Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“Shaping Fantasies”: Responses to Shakespeare's Magic in Popular Culture

2009; Routledge; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450910902921591

1745-0926

Sarah Annes Brown,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Abstract Recent criticism has shown a tendency to demystify literature and distance itself from the human capacity for wonder. It has also downplayed the idea of genius, often subordinating the autonomy of the author to larger linguistic or political pressures and structures. In this essay I aim to demonstrate the continuing potency of the idea of the vates, or poet prophet, not in criticism, but in popular culture. By contrast with Plato, who thought the productions of poets and artists were merely weak copies of copied forms, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies, and Gareth Roberts's "The Shakespeare Code" all present the composition, performance and quotation of poetry as potentially magical, creative acts with the potential to summon new worlds into existence. Through their playful engagement with the boundaries which separate fiction from reality, this world from the next, each of these three popular responses to Shakespeare's magic achieves a delicate equipoise between belief and unbelief, scepticism and wonder, which may prove more subtle and satisfying than many scholarly responses. Keywords: Allusionbardolatry Doctor Who GaimanKiplingmeta-theatre A Midsummer Night's Dream PlatoPratchettquotationRobertsShakespeare Notes 1. Wonder is briefly discussed by Fisher Fisher, Philip. 2003. The Vehement Passions, Princeton: Princeton UP. [Google Scholar], who suggests that "wonder occurs at the horizon line of what is potentially knowable, but not yet known" (2). 2. The Latin word means prophet, priest and poet. 3. In Greenblatt's Greenblatt Stephen . Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England . Oxford : Clarendon , 1988 . [Google Scholar] essay "Resonance and Wonder", the spiritual and metaphysical (and even to a large degree the aesthetic) effects of texts and other artefacts are occluded, although he does comment that a hat that may have belonged to Cardinal Wolsey "radiates a tiny quantum of cultural energy" (Learning to Curse 162). 4. In the Ion (534c) Plato asserts that poets are divinely inspired but describes this process in a largely negative way. See Halliwell Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. 5. Related discussions include Cope Cope, Jackson I. 1973. The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP. [Google Scholar]. 6. Discussions of Gaiman's treatment of Shakespeare include Castaldo Castaldo , Annalisa . "'No More Yielding than a Dream': The Construction of Shakespeare in The Sandman." College Literature 31.4 2004 94 110 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Lancaster Lancaster , Kurt . "Neil Gaiman's A Midsummer Night's Dream: Shakespeare's Integration into Popular Culture." Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.3 2000 69 77 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Myers Saxton Myers Saxton , Julie . "Dreams and Fairy Tales: The Theme of Rationality in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Sandman." The Neil Gaiman Reader Darrell Schweitzer . Rockville : Wildside , 2007 . 22 29 . [Google Scholar] and Sanders Sanders , Joe . "Of Storytellers and Stories in Gaiman and Vess's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'." Extrapolations 45.3 2004 237 48 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. 7. Individual elements and moments from these plays may of course be traced back to a great many earlier texts. 8. Sanders (240–41) offers a useful account of the way Gaiman's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"—and particularly Vess's artwork—engages with the idea that a play can seem to change reality by "magic". 9. On Bottom's dream see Joughin, and Kott Kott, Jan. 1987. The Bottom Translation, Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP. [Google Scholar] (31–32). 10. James Calderwood's Calderwood , James L. Shakespearean Metadrama . Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P , 1971 . [Google Scholar] account of Bottom's experience opens up a further "portal" between A Midsummer Night's Dream and another textual world, Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". In this poem the knight awakes from his encounter with a fairy and finds himself on the "cold hill's side", a phrase that Calderwood Calderwood , James L. Shakespearean Metadrama . Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P , 1971 . [Google Scholar] here echoes: "Seeking to translate himself from weaver into Pyramus during the rehearsal of the workmen's play, Bottom finds himself transported right on through the illusion of drama into a fairyland reality which, when he makes his return journey to the cold hillside of perturbed reason, dissolves into dream" (128). 11. See Platt Platt, Peter G. 1997. Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvellous, Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P. [Google Scholar] (124–25). 12. See, for example, Leggatt Leggatt, Alexander. 1990. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar] (107). 13. See note 4.