). The colonial postcard’s fabricated, tawdry exoticism—awkwardly staged by the French photographer and his Algerian models within the ersatz locus of the studio—shows how unfulfilled dreams of erotic adventure are often coextensive with desecrating deeds of empire, to borrow Martin Green’s phrase. In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995), Anne McClintock employs the concept of “porno-tropics” to refer to a “geometry of sexuality” in which the feminization of the virgin land and its ultimate penetration by the male explorer–conqueror are two interdependent colonial tropes (4). McClintock also argues that the gendering of colonial space is not limited to one unchangeable iconography. She remarks that “Arab women were to be ‘civilized’ by being undressed (unveiled), while sub-Saharan women were to be civilized by being dressed (in clean, white, British Cotton)” (31). The trope of penetrating the forbidden locus of the exotic harem, along with the desire to “unveil” its female inmates, whether they be Arab or Turkish, is also a focal point in Irvin Cemil Schick’s The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (1999). Adopting Foucault’s Panopticon theory, Schick contends that the “eroticized depictions of

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Muslim women [...] are often predicated upon the symbolic violation of the harem, the making transparent of its walls and of the veil” (15, emphasis in original). Sexuality and spatiality, Schick goes on to argue, become mutually defining elements in European erotic literature. More recently, Fatima Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (2001) uncovers the will-to-eroticize as an abiding aspect in Orientalist/Western art with regard to representations of the Oriental/Arab harem and its inmates. Echoing Said’s counter-Orientalist views, Mernissi remarks that Western representational art frequently derives its power from the way it freezes its exotic/erotic Other into temporal fixity, something that explains why the twentieth-century Western harem is still disturbingly medieval. In Season, Sa’eed goes West and turns his London apartment into an “exotic pleasure dome” (Harlow 78), a Western harem where the unveiling, not of the Eastern concubine, but of the Western female takes place. The metamorphosis of the metropolitan space into an Orientalized pornotopia for the symbolic fulfillment of an Arab-African sexual/colonial reconquest designates a reversal of the classical colonial scene in which the (male) colonizer penetrates/confiscates the virgin land of the colonized. Privately staging a flamboyantly exoticized reproduction of the Oriental harem, Sa’eed transfigures the “geometry of sexuality” (McClintock) that underwrites the colonial enterprise at large. His reversal of the economy of Western desire operating within the feminized ersatz of the Eastern harem amounts to a postexotic maneuver in which the Western female is now the purported seeker of that desire and the Afro-Arab male its ultimate procurer. The body of the Western woman and the space of the metropolitan city metaphorize one another in Sa’eed’s fantasies of counterconquest: Mr. Mustafa, the bird has fallen in the snare. The Nile, that snake god, has gained a new victim. The city [London] has changed into a woman. It would be but a day or week before I would pitch tent, driving my tent peg into the mountain summit. You, my lady, may not know, but you—like Carnarvon when he entered Tutankhamen’s tomb—have been infected with a deadly disease which has come from you know not where and which will bring about your destruction, be it sooner or later. (39)

Sa’eed conceives of his seduction of European women as historical reconquests of Europe itself. No sooner does he know Isabella Seymour’s Spanish descent than he concocts a story in which he traces the origin of their chance encounter in Hyde Park back to the eight-century conquest of Spain by Arabs under the much-celebrated commandership of Tarik ibn Ziad: Doubtless one of my forefathers was a soldier in Tarik ibn Ziad’s army. Doubtless he met one of your ancestors as she gathered in the grapes from an orchard in Seville. Doubtless he fell in love with her for a time, then left her and went off to Africa. There he married again and I was one of his progeny in Africa, and you have come from his progeny in Spain. (43)

Invoking the exotic grandiosity of the history of Moorish Spain, Sa’eed inscribes his intimate encounter with Isabella Seymour less as a symbolic recuperation of that history than as a personal revenge on those who have adulterated and interrupted its

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course. (The name of Isabella Seymour is significantly reminiscent of the notorious Reconquista Queen, Isabel of Castile.) Behind the immured space of his metropolitan minipalace, Sa’eed maniacally rewrites the history of “fertile Andalusia” on the body of his Western concubines (42). It is in the last and fatal wooing scene, however, that Salih ultimately portrays an Orientalist vision gone amuck. The scene dramatizes an Orientalist dystopia in which both wooer and wooed are locked up in a deadly embrace, and Sa’eed’s exoticist megalomania eventually meets its ruthless rival in Jean Morris, his English wife and last victim. It is she who plays the role of the cold-blooded wooer–conqueror. Unlike Desdemona, who loved the Moor for the “dangers he ha[s] past” and he “loved her that she did pity them” (I.iii.166–8), Jean Morris is adamantly resistant to Sa’eed’s schemes of seduction. While she continues to be secretly attracted to him, she remains impervious to the exotic spell of his “store of hackneyed phrases” (Salih 39). Gradually, she transforms their courtship then marriage into a relentless sexual tug-of-war, an onanistic carnality where his insatiable cravings for her are aroused only to be humiliatingly frustrated. Symbolically, their daily quarrels become “domestic reproduction of the Battles of Omdurman and Atbara” where Kitchener’s army vanquished once and for all the Mahdist rebellion in 1898, the year in which, significantly enough, Sa’eed was born (Cartelli 156–7). Among the casualties of this private war are the exotic paraphernalia that bedeck Sa’eed’s apartment and serve as erotic gear in his “great hunt” for European women (Salih 36). To add insult to injury, Jean Morris spitefully destroys “a rare Arabic manuscript” and throws onto the fire a valuable “silken Isphahan prayer-rug” (156–7). Eventually, and in an equally disturbing re-enactment of the fifth-act murder in Othello, this domestic warfare climaxes into a lethal combination of sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, with Sa’eed pressing down with his chest a dagger between Jean Morris’s breasts. When brought to trial, Sa’eed invokes and, surprisingly, denies his connection to Othello. He dissociates himself from the Moor of Venice precisely when his lawyer and former professor, Maxwell Foster-Keen, claims that both Sa’eed and his victims are in fact the victims of a long history of civilizational struggle between an unmistakably rational West and an unfathomably sentimental East (Salih 33). With undisguised condescension, the lawyer insists that “Sa’eed is a noble person whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago” (32–3). The lawyer’s histrionic court performance offers little more than what Barbara Harlow calls the “sentimentalism of orientalism,” a supercilious essentialism that attributes Sa’eed’s relapse into murderous wickedness to his presumed barbaric Moorish nature: Othello has become what the Western tradition of literary criticism, like the Venetians, has made of him: a hero with a flaw. A pity, after all, that he should have been governed by his passions and lust and irrational jealous desires that he fell victim to his baser nature. A pity that he lost all power of reasoning and thus all control over himself. Alas, he “loved not wisely, but too well” (V.ii.344). It was his southern temperature perhaps, the effects of overlong exposure to the sun. “For Southern men” it was said in 1603, “are cruel, moody, mad, / Hot, black, lean lepers, used to vaunt, / Yet wise in action, sober, fearful, sad. / If good, most good, if bad, exceeding bad.” Had Othello first been written and

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The lawyer intimates that in the same way that Othello’s acceptance into the Venetian State did not prevent his “descent into savagery and murder of his trusting white wife” (Cartelli 147), Sa’eed’s acculturation in the British metropolis was not thorough enough to ward off occasional outbursts of passions characteristic of non-Europeans. If anything, the lawyer’s speech perpetuates the myth of the AfroArab who is destined to brave the odds because he is not sophisticated enough to be able to “catch up” or “make it,” as it were, in an ostensibly advanced cosmopolitan culture. Sa’eed’s reaction to the lawyer’s appeal consists in a silent confession to murder and a denial of his Moorish descent. “It occurred to me,” he tells the narrator, “that I should stand up and say to them: ‘This is untrue, a fabrication. It was I who killed them. I am the desert of thirst. I am no Othello. I am a lie. Why don’t you sentence me and kill the lie’” (33). Sa’eed’s refutation of his Othelloness is meant to disrupt his assumed kinship with the Shakespearean Moor, who killed because he was all heart. In the courtroom, the professor goes to considerable pains to save Sa’eed’s life, whereas in the past, when the latter was his student, he would often tell him: “‘You, Mr. Sa’eed, are the best example of the fact that our civilizing mission in Africa is of no avail. After all the efforts we’ve made to educate you, it’s as if you’d come out of the jungle for the first time’” (93–4). By refusing to have his crimes mitigated, Sa’eed resists the Orientalist image of the helpless Moor, whose degeneration is predictable, given his purportedly inherent primitivism, and whose ultimate redemption remains a function of Western/Christian condescension. On a second occasion, Sa’eed repudiates his Othelloness because, unlike Othello, he is a self-declared avenger of the West, not its informant: [E]ach one of them [the judges] in that court would rise above himself for the first time in his life, while I had a sort of feeling of superiority towards them, for the ritual was being held primarily because of me; and I, over and above everything, was a colonizer, I am the intruder whose fate must be decided. [...] In that court I hear the rattle of swords in Carthage and the clatter of the hooves of Allenby’s horses desecrating the ground of Jerusalem. [...] They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and Verdun [...] the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago. Yes, my dear sirs, I came as an invader into your very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected into the veins of history. “I am no Othello. Othello was a lie.” (94–6)

While the Moor of Venice remains a foreign soldier but a lifelong servant of his “reverent signiors,” Sa’eed becomes “the spoilt child of the English” (52), “the handsome black man courted in Bohemian circles” (58), but who ultimately rebels against his European tutors, enlisting the purported savagism of his Moorish nature within a grander historical context of national struggle and counterconquest. Invoking an impressive history of West–East rivalry, Sa’eed insists on his right to use the same “deadly disease” of colonial violence that the invader has used then irretrievably bequeathed to the invaded.

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Post-Exoticism and the Failure of Arab Nationalism Salih’s Season hollows out what Bhabha calls “the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness,” a concept designating a Western “othering” process in which the non-Western Other is often perceived in terms of attraction and repulsion, desire and derision, at one and the same time (66–7). And Sa’eed can be said to engage literally in a ritualistic staging of the image of the appealing yet threatening Afro-Arab as it figures in the Orientalist imaginary.7 The automatization of the stereotype, that is, its literal enactment, is often regarded as a characteristic strategy in postcolonial counternarratives where the unsettling encounter between the West and the Other is indented principally to subvert that stereotype.8 In Season, Salih deconstructs the stereotype of the threateningly erotic Moor by drawing it to its extreme conclusion, thus shocking à la Swift, as it were, his Western audience out of a perfunctory acceptance of it. But one must also note that Salih’s inscription of this post-exotic Moorishness aims at transcending the limiting, retaliatory rhetoric of post-1948 Arab nationalism. While Sa’eed’s ideological “relapse into stereotypes and fabrications,” as Jassim Al-Musawi puts it, is meant “to implicate the addressee in self-analysis, instilling a sense of guilt and anguish,”9 Salih rewrites Moorishness in such a way as to cut short the incipient reactionary Arab nationalism enacted by Sa’eed in the novel and generally celebrated in contemporary Arab fiction (Said, Reflections 56). Sa’eed’s fatally flawed understanding of his colonial experience is suggested by his inability to play roles other than those defined for him by the “Orientalist imagination” (Cartelli 156). He is as much a slave to his exoticized image as his female 7 In a speech he gave at the American University of Beirut, Salih stated that Season was written not simply “to dramatize the polarization between the erotic and the other concept which Freud lumps together with Death,” but also to challenge what he considers to be the West’s “strange attraction to the Arab world”: I wanted first to write a straightforward thriller, a thriller about a crime of passion, and I had no idea about the twists and turns the story was going to take. I got stuck before Mustafa Sa’eed started his confession. I used this opportunity to do some research about crimes of passion. I also got interested in English characters like Lawrence of Arabia, Sir Richard Burton and such people who showed a strange attraction to the Arab world, the type of romanticism which I started to challenge in the novel. I fell under the influence of Freud as well and read more than once Civilization and its Discontents. What fascinated me then and would be simplistic now, is Freud’s theory of man as divided up between Eros and Death. (quoted in Amyuni 15) 8 I’m reversing here what Gershon Shaked describes as the “de-automatization of the stereotype,” referring to the defamiliarizing translational practice of assigning characters qualities and traits that are opposite to what is conventionally or prejudicially assigned to them; for example, a generous Jew, a cold-blooded rational Moor, a sexually inadequate Black African, and so on (14). 9 Al-Musawi’s Fanonian reading of Season of Migration divides Sa’eed’s story into two phases: in the “assimilationist” phase, Sa’eed relies on his Orientalized image in order to seduce English women to his bedroom; in the retaliatory phase, however, and precisely when Jean Morris resists and sees through his role-playing, Sa’eed rejects his Orientalized self and claims a new one, one that places him in the position of his community’s spokesman (201).

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victims are to it. The wooing scenes, as well as the court scene, move from mere structural and thematic variations on those in the Shakespearean text to post-exotic, parodic appropriations in which the fundamental conflict between Occidentalism and Orientalism as mutually exclusive discourses is brought to its ultimate conclusion. Sa’eed is desperately caught within the trappings of his exoticized Moorishness, so much so that he is unable to move beyond what Patricia Geesey calls the “negative pattern of cultural mythologizing”(135). So absorbed is he in his Anglo-Arab identity that everything in his life becomes an obsessive externalization of its dualism. While his London apartment symbolizes a seraglio-like space where he and his European concubines consummate their Orientalist fantasies about one another, his private Victorian-style room in his house in Khartoum is turned into a secret shrine for his other English self. As he enters Sa’eed’s room, the narrator is befuddled not only by its luxurious Victorian furniture but also by the astonishing amount of books, some written by Sa’eed himself and some by others, but all of which are in English— even the Koran is in English translation: “Not a single Arabic book. A graveyard. A mausoleum. An insane idea. A prison. A treasure chamber,” the narrator wonders after he retracts from setting fire to the room (136–8). While Sa’eed’s reinventions of these seemingly opposite spaces may be viewed as symbolic extensions of the implacable identitarian politics in which he is desperately caught (West versus East), they also suggest the inescapable rift in the identity of many postcolonial Arab intellectuals at large, a rift that Salih addresses more constructively through the countervailing voice of the anonymous narrator. Sa’eed’s obsession with his self-styled yet ineluctably incapacitating “Othelloness” is counteracted by the Marlow-like voice of the nameless narrator. The role of the frame narrator is not simply to spin the yarn of Sa’eed’s demise but also to filter it through his consciousness as an informed intellectual who, interestingly enough, has also lived for seven years in England, three of which he spent “delving into the life of an obscure English poet” (9). Like Kurtz and Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Sa’eed and the narrator in Season of Migration, respectively, articulate two different historical perspectives on the postcolonial condition. For Sa’eed, history is a series of haunting wrongs that need to be redressed. For the narrator, history is a form of consciousness that provides one with a sense of belonging and rootedness, something that makes one feel “not like a storm-swept feather but like [a] palm tree, a being with background, with roots, with a purpose” (2). Unlike Sa’eed, whose selfproclaimed nationalist mission consists mainly in vengefully re-enacting the history of violence to which his native country was subjected, the narrator conceives of the colonial experience as something from which much is to be learned and on which much needs to be built. One night, while “wander[ing] off into the narrow winding lanes of the village,” the narrator has an epiphany of sorts as he contemplates the difference between his and Sa’eed’s exilic experience: Was it likely that what happened to Mustafa Sa’eed could have happened to me? He had said that he was a lie, so was I also a lie? I am from here—is not this reality enough? I too had lived with them [Europeans]. But I had lived with them superficially, neither loving nor hating them. I used to treasure within me the image of this little village, seeing it wherever I went with the eye of my imagination. [...] Over there is like here, neither

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better nor worse. But I am from here, just as the date palm standing in the courtyard of our house has grown in our house and not in anyone else’s. The fact that they came to our land, I know not why, does that mean that we should poison our present and our future? Sooner or later they will leave our country [...]. The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were—ordinary people—and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.” (49–50 emphasis in original)

Be that as it may, the postcolonial predicament cannot be resolved so easily. For, as Peter Nazareth remarks, “Colonialism and colonial forces [...] are real and their effect is real” (Amyuni 125). By distancing himself from the vengefully returning “Othellos” of the Arab world, like Sa’eed, the narrator is simply, and perhaps simplistically, eliding the inevitable hybridity of his postcolonial identity, a hybridity that becomes the more problematic, particularly as it enters into conflict with the villagers’ irreversible traditionalism. “The significance of the novel’s engagement with Othello,” Cartelli argues, “largely rests on its concern with the impact of the West on the identity formations of those few individuals who by training, education, or circumstance are, like Othello, compelled to live in an undefined space between East and West, North and South.” The narrator’s self-congratulatory claim to “immunity from the infection of Westernism that has so fatally undermined [Sa’eed]” is informed by a desire to return to a purportedly authentic precolonial Sudan (163). Yet the novel’s thematic scheme ultimately lays bare “the naïvety of this notion of return to a pristine world, uncontaminated by the fiction of others” (Neill, “Postcolonial Shakespeares?” 179). While it rules out the recoverability of precolonial authenticity, the novel gestures toward a reconstruction of an ineluctably hybrid postcolonial Sudan that draws on the synergy obtaining from the confluence of both its colonial history and its indigenous traditions. The narrator is eventually shaken awake to the naive complacency with which he discounts the impact of colonialism (“Once again we shall be as we were”) precisely when Bint Mahmoud, Sa’eed’s widow, takes her own life immediately after she murders the second husband whom the village elders have imposed on her. The above passage is significant, not the least because it occurs shortly after the narrator’s return from Europe, when he can still say with all the assurance provided him by his European education: “I want to take my rightful share of life by force, I want to give lavishly, I want love to flow from my heart. [...] No, I am not a stone thrown into the water but seed sown in a field” (5). But as the novel proceeds, the narrator is gradually disturbed by the village’s patriarchal repression of women, a repression he would probably have taken for granted were it not for his liberal training in Europe. That the village people remain unruffled by Bint Mahmoud’s murder and suicide both outrages and estranges the narrator from a community to which he initially wanted to “give lavishly” and for which his heart would flow with love. As he confronts the village people’s uncompromising patriarchalism, the narrator experiences an identity crisis involving the same West–East divide that corroded Sa’eed’s soul.10 Yet, unlike 10 Patricia Geesey’s “Cultural Hybridity and Contamination in Tayeb Salih’s Mawsim alhijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North)” offers an insightful Bhabhian reading of Sa’eed’s, as well as the narrator’s, hybrid identity as a strategic, but often controversial, site wherefrom enunciatory cultural resistance and subversion are enacted.

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Sa’eed, he teeters only momentarily on the brink of suicide. Realizing his entrapment between the consuming streams of tradition and modernity, Occidentalism and Orientalism, the narrator is tempted to disrupt both by drowning himself in the river. But in a flickering life-asserting moment, and while still adrift in the cold waters of the Nile, the narrator decides to wade back to the shore. He realizes that with a little poetry and a great deal of hope, Sudan may continue to be “the land of poetry and the possible” that it has always been (112), despite the irremediable traditionalism of its community. Hope and poetry will help create an imaginative space of confluence onto which the East–West divide can be deterritorialized and reconciled—even if ever so tentatively. After all, if Sa’eed decides to confide in the narrator, it is because the latter has studied poetry, and while Sa’eed disappears, hoping that neither of his sons grows up with the germ of the wanderlust, the same germ that turned both Sa’eed and Othello into the two “extravagant wheeling stranger[s]” that they are (I.i.137), the narrator remains in the village and symbolically names his newly born daughter Hope. Salih’s engagement with the Shakespeare text not only opens it up to new hermeneutic possibilities but also gestures toward a new textual and transcultural space wherein an inevitably hybrid Afro-Arab Subjecthood may be reenunciated. As a modern mu’aradah novel, Season deconstructs enduring (neo)colonial stereotypes, all the while eluding the lure of return to a purportedly pristine precolonial past. Salih tropes the post-exotic Moor, creating an Orientalist dystopia in which the Afro-Arab is both the object and procurer of destructively perverse desire. The binaristic logic and the identity politics governing such dystopia are deconstructed and remapped onto an imaginative space where notions of history, subjectivity, and national identity are renegotiated and redefined in terms of their ineluctable hybridity. Works Cited Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Al-Musawi, Jassim Muhsin. The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence. Boston: Brill, 2003. Amyuni, Takieddine Mona, ed. Season of Migration to the North: A Casebook. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1985. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonialism.” Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Diana Brydon. New York: Routledge, 2000, 85–104. Barnstone, Willis. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Bartels, Emily C. “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioning of Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly. 41.4 (1990): 433–54. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bissoondath, Neil. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. 1994. Toronto: Penguin, 2004.

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Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ———. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. ———. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Age, New York: Riverhead Books, 1994. Bongie, Chris. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Brown, Marshall, ed. The Uses of Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Brydon, Diana, ed. Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 2000. Caminero-Santangelo, Byron. “Legacies of Darkness: Neocolonialism, Joseph Conrad, and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” ARIEL 30.4 (1999): 7–33. Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National formation, postcolonial appropriations. London: Routledge, 1999. Célestin, Roger. From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Davidson John. “In Search of the Middle Point: The Origins of Oppression in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” Research in African Literature 20.3 (1989): 385–400. de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Geesey, Patricia. “Cultural Hybridity and Contamination in Tayeb Salih’s Mawsim al-hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North). Research in African Literature 28.3 (1997): 128–40. Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Harlow, Barbara. “Sentimental Orientalism: Season of Migration to the North and Othello.” Season of Migration to the North: A Casebook. Ed. Mona TakieddineAmyuni. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1985, 75–9. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York: Routledge, 2001. Kastan, S. David. Shakespeare After Theory. New York: Routledge, 1999. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. Foreign Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lindeman, Yehudi. “Translation in the Renaissance: A Context and a Map.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 8.2 (1981): 204–16. Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin, eds. Postcolonial Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 1998. Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Mason, Peter. Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1998. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Mernissi, Fatima. Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001. Michaels, Benn Walter. “The Victims of New Historicism.” The Uses of Literary History. Ed., Marshall Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, 187–96. Nazareth, Peter. “The Narrator as Artist and the Reader as Critic in Season of Migration to the North.” Season of Migration to the North: A Casebook. Ed. Mona Takieddine-Amyuni. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1985, 123–34. Neill, Michael. “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference.” Shakespeare Quarterly 49.4 (1998): 361–74. ———. “Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing Away from the centre.” Postcolonial Shakespeares. Eds. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin. London: Routledge, 1998, 164–85. Prakash, Gyan. “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography.” Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Diana Brydon. New York: Routledge, 2000, 862–88. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Robinson, Douglas. Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. ———. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davis. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1970. Schick, Irvin C. The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse. New York: Verso, 1999. Scolnicov, Hanna, and Peter Holland, eds. The Play out of Context: Transferring Plays form Culture to Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Segalen, Victor. Essai sur L’Extoisme. Une Esthétique du Divers. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1978. Shaked, Greshon. “The Play: gateway to cultural dialogue,” Trans. Jeffery Green. The Play out of Context: Transferring Plays form Culture to Culture. Eds. Scolnicov and Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 7–24. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Kent : Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1996. Spivak, Chakravorty Gayatri. “Questioned on Translation: Adrift.” Public Culture 13.1 (2001): 13–22. Todorov, Tzvetan. On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. 1989. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Afterword: The Location of Shakespeare Jyotsna G. Singh

A compelling scene in the film Shakespeare Wallah (1964) depicts a performance of Othello in a quaint proscenium stage theatre in the former British summer retreat, Simla (India) in the mid 1950s. In the middle of Othello’s speech, and before he murders Desdemona, the Indian spectators notice a glamorous Bombay movie actress seated in one of the viewing boxes. She looks bored at the play and suddenly, excited, obviously starstruck viewers point at her, and walk to her box to get autographs. She signs a few autographs and leaves as Desdemona is murdered on stage. The English actors playing Othello and Desdemona from the Buckingham players struggle gamely to continue, but soon it is clear that the performance is disrupted. Shakespeare’s play is nudged “off stage” by the appeal of a Bombay actress. This moment in the film signals the end of the colonial, English language— fairly “straight”—productions of Shakespeare that continued at the end of the British Raj in the 1950s. The players in the film are loosely based on the experiences of Geoffrey Kendall’s Shakespeareana touring company, who put on more than 800 performances between 1953 and 1956. But by the late 1950s, their days were numbered and the Merchant Ivory film is generally accepted as a nostalgic farewell to the Raj, as Ismail Merchant explains: In the sixties we made Shakespeare Wallah as a metaphor for the end of the British Raj and its aftermath. A group of itinerant actors who stage the works of Shakespeare and other English classics across the subcontinent find they have become an anachronism—an irrelevance in a country where the old order had collapsed and the emerging culture is beginning to draw on other influences. (29)

The demise of Shakespeare among postcolonial Indian audiences in this film not only evokes the end of cultural colonization—a corollary of the global British Raj— it also shows how Shakespeare was locally situated within the social formations of hill towns, where the British had crafted local economies to support their sustained presence in an escape from the hot plains. The local economies continued to thrive in the early postcolonial years, in the lingering influence of the British culture and social practices. But Shakespeare Wallah depicts how the formerly colonial hotels, clubs, schools, and theatres must gradually lose their old business among mostly elite urbanized audiences of Indian army personnel, educational communities, and the anglicized upper Indian classes in general, while accommodating new tastes in entertainment and commerce, with the Bombay film industry making inroads in locations of former colonial resorts.

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Ironically, the nostalgia for the end of Shakespeare in this film is somewhat premature, as is the seemingly insurmountable distance between the bard’s plays in English (the elite culture) and the Bombay films in vernacular languages. Several decades later, the small-town English-language productions in India may be infrequent, but the postmodern, now labeled “Bollywood,” film industry has appropriated Shakespeare in two popular renditions of Macbeth (Maqbool) and Othello (Omkara). Omkara is an interesting case in point illustrating the global project of accounting for the distinct nature of Shakespeare in the local customs and traditions around the globe. The film has been completely appropriated by the Bollywood aesthetic and affect (reminiscent of Hollywood blockbusters), and as one critic notes, the director “transposes its main protagonist Omkara into a godfather type character belonging to the crime genre that now dominates the Bollywood scenario” (Bhatia). It is this fare of the songs, dancing, and hyperbolic speeches that accounts for the popularity of this film version of Othello. Furthermore, this production shows little interest in racial politics or Renaissance colonial narratives; instead, it is set in the interiors of Uttar Pradesh (in regional India), and Shakespeare’s play is completely “transmuted into the local and made accessible to a public whose daily lives are surrounded by conflicts, local rivalries, and power plays” dealing with communal and caste politics (Bhatia). Both the Bollywood production and the particularized culture-specific reception of Omkara clearly intersect on a “local–global axis,” which inflects this collection of essays in Native Shakespeares. If Shakespeare Wallah was a low-budget film, which captured the decline of colonialism in its local dimensions, Omkara demonstrates how the global culture of capital and insatiable consumerism fuels Bollywood, which in turn must mine the local social formations—rural traditions, caste-based customs, material culture—to keep up a ready supply of entertainment products. Can Shakespeare today be appropriated as anything other than a product of this global market, one in which, as the editors suggest, an “aspiring global English-speaking media” have an interest in shaping Shakespeare as international art? The distinct contribution of Native Shakespeares lies in the way it attempts to push beyond this inevitability by way of expanding “the category of appropriation” so as to include a broad range of social practices via a local–global interconnection that “prompts scholars to plot how Shakespeare’s texts, iconicity, and cultural capital reflect the uneasy relationship between the hegemonic and subaltern, the west and the rest.” Native Shakespeares, I believe, marks a paradigm shift in studies of Shakespearean appropriation and adaptation, prefigured to some extent by Shakespeare and Appropriation (Desmet and Sawyer, eds), and moving away from the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which were marked by a crucial dis-identification of Shakespeare from Anglo-Saxon culture linked to both the Greco-Roman and JudeoChristian traditions. Gradually, however, the geographical, political, and conceptual boundaries of the English (or European) Renaissance expanded into a new global understanding of the European discovery of and expansion into the Americas, East Indies, and Africa. During these decades, one could note the fault lines of the fractured discursive field called “Shakespeare” taking the form of irreconcilable, though often contradictory tensions between a canonical Shakespeare and a political Shakespeare—both within universities and within the Anglo-American culture at large.

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The legacy of these debates continues to influence discussions of the changing role of Shakespeare studies: On the one hand, pedagogical and critical approaches to Shakespeare seem to have changed radically via contemporary theoretical approaches such as feminism, postcolonialism, cultural materialism, among others. These approaches reveal how Shakespeare’s works are implicated in the different social and ideological struggles, allowing for a new politics of appropriation, as evident in this anthology of essays on “Native Shakespeares.” On the other hand, somewhat ironically, in the public debate and in the conservative and moderate attacks on this “decanonization” of the bard, Shakespeare’s authority emerges from a transcultural, universal sense of culture, as Harold Bloom describes it: Shakespeare “has been universally judged to be a more adequate representer of the universe of fact than anyone else” (Bloom 16). The effects of these cultural divisions on academia remain mixed, and, in fact, many progressive constituencies in universities frequently view Shakespeare in opposition to ethnic and minority perspectives, calling for more positions and courses in “minority” fields, from which Shakespeare is generally excluded. Such moves, I believe, block off any considerations of the material and discursive production of the Bard in ways that may have some bearing on the class, race, and gender conflicts in the dominant culture. Thus, Shakespeare continues to serve as a site on which anxieties about the power of the dominant culture are at play. Overall, however, these debates have led us to important questions about inclusion and exclusion— about Shakespeare’s “travels” in Cuba, India, in the West Indies, Ireland, among other spaces in the periphery of the metropolitan societies. Within this context of these engagements with the “resistant forms of self and culture,” in the native appropriations represented in this anthology, I wish to further problematize what Ric Knowles defines as “the struggle between the ‘potentially chaotic, Dionysian world of the theatre’ and the ‘socially reproductive tendencies’ that drive the commercial [and political] aspects of theatre [both in text and performance” (57–61). What is at issue for Knowles is the “transgressive or transformative potential” of a particular script or production, whereby specific categories of difference—race, nation, ethnicity, class, among others—can be interrogated or contained to different degrees in a given performance [or] text (10). One important, and uncommon, site for mapping the liberatory, Dionysian potential of Shakespeare’s plays is a prison production company in the United States, which offers a glimmer of how to undermine normative notions of edification and market rewards in the American education system. Niels Herold’s essay in this collection—based on a documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars—takes us to such prison productions as one location where conflicts of appropriation and exploitation are most visibly performed. In an interesting twist, Herold juxtaposes a comparison between prison theatre and the corporate and military deployment of the Bard’s plays for management training. In both instances, Shakespeare’s plays are performed in hierarchical organizations, and what links both worlds, “of moneyed leaders and disenfranchised losers, is precisely some ameliorative notion of self-actualization, that is, for the specific purposes of the particular community in which Shakespeare is the valorized text for performance”(8). Thus, Herold observes that on the surface

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at least, one can assume a kind of “emancipatory experience [as] a by-product of the educational encounter” (9). In Herold’s’ analysis of the filmed version of a prison production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, he points to the suggestive analogy between the two situations: Shakespeare as Prospero, Prospero as the warden each creates a homeopathic performance of rehabilitation through the magic bullet of theatrical illusion. Prisoners are represented as owning up to their crimes, even as they become more and more humane (like Ariel to Prospero), more capable of compassion (for the victims of their crimes) and thereby more capably, the recipients of our own. (12)

Unlike Prospero, the warden cannot forgive or free these prisoners, but the process of theatrical role play in this particular play “has a liberating effect, becomes the agency of self-awareness and ultimately of a certain kind of freedom”(11). If, however, inmate actors role-play in “order to gain access to their personal histories [and to their place in society] the management Gurus deny historicism and history in their use of Shakespeare for narrow commercial/bureaucratic goals.” As I see it, Herold’s provocative thesis has some interesting implications for our understanding of the power relations underpinning all cultural production: If the ameliorative aspects of Shakespeare humanize the institutions of capitalism, then the prison system buttressing the corporate world, evokes a “master–slave relationship”—one in which the supposedly rehabilitated prisoners are the excess, the expendable, surplus human capital of the same system. Thus the inmates’ liberation can only be temporary and metaphorical under the regimes of physical surveillance and frequent duress of the incarceration. And, if Shakespeare’s plays, in many instances, are cultural products for consumption/entertainment in a global marketplace, the prisoner–actors do not participate in this market and thus are, ironically, freed from the system of profit and reward. As a result, the prisoners cannot be culturally constructed as actors or audiences in the” real world” and within a demographic category harnessed to aims of educational edification and profit. This essay joins others in Native Shakespeares in offering us a compelling example of how (as the editors note) “people tell stories and enact them in different idioms, voices, formal shapes,” in local Shakespearean productions that harness “social energies” to ends, which in the case of the prison performances are movingly personal, affective, liberatory, and yet a part of the “prison industrial complex.” To these I will conclude by adding another prison story of the recuperation of Shakespeare (including The Tempest) in Apartheid South Africa. The actors in this instance were not disenfranchised, undereducated, typical of the prison population in the United States, but were white, educated South African men, convicted and imprisoned for their resistance to Aparthied. Hugh Lewin, the author of Bandiet, and former member of the South African Resistance Movement, was one of the designated speakers at the conference on Shakespeare/Postcoloniality held at the University of Witwatersrand in July 1996, at which I was a participant. Lewin was one of the numerous white South Africans who fought against apartheid and was imprisoned for seven years, from 1964 to 1971. Among his audience were Shakespeare scholars, mostly from South Africa, the United States, Britain, a

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few from the Indian subcontinent, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and a couple from neighboring African countries. What did Hugh Lewin, former bandiet (or prisoner) have to say to us Shakespeareans? He told us a compelling story of participating in makeshift productions of Shakespeare (and other playwrights) within the prison, with sets and costumes made from leftover debris of meager prison handouts and a makeshift, daring stage, very similar to his account in his prison memoir, while describing a prison production of Henry IV-1 (the Boarshead scenes): Paul did a marvelous Falstaff—made complete … with bulging belly, boots, cloak, sword, and an almost successful wig and moustache (ruffled-out scraps of mailbag string) which transformed regulation [prison] clean-shaven, short-hair locks into boozy exuberance … [overall] we had the startling effect of color; color, briefly, in the dull sameness of the yard’s gloom. We had something of a stage too: in our absence at the Central, a clothes line, with several strands, had been built at the end of the yard. Jock draped blankets over the line, some forward, some back, making a backdrop … from behind which we could enter … We marched in … and I remember, they gasped: the less than-a-dozen members of our audience, none of whom had been allowed to see the costumes beforehand, gasped as we flaunted past in our colors and finery, gasped and clapped spontaneously as we disappeared behind the blanket … the show was a wow. (197)

The choice of Shakespeare (and of other Western works like Murder in the Cathedral and The Dumb Waiter, which Lewin also mentions) were not unusual choices for a group of men of European descent who had studied English canonical works in their privileged white education curriculum in the South Africa of the 1950s. Yet in Lewin’s narrative of the activities of “The Courtyard Players” in the prison, what was noteworthy, obviously, was not the quality of the productions, but the power of imaginative play in a brutally literal world of physical and psychic constraint. And given these restrictions, the irony of staging the Dionysian tavern scenes was probably not lost on the prison performers and viewers. Who better than Falstaff to dramatize a rebuke to the world of literal brutality buttressed by codes of law and order that was the refuge of the apartheid state? Of course, for the prison authorities, Falstaff’s “playful” subversion of aristocratic respectability would hardly seem as threatening as Caliban’s “native” resistance to a European master. And in the Christmas of 1968, they planned such a production of The Tempest, in which they “traced the Caliban story.” “No women were allowed to be represented, so out went Miranda and we were left with interesting potential: the slave Caliban’s revolt, using the drunken Stephano and Trinculo, against Prospero, the benevolent tyrant, watched over and guarded by his noisome security man, Ariel” (200). Then, Lewin notes in his book, two days before Christmas, the prison “Headquarters banned the play, ‘permission withdrawn, no concert allowed.’ And no explanations given” (201). All future performances of all plays were banned in the South Africa prison. The grip of the monolithic apartheid State could be felt on all possibilities of human agency; maybe the prison headquarters was perceptive enough to see the dangers of illusory rebellion in a world of rigid boundaries and limits. For some readers (and listeners) of Lewin’s prison account, the scenes of the “Courtyard Players” in the prison yard will seem (and seemed) peripheral to the main narrative about routines of prison

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life and racial politics, and if anything, perhaps testify to Shakespeare’s “universal” appeal—a way of reaffirming and dehistoricizing the transcendent power of the bard (and of the great works) to uplift human spirits under any conditions. I want to to rehistoricize Shakespeare—to bracket Lewin’s talk before the conferees of Shakespeare/Postcoloniality, 1996 not only within that particular historical moment of the conference—one in which we which shared not only our (the audience’s) collective, personal, and intellectual investment in Shakespeare; but I want to contextualize this moment within the criss-crossing trajectories of imperial and postcolonial histories. Ironically, members of the conference audience in Johannesburg audience, as Shakespeareans from different countries, including from former colonies, not only exemplified the supposedly universal and timeless appeal of the Bard, but many of us also testified to the long historical reach of the colonial “civilizing mission,” the effects of which persist in most postcolonial settings. Thus, that evening in Johannesburg, at least superficially, it seemed that Shakespeare was everywhere among the far reaches of the world and that the vital spirit of his works had even come to life in an apartheid prison. Yet the ideology of apartheid, as of colonial and neocolonial discourses, was more invested in the exclusion rather than the inclusion of large numbers of non-Western people from the European liberal education and the attendant privileges that came with being “civilized” and that shaped the white members of the Courtyard players. Listening to Lewin was a compelling experience, yet at least for me, the emotional impact of imagining courageous playacting in the midst of despair held the risk of sentimentalizing and obfuscating the systemic forces of neocolonial exploitation that persist even today. While Lewin spoke in a free South Africa and after its first general election, the patterns of inequity between the whites and blacks has, as we know, not been entirely dismantled in the post-apartheid South Africa in the twentyfirst century. These Apartheid productions, like so many localized, transgressive appropriations of Shakespeare (as represented in Native Shakespeares), while bringing together local social energies and global interests, also reveal, as Knowles has discussed in other contexts, the cultural and ideological work done by individual productions as they are mediated by cultural and material conditions through which they are produced (10). Furthermore, as Homi Bhabha has argued, all: terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively … [and] the ‘right’ to signify from the periphery of an authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of traditions to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are ‘in the minority ’(2)

Thus, as this volume attests, Shakespeare can serve as an important signifier for the “native” and minority cultures in a variety of locations as well as in conditions of contingency and flux. Of course, there are no overall guarantees of a progressive outcome, and the “politics of appropriation [of Shakespeare] is unevenly recognized and practiced across the spectrum of marginal [and dominant] social groups and movements” (Ross xi–xii). However, following Shakespeare’s “travels” in wide-

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ranging locales—from postcolonial Indian hill towns to “Bollywood” films, American and South African prisons, among other settings—can nonetheless be a richly rewarding journey. Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bhatia, Nandi. “Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India.” GRAMMA: Special Issue: Shakespeare Worldwide and the Idea of an Audience, eds. Tina Krontris and Jyotsna Singh. Volume 15 (2007): 155–74. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, Eds. Shakespeare and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 1999. Knowles, Ric. Reading the Materialist Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lewin, Hugh. Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison. Cape Town and Johannesburg: Africa South Paperbacks, 1981. Merchant, Ismail. “Reflections.” New Statesman, 15 August 1997: 29. Ross, Andrew, Ed. Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

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Index

Aborigines 12, 93n5, 123, 126, 130, 132, 133, 142n61 and circus 128n10 and displacement 129, 131n25, 132n26, 135, 142 and theatre 126, 128–30, 134–5 and n36, 136–8 and color-blind casting 165, 136n40, 140, 141 interracial heterosexuality 144–5 makeup 138–40 same-sex eroticism 145–8 space 126, 128, 142 staging 138–48 Adams, Daniel Monitorial Reader (1839) 46 “The Understanding Reader, or Knowledge before Oration” 46 adaptation-appropriation 9 Adelman, Carol and Kenneth 155–9 Movers and Shakespeares 155–6, 158, 166 Shakespeare in Charge 156 and n8, 158, 164, 165, 167, 168n33 Adhaya, Baishnav Charan 93–5 Africa 39, 106, 234, 237 African-American 74n1 culture 11 literary criticism 63, 66, 70 The Black Aesthetic 65n9 literature 59, 65–6, 67, 69–70 poetry 63, 66–7 allusion 1, 10, 11, 33, 48, 51, 61, 82, 198, 205 and appropriation 10 classical 79 Alonso, Alicia 197, 203, 207–10 Angelou, Maya 68–9, 70 Anglo-American culture 234 history 10 literary theory 214 literature 38 Shakespeare studies 183, 214 textual practices 58–9

antic disposition 29 appropriation appropriation-adaptation debate 9 commercial 156 cultural 70, 96 obsolete 67 postcolonial 60, 92, 184, 213 quiet 57 trans-Atlantic 51 transgressive 183–4 transpositional definition of 59–60 Western 38n2 Arab 8, 13, 51, 154, 167n33, 215, 217–21, 223, 225 Afro-Arab 213 and n1, 215, 219, 222, 223–4, 226, 227, 230 discourse 217 harem 223–4 nationalism 216, 221, 227–30 women 223 Armfield, Neil 93n5, 126, 134, 136n40, 140, 141, 142, 147 Asia 28, 51, 58, 60, 91, 96 and n7 Australia 11, 126, 129 and n15, 133n29, 145 and genocide 129, 130n18, 132n26 history 130n19 multiculturalism 130–38 Native Title 129 and n15, 131 and n24 Stolen Generations 128n10, 131 and n25, 132, 133n29, 134–5, 142 Bakhtin, Mikhail 75, 204 The Dialogic Imagination 74 Ballet Nacional de Cuba 203, 207 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) 62, 65 Bartholomeusz, Dennis 5, 92n2 India’s Shakespeare 5–6 Bate, Jonathan 62, 184, 202 Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 62n7 Belleforest, François de 77 Benjamin, Walter 84 Theses on the Philosophy of History 76

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Bennet, William 52 Bevington, David The Complete Works of Shakespeare 19n1, 59n3 Bhabha, Homi 11, 40–41, 75, 84, 94–5, 213, 227, 238 The Location of Culture 74, 94 Bharucha, Ruston 91 and n1, 96 and n6 intracultural 98, 101 Black Arts movement 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 black/white binary 63, 67, 94–5, 106n3 Bloom, Harold 29, 30–32, 35, 45, 213, 214, 216, 235 Bollywood 3, 4, 5, 234, 238–9 Brathwaite, Edward 184 Islands 173 Brinsley, John Ludus literarius (1622) 43 Bristol, Michael 2n5, 38, 106 Britain culture 2, 202, 223 empire 33, 51, 182n13 and Eurocentric worldview 42 hegemony 2, 107 imperialism 9, 22, 24, 27, 32, 51, 91, 219 Raj 233 Brook, Peter 96 and n7 Brown, Matthew P. 48–9 Burt, Richard 60 and n5, 67, 69, 70 Canada 61, 107 and n5, 108 and n8, 109–10, 113–14, 116–21 capitalism 8, 153, 158, 159n18, 218, 236 global 9 multinational 199 Caribbean 38–9, 173 and n3, 176 history 51 theater 39 Carmichael, Stokely 65, 66n10 Carriacou 3, 39n3, 51 island 37 Shakespeare Mas 10, 21n6, 37, 38 and n2, 39–41, 51–2, 53, 58, 74n1, 79n7 Cartelli, Thomas 2, 5, 9–10, 41n5, 59 and n2, 60, 74, 75n4, 81n11, 91–2, 202, 221n6, 229; see also appropriation, transpositional Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations 5, 9–10, 216

Catholicism 20, 24, 28n16, 32 and n20, 112n12 Césaire, Aimé 12, 174 and n4, 175–7, 178, 181, 182, 183 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land) 177, 178–9 Une tempête (A Tempest) 12–13, 173–5, 176, 178–83, 215–16 Cheng, Vincent 20n4, 23n10, 25 Chrisman, Laura 188 and n8, 198, 199 codex format technology 48 Comitéde Defensa de la Revolución (CDR) 203, 205, 206, 207 commonplace 11, 38n2, 40n4, 43–5, 50–52, 156n8; see also Renaissance books 2, 43, 44, 45–8, 50 Derridian 48 gesture 51–2 concordance 50–51 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 221 and n5, 228 con-text 7, 182, 197, 199 Cuba 13, 174n4, 201–10, 235 Havana 13, 201–10 Desmet, Christy 4, 91–2 Shakespeare and Appropriation 4, 92n2 Dionne, Craig 10, 11, 58, 59, 74, 75n2, 79n7, 107n6, 175n6, 196, 197 “The Shatnerfication of Shakespeare” 40n4 Dobson, Michael 68 The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 2n2, 68n15 Dolan, Jill 125n6, 147 Dollimore, Jonathan 19 and n1 “creative vandalism” 59 Drouin, Jennifer 12, 97n8, 137n45 Ellison, Ralph 66 Invisible Man 64–5 Elyot, Thomas 62 and n7 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 37, 39, 50–51, 53 Fanon, Franz 13, 93 Fayer, Joan 37 and n1, 40, 51, 52 fin-de-siècle 218, 219 Finding Forrester 52–3, 54 Fischlin, Daniel 105n1 and 2, 110, 116, 117

Index Fortier, Mark 105n2, 118, 119 Foucault, Michel 70, 153, 223 France 12, 26, 40, 106n3, 107–8 and n8, 112n13, 116, 117, 157n10, 167, 223 French (language) 24, 105 and n1, 111, 112n12 and 13, 118n19, 174, 179n9, 182n13 French Canadian 110n9, 118n19 literary theory 214 revolution 108n7 Frassinelli, Pier Paolo 12, 13, 191, 204, 216 Freud, Sigmund 68, 227n7 Garber, Marjorie 68 and n16, 69–70 Garrick, David 2, 93 Gayle, Addison, Jr. 64, 65n9 Genette, Gérard 4–5, 10 Ghouse, Salim 96–101, 136n38 and radical interventions 97 Gilbert, Helen 38n2, 95, 120n23, 136, 137, 140 Post-Colonial Drama Theory, Practice, Politics 3n7, 38n2, 161–2 grain 7, 9, 10, 173 Grammaticus, Saxo History of the Danes 77, 83 Greenblatt, Stephen 3n3, 165 and n29 The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition 57n1, 59n4, 158n14, 159n19 Griffiths, Gareth The Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures 3n9 Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas (GTCB) 203–8 Guerrero-Strachan, Santiago Rodríguez 11, 59 Hall, Kim Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England 62n6, 138n49 Halpern, Richard 31, 40n4, 52 Hamilton, Charles 65, 66n10 Harlow, Barbara 221, 223, 225 Hawkes, Terence 2n4, 7n10 Henderson, Stephen 11, 58, 59, 60, 62–7, 69, 70, 74n1 “The Forms of Things Unknown” 57, 58, 61, 63, 64 and n8, 65–7, 70 Understanding The New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music As Poetic References 58, 63

243

Herold, Niels 12, 92, 123n2, 235–6 Hidalgo, Ana Sáez 11, 59 historiographic metafiction 73 Hollywood 52, 213, 234 Houlihan, Kathleen ni 20n5, 21, 31 Hulme, Peter 7, 174n5, 184 Hutcheon, Linda 73, 77, 105n2 Hutton, Kirstie 127, 138–40, 147 hybridity 3, 66–7, 73–5, 83, 85, 101, 105, 217, 219, 229, 230 definition of 74, 154–5 levels of 70 performed 92 imperialism 4, 26, 27n15, 33, 61–2, 63, 69, 73, 92, 95–6, 106n3, 125, 161–2, 181–2, 218–19, 238 and Shakespeare 69 United States 173n3 Western 67, 95–6 India 11, 51, 74n1, 76, 91, 94, 106 and n3, 164–5, 201, 233, 235, 237, 239 Calcutta Theater 93 and identity 5, 92 Indian Education Act of 1835 93, 164–5 jatra theater 11, 92–3, 96 and n6, 97–101; see also Hamlet; Ghouse, Salim Dutt, Utpal 96n6 and Indian identity 101 staging 99–101 Sans Souci 93, 94 Subscription Theater 93 and theatrical traditions 96 Ireland 20–35, 235 Dublin 19, 30, 33, 34 insurgents 22, 24 literary renaissance 20 national epic 26 patriotism 35 Israel 216, 220, 236–7 Japan, 128n12, 237 Joyce, James 19–35, 41n5, 74, 83n13 and adaptation 19 Ulysses 10, 19–34, 59, 74n1, 75n4, 76n5, 81n11 Kapadia, Parmita 11–12, 106n3, 107n6, 116n18, 136n38, 164–5 and n28, 175n6, 196, 197

244

Native Shakespeares

Khaki Hamlets 21, 22, 24, 33, 35 Knowles, Ric 105n1, 108–9, 235, 238 Lamming, George 173, 183, 184 Laouyene, Atef 13, 190, 196, 202 Lewin, Hugh, 237, 236, 238 Loomba, Ania 66, 69 and n18, 70, 91 and n1, 215 Post-Colonial Shakespeares 2n3, 73, 91n1 McDonnell, Maureen 12, 93n5, 120n23 and 25 McGuffy, William readers 42 and n7, 46 McMurray, Joan F. 37 and n1, 40, 51, 52 Mafeking 26–7 and n15 Maggi, Beatriz 202–3 Mailman, Deborah 123–4, 126–7, 128n12, 129, 131n25, 134 and n31, 135, 139–40, 141, 143–4, 148 Massai, Sonia 6, 70 Maza, Bob 135–7 and n45, 141, 142 middlebrow consumption 38 culture 50–53 literacy 40n4 mimicry 38, 41, 75n2, 93–5, 198 Moore, Thomas 49, 50 Moorishness 196–7, 213, 215, 216–17, 219–22, 224–7 and n8, 228, 230 négritude 173n1, 177–9, 184 Neruda, Pablo 13, 202, 208; see also Racz, Gregary New Zealand 3, 236–7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 68, 180n10 oral transmission 123, 166, 167 Orgel, Stephen, 9n12, 70 Orkin, Martin 5, 66, 215 Post-Colonial Shakespeares 2n3, 73 Packer, Tina Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management 156n8, 157n9 Piperpont, John 49, 50 American First Class Book, or Exercises in Reading and Recitation (1824) 42n7, 47 Plaatje, Solomon 13, 187–99, 202; see also Skakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

Diphosho-phoso [The Comedy of Errors] 13, 187–99 Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents 190 A Sechuana Reader in International Phonetic Orthography 190 and n14 Platt, Len 21, 22n7, 26, 28n16 polynationalism 120n23 and 25, 133–4, 142, 147–8 polyvalent 10, 50 post-exotic 216–20, 227–30 Québec 105, 106 “from-elsewhere” 119–20 Lesage, Jean 105 Molière 105–6 Quiet Revolution 105, 111 Québécois 12, 106, 119n20, 137n45 culture 105–6 language 105, 108n7, 111n10, 112n13 Shakespearean adaptations 110–11, 119n22 Á propos de Roméo et Juliette 115–16, 120 Hamlet, prince du Québec 111, 113 Hamlet-le-Malécite 115–16 Henry. Octobre. 1970. 116 and n17 Lear 113–15 La tempête 112 Macbeth, de William Shakespeare: Traduit en québécois 112, 117 Rodéo et Juliette 111 Romeo & Juliette 110n9 Sauvée des eaux: texte dramatique sur Ophélie 115–16 Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux (Richard III) 113–15 and women’s issues 115 rai 154–5 Remitti, Cheikha 154–5 Ray, Kalyan 1–2 Eastwords 1 and n1, 4 Renaissance 38n2, 40, 43, 44, 45, 48, 79, 125, 145, 156n8, 191n17, 196, 213 and n1, 214–15, 234; see also commonplacing abbreviation during 82 amplification during 82 and linguistic experimentalism 81 philosophical skepticism 8

Index rhetorical exercises 80 self-fashioning 45 Resende, Aimara da Cunha 204 Retamar, Roberto Fernández 183, 184 “Calibán” 173 Islands 173 rituals carnivals 39 African-Caribbean 38 Drunken Sailor 40 Jokunnu festival 39n3, 40 Matachines Dance 39 Philadelphia Mumers parades 39 Pierrot Grenade (mokoto mas) 39 and n3, 39–40 Pinkster Festival 39 practices 39 city waits 39 Lord of Misrule 39, 40 maypole 39 wakes 39 Roach, Joseph surrogation 48n9 Roche, James G. 156, 159 Ronfard, Jean-Pierre 113–15, 117 Royal Reader, The 37, 40, 42, 51 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 8–9, 139n51 Rushdie, Salman 2, 11, 21n6, 73–4n1, 74–85, 218n4 “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist” 76, 85 East, West 73, 74 and fragmented vision, 83 Fury 79–80n8 The Ground Beneath Her Feet 79–80n8 Haroun and the Sea of Stories 81n10 and irony 84–5 and lack of decorum 79 and n8 and verbal features 78–81 “Yorick” 11, 59, 73–85 Said, Edward 8, 66 and n11, 220, 223, 224 Culture and Imperialism 3n7, 74, 174 Salih, Tayeb 3, 196, 220 Season Migration to the North 3, 13, 190, 213, 215, 221–3, 224–30 Schutte, William 29–30, 31 Scott-Douglass, Amy 160n21, 163n26 Sears, Djanet Harlem Duet 107, 108

245

Seddon, Deborah 189 “Lost in Translation: Sol Plaatje, ‘William Shake-the-Sword’ and South African Culture” 187n3, 189n10 Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) 153–5, 158–68, 235 Rogerson, Hank 153–5, 160 and n10, 161, 162–3 and n25 Spitzmiller, Jillann 160 and n10, 161, 162–3 Tofteland, Curt 155, 160, 163–8 Shakespeare in Europe (Sh:in:E) 75n3 “HyperHamlet” 75n3 Shakespeare Wallah 233, 234 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 46 As You Like It 12, 123–4, 126–9, 132, 134–48 as character 197, 209–10 The Comedy of Errors 187–99; see also Plaatje, Solomon as culturally representative body of work 62 Hamlet 10, 11, 19–22, 25–32, 34–5, 43–4, 45, 46, 59, 73–4 and n1, 74–5n3 and 4, 75–85, 93, 97–101, 109, 115n16, 136n38, 154 “table of memory” 44, 45, 50 Henry IV, Part 1 46, 237 Henry V 157, 158, 164, 167–8n33 St. Crispin Day speech 163–4 Julius Caesar 3, 11, 37–8, 40, 42, 51–2, 154, 159 and n18 Macbeth 3, 5, 47, 49–50, 96n6, 112n14, 158, 160–61 Maqbool 3–5, 235 Measure for Measure 168 The Merchant of Venice 61, 68 and n17–69 Whai Rawa O Weneti (The Maori Merchant of Venice) 3 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1, 4, 8, 27, 28, 57, 58, 59, 61–2 and n7, 129n13 Othello 3, 13, 31, 41, 46, 78n6, 82n12, 93–6, 107, 129n14, 157 and n9, 163, 213, 216 and n3, 221 and n6, 222, 225–6, 229–30, 233 Omkara 234 as pop celebrity 104 post-hermeneutic interpretation of 38

246

Native Shakespeares

as rehabilitative theatre 162–3, 164–5 Richard the Third 221n5 Romeo and Juliet 13, 107, 129, 154, 201–10 Romeo and Juliet: Romeo y Julieta en Luyanó 203–7, 208; see also Grupo de Teatro Cheo Briñas (GTCB) 13, 203–8 Shakespeare y sus mascaras: o Romeo y Julieta 197, 203, 207–10; see also Alonso, Alicia; Ballet Nacional de Cuba Saxon Shakespeare 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 31, 41n5 Shakespeare, Un Contemporáneo Nuestro 202–3 sonnet no. 130 63–4 The Tempest 1, 3–4, 7, 12–13, 23, 34, 112n14, 160–62, 173, 174n4, 175, 181–2, 183, 236, 237 Otra Tempestad 202 Timon of Athens 156 The Tragedy of King Lear 96n6, 159 and n19, 167, 221n5 as Tsikinya-Chaka (Shake-the-Sword) 196 and n24, 197, 198 and the United States military 155, 156 Shole, S.J. 193n19, 195 Singh, Jyotsna 13, 91 The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics 13n13 Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism 13n13 “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India” 91n1, 93 “The Postcolonial/Postmodern Shakespeare” 201 Travel Knowledge: European Witnesses to Navigations, Traffiques, Discoveries in the Early Modern Period 13n13 South Africa 9, 21–2, 24, 26, 33, 187n2, 188, 193, 194, 196, 198–9, 236–7, 238, 239 and apartheid 131n20, 236–8 Batswana 187, 189–90, 191, 194, 195, 197, 198 and the Boer 21, 22–4, 26, 34 Natives’ Land Act of 1916 187–8 and the Resistance Movement 236

and Shakespearean reappropriations 13, 202 Spain 167n33, 201–2, 207, 224–5 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 85, 137, 216 Sterne, Lawrence 11, 83n13, 84n14, 85 Tristram Shandy 83, 84 Sturgess, Kim Shakespeare and the American Nation 5, 47 Sudan 3, 13, 23n9, 215, 221, 229, 230 syncretic 38, 39, 95 synecdoche 59 Te Mangai Paho 3 Telemachiad 22, 24, 31 textual grafting 48 Third Space 11, 74, 75 and n2, 84, 94, 177, 213 Tiftins, Helen The Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures 3n9 Past the Last Post: Theorizing PostColonialism and Post Modernism 7n10 Tompkin, Joanne 38n2, 120n23 Post-Colonial Drama Theory, Practice, Politics 3n7 transculturation 173–4 and n4, 182, 219 translation 6–7, 13, 73–4, 105 and n2, 110n9, 111n10, 189, 190–91, 193–4 and n22, 195–6 and n24, 198–9, 202, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 227–8 as appropriation 216–7 definition of 174–5 mistranslation 188, 198 politics of 12–13 retranslation 187, 198 theories 174 Trivedi, Poonam 5 India’s Shakespeare 5–6 Ward, Jerry W., Jr. 67–8, 70 West Indies 37, 39, 40, 42, 235 Whitney, John O. Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management 156n8, 157n9 Whittet, Michael 140 and n52, 145 Willan, Brian 189n11, 190, n12 and 15, 191n17, 197n25

Index Wilson, Thomas Arte of Rhetorique 80–81 Woodford-Gormley, Donna 13, 195, 197 Worthen, William 7, 166 and n30 Wright, Richard 11, 57, 58–9, 60 and n5, 61–4 and n8, 65–8, 70, 74n1

247 12 Million Black Voices 58 Black Boy 58 Native Son 58 White Man, Listen 11, 58

Young, Robert 74, 154–5, 177