World-Wide Shakespeares

Local Appropriations in Film and Performance

Sonia Massai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134345830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on debates around the global/local dimensions of cultural production, an international team of contributors explore the appropriation of Shakespeare's plays in film and performance around the world.

In particular, the book examines the ways in which adapters and directors have put Shakespeare into dialogue with local traditions and contexts. The contributors look in turn at 'local' Shakespeares for local, national and international audiences, covering a range of English and foreign appropriations that challenge geographical and cultural oppositions between 'centre' and 'periphery', and 'big-time' and 'small-time' Shakespeares.

Responding to a surge of critical interest in the poetics and politics of appropriation, World-Wide Shakespeares is a valuable resource for those interested in the afterlife of Shakespeare in film and performance globally.

Part One
Local Shakespeares for local audiences

2 A Branch of the Blue Nile: Derek Walcott and the tropic of Shakespeare

Tobias Döring

The English in the West Indies

The local is a difficult terrain. The very terms and concepts we employ in order to describe the specificities of a locality may be misleading because they are too general for what they are supposed to capture: the here and now often elude common linguistic categories. Language works through opposition and comparison. So if in Shakespeare, as shown in the introduction to this volume, the adjective ‘local’ is linked to the act of namegiving, this link suggests a promise as much as a problem. How can new cultural spaces be aptly named and understood? Does the act of naming indeed function as an act of siting which localizes experience? Or does it rather displace its referent into an unstable signifying system and thereby dislocate it? Historically, such questions have been most powerfully addressed within the context of colonial encounters.

In 1887 the English writer and historian James Anthony Froude went on a tour through the West Indies. To him, these islands represented both the glories of the British Empire with its civilizing mission and the more problematic by-product of nineteenthcentury economic liberalism. Once the epic scene of Britain’s greatest naval victory, the cradle of the Empire was now simply a sugar manufacturing colony. As long as liberalism ruled in Westminster, Froude feared, the New World colonies would be regarded as a mere economic asset. Froude believed that such a cavalier attitude on the colonizer’s part would lead to their regression into unruly primitivism. As he explains at some length in his travelogue The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses, tropical islands require the continued care and stern authority of their European master, lest they revert to barbarity. For ‘there are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and a purpose of their own’ (Froude 1909: 306). Wherever he goes, Froude looks for evidence of English intervention which has successfully elevated and transformed local customs. Crucially, familiar sights abound: an idyllic mountain village in Jamaica looks to him like ‘an exact reproduction of a Warwickshire hamlet’; a small church in Barbados seems just like ‘a parish church in England’; and on the island’s central square he notes approvingly a statue of Lord Nelson – just like at home in London (1909: 37, 101, 216). This Victorian traveller understands the local only when he can frame it through familiar categories.

The same holds true for a Shakespeare performance he witnessed in Tobago. The local descendants of African slaves asked permission to play for the English governor, and to everyone’s surprise they decided to stage The Merchant of Venice. According to Froude this ambitious choice deserved respect, but the quality of their performance could only be described by quoting Hippolyta’s verdict on the workmen’s play as ‘sorry stuff ’. And yet there was one notable exception: ‘Shylock’s representative’, we read, ‘showed real appreciation’, and Froude suggests why this should be so: ‘With freedom and a peasant proprietary, the money lender is a necessary phenomenon, and the actor’s imagination may have been assisted by personal recollections’ (1909: 51).

As a matter of fact, Shakespearean drama had long been performed in the West Indies (see Omotoso 1982, Ch. 1). Shakespeare as a world-wide brand name precedes the age of jet travel. Since the eighteenth century, the colonial elites in the plantocracy welcomed English touring companies on their estates. Shakespeare’s central presence in the repertoire reinforced their connection to their mother country. However, the local amateur production on Tobago, so dismissively described by Froude, does not fall squarely in with this tradition. We may well wonder what those plantation workers planned to show their colonial administrator through their ill-received performance. For we need not accept Froude’s standpoint and see their project as a touching effort towards assimilation, where the Shakespearean text provides the roles for blacks to rehearse their progress towards civilization. We should rather acknowledge the scope of performative engagements which this play offers. The Prince of Morocco’s ‘Mislike me not for my complexion/The shadowed livery of the burnished sun’ (2.1.1–2) acquires topical relevance within the context of this production. Even more so, the famous speeches of the despised Jew pleading for justice and lawful recognition bear powerfully on the local situation. That the black actor, as Froude notes, delivered them ‘with real appreciation’ might indeed be due to ‘personal recollections’ – though different from the ones Froude has in mind. Instead of eagerly submitting to European cultural models, the whole performance might have served to stage a plea for political representation – albeit a plea slyly articulated through borrowed masks.

This production shows the cultural and political ambivalence intrinsic to On the one hand, the ubiquity of Shakespearean performance has often licensed claims of universalism celebrating the plays for their avowed invention of the human. On the other hand, every performance does not just repeat but also changes a given text and therefore creates the potential for cultural difference. For this reason, Shakespearean appropriations have often been staged to reclaim cultural identity. Caribbean authors have mainly used The Tempest in this way (see, for instance, Hulme and Sherman 2000). At least since George Lamming articulated his own position as a post-colonial writer through Caliban in The Pleasures of Exile in 1960, this play has frequently been rewritten to explore power relations in the New World and beyond. However, although such projects set out to reject imperial notions such as Froude’s, they also work to re-inscribe them, because any rewriting of the Shakespearean text to some extent perpetuates the cultural authority it means to abrogate. When Lamming (1984: 6), for example, claims ‘to make use of The Tempest as a way of presenting a certain state of feeling which is the heritage of the exiled and colonial writer from the British Caribbean’, he is still formulating his critical agenda through a canonical text.¹ What does this mean for contemporary Caribbean writers like Derek Walcott?² And what does this suggest for our own engagements with world-wide Shakespeares?

Cleopatra in Trinidad

A hundred years after Froude’s voyage, a Trinidadian theatre company plans to stage Antony and Cleopatra. Their director, called Harvey St. Just, is a professional from England, but most of the actors are local amateurs, who struggle with the unfamiliar text. After weeks of troublesome rehearsals, the opening night ends in disaster. The lead actress, called Sheila Harris, resigns so that an understudy must take over. The stagehand has not been briefed and, at the tragic climax, sets up the wrong prop: during her final soliloquy, Cleopatra finds herself standing opposite a painted banana tree. The audience laugh and the critics write scathing reviews: ‘the only indigenous thing onstage last night, in Mr. St. Just’s abbreviated, aborted, and abominable mounting of Antony and Cleopatra, was a bunch of bananas inadvertently trundled onstage during the farewell speech of Cleopatra, about whom more later. Certain things remain sacred, or else our civilization is threatened . . .’ (Walcott 1986: 269).

The review and protagonists of this production belong to the realm of fiction, because they are themselves part of a stage play, Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile. And yet, this play suggests several clear parallels with actual cultural projects and can therefore be read as a critical reflection on Caribbean engagements with Shakespeare’s legacy. Premiered in Barbados in 1983 with Earl Warner as director,³ Walcott’s drama employs the age-old device of the play-within-the-play in order to establish whether universalist assumptions about Shakespeare can be effectively challenged by localized creative practices. The Barbadian première received enthusiastic reviews across the entire region, perhaps not least because it formed a rare example of what Bruce King (2000: 425) has called an ‘international West Indian’ project. Produced and sponsored by Stage One, a local non-profit company dedicated to Caribbean drama, the performance included artists and actors from the various island states. Two years later, the play’s success continued with a Trinidadian production, also directed by Earl Warner, which turned out to be the last major local performance of a Walcott drama before he won the Nobel Prize in 1992. Outside the region, however, this particular play of his has been less well received. Stage One was planning to take it to New York, but had to cancel under pressure from Equity, the Actors Union, which had to flatter members with the belief that they were protecting American minority actors against West Indians. An Amsterdam production in 1991, in Dutch translation, toured the Netherlands but failed to attract interest in other European countries. Ironically then, while A Branch of the Blue Nile explores the fate of European culture in transcultural dislocation, international audiences outside the West Indies rarely got a chance to see it performed. At any rate, the play both commemorates and continues Walcott’s own lifelong dedication to Caribbean theatre, especially his pioneering work with the Trinidad Theatre Workshop he founded in 1959 (see King 1995). Here, his idea had long been to set up a space in which the rich diversity of New World cultures could find articulation, i.e. a stage, as he famously put it in 1970, ‘where someone can do Shakespeare or sing Calypso with equal conviction’ (Walcott 1993b: 46).

However, this confident and programmatic claim has often proved problematic. Performances of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Calypso’ are not simply indicative of ‘the global’ and ‘the local’, but represent conflicting positions in cultural politics, as suggested by the controversies which used to surround Walcott’s work. In 1971, for example, Lamming published Water With Berries, a roman à clef in which an ambitious Caribbean actor named Derek plays Othello before a white English audience. Lamming’s novel, itself patterned on The Tempest, shows how the Shakespearean canon functions as a controlling script which allocates cultural roles and which, for post-colonial purposes, should resolutely be abandoned. What Lamming therefore castigates as Derek’s misguided aspiration – his craving for recognition from metropolitan elites – forms part of the historical background and of the critical material reworked in A Branch of the Blue Nile. Against this background, my reading⁴ of Walcott’s play text aims to show how its metadramatic structure situates Shakespearean performance in a particular locality and, at the same time, redraws its cultural co-ordinates.

Why, then, Antony and Cleopatra? The choice and use of this particular play raise several questions. What is Cleopatra to Trinidad? What can a Jacobean Roman history drama about war and passion do or signify in a late-twentieth-century tropical island? Trinidad’s heterogeneous and widely urbanized society has long been dedicated to a popular Carnival tradition, but there has never been a permanent playhouse or an established theatre tradition on the island. So how might the literary and the local setting of Walcott’s drama meaningfully interrelate? Such issues are, in fact, debated with some vehemence in the play. As Sheila says: ‘Trinidad isn’t Egypt, except at Carnival,/so the world sniggers when I speak her lines’ (Walcott 1986: 285). With this argument, the lead actress explains to the director why she has decided to abandon the project. To her, geographical distance marks insurmountable cultural difference. Director Harvey tries to solve the problem by introducing her to method acting, but fails in the attempt. Instead of making the foreign part her own, Sheila just remarks: ‘it’s bad method anyway, and maybe it doesn’t travel’ (1986: 218).

Another member of the company called Chris, who is supposed to play Antony, supports Sheila’s views. None of the European classics, he argues in an angry outburst, have anything to say to him or to the local audience: ‘I ain’t care who the arse is Shakespeare, Racine, Chekhov, nuttin in there had to do with my life, or the life of all them black people out in the hot sun of Frederick Street at twelve o’clock trying to hustle a living’ (1986: 246). Chris has written his own play, a typical Trinidadian backyard comedy, set in a recognizable domestic place and drawing on popular traditions. In keeping with Chris’s agenda, the play is not written in English blank verse but in Trinidadian Creole, the language of the people, which also marks his own speech (as just quoted) and which, in a famous statement, the poet Kamau Brathwaite (1984: 10) has declared to be the true expression of local experience: ‘the hurricane does not roar in pentameter’. Within Walcott’s metadrama, rehearsals for Chris’s comedy take place as a counterpoint and challenge to Harvey’s Shakespearean project. The issues raised in the play therefore anticipate the issues raised by the play: how do Shakespeare and the Caribbean relate to each other? A Branch of the Blue Nile gives voice and face to prominent positions in this long-standing debate in Caribbean literature. This debate has wider implications in relation to world-wide Shakespeares.⁵ Staging the spectacular failure of an Antony and Cleopatra performance, the play questions assumptions about the viability of cultural translation, thus addressing the controversy associated with intercultural appropriations of Shakespeare in a post-colonial context.

Antony in Egypt

When Walcott’s protagonists resent the roles they have been given and resist the established acting method, they effectively remind us of a fundamental point in post-colonial theory. In the words of Michael Neill (1998: 168), this is ‘the idea that reading is always done from somewhere’. The place of reading matters because, as many critics since Said (1983: 4) have argued, meaning is a localized product resulting from a specifically situated act of reading. For this reason it is ironic and rather problematic that, according to some commentators, Walcott features as a so-called cosmopolitan writer, or in a troubling phrase, as an ‘espouser of hybridity’ (Cartelli 1999: 13), whose work is said to transcend the concerns or constraints of locality. Against such notions, I would like to emphasize how his creative and critical engagements with the Shakespeare canon take place from a position within Caribbean culture.

What is at stake here can be illustrated by going back to Froude’s account of the West Indies. Comparison is a recurrent rhetorical device. In Jamaica, he notes, the forests are ‘as beautiful as the forest at Arden’, the nights occur to him ‘like the gloaming of a June night in England’, the Trinidadian climate is ‘hotter during daylight than the hottest forcing house at Kew’, and Barbados appears just ‘like the Isle of Thanet’ (Froude 1909: 58, 102, 218, 232). The Victorian travel text thus constitutes itself by means of similes, demonstrating how the colonial gaze appropriates all unknown places by arranging them into domestic categories. In fact, the rhetoric of comparison is as old as the tradition of European travelogues. Any travel writer trying to describe encounters with radically unfamiliar sights cannot but avail himself of some familiar points of reference. However, such a strategy leads into serious difficulties. When, for example, Herodotus, the Greek historian and ethnographer, sets out to describe the strange creatures living in the Nile, the very act of naming them is haunted by comparisons that mistake, rather than capture, their true nature: the Egyptian hippopotamus is not really a river horse, although its given name suggests as much. In the case of another local creature, the puzzling crocodile, Herodotus (1910: 148–9) makes that point himself: ‘Of all known animals this is the one which from the smallest size grows to be the greatest: for the egg of the crocodile is but little bigger than that of the goose [...]. It has the eyes of a pig, teeth large and tusk-like [...]. The name of crocodiles was given them by the Ionians, who remarked their resemblance to the lizards, which in Ionia live in the walls’. This passage illustrates the problem noted at the outset: how to find apt linguistic terms by which the local can be named.

Against this background, it is telling what another traveller observes in Egypt and the creatures in the Nile. As soon as Shakespeare’s Antony returns to Rome, he is questioned about the foreign country. ‘What manner of thing is your crocodile’, Lepidus asks him and is told: ‘It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which norisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates’ (2.7.38–42). As John Gillies (1994: 121) has argued, Antony’s report can be read on two levels. In some way, it simply parodies the kind of ethnographic rhetoric exemplified by Herodotus, whose similes are invoked only to be ridiculed. Yet in a fundamental way, this parody calls into question the pervasive strategy of representing other territories in terms transferred and wilfully imposed on them. In this sense, Antony’s tautologies could be read as marking Rome’s inability to come to terms with Egypt. The crocodile, Cleopatra’s heraldic beast, here frustrates all imperial desire for naming and subjection; its difference persists. This reading might perhaps suggest why Walcott was so interested in this play. Another source of interest for Walcott may have been the discrepancy between actor and role, person and persona explored in Antony and Cleopatra, which Neill (1994: 78–89) describes as a ‘dislocation of identity’. Such dislocations lie also at the core of colonial predicaments.

‘My body was invaded by that queen./Her gaze made everywhere a desert’. Reversing Cleopatra’s historical role, Walcott’s Sheila here describes the process of rehearsal as a physical and territorial conquest: ‘I found myself walking in pentameter’ 20 Tobias Döring (Walcott 1986: 285). Her speech echoes what has been analysed as the discursive power underpinning colonial authority through exerting itself over other bodies. In his classic study Black Skin, White Masks, for example, Frantz Fanon (1986: 211) argued that violence in the colonial arena operates precisely by placing the other into such a position of dependency: ‘The Negro is comparison. There is the first truth. [...] The Antilleans have no inherent value of their own, they are always contingent on the presence of The Other’. Fanon’s diagnosis shows what is at stake in Walcott’s metadrama. According to the local actors, the mechanisms Fanon analysed are perpetuated and their bodies made to bear fundamentally alien and alienating masks. Yet again, this might suggest a relevant conjunction of the issues explored through Shakespeare’s as well as through Walcott’s text because the Shakespearean Cleopatra, too, has been analysed as a figure fully contingent on the presence of the ‘Other’. As Dympna Callaghan (1996: 53) argues, ‘instead of accepting the fiction of Cleopatra’s status as a subject of representation, we can analyse her as an object of it – one which tells us nothing about femininity, Egyptian or otherwise, but about the Western masculinity which has fantasized her into existence’. A Branch of the Blue Nile is culturally and ideologically significant and, among other appropriations, worth critical attention because it shows what happens when such fantasies come up against the realities of post-colonial experience.

If colonial experience, as we have seen, is shaped by a rhetoric of constant comparison, we can understand the pressures on contemporary writers trying to reshape, or perhaps retrieve, an idiom that acknowledges the cultural specificities in their own sense of place. These pressures are particularly troublesome for Caribbean writers because the official designation of their region, the ‘West Indies’, derives from a historic fallacy. With each repetition of this given name, Columbus’ cartographic error lives on and continues to displace the i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Local Shakespeares for Local Audiences
• Part Two: Local Shakespeares for National Audiences
• Part Three: Local Shakespeares for International Audiences
• Notes
• Bibliography