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Panels
PANEL 1 - Ghosting Shakespeare: Filmic Distortions and Technological Inversions in Shakespearean Adaptations
This panel examines Shakespearean adaptations in which technology reanimates but also overwrites the original Shakespeare plays. Whether the use of technology actively resists the Shakespearean text or augments it, each member of this panel seeks to elucidate how the film adaptation goes into conversation with the original text, how these adaptations complicate, compromise, or adulterate the material.
To Film or not to Film: Technological Anxieties in Hamlet 2000
Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, henceforth referred to as Hamlet 2000, notably places the play within turn-of-the-millennium Manhattan. This paper will examine this adaptation of Hamlet, asking how technology in Almereyda’s film serves to replace the religious anxieties in Shakespeare’s texts. The film’s presentation of technology as key to adapting Hamlet’s key questions of ethics integrates the audience into the text, but calls the audience to question the reality of technological presentation and change. Almereyda’s adaption further cuts much of the play, whittling it to less than two hours and relying upon knowledge of both the tropes of productions of Hamlet and the pop culture references it insists on using throughout the film. Beyond this, outside of the obviously utilized Shakespeare content, Hamlet 2000 distills the anxieties of living at the turn of the millennium, Y2K, and the rapidly diversifying technological market. Shakespeare’s characters interact with a vast array of technology in the film; however, these items were mostly obsolete by the release date of the film in January 2000 at Sundance. The inclusion of this technology already dates the movie, even as it was released; reassessing it eighteen years later simply reinforces this understanding. The media usage within Almereyda’s films conveys the same existential anxieties that religion carries in the quarto texts, and adapts technology to tell the story of existential anxiety in the Y2K era. The presentation of the Ghost through CCTV televisions and Hamlet’s obsession with rewriting and retelling his own story are two critical cruxes where technological presentation supersedes the original text, replacing discussion of religious questions towards the ethics and realities of technological intervention in the modern age. Almereyda’s film calls into question our own acceptance of the role of technology in the modern era, as well as the problems inherent in making technology an inherent part of our collective consciousness.
Mikaela LaFave is a first year Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia studying Shakespeare and adaptation. She completed her Masters in English at Georgia College and State University where her research encompassed a study of space and place in selected Shakespeare plays.
I’ll make a ghost of him- The Wooster Group remixes Burton’s performance of Hamlet
In 2005 The Wooster Group started to develop a performance of Hamlet that would tour theatre festivals and continue to be performed for over eight years.
The text they used was not a script of Hamlet, but a video recording of the 1964 Broadway production directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton as Hamlet. Through digital video manipulation, they cut, sped up fast forwarded and sometimes removed parts of that performance, which The Wooster Group then mirrored with live actors on the stage. Their choice of performance text was a culturally significant performance of a canonical text, directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton, names synonymous with theatre, and specifically Shakespearean, theatrical history. It was also the first Broadway stage show to be simultaneously broadcast to cinemas all over the country, making it a technologically as well as culturally significant. What I will explore are the ways in which The Wooster Group remix, glitch and ultimately break Burton’s performance. From appearing to recreate and mirror Burton’s performance, we see a process by which they distort and ultimately ghost Burton, distorting his performance into something at times unrecognizable from the original.
Anna Corbould is a third year Dramatic Media MFA student at the University of Georgia. Her area of focus is media-based theatre, with an emphasis on the works of The Wooster Group and Robert Lepage. She is currently working on her thesis project, which is a multimedia, interactive performance of passages from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Moliere’s Tartuffe.
“Cloud Capped Towers” Made of Sand: Place and Illusion in Taymor’s Tempest
This paper examines how Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of The Tempest uses location shooting and computer-generated effects both to align with and subvert the original play’s language of utopian, poetically constructed “golden” worlds. In addition to Taymor’s inversion of Prospero’s gender in the form of Helen Mirren’s Prospera, the film takes the marked non-location of the play’s setting and re-presents it (rewriting some of the lines in the play to accommodate the shift) on the volcanic, black sand beaches of Hawaii, a decision which, while grounding the play with a sense of place, induces one to question the ecological cost, or the toll this production may have taken on the “untouched” shooting locations. Awarded a position of primacy in the first folio, and described by Jonathan Bate as both a summation of Shakespeare’s artistic philosophy and as “a prologue to the whole thrust of technological modernity,” The Tempest as play is preoccupied with the limits of the theatrical medium and the extent to which the artificiality of the stage, and the speeches delivered thereon, may influence the world outside of its fiction.1 Rather than a strict adaptation or translation of the play onto the screen, the film presents itself as a kind of sequel or retrospective to Shakespeare’s anticipation of technological modernity, and employs its filmic tropes and abilities to continue a conversation initiated by its dramatic predecessor. Taymor’s film continues the original play’s program of reflexive self-assessment while seemingly rewriting or subverting the original play’s celebration of artistic utopias, its characterization of Prospero as the roving artist figure, and the closure afforded by Prospero’s ultimate “retirement” from his art, thus calling into question whether an adaptation may both achieve and undercut fidelity to its source.
Philip Gilreath is a PhD student with the University of Georgia English Department. His interests include Early Modern Literature, theories of adaptation, appropriation, and ecocriticism.
PANEL 2 - Archive, Performance, Media: In Memory of Barbara Hodgdon
Archive Pressure
This paper takes as its starting-point Barbara Hodgdon’s mixing of personal memories of performances and attentive listening to recordings for her final essay, on “The Shakespearean Phonograph” (Shakespeare Bulletin 35.1, 2017), to think through some of the problems generated by the much-celebrated increased availability of Shakespearean performances in digital archives. The proliferation of theatre broadcasts and online sharing platforms, compounded by the practices of (live-)tweeting or blogging during and after performances, has led to growing expectation that Shakespeare scholars will have ‘seen’ most significant new productions of Shakespeare plays by the largest producing houses in the UK and Canada. To study Shakespeare in performance is increasingly a matter of catching up with an ever-expanding archive of productions, generating new forms of ‘archive pressure’ that are tied up with questions of physical, geographical, and financial access that demand some scrutiny. To what extent is the theoretically enhanced access to performances exclusionary in practice? What impact do different modes of distribution have on access? How does the proliferation of digital remediations of performances affect Shakespeare scholarship, the canon, methodologies, community-building and participation?
Pascale Aebischer is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (2004), Jacobean Drama (2010), and Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (2013). Most recently, she was co-editor of Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (2018) with Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie Osborne. Her current research focuses on bodies and performance technologies (from candlelight through social media to theatre broadcast), as well as on the connection between the reconstruction of early modern playhouses and urban regeneration.
From Space to Surface, and Back Again
This paper draws on the practical experience of tracking theatrical performances from specific locations into the digital archive for both pedagogical and research uses, asking how such productions do (or don’t) alter presumptions about Shakespeare on/as film. Building on the potential available since the advent of videotape for repeated, simultaneous close listening and seeing that can imprint lasting memories even as it disrupts linear delivery and theatrical narratology, has the computer platform substantially altered the experience of the past’s film archive? What contexts and training are required to help our senses transcend the surface and scale of the viewing screen, and can this induce a different phenomenological experience of imagined 3- or 4-dimensional reception? Resisting a static vocabulary of Shakespeare as cross-medial content, I suggest that close reading-in-pieces (a venerable tradition often mocked within academia) could offset Shakespeare fatigue, and revitalize both the playtexts and sensorium of ever-more-distracted, information-surfeited consumers.
Diana E. Henderson is Professor of Literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, and the co-editor of Shakespeare Studies (2014- ). She is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (2006) and Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (1995), and edited Blackwell’s Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (2006) and Alternative Shakespeares 3 (2008). She has worked as a dramaturg, theatrical consultant and PI for the MITx Global Shakespeares Merchant module. She is currently co-editing collections on Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy and Shakespeare and Adaptation.
His Master’s Voice
This paper takes its first cue from an iconic image, painted in 1899 by Francis Barraud, subsequently adopted and adapted as the trademark of the record company EMI, and displayed on the front cover of my three-disc set vinyl recording of John Gielgud’s Hamlet, performed with the Old Vic company and released in 1957. Depicting a small dog, head cocked slightly to the left, intently listening to the voice of his absent, possibly dead, owner, it is both a compelling summation of the dynamics of retrieval, loss and fidelity inherent in the cultural technologies of gramophone sound and an unwittingly Hamlet-like image of haunting and recurrence. It is also an image that uncannily mimics the styling of the actor who regarded himself as ‘Shakespeare’s servant’, and whom Simon Callow envisaged ‘head held high at a slight angle as if he were listening to an inner voice.’ I owe these examples to Barbara Hodgdon, whose essay ‘The Shakespearean phonograph’ provides my second cue: in this paper, I aim to listen again to Gielgud, to consider both the dramaturgy of a rendering of a legendary stage performance re-engineered as sound, and the types of work of cultural memory that it performs. Far from being a mere trace of its stage incarnation, as a voice (that voice) without a body, Gielgud’s 33 1/3 rpm Hamlet is perhaps its apotheosis; invisible, ubiquitous and endlessly re-performable in domestic space.
Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre at Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey. His books include Representing Shakespeare (1994), The Shakespeare Effect (2002), and, most recently, Shakespeare in Performance: As You Like It and Shakespeare in the Theatre: The National Theatre, 1963-1975: Olivier and Hall (both 2018). His current research has two main strands: performer training and rehearsal, and Shakespeare, performance and inclusivity.
PANEL 3 - Shakespearean Resurgences in the Digital Age: Reconfigurations of Gender, Race and Power in Contemporary American Film and TV Series
Richard III and Lady Macbeth transfigured and transmediated as Frank and Claire Underwood in House of Cards (Netflix 2013-): Linguistic, aesthetic and ethical considerations
The Shakespearean undertones of the American political TV series House of Cards have been repeatedly underscored in the press in the US these past few years (especially at the beginning of the show). The main actor himself, Kevin Spacey, told the Baltimore Sun that what characterised the original BBC TV series House of Cards and the book it was based on was that they were very much Shakespearean in inspiration. The BBC version of Frank was played by Ian Richardson who was a longstanding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company; and just before playing Frank Underwood, the American lead, Kevin Spacey, performed Richard III under Sam Mendes’s direction. This presentation will address what gives this series a specific Shakespearian feel from a linguistic, pragmatic and aesthetic perspective, taking also ethical and gender issues into consideration. If the British version could be said to be more theatrical, the American TV series seems to have distanced itself from it and drawn closer to cinematic aesthetics, and yet it still keeps the theatricality of the British series through the choice of the direct address to the viewer that recalls Richard III’s asides to the audience. The specific structural role of the aside in the digital piece will be specially analysed as well as the specificities of the modern manipulative villains-heroes of the 21st century. The Frank and Claire couple seems to be the sum of two different Shakespearian characters, marked by cunning, ruthlessness and deception. What will be delved into is what the technological and cultural context of the 21st century brings to the staging of the couple. What can speaking through the screen do that the theatrical aside cannot or vice versa? How are manipulation and hypocrisy pragmatically staged in the 21st century?
Sandrine Sorlin is Professor of English language and linguistics at Paul Valery University (Montpellier 3). Specialized in stylistics and pragmatics, she has published books on linguistic defamiliarisation in English literature (La Défamiliarisation linguistique dans le roman anglais contemporain, PULM, 2010) and on language and authority in a historical perspective (Langage et autorité: de l’ordre linguistique à la force dialogique, PUR, 2012). She is also the author of a handbook of stylistics (La Stylistique anglaise. Théories et Pratiques, PUR, 2014)and the co-editor of The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns with Laure Gardelle (John Benjamins, 2015) and The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter with Manuel Jobert (John Benjamins, 2018). Her latest monograph is a pragma-stylistic analysis of an American political TV series (Language and Manipulation in House of Cards: A Pragma-Stylistic Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).She is the current chair of the Société de Stylistique Anglaise
Claire Underwood in House of Cards (Netflix 2013-): The Digital Empowerment of Lady Macbeth
This paper will argue that the Underwoods, while recognizably a power-couple avatar of the Macbeths, are also “not-Shakespeare,” in the manner the series deviates from the script in which Lady Macbeth must go mad and commit suicide. The series’ construction of Claire can be read within a triple intertext: to Shakespeare, but also to other US presidential/First Lady series (Scandal in particular), focusing on powerful women’s rise to the ultimate form of power (with the White House as contemporary throne); and finally, to this US cultural moment (in particular, the 2016 US presidential election). I will focus on House of Cards 2.4 and the live streamed interview in which Claire answers a question on her childlessness, as a remediation of Lady Macbeth’s speech on motherhood (Macbeth I.2), as well as a Hamlet-like “play within the play,” and argue that through this digital mise en abyme and breaking of the fourth wall (in which she appropriates Frank’s Richard III-like direct address to the camera), Claire proves she can surpass and entrap others, including her husband. This announces the cliffhanger finale of Season 5 when she becomes president, in a reversal of real-life gendered power relations and Shakespearean power relations alike. Again, via the inset digital mediation of the televised national address (in which she pointedly does not pardon Frank, after having promised to do so), Claire engineers her autonomy from all preexisting scripts (intradiegetically, Frank’s; and intertextually, Shakespeare’s), and seems to embody a real-world revenge fantasy over Trump (whom Frank seems to stand for throughout Season 5).
Monica Michlin is Professor of Contemporary US Studies at Paul Valéry Montpellier University. In the field of TV series, she has edited a collection of articles on Battlestar Galactica (TV/Series vol.11, July 2017) and co-edited another with Hélène Machinal on Serial Posthumans (TV/Series vol.14, Dec. 2018). She is also co-editor of Formes de l’Apocalypse (e-book, 2017), Médiations apocalyptiques (e-book, 2018) and Programmes apocalyptiques (2019), as well as of Exposure/Overexposure (Sillages Critiques, 2014). Her own articles on TV series range from the representations of fictional US presidents to the Iraq War in Generation Kill, War on Terror in 24, or Recurrence, intertextuality and remediation in the US version of Queer as Folk. She is the current President of the French Association of American Studies (AFEA).
Uncanny Resurgence: the Othello Complex Reconfigured in Jordan Peele’s Get Out
What makes Get Out more race-horror comedy than race-horror tragedy is that the sympathetic black protagonist gets away with ferociously killing three rich white people and one white grandmother dressed in the skin of a black maid before almost finishing off Rose, his white girlfriend. But in so doing, Get Out’s Chris paradoxically reproduces with extreme prejudice the decline into savagism characteristic of what I have elsewhere described as “the Othello complex.” As schematized by Shakespeare—and elaborated by 400 years of racial stereotyping--this complex governs the process by which a presumptively “civilized” Moor responds to alleged marital betrayal by undertaking a ritualized revenge against the woman who has presumably stolen his “occupation” and manhood alike. In Get Out, by contrast, everything Shakespeare’s Othello wrongly suspects about the treachery of women is transposed to embrace the proven treachery of an entire tribe of deeply entitled white men and women. Chris is thus licensed (in a way Othello never is) to wreak a “wide and sweeping revenge” against conspirers who seek to steal his body and enslave his soul. But in casting aside the civility that attends this explosively updated version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Chris effectively confirms one of the working premises of yet another, earlier twist on Othello, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, whose protagonist claims that the artistry of renowned black musicians is pure sublimation, and that Charlie Parker “would’ve played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-Seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw.” Though Jordan Peele has constructed a film that arguably stages every African-American’s worst nightmare—the photos of past black victims that line Rose’s walls uncannily recall the parade of young black men seduced by Lula in Dutchman—in also staging what Baraka considers every African-American’s most deeply held desire, he has arguably evoked that other white American dreamscape in which fears of black male violence matter far more than the actual nature of black lives.
Thomas Cartelli is Professor of English & Film Studies at Muhlenberg College. He is author of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (1991), Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (1999), and co-author (with Katherine Rowe) of New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007). He has also edited The Norton Critical Richard III (2009) and single-text editions of Richard III for the Norton Shakespeare 3 (2016). His most recent book, Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: the Intermedial Turn & Turn to Embodiment, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
PANEL 4 - Translating metatheatricality to the screen
“The play’s the thing”: Shakespearean Performance and Gay Affirmative Action in Alan Brown’s Private Romeo (2011) and Tom Gustafson’s Were the World Mine (2008)
Far from intending a ‘faithful’ adaptation of Shakespearean texts, directors Alan Brown and Tom Gustafson have opted for citing and, consequently, assimilating the Bard’s materials into their own narrative projects. Both films present an initial situation absolutely alien to Shakespeare that will be gradually modified once the Shakespearean element enters into action. In Private Romeo the life of a group of male military cadets will be transformed thanks to the reading and performance of Romeo and Juliet, in the same way as the life of the population of a small American town will be deeply affected, in Gustafson’s film, by the local high school students’ rehearsals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the unexpected consequences of applying Puck’s magical potion to their real life. Shakespeare’s theatre, then, functions as a transformative force that changes the world for the better in what can be read as an attempt to stop anti-gay discriminatory practices in contemporary American society and institutions. Private Romeo, with a complete young all-male cast, and Were the World Mine, which, again, makes use of a predominantly young male cast are examples of the same American kiddie culture Richard Burt has already dealt with in Unspeakable Shaxxxspeares (1998). Using Burt's notion of the loser as a cool figure and Mark Thornton Burnett's concept of the Shakespeare film's engagement with globalization (Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace, 2007), this paper discusses how the Elizabethan playwright, while metadramatically overcited, remains unspoken in what seems to be a strategic turn to claim and/or celebrate pro-gay legislation and anti-bullying pedagogy in contemporary American and, by extension, First World political and educational agendas.
Juan Carlos Hidalgo is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and American Literature (University of Sevilla, Spain), where he teaches Cultural Studies and 16th -17th Century English Literature. His main research areas are Film Studies (16th-17th century adaptations), Contemporary British Theatre, Popular Culture and Queer Studies. He has published on Masculinities, Feminisms, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Queer Issues, Film Adaptations of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Contemporary Women Playwrights and Theatre History
Seinfeld/Armin/Shakespeare. Going meta in person
In the NBC sitcom Seinfeld, stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld, plays a fictionalised version of himself, also called Jerry Seinfeld and, also, a stand-up comedian. This fictionalised Jerry Seinfeld inhabits a show that is allegedly ‘about nothing’, while actually being about ordinary life, so ordinary that nobody would ever think of making a TV show out of it – and which turns out to be anything but ordinary. This scenario is itself fictionalised further in season 4 of the show, but in the direction of reality. Jerry and his fictional friend George Costanza pitch a TV show based on their fictional lives to the NBC network – which thereby becomes both the fictional and real producer of the show itself. In trying to write their own show, the characters end up writing their own lives, with unintended and hilarious consequences. In this paper, I will try to understand Seinfeld’s meta-fictionality as a return to modes of performance and storytelling which were already present in medieval and early modern theatre. There, the ancient idea that the world is a stage found a performative equivalent in interactive and self-consciously theatrical modes of drama. In the fools Will Kempe and Robert Armin, Shakespeare had two comedians who simultaneously served as inspirations for fictional characters and contributed themselves to their own fictionalisation on the stage and in reality through writing and acting. Drawing inspiration from the scholarly work of Andrew Gurr, Robert Weimann and Douglas Lanier, as well as from the BBC sitcom Upstart Crow, this paper seeks to bridge the temporal, spatial and medial gap between Seinfeld and Shakespeare’s plays to investigate the interplay between humour, fiction and, for lack of a better term, real life.
Reto Winckler studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and King's College London. He then went to China to teach English, literature and drama at universities in Xi'an, as well as working for the British Council. Since 2014, he has been reading for a PhD in English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Professor Julian Lamb. His research focuses on madness and folly in Shakespeare's plays. His articles have been published in The Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance and in Cahiers Élisabéthains.
Gregory Doran's Macbeth (2001): Filming metatheatre
This contends that Gregory Doran’s production of Macbeth (2001) was, when translated to television, transformed into a metaplay. Though analyses of Shakespeare’s Macbeth have explored its metatheatricality, this artistic concept has not been tackled in this production. I am reading Doran’s laying bare of the film’s theatrical apparatus and the film’s refractions of the crises occurring at the Royal Shakespeare Company while the film and the stage production were in process. I will address the main characters’ statuses as players in a theatricalized microcosm, explore the film’s backstage-onstage dynamics and discuss how the production’s visual meanings illuminate the company’s institutional crisis at the turn of the century.
Víctor Huertas Martín studied English Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He wrote his PhD “Hybridity in John Wyver's BBC Shakespeare films: a study of Gregory Doran's Macbeth (2001), Hamlet (2009) and Julius Caesar (2012) and Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (2010)”. He has published various articles on televisual and filmic Shakespeare. He is teaching at several universities including the Universidad Autónoma and the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.
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