Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation

Alexa Huang, Elizabeth Rivlin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137375773
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Making an important new contribution to rapidly expanding fields of study surrounding the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity.

CHAPTER 1

Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value

Douglas Lanier

These days there is a growing sense among Shakespeareans that our field has arrived at a crossroads. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the dominant preoccupation of academic Shakespeareans was to establish and preserve an “authentic” Shakespeare text. The reigning assumption has been that the source of Shakespeare’s greatness is to be identified with the verbal particularities of his scripts, which we as scholars are obliged to cherish, explicate and place in historical context. The appeal to Shakespeare’s original language, an appeal conducted from a variety of perspectives, has provided Shakespearean scholarship of the last century its distinctive cultural authority. It is no accident that professional Shakespearean scholarship—a peculiarly twentieth-century invention, we should acknowledge—can be traced to the professionalization of Shakespearean editing in the late nineteenth century and the concomitant demotion of biographical criticism’s prestige.¹ The critical descent of Shakespeare the man enabled the ascent of Shakespeare the text.

This focus on the Shakespearean text ever-more-closely read, a professional investment in the specificity of Shakespeare’s language, has cut across a wide range of otherwise divergent critical schools, even putatively iconoclastic ones, so much so that it has taken on the status of common sense among scholars. What else would you study when you study Shakespeare? And this textual paradigm carried with it an ethical imperative of fidelity, the duty to remain rigorously true to the Shakespearean text(s), even though what it means to be “true” to Shakespeare has been variously construed.² Recent textual criticism has, of course, posed a formidable challenge to this long-held view. Many have argued that a single definitive Shakespearean text is largely a critical will o’ the wisp because the documents we have received from the past suggest the fluid, ever-unfinished state of many plays.³ Even so, as editors “unedit” scripts and reevaluate marginal features like mismatched speech prefixes, it remains an open question whether postmodern textual criticism has really challenged the underlying investment of Shakespeare scholarship in Shakespeare-as-text or simply redoubles that investment by fetishizing variant historical exemplars rather than some single ideal script. Arguably, the ethical imperative of rigorous fidelity to the text has not so much been overthrown as extended to a new set of documents.

Palpable, too, is a certain restlessness with the reign of New Historicism over Shakespearean studies, though there are signs that its dominance has begun to wane. One source of that restlessness springs from how historical reading has become routinized; another from the sense that approaching an historical archive with a literary critic’s eye is no longer novel or quite so compelling, perhaps because, after New Historicism, it has become more difficult to appeal to the firm facticity of history to ground a literary reading. But that restlessness also comes from New Historicism’s own preferred modes of engagement with the present, conducted either through shadow-boxing (using a reading of the past to engage the present) or through acknowledging the historian’s situatedness in the present in what is too often little more than a pre-emptive defense against the charge of insufficient historical self-consciousness. By contrast, cultural materialist readings have always been explicit about their political aims – their interest in laying claim to the authority of the past in order to change the present. Yet by exposing the ideological investedness and discursivity of accounts of the past, they have run into difficulty with grounding the authority of any appeal to history. The newfound interest in adaptations of Shakespeare is in some ways, then, a response to restlessness with historicisms new and old.

The rise in study of Shakespearean adaptations also has multiple origins. Like the new textual criticism, it takes sustenance from postmodern reconception of the relationship between originals and (re)productions. Indeed, the founding gesture of many an article on adaptation is that we are now in an age of post-fidelity (though the very need for such an opening gambit testifies to the residual power of fidelity as a discourse). Moreover, in the 1990s and after, adaptation studies have been catalyzed by an accelerated transcoding of Shakespeare from theater and book to mass media, pop cultural, and digital forms. The global scope of Shakespeare’s transcoding has become especially apparent during the last 25 years, a fact exemplified by the Globe-to-Globe Festival, which brought foreign language productions of Shakespeare to the reconstructed Globe theater in London as part of the British 2012 Olympic celebrations, a gesture that sought to acknowledge globalized Shakespeare, and at the same time to re-appropriate it to bolster British cultural prestige. Shakespeare’s imbrication with cultural processes of adaptation is, in other words, visible to modern audiences as never before. And, we should not fail to notice, the interest in Shakespearean adaptations is in no small part yet another response to the ever-present institutional pressure to find new texts with which Shakespearean professionals might ply their trade. One of the difficulties of reconceptualizing the discipline of Shakespearean criticism at this moment is how to rethink the object of its practice and the grounds for its claims to cultural authority, which, despite enormous changes in critical practice, still remain tied to some form of appeal to the Shakespearean text(s). Foregrounding the trope of adaptation, I argue, offers a useful way forward, a means for reconceptualizing Shakespeare as a disciplinary field, but only if we revisit the role of the Shakespearean text and the authority it seems to provide in relation to adaptation.

Despite an avalanche of recent work on Shakespearean adaptation, we have been slow to absorb its consequences for the field of Shakespeare studies as a whole.⁴ Too much of this work still begins with the proposition that adaptations should be read against the “original,” that they are supplemental to or dependent upon “real” Shakespeare, and that the point of criticism is to place such works in relationship to their originary source, which stands outside them. An important, underappreciated reason for this, I believe, is the powerful undertow of classroom practice, a site from which a great deal of the interest in Shakespearean adaptation has emerged. Despite bold statements from those who problematize the authority of the Shakespearean text in relation to its latter day (re)productions, most Shakespeareans still teach adaptations in the context of courses on Shakespeare, where we tend to treat them as vehicles for generating interest in the Shakespearean text, the course’s central touchstone. No doubt there is value in that approach. But far too often the work of comparing Shakespearean scripts to adaptations fosters the illusion that (re)producers of Shakespeare engage directly and primarily with originary Shakespearean texts rather than with a much more inchoate and complex web of intervening adaptations or, just as important, with the protocols – formal and ideological – of genres and media that have little to do with the Shakespearean text. What is more, the forms of comparison we use in classes tend to obscure the extent to which the seemingly stable textual objects we treat as “proper” Shakespeare are themselves fluid and adaptational by their nature: Shakespeare’s scripts themselves adapt prior narratives, typically from one medium and/or genre to another; those scripts are inevitably changed in ways large and small, witting and unwitting, in the process of being realized in performance; the publication process—the movement from manuscript to print to latter-day editorial (re)construction to digital formatting—is itself a mode of adaptation. That is, even as adaptations have become pedagogical objects in the classroom, the curricular imperatives within which we typically conduct their study tend to reinstate the regime of the “authentic” Shakespearean text, try as we might to be explicit about critiquing concepts of fidelity and authenticity. To put the matter succinctly, pedagogical practice situates the closely read Shakespearean text as the origin and ultimate point of return of the adaptational process and thereby reinforces the secondary, derivative nature of adaptation.

Moreover, the still dominant theoretical models for Shakespearean adaptation find it difficult to resist the considerable residual power of the textual fidelity paradigm. The paradigm of “appropriation,” with its roots in cultural materialist and ultimately Marxist analysis, exerts enormous force over the field, having become its preferred term of art,⁵ appearing in the title of a major journal devoted to Shakespearean adaptation (Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation) and the title or subtitle for a score of recent books. Unlike adaptation, appropriation operates not merely on the Shakespearean text but also on the cultural authority attached to that text, its accumulated cultural capital, which serves as a legitimating token in cultural struggles between subgroups. By tracing how and in what contexts Shakespearean cultural authority is invoked, cultural materialist analysis champions counter-hegemonic appropriations of Shakespeare and exposes (ab)uses of Shakespeare in the service of dominant power. However, one problem of the appropriative model is that it tends to reify the very cultural authority it purports to contest.⁶ In practice, accounts of Shakespearean appropriation too often imagine a process in which Shakespeare’s legitimating power remains remarkably stable as it is snatched back and forth between cultural groups in a zero-sum political game of “Bard, Bard, who’s got the Bard?” By focusing on (re)distributions of a Shakespearean cultural power that we treat as stable, we can easily fail to consider the extent to which acts of adaptation actively create, transform, and recast the very Shakespeare they claim merely to appropriate, and neglect Shakespeare’s engagement with other, equally if not more powerful axes of cultural authorization, such as that of contemporary popular culture.⁷

Noteworthy, too, is how the Shakespearean text is often deployed in analyses of appropriation. In his three volumes of essays on Shakespearean appropriation, for example, the much-missed Terence Hawkes takes the provocative position that, to quote his second book, “Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare,”⁸ that is, Shakespearean meaning is available in the present only through processes of appropriation that actively create, rather than passively decode, the readings and values we attribute to the Shakespearean text. (What the word “Shakespeare” refers to in Hawkes’s famous formulation rewards close attention.) He demonstrates this proposition by unearthing with dazzling acuity the ideological investments of prior appropriators. One of the theoretical challenges of this position is adjudicating between these actively created meanings and values attached to Shakespeare’s name. If we do the meaning when we mean by Shakespeare, how are we to judge between those self-created interpretations? In his analyses, Hawkes often deploys counter-readings of Shakespeare’s text—often allied with carnivality, aurality and anarchic pleasure—to refute or dismantle the arguments of his interlocutors. That is, no small part of the rhetorical force of Hawkes’s essays depends upon an implicit appeal to the authority of the “original” Shakespeare text situated in an historically “authentic” context. Though we all may mean by Shakespeare, the appeal to the text allows some to mean more authentically and authoritatively than others. My point here is not to denigrate Hawkes’s line of analysis—it is work exciting in its implications. Rather, I am observing that the appropriative model often depends upon positing, reifying, and at times even amplifying Shakespeare’s cultural authority in order to observe it being exchanged, and also observing that final authority often remains vested in the Shakespearean text which, it turns out, once “properly” contextualized, does indeed mean, and with a vengeance.

There have been several attempts to craft alternative postmodern, post-fidelity theories of Shakespearean adaptation. Gary Taylor’s incisive chronicle of Shakespearean reinvention has the considerable virtue of mapping in all its messy complexity a tissue of interwoven cultural energies often far afield from the text itself, at least up until the twentieth century, where Taylor locates the epicenter of Shakespearean reinvention in Anglophone academia.⁹ Equally promising is Diana Henderson’s emphasis on “collaboration”: that is, on a non-agonistic conception of interactions between Shakespeare and latter-day adaptors,¹⁰ though conceptualizing how Shakespeare is a fully mutual participant in the interaction remains a formidable theoretical challenge.

Bryan Reynolds and his many co-writers have used the Deleuzian notion of “transversalism” to suggest how the Shakespearean text, particularly when reproduced in performance, creates an intersubjective space that “invites people to deviate from the hierarchializing assemblages—whether vertical or horizontal—of any organizational social structure”; Shakespeare models and produces a “metamorphosis of becoming-other-social-identities” that “confounds such concepts as the essential, the normal, the unified, and the universal” as well as the binary constructs that underwrite them.¹¹ If so, it is not clear whether the quality of transversality results from certain processes of performance or reproduction or if it is somehow located in the Shakespearean text itself.

Too often, alternate models for Shakespearean adaptation continue to think in terms of some direct encounter between an “original” Shakespeare text and the adaptor, or seek to (re)invest the Shakespearean text with special power, albeit one which is counter-hegemonic or progressive. The impulse to find a way to circle back and read the “original” Shakespearean text in relation to adaptations or to preserve that text’s authority, albeit in some transmuted form, speaks to our field’s collective investment in continuing to claim authority from that text, even as we have problematized that authority. Performance critics have offered the most thoroughgoing discussions of this theoretical impasse. William Worthen’s powerful meditations on the relationship between the Shakespearean text and Shakespearean performance have repeatedly made the case that the Shakespearean text does not and should not regulate theatrical production. Margaret Jane Kidnie arrives at much the same conclusion in her examination of the problem. Her notion of “pragmatic adaptation” appeals not to Shakespeare’s text but to an ever-changing “community of users” to define the fluid but discernible range of genuine, faithful or authentic interpretations of Shakespeare’s works at any given historical moment.¹²

This challenge here is also one of ethics and value. Despite the critique of the notion of an “original” Shakespearean text in the last critical generation, retaining some notion of fidelity to “the text” has remained a foundational orientation for literary scholars as professionals, the legitimizing ethical duty that divides us from amateurs and “creatives.” Textual fidelity has also provided a powerful means to rank rival adaptations, though in light of poststructuralist critiques of value, we have learned to couch our judgment calls in seemingly neutral language (“It’s not very i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation
• Chapter 1 Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value
• Chapter 2 Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation
• Chapter 3 Ethics and the Undead: Reading Shakespearean (Mis)appropriation in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula
• Chapter 4 Adaptation Revoked: Knowledge, Ethics, and Trauma in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres
• Chapter 5 Double Jeopardy: Shakespeare and Prison Theater
• Chapter 6 Theater Director as Unelected Representative: Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Arab Shakespeare Trilogy
• Chapter 7 A “Whirl of Aesthetic Terminology”: Swinburne, Shakespeare, and Ethical Criticism
• Chapter 8 “Raw-Savage” Othello: The First-Staged Japanese Adaptation of Othello (1903) and Japanese Colonialism
• Chapter 9 The Bard in Bollywood: The Fraternal Nation and Shakespearean Adaptation in Hindi Cinema
• Chapter 10 Multilingual Ethics in Henry V and Henry VIII
• Chapter 11 In Other Words: Global Shakespearean Transformations
• Afterword “State of Exception”: Forgetting Hamlet
• Appendix For the Record: Conversation with Sulayman Al-Bassam
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index