Shakespeare and Girls' Studies

Ariane M. Balizet

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351372039
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Shakespeare Drama

A modern-day Taming of the Shrew that concludes at a high school prom. An agoraphobic Olivia from Twelfth Night sending video dispatches from her bedroom. A time-traveling teenager finding romance in the house of Capulet. Shakespeare and Girls' Studies posits that Shakespeare in popular culture is increasingly becoming the domain of the adolescent girl, and engages the interdisciplinary field of Girls' Studies to analyze adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare's plays in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through chapters on film, television, young adult fiction, and web series aimed at girl readers and audiences, this volume explores the impact of girl cultures and concerns on Shakespeare's afterlife in popular culture and the classroom. Shakespeare and Girls' Studies argues that girls hold a central place in Shakespearean adaptation, and that studying Shakespeare through the lens of contemporary girlhoods can generate new approaches to Renaissance literature as well as popular culture aimed at girls and young people of marginalized genders. Drawing on contemporary cultural discourses ranging from Abstinence-Only Sex Education and Shakespeare in the US Common Core to rape culture and coming out, this book addresses the overlap between Shakespeare's timeless girl heroines and modern popular cultures that embrace figures like Juliet and Ophelia to understand and validate the experiences of girls. Shakespeare and Girls' Studies theorizes Shakespeare's past and present cultural authority as part of an intersectional approach to adaptation in popular culture.

1 Introduction

A Girls’ Studies Approach to Shakespeare and Adaptation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315148922-1

Tell thy story.

If thine considered prove the thousandth part

Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I

Have suffered like a girl.

Pericles 5.1.125-8¹

The story of Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, shows the destructive forces that affect young women. As a girl, Ophelia is happy and free, but with adolescence she loses herself.

Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia, 2

I’m 22, and I’m asexual, which means I don’t experience sexual attraction. And I’m a nonbinary demigirl, which means that I don’t always feel like a girl. I’m also a goth, in case you couldn’t tell.

Hamlet the Dame, Episode 2

This is a book about Shakespeare in contemporary film, television, young adult literature, and web series adaptations. I argue that focusing on girls in the study of pop culture Shakespeares reveals that the cultural construction of girlhood is a powerful animating force in contemporary Shakespearean adaptation. My intention is not only to center girls and girlhoods in an analysis of Shakespeare in pop culture but also to show that girls are always already at the center of the most “popular” adaptations of Shakespeare of the past 30 years. To understand Shakespeare’s place in 21st-century popular culture, I propose, we must acknowledge the deep entanglement between the history of appropriating Shakespeare into other forms and media and the cultural impulse to shape, through narrative example, the expression and experience of girlhood. The interdisciplinary field of Girls’ Studies offers a unique and valuable approach to this work by allowing me to situate my readings of films like 10 Things I Hate About You, television programs like Gossip Girl, young adult (YA) novels like Lisa Klein’s Ophelia, and literary-inspired web series like Hamlet the Dame within the popular, political, and pedagogical discourses that shape the lives of the girls and young people at which this media is aimed. Academic scholars of Shakespeare in adaptation often gesture to the other domains in which a play like Romeo and Juliet holds cultural authority, such as Common Core English Standards in the United States; legal and political debates over reproductive rights and sexuality; religious movements; the consumption of films, television, and digital media on demand or in the classroom; and the appropriative practices of young people through social media platforms. Girls’ Studies helps us integrate Shakespeare into this field of overlapping discourses that construe girlhood today.

Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies asks, “what happens to our understanding of Shakespearean adaptation if we turn our attention towards girls?” There is no single answer to this question, as the various media forms I address in this book (and those—like comic books, fan fiction, and live performance—that are not part of this study) draw upon contemporary discourses of girlhood differently, and to different ends. These media forms and genres (or subgenres) also engage with, reimagine, and reject one another as adaptations of Shakespeare and representations of girls and girlhoods. In part to capture this process of borrowing and lending, I have arranged Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies into chapters that focus on individual media forms: film, television, YA literature, and web series. As I will show, this structure suggests a rough chronology for the proliferation of Shakespeare in popular culture at the turn of the 21st century; the period covered in this study is from 1994 to 2018, with the first half dominated by film and the second dominated by YA literature.² My intent is not to reify divisions of media and genre but rather to give space to the forms taken by Shakespearean adaptation and make sense of phenomena like the teen movie “boom” in the 1990s and the growing body of literary-inspired web series since 2012 as related realms of cultural and aesthetic interactions with Shakespeare. Each chapter thus argues that the application of Girls’ Studies to Shakespearean adaptation in particular media reveals the inherency of girls, girlhood, and girlishness to Shakespeare’s enduring popularity.

Together, these chapters advance two larger, intertwined arguments. The first is that mass-market contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare embrace a postfeminist ideation of girlhood that appeals to Shakespeare’s cultural capital to resist an intersectional understanding of girls and girlhoods. While valuable, adaptation studies is nevertheless limited in its ability to illuminate this dynamic fully, because many institutional and creative practices contributing to Shakespeare’s cultural authority in the 21st century (such as the prominence of Shakespeare in US state-sponsored textbooks and standardized tests, or the intermedial borrowing between YA novels and film) do not remit to the Shakespearean text in ways that can be easily understood as adaptation or appropriation. With this in mind, I also argue that an interdisciplinary approach can broaden the reach of adaptation studies to animate intersectional feminist readings of girls’ friendships, community, creative potential, and education in Shakespeare’s plays as well as their afterlives. By attending to the overlap of Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies as researchers and teachers, feminist scholars can activate a vast and dynamic source of cultural authority through (and often, against) which contemporary girls and young people—via adaptation, appropriation, scholarship, or activism—find ways of expressing and validating their experiences.

The three epigraphs that open this book illustrate how Shakespeare and the concerns of Girls’ Studies are already interacting in productive and provocative ways. All three evoke a story of girlhood shaped by parental conflict and the experience or performance of suffering. We are invited to see Shakespearean characters—Marina, Ophelia, and Hamlet—as figures construed through discourses of girlhood that reflect a particular time, place, and set of values regarding youth and gender. These three passages also represent moments of conflict, especially over the questions “who does or does not count as a girl?” and “what does or does not count as Shakespeare?” The first, from Shakespeare and George Wilkins’ Pericles, uses the term “girl” rhetorically to index a king’s profound suffering, while at the same time figuring the girl onstage—Pericles’ long-lost teenage daughter, Marina—as herself an emblem of resilience and strength. Pericles seems to be praising his daughter by suggesting that he would consider her “a man” if she has endured a fraction of his travails, but his imagination can only extend to “a thousandth part” of his own “endurance.” It appears that Pericles is minimizing his daughter’s strength by asserting that in starting from the inferior position of “girl,” her endurance of even minor travails would make her “like a man.” Editors have traditionally glossed this line as reaffirming a gender binary: if Marina is strong, then she deserves to be called a man, and if Pericles is weak, he deserves to be called a girl.³ The 2003 Oxford edition suggests a slightly different reading: “you have endured with a man’s strength, while I have given in to suffering as if I were a girl” (216n126–7). Suzanne Gossett’s 2004 Arden edition offers the fullest reading of this line:

Pericles’ statement is phrased as a paradox and assumes that only a man can have endured so much and survived. However, his despair, manifest in his disheveled and withdrawn state, and Marina’s resistance, manifest in her calm demeanour, implicitly contradict traditional beliefs about male strength and girlish suffering. (382n127–8)

In effect, the distinction made by Pericles here is not only between strength and weakness but between an identity that is fixed (“thou art a man”) and one rooted in experience and perception (“suffered like a girl”). To be a girl is to experience suffering, or to experience suffering in a particular way. As Deanne Williams notes, however, this passage marks “a curious kind of competitiveness, even perversity, that makes Pericles insist that no matter what Marina has suffered, she will always be just the ‘man’ to Pericles’s ‘girl’” (Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood, 108). The use of “girl” in this moment slides between a state of being defined by suffering and a flexible mechanism of praise, seemingly disarticulated from gender and age. If Marina “counts” as a girl, it is because she suffers; if Pericles “counts” as a girl, it is because he has endured.

The second epigraph, taken from Mary Pipher’s bestselling work of nonfiction Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994), represents a crucial intersection of Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies. The impact of Pipher’s study was tremendous across American popular media and within the field of Girls’ Studies, as “Ophelia” became the name given to many girls in crisis (and a name given to the crisis of girlhood) in the final years of the 20th century. Early in Pipher’s study, the author frames her call to arms against the “girl-poisoning culture” (12) of the late 20th century through the “story of Ophelia” (20):

As a girl, Ophelia is happy and free, but with adolescence she loses herself. When she falls in love with Hamlet, she lives only for his approval. She has no inner direction; rather she struggles to meet the demands of Hamlet and her father. Her value is determined utterly by their approval. Ophelia is torn apart by her efforts to please. When Hamlet spurns her because she is an obedient daughter, she goes mad with grief. Dressed in elegant clothes that weigh her down, she drowns in a stream filled with flowers. (20)

Pipher returns to the story of Ophelia just once, on the penultimate page of the book:

Ophelia died because she could not grow. She became the object of others’ lives and lost her true subjective self. Many of the girls I describe in this book suffer from a thwarting of their development, a truncating of their potential. (292)

These passages have not garnered much attention from Shakespeare scholars, nor have they figured heavily into Girls’ Studies research on the social impact of Reviving Ophelia. I suspect this is due to the fact that Pipher’s “story of Ophelia” is not part of a sustained analysis of Hamlet, nor is this story instrumental to understanding the crises—presented in dozens of case studies—experienced by her young clients. Perhaps the best way to understand the uses of Shakespeare in Pipher’s book would be to read the “story of Ophelia” as its own self-contained appropriation of Shakespeare’s play. In this version, the focus is on Ophelia, who is given, poignantly, a “happy and free” girlhood. Pipher’s Ophelia is torn between two men, who represent competing expectations of her as a sexual/romantic partner and an “obedient daughter.” Ultimately, this story suggests that Ophelia prizes her father’s approval over Hamlet’s. This choice leads her beloved to reject her, which makes her “mad with grief,” but her death is not a suicide; Ophelia dies “because she could not grow.” In Pipher’s appropriation, too, only Ophelia dies. By framing Ophelia’s death as a result of her “thwarted development,” Pipher’s story offers a glimmer of hope: given a community that cultivates girls’ “true subjective sel[ves],” a modern-day Ophelia just might survive this story. Indeed, the book’s title preserves a singular moment in this story—the moment at which intervention could occur, when Ophelia could be dragged from the water and revived. The argument that girls can and should be “saved” from the dangers of adolescence became a powerful (but not unproblematic) driving force in some quarters of Girls’ Studies. In appropriating the story of Ophelia, Pipher ensured that the public attention paid to girls in the wake of her book would be authorized, at least partly, by its association with Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The final epigraph, from the 2017 web series Hamlet the Dame, introduces the protagonist in terms of her sexual and gender identity (as well as her goth aesthetic) simultaneously invoking and resisting comparisons to Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet.⁴ We meet the protagonist of Hamlet the Dame when she is grieving the death of her father, and in the course of the series she sees his ghost, alienates her friends, loses her boyfriend to suicide, and ultimately dies at the hands of her boyfriend’s vengeful sister. Yet the series resists, from the start, binary notions of a “gender-swapped” Hamlet. Hamlet identifies as a demigirl, although the term is used here by her best friend, Rachel Yorick, who offers to introduce Hamlet to her Internet audience in an early video by taking on her persona and reading a brief biography in Hamlet’s voice.⁵ Rachel is the one telling Hamlet’s story here, engaging with girlhood as related, but not necessarily fundamental, to Hamlet’s identity. What we see in this series is a reimagined Hamlet in which all of the main characters identify or present as nonbinary, trans, or girls and young women (many of whom also identify as queer). Girlhood is not a “crisis” in Hamlet the Dame; the series instead expresses the witty and tragic dynamics of Hamlet as particularly resonant with young people of marginalized genders—including, but not limited, to girls.

These excerpts from Pericles, Reviving Ophelia, and Hamlet the Dame highlight the intersections of Girls’ Studies and Shakespeare, especially around critical questions about authenticity, authority, and identity. Pipher’s book was a flashpoint in the legitimization of Girls’ Studies, linking one of Shakespeare’s tragic girls to the perception of Western female adolescence as a period of crisis. Since then, the name Ophelia has become powerfully associated with publications and organizations that aim to “save” girls from bullying, eating disorders, and mental health issues (among other dangers). “Ophelia” was also the name given to the discourse of girls in crisis within the growing field of Girls’ Studies, especially insofar as it offered a neat contrast to the neoliberal rhetoric of “Girl Power” at the end of the 20th century (a contrast to which I will return). This serves as a cultural backdrop for the work of feminist literary scholars seeking to reveal the essential role girl characters play in Shakespeare’s works in an effort to validate the lives and experiences of girls today. Over two decades ago, scholars such as Mary Floyd-Wilson, Jean Marsden, and Elaine Showalter were looking critically at how Shakespeare’s girl characters were depicted throughout history, illustrating the power of Shakespeare’s literary authority in the assertion of cultural attitudes towards age and gender.⁶ More recently, research by Erica Hateley, Jennifer Higginbotham, and Deanne Williams has assessed the depiction of girls within Shakespeare’s works and performance history to show that scholars have long undervalued and overlooked the essential role played by girls and young women in the Shakespearean canon, marginalizing girls as prizes to be won in marriage instead of complex characters involved in the plays’ broader themes of race and class difference, dynamic economies of finance and sexuality, and the performance of identity.⁷

While the aims of Girls’ Studies and feminist studies of Shakespeare overlap in many ways, this is the first scholarly book dedicated to the application of Girls’ Studies to Shakespeare (or any author, literary genre, or literary tradition).⁸ Insisting on the centrality of girls to contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare is also a scholarly intervention, since Shakespeare scholars have long expressed consternation and even dismay at the aesthetics of girlishness that so clearly animate Shakespeare in pop culture, at times dismissing “teen” appropriations by feminizing (and thus trivializing) youth culture, and other times openly deriding the representation of girls, girlhoods, and girlishness as worthless when juxtaposed with the cultural value of Shakespeare’s name and works. In particular, the films I examine in Chapter 2 are frequently charged with “dumbing down” Shakespeare’s works, and are characterized implicitly and explicitly as “plot...