PART ONE
Research methods and problems
CHAPTER 1.1
Shakespeare as adaptor
EMMA SMITH
IMITATIO AND ADAPTATION
To be a writer in the early modern period was to be an adaptor: âOthello was âbased on a story by Giovanni Battista Giraldi, or Cinzio, adapted by William Shakespeare.â Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus were âbased on Plutarchâs Lives, translated by Thomas North, adapted by Shakespeareâ; Henry V and most of the other history plays were âbased on Raphael Holinshedâs Chronicles, adapted by Shakespeareââ (Taylor 2016: 144). Every guide and protocol, every schoolroom exercise, every expectation from readers, aligned in anticipating the postmodernist axiom that all writing is rewriting. As Gary Taylorâs playful echo of modern movie credits attests, few early modern plays would have been eligible for the Bankside equivalent of the Oscar category for best original screenplay. The task of the writer was to take the materials from prior texts and reshape them to current tastes and requirements: whereas a modern author might be advised to write about her experiences, her early modern counterpart wrote about her reading. The term âplaywrightâ, initially satirical when coined in the early seventeenth century, followed the semantic model of words like cartwright and wainwright, suggesting not the lofty inspiration of the muses but rather artisanal labour and manufacture of new commodities out of raw materials.
Other governing composition metaphors confirm the abiding sense of writing as construction rather than, or as well as, invention. Ben Jonson likened a sentence to âstones well squared, which will rise strong a great way without mortarâ (2012: 565); for Seneca, he observed, the writer was a bee, collecting nectar from different flowers and blending them into something sweetly distinct âto draw forth out of the best and choicest flowers, with the bee, and turn all into honeyâ (583). In a less idealizing idiom, Tiffany Stern has traced the early modern vocabularies of âpatchingâ and associated words from cobbling and shoemaking for thinking about plays as textual assemblages (Stern 2004). The different hands in the manuscript of The Book of Sir Thomas More, including the interventions attributed to Shakespeare, make this concept of the patched play visible (Jowett 2011). These theories and practices of imitation and adaptation give the early modern literary text some of the qualities of the twentieth-century âfound poemâ, an artifice recycled from parts of other texts.
Almost all Shakespeareâs works conform to this humanist pattern. They revise or adapt a major source, as well as incorporating allusions or more local borrowings from a range of texts, including previous works by Shakespeare. They thus demonstrate the different vectors of âadaptation as quotation, as allusion, as embedding, as appropriation, and as palimpsestâ (Corrigan 2017: 26). Reviewing changing meanings of the word âoriginalâ across the period, John Kerrigan identifies that Shakespeare âdoes new things with and adds extensively to what he draws from pre-existing texts, but his originality is partly original-ity, a drawing upon originalsâ. He suggests that Shakespeare would not understand the prior texts from which he works as his âsourcesâ, as is now conventional, but rather his âoriginalsâ (2018: 2). That Shakespeare drew extensively on reading in creating his works was always understood, and part of the appreciation of his writing and stagecraft was the pleasure of spotting what was being imitated. Imitatio, the art of imitation, was a sign of the shared sophistication of both writer and reader: the authorâs allegiances were intended to be visible. One contemporary authority on imitation recommended that the author âwoulde have it knowne whom he imitateth, although he would not have it spyed, how and after what sort he doth itâ (Sturm 1570: sig. H1v). Imitation always invited âcomparison between the new text and the earlier oneâ (Burrow 2019: 17). Linda Hutcheon calls this appreciation of the adaptation âthe doubled pleasure of the palimpsestâ (2013: 116). For later adaptations of Shakespeare, the pleasure of recognition is also the pleasure of participation in the elite cultural register signified by Shakespeareâs works (Teague 2011; Maxwell and Rumbold 2018); for Shakespeareâs first consumers, that shared elite pleasure attached not to contemporary vernacular plays but rather to an educated familiarity with their classical antecedents.
Early appreciations of Shakespeare understood his works within this larger allusive and imitative tradition. Francis Meres drew on the classical trope of metempsychosis: âas the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeareâ (1598: 281v); attending a performance of Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple, John Manningham began by describing his enjoyment of its borrowings: âmuch like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Iganniâ (Manningham 1868: 18). Meres and Manningham articulate Hutcheonâs âdoubled pleasureâ by acknowledging both the current work and the prior texts they each recognize it adapting.
This chapter discusses adaptation as intrinsic to Shakespeareâs poetry and dramaturgy: to the texture of his writing as well as the construction of his plays. Works by Shakespeare that are now considered originary and original were in fact always adaptations. Further, the forms of Shakespeareâs collaborative encounter with a range of prior material pre-empt some of the ways later adaptation theory has understood the relationship between an adaptation and the work it is understood to adapt. These foundational collaborations alter the interpretative order of priority: because Shakespeareâs own adaptations have taken on the status of originals, they invert the evaluative assumption that the adaptation must always be secondary, derivative or otherwise lesser. Revisiting common metaphors for thinking about an imitating authorâs relation to his literary predecessors â imagery of digestion, haunting, grafting and parentage â enables us to understand some Shakespearean plots and scenes as self-exploring allegories of adaptive writing. The example of King Lear, a play taken from a range of sources including the close relative King Leir, enables us to explore in more detail the ways in which Shakespeare adapts his own, as well as othersâ, work. There are suggestive relationships between these initial acts of adaptation by Shakespeare, and the strategies employed by later adaptors of his work.
SHAKESPEARE AND ADAPTATION THEORY
In her book Adaptation and Appropriation (2016), Julie Sanders identifies a number of adaptive practices, drawn from her analysis of later reworkings of literary texts. Each of these can be traced in Shakespeareâs own engagement with his source materials, establishing his own works as adaptations. Adaptations of prose chronicle material gathered together by Raphael Holinshed into single and serial historical dramas are a Shakespearean example of what Sanders calls âtranspositionalâ adaptation, or âcasting a specific genre into another generic modeâ (2016: 26). âTrimming and pruningâ is part of Shakespeareâs adaptive method, as in his habitual condensation of long time spans into shorter, more immediate plots (combining the historical Richard IIâs two wives from the historical record in Richard II, for example), and so too is âexpansion, accretion, and interpolationâ (23). Lucrece develops almost two thousand lines of poetry out of just seventy-three lines in Ovidâs Fasti. Shakespearean works which offer âcommentaryâ via a ârevised point of view on a source textâ (61) include Romeo and Julietâs more indulgent take on its transgressive lovers compared with the cautionary moral tale Shakespeare found in Arthur Brookeâs poem Romeus and Juliet, or the post-heroic retelling of Virgilian epic in the sardonic Troilus and Cressida. Sandersâs âprocesses of proximation and updatingâ (23) are involved in Macbethâs transformation of violent Scottish history via James Iâs commitment to the divine right of kings, or in Measure for Measureâs urban plague-scape, drawing on a recent serious outbreak of pestilence in 1603â4. And, there were always âeconomic rationalesâ (23) for adaptation in the commercial theatre environment that shaped Shakespeareâs writing career. The theatreâs appetite for new plays demanded the review of classical and contemporary texts with an eye to appropriate storylines for adaptation (Hutcheon 2013: 6â7): Cinthioâs Hecatommithi, for Othello and Measure for Measure, Chaucerâs âThe Knightâs Taleâ for A Midsummer Nightâs Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Plutarchâs Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans for Antony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens. Shakespeareâs own relation to his source material, that is to say, can be helpfully understood through the framework of later adaptation theory.
We can also see Shakespeareâs reuse of his own material as an adaptive strategy recognizable in later theories of the genre. One small example: in The Merchant of Venice, the servant Lancelot Gobbo encounters his blind father who has come to Venice to look for his son, and vows to âtry confusions with himâ (2.2.22). Lancelot speaks to his father as if he were a stranger, directing him through the imaginary streets of the city, informing him his son is dead with the proverbial âit is a wise father that knows his own childâ (2.2.49â50). He then reveals his true identity, only for the tables to be turned: his father âcannot think you are my sonâ, and requires proof. Lancelot shares the name of his mother, Margery, and the two are finally introduced. The encounter between son and father shadows the other parental relationships in the play, between Shylock and Jessica, and Portia and her dead father. The prose exchange in Merchant lasts for some fifty lines, and seems to be a virtuoso opportunity for the comedian Lancelot, perhaps acted by Will Kemp, to play off the other actor as stooge.
Shakespeare adapts this scene in two later plays. The first is the recognition scene between estranged family members in Twelfth Night, where blood ties are again reinstated through the shared memory of absent relations. Viola and her twin Sebastian meet, and in a lengthy exchange, confirm their bond by reference to their father (5.1.228). This adaptation modifies tone (it is full of pathos rather than humour) and genre (verse rather than prose). The second takes up the dramaturgy of the son and his blind father with more profound adaptive energy. In King Lear, Edgar, in the guise of Poor Tom, encounters his father Gloucester: ââTis the timeâs plague, when madmen lead the blindâ (4.1.54). They are together across three scenes until the climax, when Edgar coaches Gloucester to jump from an imaginary cliff: âWhy I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure itâ (4.5.40â1). The transformation of Lancelotâs jest with his father is complete as Shakespeare adapts his own earlier scene through amplification, transposition and commentary.
But the scene of the blind father and the disguised son also carries with it the hidden, allusive contours of the earlier iteration. The adaptation is always bound to its generative prior text, and always understood relationally: it is intrinsic to the status of adaptation that it bears what Hutcheon calls a âdouble natureâ (Hutcheon 2013: 6). The Dover Cliff sequence in King Lear has long been seen as the high point of the playâs bleak epistemology, but it might also be a chance for the Edgar actor, whose performance was particularly highlighted on the title page of the first edition of the play as âthe sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlamâ (Shakespeare 1608), to perform a bravura comic turn rather like that of Lancelot Gobbo. Thinking of shared themes and moments across Shakespeareâs plays through the lens of adaptation gives a new way to identify their creative transformations, and to recognize the traces of their previous lives. For example, Shakespeare adapts Jonsonâs character Thorello from Every Man In His Humour, and Cinthioâs story of the Moor of Venice, to produce Othello, but he also adapts his own comic jealous lover plot from The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado About Nothing (and will adapt these and Othello again for The Winterâs Tale). The uneasily comic aspects of Othello (Snyder 1979; Teague 1986) are one legacy of this adaptive itinerary: the adaptation cannot â perhaps would not â entirely forget its predecessors. As a form of remembering, the adaptation carries within it its own past.
ADAPTATION AND ITS METAPHORS
Shakespeare rarely draws direct attention to his own participation in the humanist hide and seek of imitatio and adaptation. But bringing his source onstage as a prop is a knowing nod to this form of audience recognition â it has its equivalents in later Shakespearean adaptations such as the use of Shakespeareâs sonnets as a classroom exercise in 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999), or the statue of Shakespeare in Gnomeo and Juliet (dir. Kelly Asbury, 2011). In Titus Andronicus, author, characters and the audience who also know their grammar school texts, are all complicit in a brutal adaptation of Ovidâs Metamorphoses, using this text as âpatternâ and âprecedentâ (5.3.44) â or, in Kerriganâs terms, an âoriginalâ â for acts of savage violence. The story of the rape of Philomel by Tereus is explicitly invoked by the rapists Chiron and Demetrius, and they attempt to forestall Philomelâs recourse to justice through embroidery by cutting off their victimâs hands. Rather as Chiron and Demetrius revel in their adaptive inhumanity, so the play too delights in its explicit engagement with the artistic predecessor: Young Lucius, âwith his Bookes under his Armeâ, as the quarto stage direction designates (Shakespeare 1594: sig. F3v), is chased by his mutilated aunt Lavinia, who uses his school copy of Ovid to reveal her wrongs.
Elsewhere the theme of imitation is less explicit, but still present. Many of the operating metaphors for imitation are thematized in Shakespeareâs works, making their indebtedness as adaptations part of the narrative motor of plot. Some books, wrote Francis Bacon, should be âchewed and digested thoroughlyâ, drawing on classical images from Seneca and Quintilian onwards of imitation and adaptation as digestive (Burrow 2019: 85, 95). When Tamora is fed her sons in âpastiesâ (5.2.189), the monstrous banquet literalizes Titus Andronicusâs own cannibalistic adaptive practices. The pastried sons, taken from Senecaâs Thyestes, conclude Titusâs revenge by casting it as a form of perverse adaptation, in which the prior texts need to be absorbed bodily, even unwillingly, as part of the work of dynamic transformation. Tamoraâs horrified revulsion at this enforced meal is a parable of the playâs disorderly digestion of its own antecedents. Her horror is a conceptual parallel with stagings that allow Lavinia, too, to express resistance to the playâs adaptive logic. Titus kills his daughter following the âprecedent and lively warrantâ of ârash Virginiusâ, and gains Saturninusâs agreement that âthe girl should not survive her shame, / And by her presence still renew his sorrowsâ (5.3.36â43). No stage direction indicates Laviniaâs response. The common staging is to have her submit, lovingly an...