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Judith BUCHANAN

Performing the digital archive: or, how to avoid being pushed from our stools

The digital performance archive is manipulable in ways that the analogue one is not. But what does its manipulability do to the history, and the future, of Shakespeare on screen? In this talk, I will suggest that the digital or digitised back catalogue constitutes an invitation to contemporary theatre and film makers that the analogue does not – a tempting invitation to collaborate with the dead. The materials and the occupants of the digital archive – accessible and manipulable as they are – can be claimed, reanimated and re-engaged with from within the dramatic orbit of a new production. Those engagements can be tentative or trenchant, creative or disruptive, playful and/or competitive. To absorb a prior production into a contemporary production in this way is to exceed the intertextual referent and to expand the meaning and operations of the quotation. This is incorporative and trans-temporally collaborative Shakespeare.  But what can be purposefully done with and through such acts of incorporation and with the impression of collaboration they generate?

Starting with a consideration of how filmmakers in the pre-digital world consciously subsumed and rendered purposeful aspects of the inherited artistic legacy into their own acts of Shakespearean filmmaking, I will then consider the digitisation and incorporation of prior screen performances into a range of more recent productions, including the Michael Almereyda 2000 Hamlet, the Wooster Group stage production of Hamlet (first performed 2006) and the Kit Monkman 2018 film of Macbeth (co-scripted by Buchanan). To appropriate, showcase and riff off a piece of prior performance history as these productions do is to perform both specific and general work. The specific work will be considered production by production. The more general work accomplished is the implicit acknowledgement that no contemporary production is an entirely singular and contained dramatic entity. All respond not only to a version of the original Shakespeare play but, consciously or otherwise, to aspects of the performance and artistic legacy that has intervened between the play’s first performance and the present moment. The interpretive tradition for any dramatic work is, therefore, both composite and cumulative, informed by a complex set of multiply derivative networks of dependence, emulation, absorption and response as that work bowls through history. Incorporative productions make those dependencies conspicuous by explicitly showcasing a representative of the legacy received.  In inviting artistic works to encounter each other within the composite tapestry of a unifying dramatic world, these productions therefore celebrate and interrogate the reciprocal relationship between contemporary performance and the historical archive, identifying themselves as part of the archive’s ongoing creative work. Macbeth was anxious that the dead, in rising again, might displace us at the table and ‘push us from our stools’.  These productions posit ways in which the resurrected interloper might be invited to share that stool and place at the table in more hospitable ways. And what do the possibilities of such trans-temporal collaborations do to the sense of their own futurity now embedded in each new addition to the digital performance archive?

Professor Judith Buchanan is the newly elected Master of St Peter’s College Oxford, a member of the Oxford English Faculty and Director of Silents Now, bringing silent cinema to contemporary audiences in fresh ways. She is currently writing a co-authored book on live theatre broadcasts in collaboration with John Wyver, Director of Screen Productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

Douglas M. LANIER

Text, Performance, Screen

The shift from Shakespeare on film to Shakespeare on screen is not a small matter of terminological convenience. It marks not just an expansion of our field and an important change in how Shakespeare adaptations are consumed, but an important epistemological sea-change in how we conceptualize the growing number of objects under our scrutiny. We might find precedent for thinking through the consequences of this shift by looking briefly at two other terms foundational for contemporary criticism–"text," which came to supplant "book" or "work," and "performance" which came to supplant "play" or "production." The theoretical and methodological changes wrought by these two master-terms offer us insights, I will argue, into the potential affordances and pitfalls of the shift from "film" to "screen." Using the history of the terms "text" and "performance" as examples, this talk seeks to consider a few of the theoretical consequences–for good and for ill–of our disciplinary movement toward a "screen Shakespeare." Some of those consequences are, I will argue, magnified in the case of Shakespeare, given his works' traditional social functions. Under consideration will be such issues as dematerialization, migration of content across media, and contexts of consumption.

Douglas M. Lanier is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, and he served as the Fulbright Global Shakespeare Centre Distinguished Professor in 2016–17. His essays on Shakespearean appropriation and adaptation have appeared in many journals and essay collections; his monograph, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, was published in 2002. He has served as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and he was a guest editor of a special issue entitled #bard for Shakespeare Quarterly in 2017. He is currently completing two projects, a monograph on film adaptations of Othello worldwide, and a book on The Merchant of Venice for the Arden Language & Writing series.

Sam CROWL

Citizen Ken: Branagh, Shakespeare, and the Movies

As the once upstart Irish prodigy Kenneth Branagh approaches sixty, he finds himself honored and courted by the English theatrical world as the restored heir to its distinguished tradition of the actor-manager. He has been knighted, made the president of RADA, given a Special Olivier Award,  become the director of several Hollywood blockbusters and the most prolific maker of Shakespeare films in the long history of the genre. But it was not ever thus. Though he has been recognized for distinguished achievement by BAFTA, his films have not been highly regarded the English critics, and his private life, particularly during the years of his marriage to Emma Thompson, was catnip to the British press.

Distance often provides perspective. Outsiders often see more interestingly into another culture than its natives. The French are particularly good at seeing from afar.  After all, it was the French, in Le Jazz Hot back in 1932, who first championed American Jazz. They did it again, in Cahiers du Cinema, with American movies turning John Ford and Howard Hawkes and Jerry Lewis into film auteurs and championing John Wayne and Clint Eastwood as iconic film personas.  Now, in our own moment, they have done it again, with a little help from some American friends, with Kenneth Branagh.  Pierre Berthomieu wrote the first book-length critical analysis of Branagh’s films back in 1998 and two years later Sarah Hatchuel published her indispensable A Companion to the Shakespearean Films of Kenneth Branagh.  Several years later, I followed in their wake with The Films of Kenneth Branagh. Remarkably, these remain the only academic monographs devoted to his work on film.

Branagh’s career explores his liminal position between the two traditions his work reconciles: Shakespeare and film, Stratford and Hollywood.  The signature images for this exploration are two stunning shots from his first and last Shakespeare films: the startling back-lit entrance of Henry V looming in the great council chamber doorway in 1989 and its equally arresting twin capturing Shakespeare in silhouette frozen in the doorway at New Place in All is True thirty years later. Only Branagh, I will argue, has the visual imagination, courage, and perhaps folly to link Henry V and Shakespeare with Darth Vader and John Wayne, George Lucas and John Ford.  

In the thirty-five years since he performed Henry V, Laertes, and the King of France in his only season at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Branagh has created a theater and film legacy unlike that of any of his predecessors or contemporaries.  He is an actor-manager-film director who builds on the legacy he inherits from Olivier, Welles, and Zeffirelli even as he revises and transforms it. Branagh’s career as a major Shakespearean actor began in 1984; he created his own Renaissance Theatre Company in 1988; he directed his first Shakespeare film in 1989, thus establishing his triple threat talents as an actor, a manager, and a filmmaker.  We now have 35 years of work to assess. I appreciate this opportunity to revisit Branagh’s early achievement as a filmmaker and to place it in the context of the accomplishments of his predecessors, the work of his contemporaries, and the films he has directed in the past two decades.

Samuel Crowl is Trustee Professor of English at Ohio University where he has taught since 1970. He has been five time honoured for outstanding teaching and was a leader in the university’s curriculum reform efforts in the 1980s. He is the author of six books on various aspects of Shakespeare in Performance including Shakespeare at the Cineplex (2003), The Films of Kenneth Branagh (2006), Shakespeare and Film (2008), and Screen Adaptations: Hamlet(2014). He has lectured at leading colleges and universities in the United States, Europe and Africa as well as at The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., and The Shakespeare Guild in New York. At its 200th Commencement in 2015 Ohio University awarded him an Honorary Degree.

PoonamTRIVEDI

Framing Lear’s Fool in India: ‘Doth any here know me?’

The Fool in King Lear is considered the most complete approximation of this quintessential Shakespearean role. Yet, curiously, there is no actual consensus about his place and function in the play and disagreements abound. Lear’s Fool is variously characterised as a ‘natural’ or a village idiot, a clown, a professional jester or a courtly wit and cast in performances as either a young boy or an adult, or even as an old man, like the King. He is interpreted multiply as a servitor, or friend, or alter ego, or an external critic. His disappearance half way through the play, though seen by some as necessitated by the practice of the doubling of roles (here with Cordelia), or held to be replaced by Poor Tom / Edgar, adds to the confusions around his character. The variants between the Quarto and Folio versions, the additions to the Fool’s part in F, and deletions from the Q text, further increase the fluidity of his conceptualisation. Some productions see him as a dispensable character, cutting him out altogether.

This paper will track Indian versions of King Lear through their reconfigured framing of the character and role of the Fool. These almost always domesticate the play, often preferring, not a tragic, but a happy ending. They often conflate other characters with the Fool. They also take divergent views of the Fool, coloured by similar figures familiar from Indian drama (classical Sanskrit, folk theatrical and modern plays), in which he appears in many guises, playful, provocative and pungent. The Fool figures of Indian theatre are, more often than not, subaltern and subversive. The paper will explore the intertwining of these performative traditions and parse out the shifts and new collocations of meaning arising out of such transcultural encounters.

To this end, the paper will glance at the history of Lear performances on stage and on screen in India, narrowing for detailed consideration three films, Gunsundari Katha (Tale of the Virtuous Woman, 1949, Telugu), Rui Ka Bojh (Weight of Cotton, 1997, Hindi) and Natsamrat (Actor King, 2016, Marathi) and their recasting of the Fool, his relation to Lear and the play as a whole. It will supplement this with the redactions of filmed stage performances which today may be seen on the digital screen, Iruthiattam (Play of Endstop, 2001, Tamil) and Badshah Pather (Play of the King, 2013, Kashmiri) to bring film and digitised performance in conversation and to further pursue the difference technological and transcultural interlocution brings about.

Poonam Trivedi was at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi. She received her doctorate from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, U.K. Her latest publications (co-edited) are Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas:‘local habitations’ (Routledge: New York, 2018) and Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel (Routledge: New York, 2017). She has also co-edited Fields of Play: Sport, Literature and Culture (Orient Blackswan: New Delhi, 2015), Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (Routledge: New York and Delhi, 2010) and India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (Delaware: 2005 and Pearson: Delhi, 2006). She has authored a CD-ROM ‘King Lear in India’ (2006) and has published articles in The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Shakespeare Survey, Cambridge Companions to Shakespeare on Stage, and on Film, Borrowers and Lenders, Literature and Film Quarterly, Hamlet Studies among others, on Shakespeare in India, performance and film versions of Shakespeare, on women in Shakespeare and on Indian theatre. Poonam Trivedi is currently the vice-chair of the Asian Shakespeare Association and convened its biennial conference in Delhi, Dec. 2016. She was the secretary of the Shakespeare Society of India from 1993-99. She directed Merry Wives of Windsor and Lear’s Daughtersfor Indraprastha College, University of Delhi.

Courtney LEHMANN

Staying with the Trouble’: Feminism, Biopolitics, and Making Kin in Julie Taymor’s Tempest

[W]ho shall measure the heat and violence

Of the poet’s heart tangled in a woman’s body?

                --Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

 In this question, Virginia Woolf invokes the precarious ontology of Judith, Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, who was born with the same gifts as her brother but denied the opportunity to express them.  Judith, Woolf concludes, “would surely have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.”  Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of The Tempest epitomizes Judith’s dilemma in the figure of Prospera, who is at once king of the island as well as a mother, alleged witch, and scientist who, in the end, sacrifices her cherished autonomy to secure a better future for her daughter in Milan.  Although the two directors—both women—who have produced adaptations that feature a female Prospero tend to minimize the gender politics of this conversion, there is no denying the fact that changing Prospero to “Prospera” reveals the precarity of the female biopolitical subject in ways that are unthinkable with a male protagonist.

In this respect, Julie Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest offers a compelling blueprint for the process that Donna Haraway describes as “staying with the trouble,” or, the conviction to live within and against the undulating terms of a “thick present,” rife with the scars of the Anthropocene—the age of the man-made disaster.  Characterized by climate change, mass extinctions, forever wars, and the reduction of life itself to information, the Anthropocene, as Haraway describes it in her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble, is “a tragic story with only one real actor, one real world-maker, the hero, this is the Man-making tale of the hunter on a quest to kill and bring back the terrible bounty.”

It is therefore the “precarity,” as Judith Butler characterizes it, and not the potency, of Prospera’s power with which I am chiefly concerned here.  For what I see in Taymor’s complex portrait of Prospera as a female head-of-state are many of the same challenges that trouble feminist politics as well as female politicians of both liberal and conservative persuasions, from Hillary Clinton to Theresa May.  In fact, Taymor’s Tempest, I shall argue, stages a crisis of the female body politic, as Prospera’s “two bodies”—played out through her surrogate progeny, Ariel and Caliban—exist in constant and, often, violent tension throughout the film.  As a female ruler who lacks the automatic legitimacy of her male counterpart, passively inheriting her power from her dead husband according to Taymor’s invented backstory, Prospera pursues strategic relationships with Ariel and Caliban, who represent the realms of zoe, or nonhuman life, and bios, or organic life, respectively.  Rather unusually, Ariel will become more monstrous while Caliban becomes, paradoxically, more human—a process that culminates in Prospera’s decision to identify, in the end, more with “this thing of darkness” than with her “diligen[t]” spirit.  Hence, I will also explore the intersection of gender politics and critical race theory as it applies to the post-Anthropocentric feminism toward which Taymor’s film gestures, while ultimately arguing that the final articulation of the film’s relationship between Prospera and Caliban suggests that the most insidious form of racism, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, is, in fact, sexism. 

Courtney Lehmann is the Tully Knoles Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of the Pacific. She is the 2016 winner of the Distinguished Faculty Award, the highest honour in teaching, research, and service at the University of the Pacific. She has published more than forty essays and articles on Shakespeare and cinema in venues ranging from Shakespeare Quarterly to Textual Practice and is the author of Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (2002), Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (2010), and co-author of Great Shakespeareans: Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli (2013). She is the co-editor of several Shakespeare and film anthologies, as well as The New Kittredge King John and Henry VIII.

Stephen O'NEILL

“By most mechanical … hand”: Westworld’s Shakespearean things, or Becoming Posthuman

“What is it like to be a Shakespearean thing?”, asks Christy Desmet in her article, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0”. To this provocative question about the intersection of Shakespeare and digital technologies, one might respond: watch Westworld. HBO’s hit-show about an American western themed visitor experience, where human guests interact with humanoid hosts, provides a metaphor for understanding contemporary Shakespeares as non – or – posthuman, the consequence of tiny, often hidden, algorithmic operations that Desmet’s alien phenomenology tracks. Exploring Westworld’s Shakespearean intertexts, in particular host Peter Abernathy as Shakespeare quotation machine, this paper considers the uncanny loop effects of quotation and the idiomatic in the show and King Lear, itself a Shakespearean thing. I argue that these texts become mutually illuminating, reminding us that, to borrow from Donna Harraway, there is “no fundamental, ontological separation of machine and organism, of technical and organic”. Westworld does not simply quote Lear / Shakespeare but powerfully intuits these as alien ontologies. 

Stephen O’Neill is Senior Lecturer in Maynooth University Department of English. His main research interests are in Shakespeare and adaptation, especially in digital cultures. He edited Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media (Bloomsbury / Arden, 2018). Other publications include two books, Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (Bloomsbury / Arden, 2014); and Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Four Courts, 2007) and articles and book chapters on Hip-Hop Shakespeare, Shakespeare and quotation, and Shakespeare in Europe. He is currently editing, with Diana Henderson, the Arden Research Handbook to Shakespeare and Adaptation.