Enter The Body

Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage

Carol Chillington Rutter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134767793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Enter the Body offers a series of provocative case studies of the work women's bodies do on Shakespeare's intensely body-conscious stage. Rutter's topics are sex, death, race, gender, culture, politics, and the excessive performative body that exceeds the playtext it inhabits. As well as drawing upon vital primary documents from Shakespeare's day, Rutter offers close readings of women's performance's on stage and film in Britian today, from Peggy Ashcroft's (white) Cleopatra and Whoopi Goldberg's (whiteface) African Queen to Sally Dexter's languorous Helen and Alan Howard's raver 'Queen' of Troy.

1 BODY PARTS OR PARTS FOR BODIES

Speculating on Cordelia

Gonerill and Regans bodies brought out.
Enter Lear with Cordelia in his armes

Folio Stage Direction

A dead body is an instructive object.
Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre, 1985

Death may usurp on nature many hours,
And yet the fire of life kindle again
The o’erpressed spirits. I have heard
Of an Egyptian nine hours dead,
Who was by good appliances recovered.

Pericles, Scene 12, 80–85

Dead Reckoning

When Cordelia makes her final entrance in Lear’s arms, Kent will not believe what he is seeing. ‘Is this the promised end?’ he asks. Cordelia plays her last scene dead. Or maybe she’s playing dead. For she isn’t meant to die. It wasn’t what audiences were expecting. The old King Leir, the True Chronicle which they had seen at Henslowe’s Rose playhouse in 1594 and (perhaps) again, revived, in 1605 before it went into print, had a happy ending. That ‘true’ story (which, clearly, had saturated Shakespeare’s mind, for memory traces of Leir turn up in Lear) ended in return, recognition, reconciliation.¹ So maybe Cordelia in Lear’s arms is only pretending, like Hero, Helena, Juliet, Thisbe in Peter Quince’s Pyramus and Thisbe, the Player Queen in Hamlet’s Mousetrap. Or, like Desdemona (momentarily) or Cleopatra (chronically)— and with Hermione, Thaisa, Imogen to come in plays not yet written— perhaps Cordelia will revive. As Cerimon testifies over Thaisa’s body, ‘I have heard of an Egyptian…’

‘Playing dead’, of course, is precisely what the actor does in the scene. But it is also what the scene mocks the audience and Lear with imagining that Cordelia is doing. ‘She’s dead as earth,’ says Lear. But then: ‘This feather stirs; she lives!’. So is she ‘gone for ever!’, or will she ‘stay a little’? Does she breathe? Will ‘her breath…mist’ ‘a looking-glass’? Lear’s invitation (rough? urgent? gentle? querulous?) to Cordelia to speak (‘What is’t thou say’st’?’) and his command to his spectators to ‘Look on her, look, her lips’ opens up the miraculous possibility of resurrection. Are we, along with Kent, Albany, Edgar and the huddle of soldiers who circle King Lear, looking at a miracle or an hallucination, at a corpse stiffening in rigor mortis or at ‘a chance that does redeem all sorrows’?

Like Kent, whose gaze towards Cordelia’s entrance forces him to speculate, I want to question this ending, to think not just about narrative closure and the meaning of Cordelia’s death, but about the theatrical significance of Cordelia-as-corpse. Indeed, I want to use Cordelia as a case study for the kinds of work a body in play performs on stage as it focuses a whole series of paradoxical speculations. Only the most conspicuous of these is the way, in performance, a real body fakes the role of bogus corpse for the purposes of the narrative, a discrepancy Shakespeare manipulates most disturbingly in King Lear to set the finality of the narrative ending—‘she’s dead’—at odds with the ambiguity of the performative ending. We know the actor who plays Cordelia ‘lives’. Cordelia could come back to life. Any body on stage, potentially, might. The actorly body who plays dead, works, in performance, at the margin. Speechless, motionless, reduced by death from somebody to the body, the corpse, the actor’s body occupies a theatrical space of pure performance where it has most to play when it has least to act. It is a subject-made-object whose presence registers absence and loss. Narratively, too, though, the body that plays dead works at the margin: it comes in at the end; it collects up final meanings. The scrutiny of the body, the interpretations attached to it through last rites and contemplations, the final stories told about it in consolation or in rage work to fix the narrative’s final form. Looking at the body as a sign loaded with ‘story’, we discover whether what we have been watching is desolate tragedy or grotesque comedy; whether what we feel is pity or other, wilder emotions.

The questions that inform these speculations are very simple. How does Shakespeare ‘play’ the body? How do audiences—his, ours— read it? I want, first, to think about the status of the theatrical corpse to try to theorize the areas of cultural work it performs; then to view its performance historically, to attempt to recuperate some of the interpretational apparatus that might originally have been in place for making sense—or not—of death. Next, I return to King Lear’s playtext to argue that the ending replays the beginning: once again, the crisis turns on interpretation and is located in the staggering illegibility of bodies. Finally, having proposed some modes of reading the ending, I come clean on ‘speculation’, admitting that a textual body ‘means’ nothing until it’s performed. Cordelia’s body becomes legible only in performance. And not finally or definitively legible, but provisionally, plurally, and variously readable, for every subsequent performance of King Lear elaborates additional meanings, written through the body. That being the case, I mobilize another mode of ‘speculation’, looking closely at three versions of Cordelia’s final scene in performance.

Parts for Bodies

Theorizing the relationship between art and anatomy, Ludmilla Jordanova understands the body as a ‘cultural resource’ where any number of ‘social constituencies’ converge to ‘find meanings that are immediately relevant to them’. Because the body ‘is simultaneously abstract and concrete, symbolic and intimate, familiar and dangerous, ordinary and mysterious, material and sacred’, it is ‘used in all societies for doing…much business’.² One of those ‘societies‘, Keir Elam would argue, is the ‘Shakespearean critical industry’ where, over the past ten years, a ‘boom of “corporeal” criticism’ has transformed it, via what Elam imagines as a kind of academic takeover bid, into ‘Shakespeare Corp’.³ Elsewhere, Anthony Dawson reminds readers of Shakespeare how much we (already) knew about the body before Elam’s crit/ corps got hold of it: from Mary Douglas, we knew how the body figured as ‘natural symbol, a site of circulating, intersecting, clashing meanings’; from Foucault, ‘how power and discourse make themselves felt in relation to the body of the criminal, the madman, the lover.’⁴ Bakhtin taught us about the carnivalised body; Laqueur, the sexualised body. Bodies sodomised (Goldberg); patriarchally enclosed (Stallybrass); effeminised (Levine); embarrassed (Paster); anatomised (Sawday) have all been mustered in what Elam calls ‘a veritable ghost army of early modern organisms.’⁵

In Dawson’s terms, the body constructed by new historicist and cultural materialist critics works discursively: it’s a textual body that figures as a site of ‘struggle’, ‘differentiation’, ‘appropriation’. As a politicized ‘discursive nexus’, it functions as a kind of inscriptive surface: ‘differences of power are written on the body.’⁶ But against this ‘discursive‘ body Dawson posits another body, what he calls the ‘theatrical’ (or ‘performative’) body of the actor. This body is ‘ofthe text, but always exceeds the text. Reading Shakespeare requires us to read double, both discursively and theatrically, as ‘the text puts the ideological reading into play and at the same time engages it with a theatrical one.’⁷ So as we read ‘words, words, words’, we also read bodies. For Dawson, the space between the two kinds of reading is ‘both contested and negotiated’: neither displaces the other. Instead, ‘What is staged is a contest between alternative ways of making meaning, of turning theatrical experience into meaning’, a contest between body and meaning which Shakespeare stages in such a way as to locate ‘fundamental’ though ‘not exclusive, signifying power in the theatrical body’.⁸

Both bodies, the discursive and the theatrical, are at work in the final scene of King Lear. Death is a gendered topic in Shakespeare. Mostly, men die onstage, their violent deaths fulfilling the terms and conditions of male adventure, struggle, antagonism and contest, in a pattern that costs life but legitimates male heroism and male law. The Lear stage has just been occupied with this business, brother killing brother in a combat that restores legitimacy to the kingdom. Usually, male death ends the story as the dead exit heroizes (sometimes problematically) the corpse. Hamlet, borne ‘like a soldier, to the stage’, is the archetype; Antony, heaved ingloriously up the side of Cleopatra’s monument and comically denied his final speech, the parodic anti-type. Women, however, mostly die offstage, accessories, both ‘adjunct’ and ‘means to’ heroic male dying. But before those deaths occur, women’s corpses are returned onstage, represented for speculation. The physical material of their death works like the Queen’s tears in Richard II, analogized to ‘perspectives’— optical instruments—‘which, rightly gazed upon,/Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry,/Distinguish form’ (2.2.18–20). That is, the dead body of the woman has a part to play in which the paradoxical looking economy it sets up with the spectator is skewed, ‘awry’. And that requires us to bend our sight in order to see better.

At the end of King Lear, Shakespeare requires Cordelia’s dead presence on stage, and he requires three audiences to study her body. Is the body there to provide material on which to write male performances and male reactions? Perhaps, for Cordelia’s body is Lear’s sole speculation. He constructs his own final performance upon it: he plays across it, plays over it, plays with it. Or is it there to signify, mutely, a recuperation of patriarchal power? Perhaps, for, dead silent, Cordelia finally achieves female excellence and redeems the fault she committed by faulty speaking in the opening scene where Lear’s ‘Mend your speech’ rebuked the ‘Nothing’ she wanted to say. Now, saying nothing, Lear approves her: ‘Her voice was ever soft,/Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman’. Of course, speechless, Cordelia is deprived of obvious power to construct her own meanings. Dead, she is a tabula rasa or collection of signs, like Desdemona, the ‘fair paper’, the ‘goodly book’ Othello writes ‘whore upon’, or like Lavinia, whose ‘martyr’d signs’ Titus will ‘wrest’ into ‘an alphabet’ to read her as a ‘map of woe’. On this surface Lear will inscribe his particular desires and fantasies, for Cordelia is Lear’s object—her evacuated subjectivity a cause for lament and her body, as Janet Adelman puts it, ‘a prop for Lear’s anguish’.⁹ As object, her corpse is situated to occupy what Elisabeth Bronfen explores as the prime iconic space reserved for the female body in western culture.¹⁰ ‘Look on her,’ says Lear. Cordelia-as-corpse is the spectacle that holds and directs the all-male gaze, passive, unresisting, whatever Lear makes her.

Or not. For the body I have just been describing, positioned inside a gendered discursive nexus, is attached to that other, performative body. Dead, her text exhausted, Cordelia has nothing to act yet everything to play for. She is indeed a prop, but not in Adelman’s sense; rather, she’s a theatre prop, ‘property’—belonging to—Lear’s performance.¹¹ And, like all Shakespeare’s properties from Desdemona’s handkerchief and Cressida’s glove to Yorick’s skull and Antony’s sword, she is both a troubled and troubling signifier. Performing death, her corpse alienates— in the Brechtian sense—Lear’s performance by challenging the anguish Lear attempts to fix upon it. The discursive effect of this is to frame the theatrical site of female death not as a conformable but as a subversive site. Cordelia’s body does not behave in death. Her corpse plays up. Even as the audience is required to ‘Look on her’, the demand that we look is most intense at the very moment when what we are looking at is most vexed.¹²

How are we invited to look at this body? To address that, I want to begin by considering how Shakespeare’s audience might have looked.

Instructive Objects

Michael Bristol’s dry comment, ‘A dead body is an instructive object’, prompts a come-back. What (and whom) does it instruct? Death, certainly, is universal, but its practices are historically constituted.¹³ How we imagine it, react to it, dress up for it (as mourners and as corpses), repress, discuss, remember, mystify and profane it, are all elaborated in customary rituals that formulate death as a social text, a cultural performance, whose conventions are open to revision and subversion. To be legible, whatever instruction death offers requires historicized reading.

Consider the Londoner, a householder in the Liberty of the Clink on the South Bank, who lived through the first week of August 1593. In that single week, 1,305 Londoners out of a population of some hundred thousand died of plague. This imaginary Londoner’s real neighbour, Philip Henslowe, whose Rose playhouse down Southwark High Street, on Maiden Lane, had been enlarged and refurbished eighteen months earlier to accommodate the Admiral’s Men, their stellar lead player, Edward Alleyn, and the bustling increased business the move anticipated, was an eyewitness who wrote to Alleyn telling him the appalling news.¹⁴ The players were on tour and the Rose shut by order of the Privy Council to prevent the spread of infection, attributed by some to the ‘profanity’ of playhouses by a logic that construed epidemic death as God’s punitive, if dreadfully promiscuous, judgement upon players. A week later, Henslowe wrote further. ‘As for newes of the sycknes,’ he told Alleyn, ‘I cane not seand you no Juste note of yt be cause there is command ment to the contrary but as I thincke doth die with in the sitteye and with owt [i.e. in the suburbs] of all syckneses to the nomber of seventen or eyghten hundreth in one weacke.’ Henslowe’s own household was ‘flytted with ffeare’: ‘Rownd a bowte vs’ the ‘sycknes…hathe bene all most in every howsse…& wholle howsholdes deyed…. Robart brownes wife in shordech & all her chelldren & howshowld be dead & heare dores sheat vpe.’¹⁵

Ten years later, in the summer of 1603, London went through it all again. Entire households died. Doors, again, were shut up. This time it was Joan Alleyn who wrote to the absent players. Her stepfather, Henslowe, was ‘at the Corte but wheare the Court ys I know not.’ (As a Groom of His Majesty’s Chamber, Henslowe was required to attend upon the new king, whose coronation on 25 July would be curtailed to the bare ceremony for fear of the infection.) In the final week of June, 158 Londoners were listed dead of plague; by mid-July, 917; in August, Bartholomew Fair was cancelled as the week by week total rose from 1,922 to 2,713 to 3,035. John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton that he had returned to London from the country ‘and meant to have tarried here till the coronation, but seing yt wilbe so private, and the sicknes increseth so fast upon us, I wish myself there again, and will make all the haste I can out of towne, for yt growes hot here.’ London was deserted—at least of its gentry. ‘Powles grows very thin,’ Chamberlain wrote, ‘for every man shrinckes away’—most conspicuously, the king, removed from London to his hunting lodge in the country.¹⁶ His meaner subjects were not so fortunate. While Joan Alleyn rejoiced that her own household were ‘in good healthe & about vs the sycknes dothe Cease’ and reported that ‘All the [playing] Companyes be Come hoame & well for ought we knowe’, she sent desolate news of another player: ‘Browne of the Boares head is dead & dyed very pore, he went not into the Countrye at all.’¹⁷

How did people who lived through these deadly years, who avoided death in their houses and gardens to perform it on stage or observe it, as spectator...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Body Parts or Parts for Bodies
• 2 Snatched Bodies
• 3 Shadowing Cleopatra
• 4 Designs on Shakespeare
• 5 Remembering Emilia
• Notes
• Bibliography