The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation

Diana E. Henderson,Stephen O'Neill

• Éditeur: The Arden Shakespeare
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350110311
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation explores the dynamics of adapted Shakespeare across a range of literary genres and new media forms. This comprehensive reference and research resource maps the field of Shakespeare adaptation studies, identifying theories of adaptation, their application in practice and the methodologies that underpin them. It investigates current research and points towards future lines of enquiry for students, researchers and creative practitioners of Shakespeare adaptation. The opening section on research methods and problems considers definitions and theories of Shakespeare adaptation and emphasises how Shakespeare is both adaptor and adapted.A central section develops these theoretical concerns through a series of case studies that move across a range of genres, media forms and cultures to ask not only how Shakespeare is variously transfigured, hybridised and valorised through adaptational play, but also how adaptations produce interpretive communities, and within these potentially new literacies, modes of engagement and sensory pleasures. The volume's third section provides the reader with uniquely detailed insights into creative adaptation, with writers and practice-based researchers reflecting on their close collaborations with Shakespeare's works as an aesthetic, ethical and political encounter. The Handbook further establishes the conceptual parameters of the field through detailed, practical resources that will aid the specialist and non-specialist reader alike, including a guide to research resources and an annotated bibliography.

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: ‘Othello was “based on a story by Giovanni Battista Giraldi, or Cinzio, adapted by William Shakespeare.” Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus were “based on Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Thomas North, adapted by Shakespeare”; Henry V and most of the other history plays were “based on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, adapted by Shakespeare”’ (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 Taylor’s 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 ‘playwright’, 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 ‘stones well squared, which will rise strong a great way without mortar’ (2012: 565); for Seneca, he observed, the writer was a bee, collecting nectar from different flowers and blending them into something sweetly distinct ‘to draw forth out of the best and choicest flowers, with the bee, and turn all into honey’ (583). In a less idealizing idiom, Tiffany Stern has traced the early modern vocabularies of ‘patching’ 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 ‘found poem’, an artifice recycled from parts of other texts.

Almost all Shakespeare’s 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 ‘adaptation as quotation, as allusion, as embedding, as appropriation, and as palimpsest’ (Corrigan 2017: 26). Reviewing changing meanings of the word ‘original’ across the period, John Kerrigan identifies that Shakespeare ‘does new things with and adds extensively to what he draws from pre-existing texts, but his originality is partly original-ity, a drawing upon originals’. He suggests that Shakespeare would not understand the prior texts from which he works as his ‘sources’, as is now conventional, but rather his ‘originals’ (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 author’s allegiances were intended to be visible. One contemporary authority on imitation recommended that the author ‘woulde have it knowne whom he imitateth, although he would not have it spyed, how and after what sort he doth it’ (Sturm 1570: sig. H1v). Imitation always invited ‘comparison between the new text and the earlier one’ (Burrow 2019: 17). Linda Hutcheon calls this appreciation of the adaptation ‘the doubled pleasure of the palimpsest’ (2013: 116). For later adaptations of Shakespeare, the pleasure of recognition is also the pleasure of participation in the elite cultural register signified by Shakespeare’s works (Teague 2011; Maxwell and Rumbold 2018); for Shakespeare’s 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: ‘as the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare’ (1598: 281v); attending a performance of Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple, John Manningham began by describing his enjoyment of its borrowings: ‘much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Iganni’ (Manningham 1868: 18). Meres and Manningham articulate Hutcheon’s ‘doubled pleasure’ by acknowledging both the current work and the prior texts they each recognize it adapting.

This chapter discusses adaptation as intrinsic to Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 author’s relation to his literary predecessors – imagery of digestion, haunting, grafting and parentage – 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 others’, 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 Shakespeare’s 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 ‘transpositional’ adaptation, or ‘casting a specific genre into another generic mode’ (2016: 26). ‘Trimming and pruning’ is part of Shakespeare’s adaptive method, as in his habitual condensation of long time spans into shorter, more immediate plots (combining the historical Richard II’s two wives from the historical record in Richard II, for example), and so too is ‘expansion, accretion, and interpolation’ (23). Lucrece develops almost two thousand lines of poetry out of just seventy-three lines in Ovid’s Fasti. Shakespearean works which offer ‘commentary’ via a ‘revised point of view on a source text’ (61) include Romeo and Juliet’s more indulgent take on its transgressive lovers compared with the cautionary moral tale Shakespeare found in Arthur Brooke’s poem Romeus and Juliet, or the post-heroic retelling of Virgilian epic in the sardonic Troilus and Cressida. Sanders’s ‘processes of proximation and updating’ (23) are involved in Macbeth’s transformation of violent Scottish history via James I’s commitment to the divine right of kings, or in Measure for Measure’s urban plague-scape, drawing on a recent serious outbreak of pestilence in 1603–4. And, there were always ‘economic rationales’ (23) for adaptation in the commercial theatre environment that shaped Shakespeare’s writing career. The theatre’s appetite for new plays demanded the review of classical and contemporary texts with an eye to appropriate storylines for adaptation (Hutcheon 2013: 6–7): Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, for Othello and Measure for Measure, Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale’ for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans for Antony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens. Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 ‘try confusions with him’ (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 ‘it is a wise father that knows his own child’ (2.2.49–50). He then reveals his true identity, only for the tables to be turned: his father ‘cannot think you are my son’, 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: ‘’Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind’ (4.1.54). They are together across three scenes until the climax, when Edgar coaches Gloucester to jump from an imaginary cliff: ‘Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it’ (4.5.40–1). The transformation of Lancelot’s 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 ‘double nature’ (Hutcheon 2013: 6). The Dover Cliff sequence in King Lear has long been seen as the high point of the play’s 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 ‘the sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam’ (Shakespeare 1608), to perform a bravura comic turn rather like that of Lancelot Gobbo. Thinking of shared themes and moments across Shakespeare’s 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 Jonson’s character Thorello from Every Man In His Humour, and Cinthio’s 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 Winter’s Tale). The uneasily comic aspects of Othello (Snyder 1979; Teague 1986) are one legacy of this adaptive itinerary: the adaptation cannot – perhaps would not – 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 – it has its equivalents in later Shakespearean adaptations such as the use of Shakespeare’s 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 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, using this text as ‘pattern’ and ‘precedent’ (5.3.44) – or, in Kerrigan’s terms, an ‘original’ – 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 Philomel’s recourse to justice through embroidery by cutting off their victim’s 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, ‘with his Bookes under his Arme’, 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 Shakespeare’s works, making their indebtedness as adaptations part of the narrative motor of plot. Some books, wrote Francis Bacon, should be ‘chewed and digested thoroughly’, 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 ‘pasties’ (5.2.189), the monstrous banquet literalizes Titus Andronicus’s own cannibalistic adaptive practices. The pastried sons, taken from Seneca’s Thyestes, conclude Titus’s 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. Tamora’s horrified revulsion at this enforced meal is a parable of the play’s disorderly digestion of its own antecedents. Her horror is a conceptual parallel with stagings that allow Lavinia, too, to express resistance to the play’s adaptive logic. Titus kills his daughter following the ‘precedent and lively warrant’ of ‘rash Virginius’, and gains Saturninus’s agreement that ‘the girl should not survive her shame, / And by her presence still renew his sorrows’ (5.3.36–43). No stage direction indicates Lavinia’s response. The common staging is to have her submit, lovingly an...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: RESEARCH METHODS AND PROBLEMS
• PART TWO: CURRENT RESEARCH AND ISSUES
• PART THREE: NEW DIRECTIONS
• Resources
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint