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Introduction

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/intelitestud.17.2.0157

1524-8429

Elizabeth Kelley Bowman,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Pascale Aebischer was among the first scholars to address Mike Figgis's adaptation, in the film Hotel, of John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi. Aebischer proposed an understanding of the “presposterous” contemporary Jacobean film or play text, a “countercinematic” Warburgian Nachleben (afterlife) or adaptation as “cultural cannibalism”: anachronistic, narratologically disjointed, and irreverent.The early moderns’ anxiety over textual legacy and influence, the monuments and architecture of history, was refracted by late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century directors into Aebischer's “preposterous contemporary Jacobean,” a series of works like Hotel, Edward II, The Revengers Tragedy, and Coriolanus, that challenge and complicate the reception of Shakespearean or Websterian work. This category of the preposterous stands in contrast to works such as Shakespeare in Love or Anonymous (2011), a Da Vinci Code-style flowering of sentimentalism, conservatism, conspiracy theories, and contempt for scholarly accuracy.But there are other categories besides that binary. Brigitte Maria Mayer's film installation of her late husband Heinrich Muller's play Anatomie Titus: Fall of Rome foregrounds nonviolence, global vision, femininity and the female voice, and restoration of society, recalling Webster and Theobald's visions. This is not the preposterous, but the immense, the transcendent. The articles collected in this volume include works beyond Jacobean tragedy, and perspectives beyond binary opposition.Jennifer Flaherty examines the “both nostalgic and preposterous” portrayal of the city of Rome in Taymor's Titus and Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus, deliberately ambiguous for Fiennes and heavily specific for Taymor. Subversion and confirmation of sentimentality jumble together in those adaptations, as Flaherty complicates any easy answer. Sébastien Lefait considers Shakespearean reflexivity in the “fidelity” of Anonymous in this issue, while Patricia Wareh examines “thrift” in Hamlet and the television show Slings and Arrows. Edward Plough disrupts discourse with his musical-theater adaptation of Pericles, pursuing a path forward from the dispute over “original practices.” Benjamin Hilb discusses counters and disputes to wartime propaganda in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight; Louise Geddes approaches Thatcherite Britain theater in the context of “useable culture,” particularly Barrie Keefe's A Mad World, My Masters. Dan Mills explores postmodern canonization in Mystery Science Theater 3000's production for television of Hamlet.These critical approaches all experiment with received theory—as do the adaptations they cover. Mike Figgis's nontraditional, even antitraditional, adaptation of Dutchesse participates in, even defines for Aebischer, the category of the preposterous: a deliberately deconstructive, challenging approach to sacred cows of the literary canon, including William Shakespeare and even the more obscure Webster. This definition is somewhat elastic for Aebischer, being used to designate related adaptations of Elizabethan and Carolinian plays as well.Aebischer describes the Jacobean era as the locus for all horror, on the basis of an energetic group of violent tragedies, although the great Jacobean tragedies were produced alongside many comedies and tragicomedies, and the same author or collaborators would usually produce both kinds of plays. Webster, for example, wrote or collaborated on more extant comedies than he did tragedies, but is popularly—inaccurately—understood as a synonym for Grand Guignol horror, portrayed in Shakespeare in Love of a budding serial killer, or by T. S. Eliot as “much possessed by death.” Kenneth Tynan said, in reviewing a performance of Malfi: Webster is not concerned with humanity. He is the poet of bile and brainstorm, the sweet singer of apoplexy; ideally, one feels, he would have had all his characters drowned in a sea of cold sweat. His muse drew nourishment from Bedlam, and might, a few centuries later, have done the same from Belsen. I picture him plagued with hypochrondria, probably homosexual, and consumed by feelings of persecution … (44) Concurrently, the Jacobean era itself has become a cultural touchstone for graphic violence and sexuality, although the Renaissance sources for films like Hotel are themselves often adaptations of ancient literature and historical records, rather than being particular to their times. Certainly, some eras have different tastes than others, as, for example, the Jacobean and Carolinian theaters were followed by the closing of the theaters under Cromwell and then the Restoration. But Anatomie Titus is as much the contemporary Roman as the contemporary Elizabethan (not Jacobean, of course, although in other ways it is not far removed from Aebischer's concept).Julie Taymor's Titus illuminates the radicalism of Hotel and Anatomie Titus by comparison. Where those works are overtly radical in their use of source texts and in their visual portrayals of architecture and in their critique of social structure, Titus illustrates a contemporary film and theater director's conflicted use and nonuse of violence in adapting a famously violent Elizabethan play. Aebischer's discussion of films notably ignores Titus, except for a brief reference to its cannibalism (280), although she extensively analyzes Shakespeare in Love and Hotel.Titus simply does not fit Aebischer's formula as the other two do. While Tom Stoppard's screenplay for Shakespeare in Love provides all the clichés of Hollywood in a superficial, romanticized look at late Elizabethan culture, it also sardonically presents the concept of the contemporary Jacobean: John Webster as a tiny boy, torturing animals in the true psychopathic manner, telling Shakespeare that Titus Andronicus is his inspiration, as Aebischer notes, although she does not make the connection to Titus.How the bleak tragedy of Titus is supposed to have influenced the cheerful, earthy majority of Webster's work in his many collaborative comedies is not explained. The reference is rather a convenient, superficial manner of demonizing Webster, and perhaps, by extension, the Jacobean tragedy, while Shakespeare romances an aristocratic woman who cross-dresses to act in his plays (only one of the film's many anachronistic plot elements), writes Elizabethan comedies, and mopes.The Duchess is motivated by a desire for self-determination and love for Antonio. Shakespeare has plenty of violence, whether or not he relished it: Titus Andronicus, King Lear, and so on. What about Webster's city comedies, tragicomedy, Monumental Column? Neither Webster nor the Jacobeans in general were simply about violence and tragedy. Thus we have articles here revolving around comical and life-affirming adaptations as well. Even in Marlowe, Faustus falls partly through love and not a relish of violence. While Aebischer accepts the general critical focus on Webster as solely a violent tragedian, she does suggest that Hotel critiques a superficial understanding of the Jacobean as a signifier for violent transgressive impulses.Aebischer describes Stoppard's reference as “an obvious insider's joke directed at more knowledgeable viewers who will understand that Webster is in a conflictual relationship with his main influence, Shakespeare, and that his plays, unlike Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, are motivated not by love but by a relish of violence” (288). This sweeping generalization ignores Webster's many collaborative, light-comedic plays, such as Westward Ho! and The Cure for a Cuckold—which outnumber his two tragedies and one tragicomedy, although the comedies have been all but forgotten by scholars, let alone the public—as well as Shakespeare's many bleak tragedies and histories such as King Lear and Richard III, to achieve a caricaturized, inaccurate contrast between Shakespeare as an idealistic humanist and Webster as an apparent psychopath. The question of Webster's main influence is hardly answered by the assumption of Shakespeare. Shakespeare had not yet been anointed by Johnson when Webster wrote, and he existed in a sea of competitors. Furthermore, Webster's tragedies are more often compared to Marlowe's. Romeo and Juliet, of course, is a tragedy that demonstrates the power of violent hatred to destroy young lovers. If Romeo and Juliet, as characters, were “motivated by love,” so was the duchess of Malfi, who only wanted to marry the man she loved. The assassin Bosola, hired by her incestuously jealous brother, is a man of business, who kills for money, not solely a “relish of violence”; at any rate, a Stoppardesque facile conflation of an author with the most depraved character possible to find in his entire body of work is simply illogical. Indeed, Malfi has more in common with Romeo and Juliet (or a more mature pair, Antony and Cleopatra) in terms of plot and character than it does with primarily violence-driven Shakespearean tragedies like Titus Andronicus or Macbeth. Stoppard's comparison fails.Hotel, on the other hand, is an obscure, art-house exercise in experimental technique, dismissed by audiences and academic critics alike until Aebischer's article nearly a decade after its release: It is no coincidence … that Hotel's most explicit critique of the cinematic gaze is contained in the words of the hotel maid, the only words in the film to have been scripted by Figgis himself. The critique of the director's controlling male gaze ventriloquizes the director's own words: no female subject, whether the Duchess or the maid, actually achieves sexual or artistic autonomy in this film. (Aebischer 301–02) To critique the hotel maid's words as non-autonomous because they were scripted by the director, however, is to suggest that no script can possibly portray an autonomous voice even within the confines of the fictional realm, that Hamlet does not really speak for himself within the confines of fictional Denmark. Aebischer is also implying here that author and character are the same, a fallacy of authorial intent.For Aebischer, Hotel allows us to forego sentimental nostalgia and avoid the intellectual pitfalls of the Shakespeare industry by focusing on Webster, since Webster's Jacobean play is “alien enough to be new” (281): Using Webster's Duchess of Malfi as a “preposterous” pre-text, Hotel takes issue with Shakespeare's canonical status, challenging his preeminence through an aggressive riposte to the disparagement of Webster in John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1999), one of Hotel's principal intertexts. Rather than offering Shakespeare in Love's transparent correspondence between the plot of the frame narrative and the play-within-the-film, Hotel—much like Kristian Levring's contemporary Dogme reworking of King Lear in The King Is Alive (2000)—resists straightforward parallels and a reliance on convention and the roots of culture (280).Anatomie Titus represents a third path, overtly deconstructing a straight reading of the text and questioning the emphasis on language and Western ideas of self-determination and self-representation with the Warburgian juxtaposition with other cultures and mores. Mayer's work suggests not satirical nonsense, but a cataloged immensity, the transcendence of language through art and culture: Africa, Asia, as well as Europe. The “survival of the Antique” that Warburg admired represents the commonality of humanity and exposes the facade of cultural hegemony.Titus does not have a “preposterous” purpose in Aebischer's sense: the intent of deconstructing the Shakespeare industry, and the film industry as a whole, by exposing the constructed nature of film and gender roles, and exposing the violence film does. Titus undercuts any notion of Shakespeare's plays as uninterested in violence or psychopathy, and resolves the artificial conflict Aebischer sets up between Shakespeare and the “Jacobeans” (among whom she apparently counts the Elizabethan Marlowe), for Shakespeare's productive period actually bridges the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.Anxiety over control, influence, and legacy in critical approaches to these adaptations is well founded in familial, dynastic, and architectural dissolution in these texts and their contexts. Families, dynasties, and architecture break upon the shoals of characters who begin to refuse their proscribed roles even in the constant barrage of pressure to conform, to obey, and to be silent. Sometimes that refusal is a fortunate fall, but sometimes hubristic, a fatal flaw. The progressive, disturbing, paradigm-shattering adaptation history of Malfi is contained and foreshadowed in microcosm in the defiance of Webster's protagonist. The duchess is not star-crossed so much as she becomes star-crossing: “I could curse the Starres.” As she defied accepted norms and certain elements of systemic sexism, it is not surprising to see later adaptors further develop the “femininity,” romance, and Hall-of-Mirrors structure suggested throughout Webster's text in the duchess's flight to a Marian shrine, her brief revival after death, and her ghostly Echo.Although this is a literary and not a geopolitical study, we do acknowledge the continuing attention of the news media to lingering practices of honor killing and female genital cutting in some Muslim groups in Europe and North America, as well as in some Muslim groups in Africa and Asia. These news accounts generally treat honor killing and mutilation as barbaric expressions of an ethnic, political, and religious threat from beyond the gates of civilization, yet we find parallel practices in the European literary canon, to say nothing of European and North American history down to the present day, and particularly in the revenge tragedies of the preposterous contemporary Jacobean adaptation. Underlying my own use of the term “honor killing” in the study of these tragedies is an assertion of this European parallel to scapegoated practices.The passage of time distorts. History is as untranslatable as a foreign language. Yet I, like many, have come to relax a strictly rectilinear way of thinking and become more fluid, to articulate and release anxieties and encroaching paranoia, to see the tempest as a tide. I did not expect what I found in Figgis or Mayer. Nor did I expect what I found in Webster or Shakespeare. Looking at these works, and being swept up in their dreaming, changed me. The multifaceted approach to vertical and horizontal levels of adaptation mined metaphors that developed into expressions of anxiety and responses of comfort. Attempts at control were unsuccessful, both in the original texts, where such attempts destroyed societies, and in adaptation history, where many adaptors freely remixed existing works. Yet this loss of control was not in itself destructive, but rather a renewal of fertility and promise.