Shakespeare and Geek Culture

Andrew James Hartley, Peter Holland

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350107755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

From fantasy and sci-fi to graphic novels, from boy scouts to board games, from blockbuster films to the cult of theatre, Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. Where there is popular culture there are fans and nerds and geeks. The essays in this collection on Shakespeare and Geek Culture take an innovative approach to the study of Shakespeare's cultural presences, situating his works, his image and his brand to locate and explore the nature of that geekiness that, the authors argue, is a vital but unrecognized feature of the world of those who enjoy and are obsessed by Shakespeare, whether they are scholars, film fans, theatre-goers or members of legions of other groupings in which Shakespeare plays his part. Working at the intersections of a wide range of fields – including fan studies and film analysis, cultural studies and fantasy/sci-fi theory – the authors demonstrate how the particularities of the connection between Shakespeare and geek culture generate new insights into the plays, poems and their larger cultural legacy in the 21st century.

PART ONE

Geek Culture
and Fiction

1

Shakespeare, Tolkien and Geeking Out

Andrew James Hartley

‘Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,’ Christopher Tolkien observes sadly in a recent interview (Rérolle 2012). ‘The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.’

I’ve heard similar remarks from disappointed Shakespeareans leaving theatres, though at least for us we know that Macbeths on stage and screen are like buses: there’ll be another along in a few minutes. Tolkien films, not so much, so they take on the de facto effect of being somehow definitive. The Lord Of The Rings (LOTR) films were a massive financial gamble and it will be a long time before their shadow has receded so far that another company might consider a remake worth the risk.¹ But beyond the fiscal concerns, the agonizing over the extent to which Peter Jackson’s films get the books (including the far less critically successful Hobbit film) ‘right’ (whatever that means), Christopher Tolkien’s faintly elvish turn away from the world and toward the undying lands beyond the sundering sea raises questions about adaptation, authority, the construction of meaning and the limits of cultural ownership which have been playing out in Shakespeare studies for some time.

Not so very long ago – in my own lifetime, certainly – the pairing of Shakespeare and Tolkien would have seemed slightly outrageous, an attempt, perhaps, to dignify the literary fringe by association with a canonical genius, but those days have gone, with both authors shifting toward the cultural centre, the chasm between them collapsing like the bridge at Khazad Dûm. As Janet Brennan Croft argues in the preface to her collection dedicated to the two writers, there is much which connects them:

Both have been condemned as superficial or hack writers with a shaky or undeserved spot in the canon, and both have also been nearly deified as among the greatest who ever wrote. Both also appeal equally strongly to a general audience and to amateur and professional scholars, and inspire creative works in other fields.

(Croft 2007: 1)

The essays which follow her preface are reflective, scholarly and expressly textual in their preoccupations (the subtitle describes the book as ‘essays on shared themes and language’) – more nerd than geek, if you will – the fan’s delight, though visible beneath the surface, necessarily occluded in the interests of academic respectability. What I want to do here, by contrast, is explore some of the things which make the two authors similar and different, not through literary analysis so much as through placement in culture in general and geek culture in particular. Along the way I want to explore ideas of adaptation and ownership which might help us counter Christopher Tolkien’s despairing retreat.

Tolkien, Shakespeare and the battle for fantasy

The Lord of the Rings is dotted with conscious echoes from Shakespeare, particularly from Macbeth, some obvious instances of which are the prophesy that no man can kill the witch king of Angmar (aka Lord of the Nazgûl), a man who, like Macbeth, has sold his soul for power. The witch king dies at the hands of the shield maiden, Eowyn, rather than falling to a hero who was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped, but the comparison is clear, Eowyn taking the role of virtuous female warrior in pointed opposition to the villainy of Lady Macbeth, who has no parallel in LOTR. Then there’s the ents, the walking trees who overthrow Isengard, and who grow out of Birnam Wood.² But Tolkien famously ‘rather enjoyed voicing the ultimate Englishman’s heresy of hating Shakespeare altogether’ according to David Day (Tolkien’s Ring, 2011).³ At first blush, this seems odd since Shakespeare was one of the few literary giants to incorporate fantastic elements in his plays: plays like Macbeth make conspicuous use of witchcraft, the Tempest uses magic and elemental spirits, A Midsummer Night’s Dream uses elves and fairies – albeit in forms Tolkien thought debased. Plenty of Shakespeare’s less obviously fantastic plays feature ghosts, others use prophesies, omens, the appearance of gods like Hymen or Jupiter and numerous other supernatural elements such as those which saturate the late romances. Shakespeare never presents an entirely fantastic world as Tolkien does (Dream and Tempest are probably the closest), but his work is shot through with fantastic elements, and it could be that Tolkien saw his use of those elements to tell essentially realist stories as a failure to commit to the genre, even a denigration of it, though fantasy as a theatrical genre did not exist for Shakespeare. While some of Tolkien’s scepticism about Shakespeare came from the way he eclipsed the ancient and medieval texts Tolkien thought should get more attention, his pointed resentment, even hostility, came from the notion that ‘Drama is naturally hostile to fantasy.’ The quotation goes on, ‘Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy’ (Tolkien 2001: 49–50).

Some of this speaks to the technology of his day, which we might question in the light of current movie capacity, and I’ll leave alone for now that loaded ‘as it should be’, but the issue runs deeper. What Tolkien is defending here is the fantasy of the private reader, the fantasy of imagination led simply by words, and while I respect the value of that I’m wary of that bookish binary in which enacted fantasy is not fantasy. Tolkien wants to reserve the act of fantastic creation not simply for the author but for the author in collaboration with the reader, and in such fantasy there can be no completion. What we have there is a process which is limitless, the Balrog remains the merest fleeting impression conjured by words – it never becomes measurably material. When a play or film gives that Balrog – or Shakespeare’s weird sisters – physical form, it closes off possibilities, rendering concrete what was amorphous, and making singular what was potentially infinite.

But this is the nature of all theatre and it is why we have multiple Macbeths on stage and film, because – contrary to popular notions of rightness and authenticity – the purpose of such productions is not to get the play right but to make it new, all performance being by definition adaptation. It is this adaptive process that Tolkien’s notion of fantasy resists, and it is therefore telling that he finds the witches of Macbeth intolerable on stage, but suggestive on the page, concluding in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ that they would have been better realized in a story (a novel or narrative poem) than in a play (Tolkien 2001: 50). This despite discussions elsewhere celebrating the human and realist aspects of the plays as more successful on stage.⁴ In insisting on fantasy’s non-dramatic nature, Tolkien claims the natural flux of the thing as something which stays both plural and unspecific in the reader’s head rather than allowing that flux to take infinite forms in subsequent material afterlives, an argument familiar to Shakespeare scholars in Harry Berger Jr.’s (1989) preference for the infinite possibilities of ‘imaginary audition’ over the limited theatrical fixities of ‘the new histrionicism’. In the process, Tolkien denies not merely the value of adaptation, but claims – unsurprisingly, I think – fantasy for the cerebral processes of the mind in which visceral response to sensation is minimized:

In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it.

(Tolkien 2001: 50)

This is, he does not need to explain, a bad thing. To my mind, it smacks of what Jonas Barish (1981) calls the antitheatrical prejudice which has various origins, not least of which is the anxiety of being swayed by one’s senses. Tolkien’s fantasy world is curiously acorporeal, beauty and ugliness operating partly at the level of abstract romanticism rather than being sensual or – god forbid – sexual, but functioning primarily as moral signposting. This is notably and problematically conspicuous in matters of gender (all the book’s women – Arwen, Galadriel, Eowyn and Luthien – exemplify broadly the same characteristics of beauty), and it models one of the ways high fantasy retreats from reality, as the problematic racial profiling of his warring factions offer a pretty safe rule of thumb (in spite of his stand against Nazi anti-Semitism):⁵ slim and fair = good; swarthy and misshapen (by the standards of the slim and fair) = evil. Tolkien’s resistance to Shakespeare and drama, I would argue, is a resistance to the incursion of reality into his hermetically sealed version of fantasy, and as such it is in accord with a problematic conservatism which leans to the essentialist.

The inevitability and uncertainty of adaptation

Rather than sparring over the politics of fantasy, however, I want to discuss ideas of adaptation, the taking of original literary material and changing it, transforming it in terms of genre, form or content. Old discussions of the subject tended to get hung up on questions of fidelity to the original, particularly on what was lost when changes were made (Christopher Tolkien’s position). More recently, Linda Hutcheon has moved the debate into more productive territory (Whittington 2008: 405). She says that part of the pleasure of adaptation ‘comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’ (Hutcheon 2012: 4). In the current market in which familiar material takes new form on different platforms (video game, book, movie, etc.), the key is moving away from a hierarchical notion of original and recreation, seeing instead related works which are in dialogue.

That said, Tolkien is crucially right about the way imagination is complicated or overpowered by the visual, and in this he suffers in ways Shakespeare does not, at least in part because he is a novelist, not a playwright. Novels offer – or seem to offer – semantically complete art, the semiotic system of their communicative form bound between the pages of the book. This is arguable, of course, and I will return to why, but it certainly seems that the novel is a more totalized and finite immersion in the art object than is a play which is necessarily partial, only achieving completeness when the words are mediated through the voice and bodies of actors (at very least) in ways not precisely scripted by the dramatic text.

Shakespeare is, in various ways, already fluid. Everything we know about how his plays came together, how they were performed and published, suggests process rather than simply the generation of a stable and completed product, and every theatrical incarnation is necessarily an extension of that process into a hypothetical, the addition of actors, costumes and a million other factors not dictated by the play as text. Such theatrical incarnations model overtly what is always true even of reading, that the text is transformed through interaction with a spectator, its meanings generated by that process rather than somehow residing in the printed words. Yes, all performance is adaptation, but adaptation remakes the original as an entity in continual flux. As David Fischlin and Mark Fortier phrase it, ‘Adaptation implies a process rather than a beginning or an end, and as ongoing objects of adaptation all Shakespeare’s plays remain in process’ (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 3). That process can, however, be violent, generating contradictions as adaptation becomes its near neighbour, appropriation. In embracing the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One Geek Culture and Fiction
• 1 Shakespeare, Tolkien and Geeking Out
• 2 ‘I Opened a Door; That Is All’: Neil Gaiman’s Decidedly Human Shakespeare in The Sandman
• 3 Shakespeare Unfocused in Time: Problems of Memory and Anachronism in Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters
• 4 May the Bard Be with You: Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital Investment in SciFi/Fantasy Adaptations
• 5 Not Now: The Present in Shakespeare’s Past and Ooo’s Future
• Part Two Geek Culture and the Shakespeare Sandbox
• 6 ‘Let’s Kill Claudius in the Church!’: Fan Fiction and Wish Fulfilment in Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet
• 7 Hiddleston–Shakespeare–Coriolanus, or Rhizomatic Crossings in Fanfic
• 8 The Bard is Dead, Long Live the Bard: Kill Shakespeare and the Popular Death of the Author
• 9 ‘There Lies the Substance’: Richard II and the Adorkable Paratext
• 10 On Eating Paper and Drinking Ink
• Part Three Pastimes, Gaming and Shakespeare
• 11 Shakespeare and the Renaissance of Board Games: Appropriation and Geek Culture
• 12 The Bard of Boys’ Life: Shakespeare and the Construction of American Boyhood
• 13 Some Women Just Want to Watch the World Burn: Gendered Villainy in Shakespeare and Geek Culture
• 14 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as Shakespearean Theatre
• Part Four Film, Theatre and Geek Culture
• 15 Liberating the Geek in Recent Shakespeare on Film
• 16 Whedonesque Shakespeare and Hyperdiegetic Casting
• 17 Worst. Lear. Ever. Early Modern Drama and Geek Hermeneutics
• 18 ‘It Was Geek to Me’ Shakespeare, Performance and Geek Cultures
• Index
• Copyright