SHAKESPEARE�S HAMLET IN AN ERA OF TEXTUAL EXHAUSTION

Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, Lisa Ulevich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351967457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

"Post- Hamlet: Shakespeare in an Era of Textual Exhaustion" examines how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture's oversaturation with this most canonical of texts. Combining adaptation theory and performance theory with examinations of avant-garde performances and other unconventional appropriations of Shakespeare's play, Post- Hamlet examines Shakespeare's Hamlet as a central symbol of our era's "textual exhaustion, " an era in which the reader/viewer is bombarded by text—printed, digital, and otherwise. The essays in this edited collection, divided into four sections, focus on the radical employment of Hamlet as a cultural artifact that adaptors and readers use to depart from textual "authority" in, for instance, radical English-language performance, international film and stage performance, pop-culture and multi-media appropriation, and pedagogy.

1 Introduction

Post-Hamlet

Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar and Lisa Ulevich

I’m not Hamlet. I don’t take part anymore. My words have nothing to tell me anymore. …My drama doesn’t happen anymore. Behind me the set is put up. By people who aren’t interested in my drama, for people to whom it means nothing. I’m not interested in it anymore either.

The Actor Playing Hamlet, Hamletmachine

Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, a new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance that has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.

Khakheperraseneb, 2000 B.C.E.

The computer is not the enemy of the book. It is the child of print culture. …

Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck

At the Shakespeare Association of America Annual Conference in 2015, we enjoyed a coffee break between panels by devouring a cookie with Hamlet’s face on it. (He was delicious.) Grateful to Bedford/St. Martin’s for providing her with an opportunity to eat the face of Christopher Eccleston, who was depicted in sugar frosting, staring soulfully into the empty eye sockets of Yorick, Sonya couldn’t help but wonder if our cultural obsession with Hamlet has finally reached ludicrous proportions—or perhaps even an absurdist endpoint. As we partook of this strange Eucharist, we talked about Hamlet: we wondered if Shakespeare’s melancholy prince was dead, or still among us, or maybe just being culturally transfigured by some weird transubstantiation. We wondered if Shakespearean performance and adaptation might be yielding to a sense of textual exhaustion—“destroying” Hamlet because audiences and directors increasingly feel that there are no more Hamlets left to make. We wondered if our students weren’t the only ones getting bored and frustrated with the endless reiterations of Hamlet.

We are living in a historical moment that fears the end of Hamlet—or at least one which fears that we have exhausted the interpretive possibilities of Shakespeare’s most popular tragedy. As the most frequently performed, written-about, and taught play in the Shakespearean canon, Hamlet has acquired both a place of indisputable power as an icon defining “literature” in our culture and a jaded sense of scholarly (and sometimes not-so-scholarly) ennui.¹ This collection explores the ways that our culture is “finished with” the Dane—the ways in which recent reiterations and homages to Shakespeare’s play have moved beyond Hamlet in its “original” textual context and interpretive history, and also those ways in which we may not be finished with him yet—the various ways we have kept Shakespeare’s text alive by remaking it. Using adaptation theory to approach this most adapted and performed of all English plays—the urtext of Western theatrical adaptation—the essays in this volume approach the imagined death of Hamlet, the idea of being post-Hamlet (or perhaps even the ultimate impossibility of envisioning English literature without Hamlet) through a variety of lenses, including adaptation, performance, and pedagogy.

The Hamlet Apocalypse

It isn’t surprising that Hamlet is one of the world’s most frequently adapted texts. After all, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is fundamentally a play about belatedness. It is a text interested in what happens later, a play whose main character has his eyes on that which happens after—after the action of the play has ended, after he himself is dead.² The prince is alive, but his mind is already on the “undiscovered country” (3.1.79). Throughout the play, Shakespeare’s Dane is primarily concerned with those things that are “post”—with that which is (whether it is an ephemeral ghost, or rotting flesh, or disinterred skull [post-king, post-life, post-human]) already gone. Indeed, Hamlet expends a fair number of lines questioning and contemplating a future fictional world that is post-Hamlet (a world without himself, in which he will “not be”). The melancholy prince’s self-destructive impulse, the desire to imagine a future world in which his “too too solid” flesh will rot and “melt” (1.2.129), becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the past that has literally haunted him (dead kings, freshly dug graves, and “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay” [5.1.202]) eventually becomes the future (eight bodies, all told).³ The play ends with his funeral arrangements (“Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage” [5.2.379]) just as his soliloquies told us that it would, and we have no way of knowing what comes after (there’s the rub). If one of the fundamental questions posed by Hamlet is what comes after Hamlet, it is one that the play does not, and cannot, answer.

But we have been answering it—for more than four hundred years now. While the late 1800s and early 1900s were primarily interested in the character of Hamlet as a psychological exploration of the human (in retrospect, Prince Hamlet himself has become the paragon of paragons, the ultimate “quintessence of dust” [2.2.278]), more recent decades find us mostly interested in the “Not-Hamlet,” the Hamlet who is not to be, the places around, behind, before, and after this overshadowing and verbose protagonist.⁴ Thus, we have more and more adaptations about Ophelia.⁵ Adaptations in which Hamlet is a robot.⁶ Adaptations with Hamlet and space aliens.⁷ Adaptations, à la Hamletmachine, in which Hamlet publicly declares himself “not Hamlet” This desire to undress, undo, destroy, dig into the textual space that is not Hamlet—this is perhaps the desire not so much to rewrite Hamlet as to unwrite Hamlet.⁸ And as our various Hamlets become more and more outlandish (more destructive, more creative, more subversive), less human (animal Hamlet, computer-generated Hamlet), and more commercial (tote bag Hamlet, T-shirt Hamlet, cookie Hamlet), it might be fair to wonder if Hamlet is, in some sense, a cultural text that is becoming increasingly exhausting and exhausted, used up, overdone.⁹ If audiences become tired of Hamlet, will we stop performing it? If students become tired of Hamlet, will we stop teaching it? Paradoxically, the fear that Hamlet is used up may actually cause us to produce more Hamlet—in order to defend this quintessential Shakespearean text, our Hamlets must become more and more experimental, avant-garde, and radical.¹⁰ Indeed, if a director or writer is seeking to do experimental work, Hamlet has become the play to experiment with—not just because the text is so well-known, but also because we are, on some level, trying to remake and thus “save” this symbol of the humanities and humanism from imagined depletion.

In addressing the “textual exhaustion” of Hamlet in this volume, we intend a variety of interrelated potential meanings. First, we use the term “textual exhaustion” to indicate cultural anxieties regarding the potential end of Hamlet. As artists, scholars, and teachers, we may become fearful that the literary source text may somehow run out or be used up—that the sheer ubiquity of Hamlet will eventually cause audiences and readers to tire of it. Thus, we are currently creating adaptations, performances, and even lesson plans in the margins of Hamlet’s imagined apocalyptical moment. This increasing sense of Hamlet’s textual exhaustion is quite similar to declarations proclaiming the death of the novel in the late 1960s.¹¹ In his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” John Barth discusses the cultural anxiety surrounding the supposed exhaustion of the novel as a literary form. The artistic possibilities of the genre, of course, have never really been (and are not currently) exhausted. However, in the wake of high modernism’s experimental excess (e.g., novels that abandoned plot and experimented with point of view, forsaking established norms of language and syntax), artists and critics began to feel a sense of anxiety about the continued longevity of the novel as a genre:

Suppose you’re a writer by vocation … and you feel, for example, that the novel, if not narrative literature generally, if not the printed word altogether, has by this hour of the world just about shot its bolt. … Whether historically the novel expires or persists as a major art form seems immaterial to me; if enough writers and critics feel apocalyptical about it, their feeling becomes a considerable cultural fact, like the feeling that Western civilization, or the world, is going to end rather soon.

(Barth 71)¹²

We aren’t arguing that Hamlet has outlasted its interpretive possibilities or that it has outlived its life on the stage. The practices of publishing on, performing, and teaching Hamlet won’t stop. This “Post-Hamlet” introduction we are writing will be followed by many, many more reiterations of Hamlet (the king is dead, long live the king). What matters is that those of us engaged with Shakespeare—scholars, artists, actors, writers, teachers—are afraid that Hamlet might be exhausted. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues regarding Barth’s literature of exhaustion: “That these ultimacies are merely ‘felt’ rather than material makes them no less real” (528). That such anxiety is widespread is clear. Simon Russell Beale, who played Hamlet at the National Theatre, London in 2000, described the anxiety of performing Hamlet:

There has never been a time when there aren’t 800 Hamlets. … You are aware consciously that there is a history about it. You see this list of Hamlets and you think “Oh, my God, no. And there’s Adrian [Lester] opening in five minutes. There’s Olivier. There’s Gielgud. …”

(qtd. in Thompson and Taylor 2)

This fear of textual exhaustion has a powerful artistic and aesthetic effect: in reaction to this anxiety, performances of Hamlet have become increasingly experimental in recent years. Experimentation begets exhaustion, which begets yet more experimentation.¹³ The more experimental and far-flung our Hamlets become, the more concerned we become that we have worn out Hamlet’s interpretive possibilities—in response, we must make even more bizarre, surprising, and shocking Hamlets. The fear of textual exhaustion is producing all kinds of fascinating productions, works of art, films, critical articles, and lesson plans. As Barth explains regarding the “death of the novel”:

If you took a bunch of people out into the desert and the world didn’t end, you’d come home shamefaced, I imagine; but the persistence of an art form doesn’t invalidate work created in the comparable apocalyptic ambience. That is one of the fringe benefits of being an artist instead of a prophet.

(71)

The traditions of performing and adapting Hamlet are alive and well: however, the radical adaptations that have proliferated on both stage and page tell us something about the cultural ambience in which such works were produced. Our reactions to Hamlet are becoming increasingly “Post-Hamlet,” as directors, writers, and even teachers respond to a looming sense of textual exhaustion.

Exhaustive reading, exhaustive interpretation, and exhaustive footnotes create another form of textual exhaustion that constructs an interpretive framework around Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Although all of Shakespeare’s plays have attracted extensive commentary, Hamlet has attracted a body of critical commentary like no other. Although exhausting the possible critical articles that could be written about Hamlet isn’t any more possible than exhausting its possibilities in performance, it doesn’t mean that scholars haven’t worried about it. In 1908, Horace Howard Furness begged the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard to stop writing on Hamlet (Thompson and Taylor 1). Furness’s rationale was that too much had already been written on the play: he argued that the library stacks, even over one hundred years ago, were clogged and glutted with too much Hamlet (Thompson and Taylor 1). As Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor explain:

By the 1990s the average number of publications every year on Hamlet, as recorded in the Shakespeare Quarterly Annual Bibliography, was running at well over 400 … We must therefore begin by acknowledging the extraordinary size of “the Hamlet phenomenon” and the challenge it represents to everyone who confronts it. The sheer depth and breadth of the tradition weigh heavily on those who tackle Hamlet, whether as actor, director, editor, or critic.

(1–2)

This kind of textual exhaustion—the incredible plethora of critical readings of Hamlet—creates the canon of accepted interpretive possibilities by which Hamlet is received and understood as Hamlet, outlining the boundaries of those adaptations and performances that may be accused of not being “Hamlety” enough. Such textual exhaustion functions to tell us what kinds of interpretations are generally expected and are considered acceptable—what is and isn’t a part of the scholarly mainstream. As Catherine M. Chin writes of exegetical exhaustion in Biblical commentary: “The work of textual exhau...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Post-Hamlet
• Section I Post-Hamlet Appropriations
• Section II Post-Hamlet Performances
• Section III Post-Hamlet Classrooms
• Section IV Post-Hamlet Post-Script
• Index