Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age

Fan Cultures and Remediation

Anna Blackwell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319965444
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book offers a timely examination of the relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary digital media. By focusing upon a variety of 'Shakespearean' individuals, groups and communities and their 'online' presence, the book explores the role of popular internet culture in the ongoing adaptation of Shakespeare's plays and his general cultural standing. The description of certain performers as 'Shakespearean' is a ubiquitous but often throwaway assessment. However, a study of 'Shakespearean' actors within a broader cultural context reveals much, not only about the mutable face of British culture (popular and 'highbrow') but also about national identity and commerce. These performers share an online space with the other major focus of the book: the fans and digital content creators whose engagement with the Shakespearean marks them out as more than just audiences and consumers; they become producers and critics. Ultimately, Digital Shakespeareans moves beyond the theatrical history focus of related works to consider the role of digital culture and technology in shaping Shakespeare's contemporary adaptive legacy and the means by which we engage with it.

© The Author(s) 2018

Anna BlackwellShakespearean Celebrity in the Digital AgePalgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96544-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anna Blackwell¹

(1)

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Anna Blackwell

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

To Be or Not to Be (A Shakespearean)

On Saturday the 23 April 2016, the twenty-seven-year-old British actor Paapa Essiedu stepped out onto the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon . The award-winning lead of the RSC ’s then run of Hamlet , Essiedu had the attention of the audience in the theatre and 1.5 million viewers who were watching the stage from the comfort of their homes on BBC Two. Walking forward, Essiedu looked up at the audience with an apprehensive yet thoughtful expression and pronounced the immortal line, ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question’. Well, not quite. Essiedu had barely begun ‘that is’ before he was interrupted by the Australian comedian and songwriter Tim Minchin who rushed on stage to offer the actor a ‘note’ on his delivery. Minchin explained that ‘or’ needed to be more heavily emphasised (‘it’s the choice’) and, skull in hand, performed his preferred reading of the line. The moment was no accident and was instead one sketch in a varied programme of variety-style theatrical entertainment for Shakespeare Live! From the RSC (dir. Gregory Doran , 2016), a gala celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday and the 400th anniversary of his death. Essiedu’s comically interrupted performance took place alongside other excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays including the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet and Henry’s wooing of Katherine of Valois in Henry V, as well as more unconventional adaptations of the plays such as ‘This Gives Life to Thee’, a meditation on Shakespeare’s cultural influence by the Shakespeare Hip Hop Company.

Essiedu exerted his greater professional knowledge of Shakespeare, however, and confronted the comedian reminding him that the skull prop was not needed—‘it’s the wrong soliloquy’. When questioned further by Essiedu on his familiarity with the text in light of his insistence that Hamlet ‘always has the skull’, Minchin admitted: ‘Have I ever played the Dane? Have I ever given my Dane? … No’. Minchin’s frustration increased in response to Essiedu’s quiet expression of satisfaction at having bested the strange interloper to his stage and he exploded, questioning the black actor whether there was some ‘intrinsic reason’ why the audience wouldn’t accept him as the prince of Denmark: ‘Say it – say it! I will never play Hamlet in Stratford-upon-bloody-Avon because I’m ginger’.

Minchin has indeed never played Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon and is in many ways a strange candidate for the role despite his accomplishments as a star of the musical comedy and theatre worlds. ¹ There is also some truth in his joke that there are implicit reasons why certain individuals are barred from ‘Shakespeareanism ’, although the joke is not targeted solely at reasons as trite as hair colour. His insistence that the black Essiedu has discriminated against him as a potential Shakespearean on the grounds of his hair colour revivifies a much older Minchin joke about racial intolerance. In one of his most famous comic songs, ‘Prejudice’, Minchin sings the emphatic refrain, ‘Only a ginger can call another ginger “ginger”’. This largely pejorative term is described by Minchin in the song as possessing a ‘terrible history/ Of being used to abuse, oppress and subdue’: ‘Just six seemingly harmless letters/ Arranged in a way that will form a word/ With more power than pieces of metal/ That are forged to make swords’. The song elaborates upon this theme, detailing humourously the struggles of redheads to reclaim a descriptor more commonly used against than in support of them. The song’s focus on the word ‘ginger’ is, however, a euphemism for a term with far greater historical significance and capability to offend; a word which shares ginger’s ‘[a] couple of Gs, an R and an E, an I and an N/ Just six little letters all jumbled together’, that is ‘nigger’. Minchin’s instruction that only ‘a ginger can call another ginger’ is intuitively mapped onto the more politically urgent warning against the appropriation of language from the communities for whom those words possess significance. Implicit in Minchin’s song is thus the caution that reclaimed words such as ‘nigger’ lose their self-identifying potential when uttered by the types of social groups who historically wielded it as a pejorative.

Though playful, the exchange between Essiedu and Minchin reveals much about the implicit processes at work in determining a canon of Shakespearean performers and it is for this reason that Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation begins with its example. The conversation they enact, and the questions provoked by the sketch are, after all, foundational to the formation of the ‘Shakespearean’, the fan practices which engage with Shakespearean celebrity and the subsequently remediated versions of the playwright which this monograph will explore. It therefore befits this introduction to Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age to first establish the ideological work of determining one performer a ‘Shakespearean’ actor over another because, in spite of the RSC’s insistence that they cast actors ‘with the most appropriate level of skill and talent […], regardless of their ethnicity’ (Rogers and Thorpe 2014b, 488), it is significant that it took until 2016 for the RSC to cast their first black Hamlet.

Celebrating Shakespeareanism

In order to assemble a representative group of performers who can institutionally be characterised as ‘Shakespeareans’, one could do worse than looking to those actors who join Essiedu and Minchin later in the sketch to offer their own reading of the contested line: Benedict Cumberbatch , Harriet Walter , David Tennant , Rory Kinnear, Ian McKellen and finally Judi Dench . These are all British stars who meet conventional markers of acting success including—but not limited—to critical renown. This renown often aligns with and rewards Shakespeareanism but alongside the formal and, often more highly publicised, recognition evident in award ceremonies—of which the most prominent for the British theatre includes the Laurence Olivier Awards, London Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards or Evening Standard Award—the acting community does offer some denotations of specifically Shakespearean prestige . Adaptation scholars Courtney Lehmann (2002) and Judith Buchanan (2005) both cite a moment on the set of British Shakespearean actor and director Kenneth Branagh’s 1999 Hamlet when Derek Jacobi , playing Claudius in the adaptation, delivered a bound copy of the play to Branagh. The book once belonged to Victorian actor and stage manager Johnston Forbes-Robertson and been passed since ‘to the finest Hamlet of the next generation’ (Jackson 1996, 206), from Jacobi to Branagh, via Michael Redgrave, Peter O’Toole and others. As Hamlet, as Jonathan Holmes observes, ‘obsesses with inheritance, genealogy and filiality’ (2004, 94–95), the moment has particular performative and textual resonance. The gift becomes a symbolically freighted moment, therefore: ‘offered a new patrilineage’ by Jacobi , Branagh is christened ‘both natural son and heir apparent to English theatrical royalty ’ (Lehmann 2002, 184–85). The gift is further distinguished as not only as a coming-of-age for Branagh but for adaptive media forms; as Buchanan notes, ‘for the first time, it was upon a screen Hamlet that the honour was bestowed’ (2005, 1–2). ²

Still, status-bearing gifts such as these are rare and, like the prizes detailed by Barbara Roisman Cooper as one method of defining the performers surveyed in her Great Britons of Stage and Screen, the result of relatively limited ‘official’ consensus in relation to an individual performer. Tellingly, although the Hamlet gift-giving tradition adapts to the new frontiers of Shakespeare performance, there is no suggestion that the gift could be passed to a woman or anyone who is not a white man. This is not to suggest that either conventional award-giving or symbolic transferrals of status are purposefully elitist but that they presume a meritocratic, level playing field which does not acknowledge systemic or institutional biases. The prestige of being regarded as a ‘Shakespearean’ thereby evades definition, even as it wields considerable cachet in both traditional prize culture and in a much wider cultural context. This means that despite the frequency with which the ‘Shakespearean’ appears in mainstream culture, the phenomenon remains a slippery one. As Marjorie Garber writes, ‘Shakespearean’ is now an ‘all-purpose adjective, meaning great, tragic or resonant’ (2008, xiv). This elusive categorisation is not determined entirely by reception , however, and can often result as much from the concerted effort of an actor to self-identify as such.

The dubiousness of self-declared prestige reflects the dangers inherent in an elite’s employment of ‘high’ cultural capital to reinforce their cultural and social dominance (although it should be noted that such self-classification is not without risks; see Chapter 2 and my discussion of Kenneth Branagh in the mainstream). One of the great frustrations that faces those scholars and theatre enthusiasts who desire more diversity in the arts is indeed that the ‘Shakespearean’ is in many ways a self-selecting label which reflects a performer’s success rather than their inherent talent. The problem with this—and which should become apparent across the course of Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age—is that for many high-profile performers their success intersects with other forms of privilege which have invariably helped them advance further than pure talent would alone. This is true of a high proportion of British performers in particular: the Sutton Trust reported in 2016, for instance, that 42% of British BAFTA winners were privately educated and 35% attended grammar schools (Kirby 2016). Commenting on the report’s findings, the Chairman of the Trust Sir Peter Lampl observed, ‘your chances of reaching the top in so many areas of British life are very much greater if you went to an independent school’ (Gurney-Read 2016). Although further studies have not drilled down into social differences between and across the acting profession, it is only to be expected that Shakespearean actors are assisted by the proximity between social and cultural capital given that the playwright’s name exists as a common shorthand for intell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Pre-digital Shakespearean Celebrity
• 3. Performing the Shakespearean Body: Tom Hiddleston Onstage and Online
• 4. Professional and ‘Amateur’ Shakespeareanism Onstage and Online
• 5. Richard III, The Digital Shakespearean
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter